As I was coming upon my 15th straight hour of playing Icewind Dale II (a computer game) I started thinking about how nice it would be to turn the brainpower expended into something productive, like cash. I imagined a future where a “negentropy engine” hooked directly into my brain would turn the “raw material” of ordered thought into standardized, commoditized units of “order” that could be used as “ordering energy” in any application that required human thought. Perhaps other units for creative thought. So everyone would wear a little helmet and do whatever the hell they wanted all day and to the extent they created order or thought creatively they would generate these standardized units and get paid for them. So people who sit around all day and watch Oprah don’t get paid much while people who play chess are getting paid alot. Any application, say for instance, the medical diagnostic programs that predict the disease based on the symptoms could be made more accurate by including an “intuition variable” that would use these “order credits” as energy.
That’s alot of preface for the question I suppose:
I know physicists are always talking about measuring the entropy of the universe, but would it be possible to measure the entropy/negentropy of human thought?
Measuring the level of activity in your brain is no problem, but if you want to make a subjective distinction between positive and negative thoughts, you’d have to come up with some rule base to describe which is which and then see if the distinction appears in any measurable way. Different activities cause different kinds of brain activity, so it’s certainly possible.
However, just measuring the difference isn’t enough for your scheme. No one is going to pay you just to think creatively if they get nothing useful out of it. After all, you playing chess or watching Oprah provides exactly the same level of value to anyone outside yourself (except Oprah’s advertisers, who already pay you, indirectly, to sit and watch).
I assume part of your plan involves letting other people insert their problems into your head so when you think creatively about them they get output which is useful to them. Then someone might pay you for your extra cycles. However, being able to put data in and get it out through a helmet is a whole different problem than just measuring activity.
As an aside, I think the system you imagine has already been invented. It’s called “employment”. I have a bunch of people that I pay to think creatively about problems I give them. I use a high-tech input device to insert these problems into their brains; I talk to them and give them design documents. They found my activity-monitoring helmets uncomfortable, so now I just measure their creative output by how much progress they make on the tasks I’ve given them. I pay them for their time based on the level of activity and the quality of their output. We refer to the system colloquially as “work”. Probably not what you were looking for, eh?
LOL. I’m not really asking about even the theoretical possiblity of this working. In the end, I’m really asking if there is a negentropy equation like the one for entropy and if it’s possible to apply to anything other than the entire universe.