Flammarion wrote:
>
>
> 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.
I'm not so sure about that - maybe "more is different" applies. "This
is red" is really a summary, an abstraction, of what the red sensor
firing means to the alien. To a human it's the color of blood and has
connotations of violence, excitement, danger. To an alien with green
blood... from a planet with red seas...? If you knew all the
associations built up over a lifetime of memories and many lifetimes
of evolution maybe the 'hard problem' would dissolve.
Brent
> It is easier to write a book on the van Gogh's iconography than it
> is to explain how The Sunflowers *looks*.
> >
>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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 Thu Aug 27 2009 - 18:27:08 PDT