"Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain" by philosopher Patricia Churchland

[bennyboy]

That's why you could transcode an mp3 to hologram, to memory chips, or to arranged black-and-white seashells on the beach if you wanted to, and that information would be the same.

Not unless they all shared the same format, or were formatted. It can be -made to be the same-, would be a more accurate way to say this. Kind of the point of adopting any specific medium in the first place, from a standpoint of top down use. So that whatever information you wish to convey (be it the "meaningful experience" of casablanca -or- a series of slides-on-film of flesh eating bacteria) can be understood by more than one user. If I hand you a vhs cassette of casablanca..and you only have a dvd player...where did all that "meaningful experience" go?

Right. So if you happened upon "Penny Lane" arranged in black and white seashells on a beach, you wouldn't even know, unless you were aware of some kind of decoding algorithm. However, the specific mechanics of the information are separate from the information itself. You could rearrange your seashells into a Shakespeare book if you wanted to.

The point is that it may be the flow of information, which is relatively abstract, that may be responsible for consciousness of self, not the specific material structure of the brain. As soon as that information processing stops, for example if someone's in a coma, then the sense of self disappears, too. The alternative is that there is something magical about a specific arrangement of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that allows sentience to flicker into existence. That idea seems pretty strange to me.