Figure 3.

Information. (a) System S analyzed in this figure. All units have $\tau =1$ and $\eta =-3$ (partially deterministic AND gates). The remaining panels show on the left the time unfolded graph of the mechanism $M=\{A,B,C,D\}$ constraining different output purviews and on the right the probability distribution of the purview $Z=\{A,B,C\}$ (effect repertoires). The black bars show the probabilities when the mechanism is constraining the purview, and the white bars show the unconstrained probabilities after the complete partition. The “*” indicates the state selected by the maximum operation in the ID function. (b) The mechanism at state $m=\{\downarrow ,\downarrow ,\downarrow ,\downarrow \}$. The purview state $z=\{\downarrow ,\downarrow ,\downarrow \}$ is not only the most constrained by the mechanism (high informativeness) but also very dense (high selectivity). As a result, it has intrinsic information higher than all other states in the purview and defines the intrinsic information of the mechanism as 0.27. (c) If we change the mechanism state to $m=\{\downarrow ,\uparrow ,\uparrow ,\uparrow \}$, the probability of observing the purview state $z=\{\downarrow ,\downarrow ,\downarrow \}$ is now smaller than chance. However, this probability is still very different from chance and therefore very constrained by the mechanism (high informativeness). At the same time, the state is still very dense, meaning it has a probability of happening much higher than all other states (high selectivity). Together, they define the intrinsic information of the state, which is higher than the intrinsic information of all other states in the purview, defining the intrinsic information of the mechanism as 0.08.