On 28 Aug, 02:27, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 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.
Not at all. That theory predicts that some entirely novel sensation--
one which
has not built
up any associations --should be easy to describe. But it isn;t. And in
fact
describing associations is a lot easier than describing the core
phenomenal feel.
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Received on Fri Aug 28 2009 - 01:42:11 PDT