jamesofseattle.bsky.social
Observer on the world, trying to keep things straight.
171 posts
64 followers
134 following
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As soon as the robots build some nice hotels, I’m there.
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[finger hovering over unfollow ….]
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It was sunny in Seattle, so I went for a walk.
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#philosophy
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So to answer my question, “the information” is mutual information. But every thing has mutual information with every other thing. So nothing is moving. Information is not being passed along. It’s already everywhere. It’s just being changed here and there. Yes?
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BTW, I would not be surprised if the feedback replay is exactly how the brain evokes memories, just using other neurons as opposed to electronics.
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I (comp. functionalist) say “consciousness is a capability, requiring computational dynamics and counterfactuals“. A given process is not “conscious”, but may be part of an experience. The feedback replay simply changes the computation to a different computation, essentially evoking a memory. Yes?
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So you don’t want to use my suggestion of mutual information, which is fine, but then I simply don’t understand what “the information” is that is being received and passed along. Can you explain?
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[warning: amateur computational functionalist reply]
Seems to me that the feedback replay changes the computation performed by the system, or more specifically, eliminates the computation. If performed only once, we would call that a (potential) hallucination. What am I missing?
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[anybody else read “Soft burnt butter fingers …”?]
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Please explain, what is “the info” if not the correlation? What do I misunderstand about mut. info? If A is correlated w/ B, then A & B share mut. info, no? I appreciate every physical object has some mut. info w/r to every object in its causal history, but the degree of corr. = amount of info, no?
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[not a neuroscientist, obv., but …]
I suggest you use a different concept of information. Specifically, mutual information. The brain can create stuff (mostly neurotransmitters) that has high correlation(mutual info.) w/ respect to patterns in the world (both inside and outside of the brain.)
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That hard part is recognizing/understanding that your own first person perspective *is* a pattern recognition first-person perspective.
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I guess my point is that everything you might say about phenomenal consciousness would be true about the first-person perspective of pattern recognition, whereas everything you say about access consc. would also describe an objective perspective of pattern recognition. So …
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[am wondering how consciousness would make it special.]
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[what if we define qualia as the first-person perspective of pattern recognition?]
*
[sorry, carry on]
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If you simulate photosynthesis, it produces energy *within* the simulation. If you simulate consciousness, it is conscious of things *within* the simulation. If it interacts with things outside the simulation, it can be conscious of those things as well.
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Isn’t that just the fact that the universe follows patterns/laws, which becomes the source of (mutual) information?
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All of them.