On Apr 20, 2:04 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > The main difficulty I see is that it fails to explain the sequential > aspect of consciousness. If consciousness is identified with > information then it is atemporal. >
Time is just the dimension of experience. But experience is an internal "psychological" concept, not an external concept. Therefore "time" is also an internal feature of subjective experience, not necessarily an external feature of objective reality. So it seems to me that we have have no direct access to the physical world. Information about the physical world is conveyed to us via our senses. BUT, we don't even have direct conscious access to our sensory data. All of that sensory data is instead apparently heavily processed by various neural subsystems and "feature detectors", the outputs of which are then reintegrated into a simplified mental model of reality, and THAT is what we are actually aware of. That mental model is what we think of as "the real world". So it seems to me that, even accepting physicalism, we can already think of ourselves as living in a virtual world of abstract information. The same is true of time. We experience time only because we represent that experience internally as part of our simplified model of the world. If there is an external time, it could be altered in many ways, but our internal representation (and experience) of time will remain unchanged. Time derives from Consciousness. Not vice versa. Time IS an aspect of consciousness...and thus doesn't exist seperately from conscious experience. And also you can go back to the computer simulation idea and think about various scenarios. If you and your environment were simulated on a fast computer or a slow computer...you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. If the computer ran for a while, then the simulation data was saved and the computer turned off, then a year later the computer and the simulation were restarted where they left off, you would have no way to detect that a year had passed in "external" time. To you in the simulation, it would be as though nothing had happened, because the computer simulation would pick up on the same exact calculation where it had left off. There was no interruption in your experience of time. I agree that experience and consciousness requires changes of state, but I don't agree that it must be change with respect to an external physical "time" dimension. The best analogy that I have heard is that if you have a non-horizontal line, it's Y value changes with respect to the X axis. So some piece of information (the Y value) "changes" with respect to another set of values (the X axis). But there is no time involved in this type of change. Your experience of the X axis will depend on how you represent the X axis internally in your model of reality. Maybe you will experience the X axis spatially...maybe you will experience it chronologically, maybe you will experience it some other way entirely. Your experience of it depends entirely on how it is represented internally in the information that produces your conscious experience. I think that the Sherlock Holmes approach is the correct one for investigating and explaining the nature of consciousness and reality: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." I come to the conclusion that consciousness is information by way of process of elimination. I can think of experiments or scenarios where you can do away with everything except information and still get behavior that seems conscious and which therefore I assume is actually conscious. Information is the only common factor in all situations where consciousness seems to be in evidence. And really, it doesn't seem that counter-intuitive to me that information is ultimately what makes me what I am. So, I agree with David Chalmers that the idea that some (all?) information is conscious in some way is a fundamental aspect of information, and not really reducible to more fundamental descriptions or processes. Which again makes sense...how can you get more fundamental than "information"? On Apr 20, 2:04 am, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > The main difficulty I see is that it fails to explain the sequential > aspect of consciousness. If consciousness is identified with > information then it is atemporal. There are attempts to overcome this > objection by assuming a discretized consciousness and identifying > sequence with a partial ordering by similarity or content, but I find > them unconvincing because when you chop consciousness into "moments" > then the "moments" have very little content and it's not clear that it > is enough to define a sequence. It seems you have allow each "moment" > to have small duration - and then you're back to process. Or instead of > expanding consciousness in the time direction, you could get enough > information by expanding in the "orthogonal" direction - i.e. including > unconscious things like information stored in memory but not being > recalled (at the moment). But then you've slipped physics in. > > Brent- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text - --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
