This fits in well: the philosopher of consciousness and mathematician,
David Chalmers, coined the phrase:
"Experience is information from the inside; Physics is information from
the outside."
Which I quite like. It's in his book "The Conscious Mind: towards a
fundamental theory" which is heavy going, but seems to have some really
good ideas.
okidokee,
tim
On May 18, 2005, at 8:26 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> I was using the term "information" loosely, to include what is
> commonly termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a
> physical system is fully specified, then that is all you need in order
> to duplicate or emulate the system. The new system will do everything
> the original one did, including have conscious experiences. It's worth
> stressing this point again: you don't need any special, non-physical
> information to emulate or duplicate a conscious system; you don't need
> God to provide it with a soul, you don't need to purchase a mind-body
> interface kit, you don't need to meditate and wave quartz crystals
> around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge of its
> subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw
> materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which
> indicates where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you
> automatically have a system which talks, eats, and is conscious.
> Psychology and biology have been reduced to physics and chemistry.
> Consciousness has been shown to be just be an emergent phenomenon in a
> particular type of biological computer. Agree so far? OK: having said
> all that, and assuming at this point that we know the position and
> function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still* would
> wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system. My curiosity
> could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system
> myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I "became one" with the
> new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such
> lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or
> any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference
> between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and
> say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't
> think you can deny it.
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
>> From Lee Corbin:
>> Jonathan contrasts descriptions and what the descriptions describe:
>>
>> > > Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is
>> special
>> > > about first person experience: it is the gap in information
>> > > between what can be known from a description of an object and
>> > > what can be known from being the object itself.
>> >
>> > But how can "being an object" provide any extra information? I
>> don't see
>> > that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can
>> "being an
>> > apple" provide any extra information about the apple?
>>
>> Let's remember some naive answers here. First, for a fixed physical
>> object, there exist infinitely many descriptions. It's a common
>> belief that beyond a certain amount of accuracy, differences don't
>> really matter. For example, one ought to be quite happy to teleport
>> even if there is one atomic error for every 10^20 atoms.
>>
>> Second, a common interpretation of QM asserts that beyond a certain
>> accuracy, there is *no* additional information to be had whatsoever.
>> That is, that there exists some finite bit string that contains
>> *all* an object's information (cf. Bekenstein bound).
>>
>> Still, the naive answer is that a description (or even a set of
>> descriptions) of a physical object is different from the physical
>> object itself: a physical object is a process, and a set of
>> descriptions is merely a set of bits frozen in time (and here
>> we are back again, you know where).
>>
>> However, I hold with these "naive" answers, as do a lot of people.
>> And so therefore I proceed to answer the above question thusly:
>> "Being an apple" provides *no* information beyond that which would
>> be provided by a sufficiently rich description. Even if an
>> emulation of a person appreciating the sublime, or agonizing to
>> a truly horrific extent, or whatever----no information obtains
>> anywhere that is not in principle available to the experimenters,
>> i.e., available from the third-person.
>>
>> You could make the experimenter *hurt*, and then say, "now you
>> know what it feels like", and given today's techniques, that
>> might very well be true. But this is only a limitation on what
>> is known and knowable today; it says nothing about what might be
>> knowable about a human subject of 20th century complexity to
>> entities living a thousand years from now.
>>
>> (We ignore the possible effects on the experimenter's value
>> system, or possible effects on his incentives: we are just
>> talking about information as bit-strings, here.)
>>
>> > Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a
>> > description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference
>> > between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the
>> > difference is one of physical existence, not information.
>>
>> Yeah, that's the way it seems to me too.
>>
>> Lee
>>
>
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Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 02:51:27 PDT