Department of Psychology, Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Chaos. 2022 Jun;32(6):063109. doi: 10.1063/5.0068115.
Non-isolated systems have diverse coupling relations with the external environment. These relations generate complex thermodynamics and information transmission between the system and its environment. The framework depicted in the current research attempts to glance at the critical role of the internal orders inside the non-isolated system in shaping the information thermodynamics coupling. We characterize the coupling as a generalized encoding process, where the system acts as an information thermodynamics encoder to encode the external information based on thermodynamics. We formalize the encoding process in the context of the nonequilibrium second law of thermodynamics, revealing an intrinsic difference in information thermodynamics characteristics between information thermodynamics encoders with and without internal correlations. During the information encoding process of an external source Y, specific sub-systems in an encoder X with internal correlations can exceed the information thermodynamics bound on ( X , Y ) and encode more information than system X works as a whole. We computationally verify this theoretical finding in an Ising model with a random external field and a neural data set of the human brain during visual perception and recognition. Our analysis demonstrates that the stronger internal correlation inside these systems implies a higher possibility for specific sub-systems to encode more information than the global one. These findings may suggest a new perspective in studying information thermodynamics in diverse physical and biological systems.
非孤立系统与外部环境具有多样化的耦合关系。这些关系在系统与其环境之间产生了复杂的热力学和信息传递。当前研究中的框架试图略窥非孤立系统内部的内部秩序在塑造信息热力学耦合方面的关键作用。我们将耦合描述为一个广义的编码过程，其中系统充当信息热力学编码器，根据热力学对外部信息进行编码。我们在非平衡热力学第二定律的背景下形式化了编码过程，揭示了具有和不具有内部相关性的信息热力学编码器之间在信息热力学特征方面的内在差异。在外部源 Y 的信息编码过程中，具有内部相关性的编码器 X 中的特定子系统可以超过（X，Y）的信息热力学限制，并比系统 X 作为一个整体编码更多的信息。我们在具有随机外部场的伊辛模型和人类大脑在视觉感知和识别期间的神经数据集上计算验证了这一理论发现。我们的分析表明，这些系统内部更强的内部相关性意味着特定子系统比全局系统更有可能编码更多信息。这些发现可能为研究不同物理和生物系统中的信息热力学提供了一个新的视角。
