Scientific American article on IIT

I suspect the fault ultimately lies not with Stephenw, but with Luciano Floridi.

lol  Even when Floridi is talking "stuff", he does so with elegant prose.  

Let me stay on the path. 

What is an information-based object?  It is an analog to the meaning of the term -- physical object.  A term hard to define as well, but with a deep innate understanding in the common sense.  We just know that there is a kind of unity and we are ready to relate the parts and functions for usefulness.  It will have substance and structure.  It will be circumstantially in an environment with potential future interaction and carrying information about past interactions.

Calling a concept - what ITT uses as the causal structure - an information(al) object is natural.  We have terms in language for all types of IO's such as a thought, an equation, a feeling and (used socially) an intention.

We just know what information objects (IO) are through all the terms of abstraction used to communicate them.  As communication tools, they have their own science, Linguistics.

The idea here is that the evolution of information objects is as profitable to study as that of physical objects.  Math has a deep knowledge-base of using these constructs and has a trail of how the logic is used to create equations and algorithms.

The implication here, is that subjective thoughts yield to objective analysis, just as does physical objects.  Mind is moving these "objects" and changing their probable future states.  These are measurable as to disputations and propensity, as to outcomes of behavior.

great article  https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone...sciousness

   Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole materialist perspective. A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.

It is easy to see how we got here. Materialism is an attractive philosophy – at least, it was before quantum mechanics altered our thinking about matter. ‘I refute it thus,’ said the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson kicking a large rock as refutation to arguments against materialism he’d just endured. Johnson’s stony drop-kick is the essence of a hard-headed (and broken-footed) materialist vision of the world. It provides an account of exactly what the world is made of: bits of stuff called matter. And since matter has properties that are independent and external to anything having to do with us, we can use that stuff to build a fully objective account of a fully objective world. This ball-and-stick vision of reality seems to inspire much of materialism’s public confidence about cracking the mystery of the human mind.

My wise-ass view is that Johnson didn't believe in information objects, because they weren't tacitly physical.  On the other hand - the reality of a plan governing finances may have been an issue.  Information objects have casual outcomes.

 On 16 March 1756, Johnson was arrested for an outstanding debt of £5 18s. Unable to contact anyone else, he wrote to the writer and publisher Samuel Richardson. - Wiki

great article  https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone...sciousness

I liked this article very much, so let's start with that. Notice in particular two things:

1) He writes in easy to understand prose, even though he is talking about a great mystery. I don't think Floridi and his acolytes add anything by writing in riddles. For example, it was only in your last reply that I realised what it was that you (and presumably Floridi) mean by an informational object - I suppose an idea or set of related ideas comes close.

2) The early quantum theorists were obviously fond of interpretations of QM that include consciousness. Those interpretations basically imply that consciousness is much deeper than the properties of arrays of neurons (or transistors). I think their hunches are far more likely to be correct.

My feeling is that there is great benefit in managing to understand some elementary QM at the level of equations - it will give you a lot of insight into what the author of that article is discussing. If you can still remember a bit of school calculus, you could definitely do this.

Elementary QM is taught with a series of grossly simplified models - some involving just one particle moving in one dimension. This simplifies the maths a great deal. Just understanding a 1-D model of a particle moving in a box can reveal so much. For example, can you plough through a bit of this?

https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/...sional_box

Have a look at the bottom, where wave functions are plotted out.

The wave functions for this simple case are nothing more than trig functions that people use to do geometry!

To me, that suggests that QM describes a reality that is precise, but translating that precise reality into what we see if we open our eyes is much more open to interpretation.

To me, consciousness is almost certainly bound up with the mystery of why matter at its lowest level is described in this extraordinary way. I mean, for one thing, you might think that a particle in a box might just sit somewhere doing nothing at all. However there isn't a solution that corresponds to such a situation - the particle never sits at complete rest, and because it is moving it has energy. Moreover, for a given particle and box size, it can only take specific energy values (i.e. in the box simplification the particle's speed can only have certain values).

I think that the mind is not made of matter - which is why it seems to persist in NDE experiences - and exerts its control on matter because it supplies the conscious observer - i.e. it collapses all those wave functions. The physicist Henri Stapp explored this idea in some detail.

