Compression through internal and external information bottlenecks resolves information intractability across brains, bodies and worlds

Abstract

Agents are constantly challenged to navigate uncertainty in a world that contains far more information that they can process, improving predictability by exploiting regularities from the environment. This frames the challenge of reducing information intractability as the main problem any artificial or biological agent needs to solve. We argue that this challenge is solved through the systematic use of information bottlenecks--a diverse suite of strategies functioning to compress and selectively filter environmental information so as to build tractable representations of the world. We show that such bottlenecks are adaptive and operate across multiple scales, from the evolution of neural circuits and sensory systems to the actions that organisms use in real-time to select and structure their own sensory inputs. A key aspect of our proposal is that information bottlenecks are not only internal and biological, but can also be externalized through actions in the world. By transforming their environments, agents construct external bottlenecks--material and cultural mechanisms that reduce the cost of inference and transmit regularities that are shared across individuals and even across generations. From this perspective, niche construction, material culture and even social and cultural norms, can be also understood as adaptive informational mechanisms, collective information bottlenecks that alter our worlds in ways that promote predictive success. Agents increasingly solve the intractability problem not only through evolutionary changes in their biology and internal neural mechanisms, but by systematically constructing and exploiting information bottlenecks in the world. Culture itself, we suggest, is just such a bottleneck-constructing mechanism.