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No surprise here... Edwin Jaynes called this the mind projection fallacy whereas Ayn Rand called it the primacy of consciousness, an epistemological error. If
by dmfdmf 17y ago
No surprise here... Edwin Jaynes called this the mind projection fallacy whereas Ayn Rand called it the primacy of consciousness, an epistemological error. If everything is "information" then what are the physicists studying? To quote AR "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms". Full quote here;
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html
- Qz 17y agoConsider a computer program with access to the memory in which the program is running and no other inputs. The program is information, and only has access to information. The information is embodied in some set of hardware, but the computer program has no way of knowing or accessing this hardware (and we assume the hardware is 100% reliable, e.g. no memory faults due to overheating RAM or whatnot). So from the perspective of the program, everything is information, including the program itself. Substitute 'conscious mind' for 'program' and you have a conscious mind in a world of nothing but information. The fact that a 'hard' world exists outside of the 'soft' world is irrelevant, by virtue of being unknowable.