Consider one’s brain state on the granularity that it stores information. It contains N bits of information.
What would those N bits of information be if you saw something red?
It is impossible to know this information, because it would take all your available N bits.
Yet if you don’t know all this information, clearly you learn something new as soon as you see something red, at least, as long as your attention would then be drawn to the parts you didn’t previously know about, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption at all.
Now suppose that you have that knowledge in some compressed form, of M<N bits. But then seeing red and entering that state would be like completing a calculation, which frequently produces the “Aha! I have learned something new!” response.
Consider one’s brain state on the granularity that it stores information. It contains N bits of information.
What would those N bits of information be if you saw something red?
It is impossible to know this information, because it would take all your available N bits.
Yet if you don’t know all this information, clearly you learn something new as soon as you see something red, at least, as long as your attention would then be drawn to the parts you didn’t previously know about, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption at all.
Now suppose that you have that knowledge in some compressed form, of M<N bits. But then seeing red and entering that state would be like completing a calculation, which frequently produces the “Aha! I have learned something new!” response.