On 21 Aug, 21:01, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> Flammarion wrote:
> > Do you think that if you scanned my brain right down to the atomic
> > level,
> > you still wouldn't have captured all the information?
>
> That's an interesting question and one that I think relates to the
> importance of context. A scan of your brain would capture all the
> information in the Shannon/Boltzman sense, i.e. it would determine which
> of the possible configurations and processes were realized. However,
> those concerned about the "hard problem", will point out that this
> misses the fact that the information represents or "means" something.
> To know the meaning of the information would require knowledge of the
> world in which the brain acts and perceives, including a lot of
> evolutionary history. Image scanning the brain of an alien found in a
> crash at Roswell. Without knowledge of how he acts and the evolutionary
> history of his species it would be essentially impossible to guess the
> meaning of the patterns in his brain. My point is that it is not just
> computation that is consciousness or cognition, but computation with
> meaning, which means within a certain context of action.
>
But figuring out stored sensory information should be about the
easiest part of the task. If you can trace a pathway from a red
sensor to a storage unit, the information in the unit has to mean
"this is red".
What is hard about the Hard Problem is *not* interpretation or
context.
It is easier to write a book on the van Gogh's iconography than it
is to explain how The Sunflowers *looks*.
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Received on Thu Aug 27 2009 - 10:12:18 PDT