David

I really struggle to follow your concepts.  Perhaps its an intellectual limitation of mine, but I can't help but shake the sense of your choice of words as being the challenge.  These two sentences, for example, seem utterly intractable to me.

Is there any chance you can restate the above in more plain language?  If its simply too complex to further breakdown, that's okay.  Again, I am not being pejorative here at all.  I just can't follow along as written.

I was just trying to describe how the basic problem is to find the reciprocal pathways for mind to influence the brain's physical state.  The assumptions for the ITT model is that the brain's signaling is the physical cause.

There is another picture of consciousness called global workspace theory (GWT). In this view, consciousness is created by the workspace itself — and so it should be a feature of any information-processing system capable of broadcasting information to other processing centers. It makes consciousness a kind of computation for motivating and guiding actions. “Once you have information and the information is made broadly available, in that act consciousness occurs,” said Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. -Wiki

Here, above, is ITT's competition.  Both have contributions to make on of how brains interact with mind.

The key pathway seems not well addressed.  How mind communicates with bodily systems!

The key pathway seems not well addressed.  How mind communicates with bodily systems

My tentative answer is that the mind is non-physical except that it can perform the QM trick of collapsing wave functions. More subtly - as described by Stapp - it can freeze a quantum system in one state by repeatedly observing it.

The only problem with this concept is to ask how the mind knows which of the innumerable
quantum things going on in the brain need to be manipulated.

However Dean Radin's famous presentiment experiment might be the answer, because it seems to show that minds are sensitive to what is going to happen in the very near future. Could that be used to select those processes that would move in the desired direction?

That still leaves the question as to how the non-physical consciousness receives sensations from the physical world.

I hope you are beginning to realise that physical theories of consciousness just don't make sense.

Part of the trouble IMHO is that calling part of the system the 'global workspace' doesn't really distinguish that from the rest - nor does it explain consciousness or qualia.

Whatever the ultimate answer is, I'd be very surprised if it doesn't involve QM. Notice that neither IIT nor the global workspace involve QM.

I hope you are beginning to realise that physical theories of consciousness just don't make sense.

Whatever the ultimate answer is, I'd be very surprised if it doesn't involve QM. Notice that neither IIT nor the global workspace involve QM.

You said a lot of sensible things, which I do agree with.  But.........

Your attempt to say that I have a physical theory of consciousness, because I try to understand the ongoing research, misses the point.  I have a theory of mind (of which consciousness is part) that maps the physical events to mental events, each with separate environments.  The mapping is the new ingredient that shifts the framework.

That means that there are multiple scientific process models, including the physical nature of consciousness and the informational nature of the brain.  ITT and GWM both explore the informational nature of the brain and the physical outcomes of both conscious awareness and sub-conscious information processing.

What is missing - IMHO - is the balanced research on the informational nature of mind and the informational outcomes of mind.  Living things act logically in their own behalf.  Modern biology doesn't answer it well.  The using of information tools is more important because it causes the affordance of physical tools.

Oh - wait - there is plenty of science there - its status just suppressed by Physicalism's hold on the narrative.  Subjects such as perception, decision-making, the origin of instincts, Bayesian principles structuring responses and the role of mind in evolution.

What makes ITT and GWM models positive for Psi, is that they are testable to some degree.  And they are testing against each other formally, right?

Shifting t talking abouto QM and consciousness, I acknowledge its positive view of the subject of mind.  I have read my Stapp (and Von Neumann's  Process One) and know what the Quantum Zeno effect is?

I did enjoy taking a few minutes to go thru the variables of QM, on the Chemistry site.  Thanks for posting the link.  It was well done.

My own take is  -- that the picture organizes as you more up the categories of reality.  I would point to this as the horizon of thought.

 Mathematically, quantum mechanics, and in particular quantum statistical mechanics, can be viewed as a generalization of probability theory, that is as quantum probability theory. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can then be generalized to a Bayesian interpretation of quantum mechanics, and thus (in principle) of all physics.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Bayesian+i...+mechanics

Since the mind uses the logical probabilistic structures in realty, I suggest that one can infer that since biological beings evolved to use Bayesian predictions, that these probability structures are real.  And mind has adapted and assimilated these "hand-holds" for gaining control of the mutual information in their environments.