3 Substances in 3 Environments

Hi Stephen,

Moreover, like the physicalist, you seem to see that to which mind, mentality, and experience are reduced or with which they are identified - information (objects and their flow) in your case - as deterministic: as captured in their "essence" by "algorithm and programs". It seems to follow then that you see mind and mentality, including phenomenal experience, themselves as deterministic: algorithmic and programmatic. You thus seem implicitly committed to a denial of free will.

Laird,

I see algorithms, logic gates and truth tables as information that has been structured by mind in special useful ways.  Mind, as an abstract term, represents exactly these creative activities where the environment responds to willful ideas.  Very far from a free will denier, I understand free will fairly well.  The best in depth arguments are at https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/

The Information Philosopher proposes a model of human freedom that is indeed a halfway house between chance and necessity, one that involves both, first indeterminism to generate free alternative possibilities, then adequate determinism to choose, to will one of those possibilities.

Without this freedom there can be no explanation for human creativity, which brings unpredictable new information into the universe, "something new under the sun."

I present a metric to measure mind in an informational environment.  Will, foresight, understanding and personal experience are actively changing the info environment.  Different than physical energy action in the informational environment is the changing of real-world probability.  Mind has evolved from direct perception of the affordances in our info space.  Space that includes probabilities wave forms into the past, present and future.  And can manifest change globally as modern communication systems prove.