Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t...
by goatlover on Sunday September 30, 2018 @05:57PM
(#18108659)
> It seems to me that qualia are simply information, or a process performed on information.
Not all information has a subjective component to it, so qualia can't be identical to information, unless one is a panpsychist.
Moreover, information can be seen as an abstraction from experience that humans create via cognition and language. One might respond that all physical processes involve information, but physics is itself an abstraction. It's our attempt to create a map or models of the world. It's not the world itself.
Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t...
by simonh on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:46AM
(#18110951)
>Not all information has a subjective component to it, so qualia can't be identical to information, unless one is a panpsychist.
Doesn't that just make qualia a subset of information, not distinct from it? Even metadata is still just a form of data.
Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t...
by coldtea on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:12AM
(#18111058)
>Charmers argues that quaila cannot be reduced to physical causes. However we know for sure that any conceivable information or process that can be performed on information must be tractable to physical encoding.
That's taking what you ought to prove for granted.
We hardly know it "for sure". Even if we're totally certain of it, he haven't proved it.
Charmers argues that quaila cannot be reduced to physical causes. However we know for sure that any conceivable information or process that can be performed on information must be tractable to physical encoding.
It seems to me that qualia are simply information, or a process performed on information. If so, clearly they can have a physical cause. To refute this, Chalmers would have to show some property or characteristic of qualia that is not information or a process performed on it. But this is impossible. Any such explanation would by definition have to be encoded in information or a process performed on information.
Therefore if it is even possible for Chalmers to explain or adequately describe his thesis in a complete and consistent way, it must be true that his thesis is false.