Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

I don't see what needs to be explained: I have a first person experience because it is my rain that processes the information. it seems trivial to me.

In your view, first-person perspective is fundamental then?

This question has been bothering me. It just seems, well, strange.

The first person perspective is no more or less 'fundamental' than the third-person perspective is. It is simply a matter of who or what is collecting the data and about what.

But guessing about the meaning here, no, I don't see consciousness as fundamental. I see it as a derived property.

What I *do* see as fundamental is interaction. Things interact and, in fact, are defined by the types of interaction they can enter into.

Interactions change those things that are interacting, sometimes in simple properties (momentum, energy) and sometimes it changes the *type* of objects involved (say, changing a quark to a lepton). Such changes are information that the interaction happened.

So, in a sense, I do consider information to be basic: it is created in every interaction.

Living things, by their interaction with their environment, obtain information from their environment and modify behavior based upon that information. This is as true of plants and bacteria as it is true of animals.

Some animals have developed brains that are devoted to the processing of information collected by their senses (a type of interaction). When those brains get complicated enough in the right way, they have an internal representation of the organism itself (we can actually map out the regions in the brain that correspond to touch from different areas of the body).

When that happens, that internal representation of 'self' is the first person perspective. The way that other aspects of brain processing interact with that internal representation is the 'feely' aspect of consciousness.

I think dualism, whether substance dualism or property dualism, is based on flawed metaphysics (what is a substance?) and so misses the point. Consciousness is a type of interaction based on information about the 'self'.