Is embodiment necessary for consciousness?
Nathaniel Wright’s chapter, with Neil Lawrence and Nicky Clayton, appears in Perspectives on Machine Consciousness.
Overview
The Information Topography programme develops a generative theory of communication structure. Shannon’s information theory characterises what can be transmitted through a channel taken as given. It does not explain where channels come from, why particular participants are linked, or how those links change when information conditions change.
Our premise is that communication structures are governed by constraints on information dynamics. Combining information-conservation constraints with maximum-entropy production yields a state-dependent flow geometry in which the Fisher information metric acts as a conductance tensor — an information topography. Because structure emerges from constrained dynamics, changes to the dynamics predict changes in structure.
The programme builds on The Atomic Human (Lawrence, 2024), which framed human intelligence through the embodiment factor — the extreme imbalance between human computation and communication — and on the inaccessible-game formalism, which derives topographic dynamics from information-theoretic axioms without pre-specified agents or channels. Teaching in L172 Information, Energy and Intelligence develops the same mathematical machinery with students.
Research themes
- Axiomatic foundations of information topography (inaccessible game; open-system extensions; classical and quantum representations of precision/capacity trade-offs)
- Fisher conductance as a predictive geometry for bottlenecks and reorganisation
- Information-theoretic accounts of regulation and judgement (Good Regulator conditions; action-sufficient representations)
- Links from constrained information dynamics to cybernetic viability and organisational communication structure
Relationship to other programmes
Information Topography supplies the mathematical core of the broader InfoTop agenda. Predictions and instruments are tested in engineered multi-agent systems in the Interfaces programme, and in institutions adopting AI in the AI Adoption programme.
Related Publications
The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI
Allen Lane:
The Inaccessible Game
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The Origin of the Inaccessible Game
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The No Barber Principle: Towards Formalised Selection in the Inaccessible Game
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Related News
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3 December 2024
Financial Times: AI cannot replace the atomic human
Neil Lawrence’s Financial Times opinion piece argues that the part of human attention machines cannot measure is also the part they cannot replace.
6 June 2024
The Atomic Human published
Neil Lawrence’s book on human and machine intelligence is published by Allen Lane.