On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

To answer off the cuff and without going into great depth at the moment, I guess I would consider the external objects of the material world around me as providing all the content that my brain receives and "computes" into the images and concepts which make thought, but more essentially, survival possible. Does that even follow from your question? (It's still quite early in the morning over here).

Also, if by metainformation you mean something like Kant's twelve categories, well, then I'll just have to hold my tongue until I get around to reading Schopenhauer. :-) I've been told that he discarded all of those except one... causality.

By metainformation, I mean information about information: where, exactly, does it come from? Why does it exist? What, if anything, does it "really" represent? Is it really just photons entering the eye in a physically monist universe, or is the entire physical universe the idealization of raw information that itself is not part of such a framework?

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To answer off the cuff and without going into great depth at the moment, I guess I would consider the external objects of the material world around me as providing all the content that my brain receives and "computes" into the images and concepts which make thought, but more essentially, survival possible. Does that even follow from your question? (It's still quite early in the morning over here).

It follows just fine. It means that you have accepted that the physical universe exists as something beyond experience, concept or idea, and that our perceptions are representations of information from that universe. So you must be either a physical monist or a dualist, but cannot be an idealist.