Re: Consciousness is information?

From: russell standish <lists.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:05:51 +1000

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 01:01:49PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Kelly <harmonk00.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >
> > I don't say that they are rare, I say they don't make any sense.  A
> > big difference.
> >
> > I say that every possible event is perceived to happen, and so nothing
> > is more or less rare than anything else.  There are only things that
> > are rare in your experience.  They are not rare in an absolute sense.
> >
> > Why do I say this?  Because I think that platonism is the best
> > explanation for conscious experience, and the above view is (I think)
> > the logical conclusion of that platonic view of reality.
> >
> >
>
> I am not sure that the measure problem can be so easily
> abandoned/ignored. Assuming every Observer Moment had has an equal
> measure, then the random/white-noise filled OMs should vastly
> outnumber the ordered and sensible OMs. Though I ever only have one
> OM to go by, the fact I was able to maintain a
> non-random/non-white-noise filled OMs long enough to compose this post
> should serve as some level of evidence that all OMs are not weighted
> equally.
>
> Bruno has suggested that computationalism is a candidate for answering
> the measure problem in a testable way. However there may be other
> ways to answer it by considering platonic objects, for example
> counting the umber of paths to a state, that is how often it reappears
> as a substructure of other platonic objects, etc. Whether or not this
> is testable is another question, but whether the ultimate explanation
> of consciousness is computation or information, I feel that measure is
> important.
>
> Jason
>

What you are talking about is what I call the "Occam catastrophe" in
my book. The resolution of the paradox has to be that the
random/white-noise filled OMs are in fact unable to be observed. In
order for the Anthropic Principle to hold in a idealist theory
requires that the OM must contain a representation of the observer, ie
observers must be self-aware. Amongst such OMs containing observers,
ones that are the result of historically deep evolutionary processes
are by far the most common. And evolution of those observer moments
must also be constrained to be similar to those previously observed,
eliminating white rabbits, due to "robustness" of the observer.

Cheers

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish                  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics                         	 
UNSW SYDNEY 2052         	         hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia                                http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Wed Apr 29 2009 - 16:05:51 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:15 PST