The Information Theory Mind
How mid-century engineering math fundamentally changed our definition of human consciousness
In 1948, a Bell Labs mathematician named Claude Shannon published a paper about telecommunications that quietly rewired how we think about ourselves. By defining information through the cold arithmetic of the 'bit,' Shannon gave engineers a way to measure the transmission of data. But it did not take long for psychologists to look at telephone wires and decide they were actually looking at human skulls.
By the 1950s and 60s, cognitive psychology had fully embraced the computer metaphor. The mind was no longer a mysterious theater of holistic consciousness; it was a biological mainframe. This shift brought rigorous experimental methods to a field that desperately needed them, famously yielding George Miller's magical number seven—the rigid limit of our working memory capacity. We became information processors, channel capacities, and data crunchers, operating at measurable speeds.
There was, however, a quiet casualty in this computational coup: everything that makes human existence messy. Emotions, subjective feeling states, and unconscious bodily drives did not fit neatly into binary data streams. Under the information-theoretic lens, feelings were conveniently sidelined as mere 'noise' in the communication channel or treated as secondary evaluations tacked on after the real work was done.
This creates a rather glaring psychological blind spot. By equating thought strictly to data manipulation, traditional cognitive science struggles to account for embodied cognition, tacit knowledge, and the messy, narrative-driven nature of human meaning-making. Critics point out that a mind cannot be cleanly separated from its biological embodiment and continuous physical interaction with the environment. Whether discrete bits and symbols are actual neurological realities or simply convenient accounting tricks remains a persistent debate. Yet, despite decades of pushback from dynamical systems theory and embodied cognition, the vocabulary of information theory remains firmly lodged in our scientific and cultural imagination.
We are still remarkably comfortable viewing ourselves as computers, even if we happen to be computers that forget why we walked into the kitchen, panic for no logical reason, and desperately need a nap.
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