(January 29, 2016 at 4:39 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I think you'd have to provide a little more information as to what an idea is, and what you mean by "encoding in DNA". Do you mean this as an observation, or the explanation for an observation?
Well, I'm playing devil's advocate here, by which I mean that I'm trying to ignore my own sense of what mind is, or ideas, and trying to see ideas purely as physical patterns which arise for certain reasons, or which are expressed in certain ways. So right now, and only right now, I mean that an idea is a representational state, i.e. a partial mirror of an external physical reality.
If DNA represents an idea-- which I think both you and Jorm would say it does-- then that means that mind as we experience it and ideas aren't necessarily the same thing, which would be an important philosophical conclusion we could arrive at even without appealing to qualia.
I don't really want to define idea too narrowly, because I want to draw an analogy between an idea in the human brain, which is short-term and temporary, with other representations of state, like those implied in DNA.