On 5/09/2017 8:39 am, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 03:14:12PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote:
Information is in the constraints. If I know something or other, then
this entails that some bitstrings are compatible with my existence,
and others are not.
But as Bruce pointed out, that's a dualist model in which "you" are
different than bitstrings and you "know" things. How would some
bitstring NOT be compatible with your existence? Aren't you
supposing that all bitstrings exist?
All bitstrings exist. Some are compatible with my (as in my current
OM) existence, others are not. Otherwise, there would be no knowledge.
What's the issue with trying to classify this as dualist or not? It
seems irrelevant to me. In my book, I described trying to see where my
theory fit into David Chalmers's bestiary of philosophy of mind
positions. The answer was it fit into all categories except the
"eliminative materialism" one. In particular, it could be both
materialist and immaterialist (materialist because physical
supervenience holds, immaterialist because consciousness was
emergent), both dualist and monist (where the dualism was property
dualism, not Decartes' substance dualism). I actually put this to
David on the one and only lunch meeting I had with him, and he
admitted his classification was for a specific purpose (which he
didn't go into), and probably not at all universal.
I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. When I
suggested that your idea of an observer interpreting strings was
dualist, I meant property/function dualism, not Cartesian substance
dualism. So you want an OM (bitstring) to "interpret" other bitstrings
(data). You say: "The whole point of the bitstrings is that they are
interpreted by something we call an observer." That, in my
understanding, is a dualist position -- you have two things: an
observer, and things that are observed. But if bitstrings are all that
there is, then I do not understand bitstrings "interpreting" other
bitstrings. The conscious observer consists, in this picture, of the set
of all bitstrings that are compatible with that particular OM. There is
no distinction between observer bitstrings and data bitstrings.
In such a picture, a different observer moment is some different set of
strings compatible with some different conscious moment. If you are to
make this into a theory of mind/consciousness, you have to specify how
these sets are related to each other to make up a continuous stream of
consciousness; or not related directly, so that the two sets we are
considering belong to different conscious observers.
What is it about a bitstring that makes if part of an OM? Clearly, not
all bitstrings are part of consciousness -- not all infinite bitstrings
are necessarily included in OMs. What is it about a bitstring that makes
it part of your OM?, while this other bitstring is part of my OM? What
makes one bitstring a past OM and another bitstring a future OM? I
suspect that answering questions such as this will inevitably lead to
(functional) dualism, and you will not have actually succeeded in
explaining the observer at all. (Bitstrings would have no different role
in such a theory than quarks and electrons have in a physicalist theory:
in both, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon; emergent from the
underlying ontological substrate, but with no more fundament explanation.)
Bruce
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