Seeing red

[bennyboy]

So in other words, what would be a state at the particle level? Would concentrated ions count as a state for instance, where one concentration is a different state from another concentration? Or would a molecule count as a state in the sense of being a structural organisation of atoms etc? This is not the way I usually think about these things so I'm having trouble with it.

That's the thing. Everything in the universe has some relationship to everything else, and these relationships are all dynamic on some level. So it's ALL information in a sense. So when we talk about mind, and brains, and neural nets, what is the distinguishing feature that separates any arbitrary collection of components as having "states" or carrying "information," and the rest just being a bunch of stuff floating in space? I think you can guess that my position is that it is only by mind that these rather arbitrary divisions can be made, and so we're thrown back into our circle again. Let's say I were to arrange a bunch of black and white stones into a digital pattern on a beach, representing a Beatles' song. Is it a song, or isn't it? To me, it is, to anybody who doesn't know my mind, it couldn't possibly be. So perhaps something ONLY becomes information when a sentient mind aritrarily imbues it with meaning. Back to the circle a third time.

My particular interest is in photon emission and reception, and for a particular reason. From the "perspective" of a photon, no time has passed no matter how far it travels, which means (to me) that the point of arrival is predestined. The photon, then, instead of being seen as a packet of energy traveling for millions of years, could be seen as serving a kind of distant electron function: it binds together two atoms at a point (due to the relativistic flattening of the universe at the speed of light). What does this have to do with anything? -- It is an extension of information through time and space, much as DNA is an extension of state through time in the form of statistical effects of the environment on that DNA's formation, and much as the human memory serves to bring a remembered state into comparison with a new state.

Then there's another question that is worth thinking about, both from your position and mine. What about subconscious processes (or indeed non-conscious processes). From my original theory's perspective, there'd have to be a reason why certain neural circuits did not contribute to consciousness despite still being states and relationships. And the same question would apply to your theory... why would certain particles contribute and not others to consciousness, especially given the essentially uniform physical structure of neurons?

This is a problem, and is still so even in psychoneurology. It turns out that most perceptions, and consciousness itself, is distributed across many brain parts, and not always the same subsystems of each part. In other words, it seems to be the percepts themselves, rather than the mechanism processing them, which is responsible for the sensation of awareness.

Selective brain damage is interesting, too. In various cases, you can lost the ability to do a specific function: say, recognize a face. That experience is no longer in your toolkit. And yet, the basic "screen" of consciousness is still fine. I wonder if when we are sleeping, there's a kind of idea-less "screen" or not, but I'm not sure how it would even be possible to determine.

This seems to be the case: that sounds, sights, smells, etc. are coordinated on a kind of common medium. But it doesn't seem to exist anywhere. My guess is that it doesn't exist at all, and that wherever there is processing, there is percept-- but its just not "owned" by you, and so it's not part of your subjective experience. Your neuron may be having a blast with its exciting processing of electrochemical cascades, oblivious to your existence.