[ladyattis]

I think there's a problem at the heart of the matter, specifically the idea that the act of measurement is in itself powerful when in point of fact that this isn't universally the case. As the old adage goes: "garbage in, garbage out." Even more troubling, there is a physical limit to our ability to model what we measure. Take the retina, it has around a million light receptors and even if you assumed they only have two valid states then you're left with around 10^300,000 bits of information to process, so good luck with that. Same thing applies to whatever firms are measuring and what they think is conveying relevant information as they'll have similarly exponential increases if they don't filter out the vast majority of irrelevant data points and states.

[gmfawcett]

> it has around a million light receptors and even if you assumed they only have two valid states then you're left with around 10^300,000 bits of information to process...

That would only be a million bits (1 Mb). You're counting potential states, not bits.