Scientific American article on IIT

My opinion is that NDE's - particularly those with an explicitly paranormal component (e.g. observing things in other rooms of the hospital) - more or less nail the fact that the brain does not create consciousness, but just modulates or focuses it. If you accept that, then a lot of other phenomena make sense, such as death bed visions, contact with the dead, and reincarnations.

If an NDE was a rather vague experience slowly fading as the person gets closer to irrevocable death, then I might feel differently, however NDE's seem to evolve in complexity as they progress - so I don't think the brain constructs them.

David

In terms of measurables, NDE's report as very full of meaning and experiences of deep understanding.  ie...  Mind is integrating and restructuring due to experience.

The effect of these personal loadings of powerful meaning and understanding, have outcomes that can be seen to be more or less life changing.

I would posit that some NDE's report to change the character of a person.  The inner structure of decision-making and emotional control of a person exhibit being influenced.  These changes and their patterns - again are measurable.

So the Mind is irreducible, but what can be explained is how this irreducible mind affects the Physical?

Mind is not the sum of physical parts.  I think this is the common sense of today's philosophy.  This is something different.  

I am saying that mental outcomes are generated by the action of mind, directly on the probabilities streaming by.  My image of this has always been mind bending these probability waves, as in the visuals of a large mass warping gravity.  I thought this idea better expressed above, in the original article.

I am saying mind is active in the environment of information.  And when thoughts are framed as information objects having structured relations to other activities and information objects - reductive ideas can be helpful to track the processes.  Just like physical processes, there are patterns to discover.

The mind experiencing deep meaning is something else.  Animals and people are creatures of habit and predictive models describe much of behavior and how communication works.

An example.  A bridge is built.  But before a physical bridge came to be in modern times, there was an information object of a probable bridge (plan).  It connected to reality with its bill of materials, where certain concrete and steel objects' probability for restructuring took place.  They were not at the build site yet.  But entropy has changed.  Things can come together based on the plan.

Yes, but for the plan to be realised a lot of people had to work on it. If you took the state before building commenced, but then took away the people, absolutely nothing would happen.

If you do just about anything entropy changes - typically it increases or stays the same if the system is closed.

Things don't come together, people gather the things together with the purpose of executing the plan.

Your example shows that people - each with their non-material consciousness - can cooperate to get things done.

I suppose you could suggest that the bridge could be built using a bridge-building robot. However that would have to be created by people - there is no way round it.

The thing I don't get about IIT is why it cannot simply be a measure rather than explanation?

I'm ok with this idea of consciousness being modeled to some degree within the context of quantitative measurement as "Information" but how does that connect back to the "Information" of everyday experience?

 "If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature."
~ C.S. Lewis

The elevation of ITT, by some, is because of the increasing atmospheric pressure coming from the vacuum of a working explanatory model.  ITT is a measurement strategy.  The philosophical explanation currently associated with the math is panpsychism.  A metaphysical stance, I think that is wrong about the big picture.

I love the C. S. Lewis quote.  Science, logic and math helps sort the objective nature of "instincts and taboos".  It will take a pragmatic look and how meaning is associated with objects and environments to effectively sort out instincts.

 (Phys.org)—A pair of biology professors, one with the University of Illinois, the other with Macquarie University in Australia has proposed in a Perspective piece in the journal Science that the traits we see as instinctual in animals were likely learned by ancestors. In their paper, Gene Robinson and Andrew Barron suggest that those behaviors learned by ancestors wound up in their DNA somehow, making them instinctual behaviors in later generations.

 https://phys.org/news/2017-04-biology-pr...olved.html

Charlie Darwin wrote about this 150 years ago and described a model of how it works.  The authors want to find it the "engram" or physical markers in epigenetic activity.  Of course for me, they are looking under the streetlight.  Instincts are best studied as information objects, open to the perception of living things.

The elevation of ITT, by some, is because of the increasing atmospheric pressure coming from the vacuum of a working explanatory model.  ITT is a measurement strategy.  The philosophical explanation currently associated with the math is panpsychism.  A metaphysical stance, I think that is wrong about the big picture.

So wouldn't you think that the observation that certain structures, such as arrays of gates, have high phi, would discredit this "measuring strategy"?

Besides, it couldn't be a measuring strategy because it is exponentially hard to evaluate!

David

Instincts are best studied as information objects, open to the perception of living things.

So you have hacked off the 'al' suffix, but it doesn't change my reply.

What is an information(al) object?

Is it a memory chip, or a piece of paper, or a piece of paper that has been written on - or what?

David

So wouldn't you think that the observation that certain structures, such as arrays of gates, have high phi, would discredit this "measuring strategy"?

Besides, it couldn't be a measuring strategy because it is exponentially hard to evaluate!

David

In my own humble view of this, I sees objects, which have physical substrates organized for computation and designed to integrate signals, when measured should have some Phi.  I just think Phi is a measure of integration potential with an eye to causality, in terms of inner signaling furthering expanding integration.
  
Is an chip with an array of gates figuring out its environment?  Hopefully in light of the Terminator legend, no.  Is it processing any information without electronic stimulus?  No.  Will it have an instinct for self-preservation?  No.

Think of an information object - as an objective configuration of probable outcomes in the environment - that can be known and understood by minds active in that information space.  This would be an affordance.

Think of an information object - as an objective configuration of a specific observation, which when known (mutual information) becomes useful for predicting the state of the past or future.  This could be a measurement and data, such as 2 amp output. 

Think of an information object - as an objective configuration of processes, that relate inner structural bits with possible circumstance outputs, such as a computer program.

 Third, it is suggested that an ontology of structural objects for OSR can reasonably be developed in terms of informational objects, and that Object Oriented Programming provides a flexible and powerful methodology with which to clarify and make precise the concept of “informational object”. The outcome is informational realism, the view that the world is the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. - Luciano Floridi 

bolding mine

Think of an information object + its observation = an experience and/or actual occasion.  Consciousness is not a movie watcher but a tool of perception.  We experience our minds perceiving information objects and their intrinsic meanings, holistically.

In my own humble view of this, I sees objects, which have physical substrates organized for computation and designed to integrate signals, when measured should have some Phi.  I just think Phi is a measure of integration potential with an eye to causality, in terms of inner signaling furthering expanding integration.

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 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.

It's not you.

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