I don't disagree with any of your examples and ideas below. I agree
that consciousness deals with models of the world (assuming there is a
world). I agree that time is just sequence (I referred to the
"sequential aspect of consciousness). But ISTM that each of your
examples implicitly or even explicitly depends on a process, over and
above the information:
"...sensory data is instead apparently heavily *processed*..."
"...we *represent* that experience internally..."
"... and still get *behavior*..."
Brent
Kelly wrote:
> On Apr 20, 2:04 am, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>> The main difficulty I see is that it fails to explain the sequential
>> aspect of consciousness. If consciousness is identified with
>> information then it is atemporal.
>>
>>
>
> Time is just the dimension of experience. But experience is an
> internal "psychological" concept, not an external concept. Therefore
> "time" is also an internal feature of subjective experience, not
> necessarily an external feature of objective reality.
>
> So it seems to me that we have have no direct access to the physical
> world. Information about the physical world is conveyed to us via our
> senses. BUT, we don't even have direct conscious access to our
> sensory data. All of that sensory data is instead apparently heavily
> processed by various neural subsystems and "feature detectors", the
> outputs of which are then reintegrated into a simplified mental model
> of reality, and THAT is what we are actually aware of. That mental
> model is what we think of as "the real world". So it seems to me
> that, even accepting physicalism, we can already think of ourselves as
> living in a virtual world of abstract information.
>
> The same is true of time. We experience time only because we
> represent that experience internally as part of our simplified model
> of the world. If there is an external time, it could be altered in
> many ways, but our internal representation (and experience) of time
> will remain unchanged. Time derives from Consciousness. Not vice
> versa. Time IS an aspect of consciousness...and thus doesn't exist
> seperately from conscious experience.
>
> And also you can go back to the computer simulation idea and think
> about various scenarios. If you and your environment were simulated
> on a fast computer or a slow computer...you wouldn't be able to tell
> the difference. If the computer ran for a while, then the simulation
> data was saved and the computer turned off, then a year later the
> computer and the simulation were restarted where they left off, you
> would have no way to detect that a year had passed in "external"
> time. To you in the simulation, it would be as though nothing had
> happened, because the computer simulation would pick up on the same
> exact calculation where it had left off. There was no interruption in
> your experience of time.
>
> I agree that experience and consciousness requires changes of state,
> but I don't agree that it must be change with respect to an external
> physical "time" dimension. The best analogy that I have heard is that
> if you have a non-horizontal line, it's Y value changes with respect
> to the X axis. So some piece of information (the Y value) "changes"
> with respect to another set of values (the X axis). But there is no
> time involved in this type of change.
>
> Your experience of the X axis will depend on how you represent the X
> axis internally in your model of reality. Maybe you will experience
> the X axis spatially...maybe you will experience it chronologically,
> maybe you will experience it some other way entirely. Your experience
> of it depends entirely on how it is represented internally in the
> information that produces your conscious experience.
>
> I think that the Sherlock Holmes approach is the correct one for
> investigating and explaining the nature of consciousness and reality:
> "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
> improbable, must be the truth."
>
> I come to the conclusion that consciousness is information by way of
> process of elimination. I can think of experiments or scenarios where
> you can do away with everything except information and still get
> behavior that seems conscious and which therefore I assume is actually
> conscious. Information is the only common factor in all situations
> where consciousness seems to be in evidence. And really, it doesn't
> seem that counter-intuitive to me that information is ultimately what
> makes me what I am.
>
> So, I agree with David Chalmers that the idea that some (all?)
> information is conscious in some way is a fundamental aspect of
> information, and not really reducible to more fundamental descriptions
> or processes. Which again makes sense...how can you get more
> fundamental than "information"?
>
>
> On Apr 20, 2:04 am, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>> The main difficulty I see is that it fails to explain the sequential
>> aspect of consciousness. If consciousness is identified with
>> information then it is atemporal. There are attempts to overcome this
>> objection by assuming a discretized consciousness and identifying
>> sequence with a partial ordering by similarity or content, but I find
>> them unconvincing because when you chop consciousness into "moments"
>> then the "moments" have very little content and it's not clear that it
>> is enough to define a sequence. It seems you have allow each "moment"
>> to have small duration - and then you're back to process. Or instead of
>> expanding consciousness in the time direction, you could get enough
>> information by expanding in the "orthogonal" direction - i.e. including
>> unconscious things like information stored in memory but not being
>> recalled (at the moment). But then you've slipped physics in.
>>
>> Brent- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> - Show quoted text -
>>
> >
>
>
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Received on Mon Apr 20 2009 - 22:50:02 PDT