(2022-07-25, 07:19 PM)stephenw Wrote: [ -> ]Mind definition
Information sciences can quantify all of the above. C'mon you-all know that is not what the the Hard Problem is? I am glad to go over what Chalmers is saying currently about how physical processes (not information) cannot address life's ability to think and feel.
Mind, since the beginning of history, is the source of perception from the senses and the meanings they bring. These useful meanings evolved mind as skills. Meaningful subjective information comes from mental work. Mind is the equal to physical forces, in its own informational environment, especially communication skills. It is active in making the immaterial changes to the ecological environment that are characterized as will. Willful intent and motivation change real world probabilities. Mind is exactly this action.
And importantly, it is science and math modeled and open to methodology.
How does mind changing probabilities in the environment get measured? Enter dissipative structures fighting entropy.
Here is an informational view stating that it not physical.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/s...prigogine/
My humble take is --the difference in systems that can create their own order and organization is the action of MIND.
Various definitions of "mind":
- The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.
- The part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels, understands, and remembers.
- The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.
- In a human or other conscious being, the element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc.
- (In psychology): all intellectual and psychological phenomena of an organism, encompassing motivational, affective, behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive systems; that is, the organized totality of an organism's mental and psychic processes and the structural and functional cognitive components on which they depend.
The first four of these are different versions of the standard English meaning, and center on the basic, intuitive human conception of "spirit", which is immaterial and the core of consciousness, and is key to comprehending the "Hard Problem" and the fundamental existential difference between qualia and objective physically measurable phenomena.
The fifth and last of these definitions is the one you offer, the specialized one of psychology. This tries (in order to be as "scientific" as possible) to couch itself as much as possible in objective measurement and physical observation-related terminology rather than mushy terms that can't be related to anything physically real and observable. This is Psychology trying in vain to ape its "betters" in physics and the other "hard" sciences.
Therefore, the essence of what "psychology" is supposedly studying actually completely escapes it by its own self-definition. That is intentional on the part of the many psychologists who are fervent reductive materialists, deny the reality of spirit, and even deny the reality of consciousness as anything but an illusion.
Sure, information science can quantify most of the elements of psychology's own self-definition, but these components are deliberately chosen to be objectively measurable (unlike conscious awareness, the core of mind), intentionally leaving out the central and essential essence of what is consciousness, which is immaterial.
My impression is that your information sciences are trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to straddle both completely contradictory camps. To "have their cake and eat it too". The fact remains that "information" in itself is immaterial but still real (like mathematics). By itself information is completely causally impotent. It's lack of causal efficacy makes it impossible for information in itself to be any basis for consciousness. Information is manifested or instantiated in the physical world by means of arrangements and configurations and structures of physical things in general, with examples being synapse connections in the brain and logic gates in computers, or the coded base pair configurations of DNA, but as the Hard Problem recognizes, it is also impossible for this to be the basis for consciousness.