Structural Information Theory - Modelling Principles

Modelling Principles

In SIT, candidate interpretations of a stimulus are represented by symbol strings, in which identical symbols refer to identical perceptual primitives (e.g., blobs or edges). Every substring of such a string represents a spatially contiguous part of an interpretation, so that the entire string can be read as a reconstruction recipe for the interpretation and, thereby, for the stimulus. These strings then are encoded (i.e., they are searched for visual regularities) to find the interpretation with the simplest code.

In SIT's formal coding model, this encoding is modelled by way of symbol manipulation. In psychology, this has led to critical statements of the sort of "SIT assumes that the brain performs symbol manipulation". Such statements, however, fall in the same category as statements such as "physics assumes that nature applies formulas such as Einstein's E=mc2 or Newton's F=ma" and "DST models assume that dynamic systems apply differential equations". That is, these statements ignore that the very concept of formalization means that potentially relevant things are represented by symbols - not as a goal in itself but as a means to capture potentially relevant relationships between these things.