Mind Over Matter?

[emjay]

@emjay

Yeah, Benny and I have had this convo a bunch.  Unfortunately our positions (and our standards of explanation) differ on some pretty hard sticking points.  Until I get some clarity on how information does information to information sans some structure or arrangement capable of doing so....they aren't really compatible.   Essentially, until he describes how an unstructured, disjointed system interacts...or some possible means of that interaction..the similarity is only superficial - or provides some explanation of the structure of immaterial stuff that is both capable of and engaged in computation..at which point we'd know one way or another if our two positions were compatible.  One certainly -could- hold to both.   I think he and I approach it from different angles.  He's more focused on "what the stuff" is....I'm more focused on "how the stuff"...no matter what, accomplishes the observed effect.  

Mostly, my main gripe in Benny and I's convos on the subject..isn't so much that he's wrong about mind (how would I know...lol?)...as he is wrong about the problems presented by any given explanation of mind.  He, like you, for example...wonders "why consciousness".   It has been (and obviously Benny correct me if I'm wrong or you've made alterations) his position that consciousness is somehow a problem from the standpoint of material monism - mine is that it isn't a problem for monism any more than it would be for dualism - specifically in the context of computation.  If mind is comp, then any stufff...no matter what the stuff is made of...and no matter how many different kinds of stuff there are...which is capable of acting as a computational system is in the range of "mind".  All that's left, then, is to determine how robust a system is required to satisfy "mind" however we choose to set the standard (perhaps using our own..whatevs) and how we might manufacture this "mind" business out of any material one chooses (again, provided it is capable...wet paper doesn't work so well, for example).  Benny would need to explain this light based information mind in a similar manner as I described the spirit resistor mind, for me to be able to have further opinions - or for me to accept that even the slightest attempt at an actual explanation has been made.  :winks at Benny:

To tie it in with your response....not all data exchange is computation...so, to me, not all data exchange should be expected to yield a mind (and so I'm not surprised when things exchange vast amounts of data without presenting consciousness, or something we would recognize -as- consciousness.

Hi Rhythm, I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply (though I know you don't mind  ) but I was just hoping that bennyboy would reply first so I'd have a bit more to go on because as it stands I think I've possibly misunderstood some of his argument, due probably but ashamedly to the fact that since I thought his idea seemed 'uncannily' similar to mine in most of its arguments I might have seen what I expected to see and not read it properly. Sorry about that bennyboy. I certainly misread his penultimate paragraph about photons and atoms and therefore missed the crux of his argument, hence asking him a redundant question about the physical laws of the universe and whether they counted as information. So having read it more carefully now it seems to be essentially Panpsychism but perhaps with the subtle difference that it is the change in state between systems - a photon leaving here and arriving there - that defines information and ultimately leads to consciousness. So in his theory it looks like anything that stayed static would not have consciousness which is perhaps different from Panpsychism. Though if I'm still wrong in my understanding of his theory, my apologies to all concerned.

Anyway I quite like that theory because it deals with the question of where the boundaries lie for a given system i.e. there seem to be no boundaries. For instance the brain is what we'd call a robust system that produces consciousness but where are the boundaries of that system? The obvious answer is that it is the physical limits of the brain (and nervous system)  structure but why should it be? If something else affected the brain from outside it - in the sense of changing its state - would that not become part of the system - at least for that moment in time? That external influence could be something subtle like radio waves or it could be something catastrophic like the brain being impaled by a foreign object. In the latter case it would most certainly cause a disruption if not the total destruction of consciousness, suggesting that it still needs to be a robust system - or have a particular design - to sustain consciousness as we know it. That's where the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness I talked about before could come in handy - though I have only read an article on it, not read anything in depth. It means to 'measure' how integrated the information is before and after the injury. I won't say any more on that until I've read a bit more about it, but somehow IIT looks like it would fit in perfectly with these theories.