Amassing Information: The Information Store Principle

Abstract

Natural environments tend to be both highly complex and highly variable. The frequently immeasurable number of variables associated with natural environments tends to be in constant flux. Most animals and plants must survive in complex, variable environments dealing with day and night, summer and winter, drought and flood. Any natural information processing system must find a way to handle this complexity and variability. Nevertheless, despite the complex, variable environment in which a natural information processing system must function, it must be able to treat its environment as familiar and predictable. It must be able to ignore variability that does not matter to its functioning while responding to variability that does matter. In one sense, the manner in which this complexity is handled is straightforward. Immense complexity is handled by immense information stores. Natural information processing systems build sufficiently large information stores to handle most of the vagaries inherent in their environments.