Kelly wrote:
> On Apr 26, 12:47 pm, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>> No, I think you're missing my point. Consider your analogy of fitting
>> together images to make a complete picture. You present this as a
>> spatial representation of the sequential flow of consciousness. Now
>> suppose your spatial elements have zero extent - they are "spatial
>> instants", i.e. points. What fits them together?
>>
>>
>> It appears to me that you are implicitly supposing that information in
>> the brain (say in it's structure) can be associated with an instant of
>> consciousness and hence allow it's position in the "complete picture" to
>> be determined. But it would not be a legitimate move to use information
>> that was not in the instant itself. And that's what I find implausible,
>> that there is significant information content in a conscious interval of
>> infinitesimal duration.
>>
>
>
> So, we have two things represented by a puzzle piece.
>
> 1) The contents of an instant of consciousness...which is the "image
> fragment" on the surface of the piece.
>
> 2) How that instant of consciousness relates to the instants that
> preceeded it and follow it...which is the piece's position within the
> larger picture
>
>
> And you have two seperate questions about information and conscious
> states.
>
> A) What information is responsible for a conscious state
>
> B) What information is IN a conscious state.
>
> And I think your questions focus on 02 and B.
>
> So, as for 2...there is no actual relationship between the instants.
> They fit together based solely on the first person subjective feeling
> of flow, which undoubtedly involves some sort of short term memory.
> Part of the feeling of an instant is how it is related to the previous
> instant.
>
Are you thinking of something like a linked list in which each state, in
it's inherent information, has a pointer to a previous (or future)
state. And the existence of this link constitutes the "feeling of flow"?
The idea of involving short term memory would be more conventional, but
I think it also entails allowing that conscious states have some
duration in time, or form a continuum.
> As for B, I'm not sure this matters, as it's really a seperate
> question from A. So I am saying consciousness is information, but I'm
> not saying it's the information that describes the particular things
> that you're conscious OF at any given instant.
>
> If I write down the details of what I'm conscious of AT this moment,
> that information isn't the information that caused my conscious
> experience OF that moment.
>
> Conscious experience is tied to A. Not B.
>
> B has no special significance. I'm not sure what it even really means
> to talk about the information in a conscious state. How much
> information is in the feeling of anger? How many bits describe the
> subjective experience of seeing red?
>
My problem exactly. But if we are no longer talking about information
IN a conscious state, but rather information responsible for the
conscious state then we have introduced the possibility of a whole
physics (a brain, a world) that may be responsible for many things, only
one of which is consciousness. In particular, it may be responsible for
limiting the conscious states and for fitting them together in succession.
Brent
>
> >
>
>
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Received on Mon Apr 27 2009 - 10:42:26 PDT