Compressing Hegel (2020)
It&#x27;s ironic that an author who takes their moniker after Wittgenstein would espouse a view that Wittgenstein&#x27;s own later work (the investigations) practically argues directly against.<p>The perspective presented here is soaked through and through with information theoretic bias and clearly stems from an overly digital consideration of human experience. &quot;Intelligence&quot; is intimately related to context, use, community, and goals. We don&#x27;t call someone intelligent because we can point to some lossless compression algorithm implemented by his neurons, we call him intelligent when he <i>produces the behaviors we desire</i> in a given situation.<p>Consider for instance, how this theory fails to account for athletic knowledge. It seems fair to state that people with tangible skills requiring the use of the body posses some kind of intelligence, it seems less accurate to try and describe this form of intelligence as lossless compression. The compression metaphor really only works for intelligence with respect to the manipulation of symbolic <i>representations</i> and even then I think there are plenty of counter examples of what we&#x27;d call intelligent behavior that would suggest not all cases are reducible to &quot;lossless compression&quot;. It is all highly dependent on the questions you ask, as Wittgenstein well knew.<p>Personally, I do not feel this is a good piece of philosophy and it&#x27;s symptomatic of a trend toward &quot;computormorphization&quot; which has been rampant since the computer emerged (it&#x27;s like anthropomorphism except interpreting the behavior of other (actually living things!) as though they behaved just like computers). You can also see this in the reification of concepts like information (we talk about information as though it were some objective material object, but information is not a substance--only <i>interpreters</i> produce information; a text is a vehicle for information but it does not &quot;contain information&quot;--the information is produced by the reader of the text and fully depends on what distinctions they deem relevant)