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Seeing things through the lens of information seems more like dualism than the arguments for the distinct nature of human "consciousness". (Which doesn't mean i

Seeing things through the lens of information seems more like dualism than the arguments for the distinct nature of human "consciousness". (Which doesn't mean it can't be correct, of course, but simply that people often tend to depict the debate as being the other way round). What is a "soul" if not the idea that consciousness exists as an abstraction independent from the material it runs on? The purely materialist argument is that "information" is just a pattern in the signal processing apparatus of carbon based lifeforms (i.e. it's a representation of the universe in our neurons, not the universe) which very loosely maps to physical processes. Very loosely is important here too: humans can identify equivalent patterns in things as dissimilar as the LCD output of a pocket calculator and beads on an abacus and act accordingly, but I'm not sure the constituent atoms of the calculator and abacus have any view on the matter.

epgui 4y ago
I'm not sure this adds anything useful to the conversation, but I don't believe the word "soul" maps very well to any real thing: we may as well be talking about the "quingel", the "probble", the "finglam" or the "subvick". There's no neuroanatomic basis for a "soul", but there is at least some extremely fuzzy mapping from neuroanatomy to the concept of "consciousness". It's a bad mapping, but it means more than nothing at all. --- And I reject the idea that taking the perspective of information is taking a dualist perspective. I am advocating for the opposite: taking "information" seriously as some sort of low-level quantum substrate of the universe. It's a purely materialist view, where the material is literal information. An extreme version of this, which I find quite intellectually useful, is the mathematical universe. [1] Note that in your examples of information, you are pointing to higher-level information, which emerges in complex systems. It's not an incompatible view! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

epgui 4y ago

I'm not sure this adds anything useful to the conversation, but I don't believe the word "soul" maps very well to any real thing: we may as well be talking about the "quingel", the "probble", the "finglam" or the "subvick". There's no neuroanatomic basis for a "soul", but there is at least some extremely fuzzy mapping from neuroanatomy to the concept of "consciousness". It's a bad mapping, but it means more than nothing at all. --- And I reject the idea that taking the perspective of information is taking a dualist perspective. I am advocating for the opposite: taking "information" seriously as some sort of low-level quantum substrate of the universe. It's a purely materialist view, where the material is literal information. An extreme version of this, which I find quite intellectually useful, is the mathematical universe. [1] Note that in your examples of information, you are pointing to higher-level information, which emerges in complex systems. It's not an incompatible view! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...