• bongo fury
    1.6k
    A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In color, with sound.Marchesk

    Oh, I get it. You come to expose the illusionists, not to praise?
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Oh, I get it. You come to expose the illusionists, not to praise?bongo fury

    I came to do what I stated in the OP.
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    Er, so...

    A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In color, with sound.Marchesk

    Is this your position or your proposed reading of theirs?
  • Harry Hindu
    4.9k
    idealists have the problem of anthropomorphically projecting themselves onto a world that isnt composed of just ideas. Its information all the way down. Ideas are composed of qualia, or sensory data. Ideas are not fundamental - qualia are. If you can break down ideas into various sensations then ideas can't be the building blocks of reality.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    So you're a panpsychist informationist. Materialism is wrong, it's information.
  • Marchesk
    4.6k
    Is this your position or your proposed reading of theirs?bongo fury

    Neither. It's a response to the idea of pictures in the head.
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    Neither. It's a response to the idea of pictures in the head.Marchesk

    Haha, sarcasm, then?

    Fine, although I do think that the "neural representations" favoured by the likes of Dennett and Frankish (thanks for the links) are questionable as being probably ghosts of "the idea idea", and other mentalisms. Hence the prevaricating in 3.3 Who is the audience?. And the possible own goal, if

    An appearance of something which isn't there.Marchesk

    gets supposed as a thing located in the head, to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere.
  • Zelebg
    626
    One leads to a hard problem and one doesn't.

    How? What exactly is the difference between the two?
  • Harry Hindu
    4.9k
    Materialism is wrong, it's information.Marchesk
    I don't know. What does it mean for something to be material as opposed to information? Why not just say the mind is made of matter? If you only know about matter by how it is represented in the mind as concepts, then what exactly is the nature of matter and how does it interact with mind if the mind is not matter as well? Is there any difference in how matter and information behave, or interact causally?
  • Harry Hindu
    4.9k
    So you're a panpsychist informationist.Marchesk
    If by "panpsychist", you mean that I believe everything from atoms to the universe is conscious, then no. I think we should clarify the distinctions between qualia, thoughts, experiences, and consciousness, and determine if any one is a fundamental building block of another.

    Why would my feet be conscious if my brain was aware of the state of my feet? What layer of reality does my consciousness reside? Is it neurons that have consciousness, brains, or whole bodies? Why would there be different layers of consciousness if the upper layers could simply be conscious of the lower layers, thereby bringing them into existence? It seems a bit more complex than is necessary to claim the everything at every layer or reality is conscious, when consciousness seems to reside at a certain layer, and not all of them.

    The objects that seem conscious are the ones that have brains. The brain could be thought of as an sensory information feedback unit. It is how the brain tracks behaviors and their results in real-time and compares it to some goal in the mind. It is a way of mapping one's progress towards changing the current state-of-affairs to match a conceptual state-of-affairs. This is where the feeling of "looking at qualia" that entails what many think of when they think of consciousness - an experience, with the experienced and the experiencer. I don't see matter other brains having this information feedback producing a "what it is like". Only brains do that, thanks to the massive energy they process for fuel.

    The rest of the universe, we are told is "mostly empty space", and "matter and energy are interchangeable", so how is it that we can't think of consciousness as pure energy, or an energy feedback loop? How is that incompatible with a materialist view of the universe, and how would that leave consciousness under-explained?

    I tend to think of information as the relationship between causes and their effects. So when I say everything is information, what I mean is that everything is causal relationships. You mentioned relationships before. Apples are the effects of prior causes - an accumulation of events, becoming exponentially more complex with the steady stream of energy flowing into the system, within a particular area. Our minds are a snapshot of a particular event in space-time, even symbolizing the snapshot with words, "a ripe apple", transforming the event in the world into an object of the mind, hence our idea of physicalism.
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