On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

I like the idea of property dualism but until I feel I have a better grip on all the issues involved and different approaches at solving them, I'm content with the position of agnosticism, but leaning towards the computational theory of mind (as far as I understand, that can be held in consistence with property dualism as well?).

Yes, you'll see that I'm a self-declared agnostic as well. But let me ask you this-- in a computational theory of mind, what is being "computed"? It seems to me you'd need metainformation-- i.e. information about your information, to arrive at an answer. But we don't have access to that.

Therefore, in a computational model, I'd argue that the simplest view is still an idealistic one, with a conflation between "idea" and "information." Or, to be cheeky, you could say our universe is "informationalist." Ultimately, it doesn't really matter if our information comes from an objective reality, or the Matrix, or the Mind of God: Matrixian spaceships still fly, Theomentalist (lol) bridges still stand, and "real" Bieber still sucks. But the information as it's presented to us, that is really the end of the line for our gnosticism.