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The Contribution of Information Theory to Pathological Mechanisms in Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

W. Ross Ashby
W. Ross Ashby*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A.
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Extract

Information theory is sometimes presented as a new philosophy; here it will be presented as an essentially practical branch of science. Its essence occurs when an engineer says: “You can't get ten manoeuvres out of that satellite when you've only five signals.” He is thinking along the usual and well understood lines of cause and effect, but using a rather unusual approach: instead of trying to relate each cause to its particular effect (e.g. “what is the cause of tuberculosis?”), he is bringing a set of (five) causes into some relation with a set of (ten) effects. Throughout this article, information theory will be used in accordance with what I believe to be its true nature—that it is the body of knowledge developed to help when we have problems in which large numbers of causes are related in some way to large numbers of effects.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 114 , Issue 517 , December 1968 , pp. 1485 - 1498
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1968 

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