A bundle of sticks that looks like this: VIII with no one to observe it is a bundle of sticks. It can't ever be more than that without some mind observing it and attaching additional signifiers. However, when the bundle of sticks is observed by someone who knows Roman Numerals, it's a bundle of sticks AND it picks up a new attribute courtesy of the mind observing it: it's a bundle of sticks and the roman numeral for 8. — RogueAI
Another fun version I have thought about before:Here is a demonstration — Count Timothy von Icarus
If algorithms are just names, a relatively bare bones symbol shuffling algorithm is almost godlike in it's ability to name almost everything. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So something changes in the computer when it is observed or is computation just in the mind of the observer? — Count Timothy von Icarus
My guess is that it comes down to the ability to discern between small differences. This is also what instruments do for humans and computers, allow for greater discernablity. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It seems difficult to have information be mind independent but not computation. I won't comment on the status of such things in theoretical "mindless universes," but in the real universe meaning, at least at the level of reference to something external to the system, absolutely seems to exist sans observers, e.g. ribosomes are presumably not conscious but can read code that refers to something other than itself, and they in turn follow the algorithm laid out in the code to manufacturer a protein. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Humans are part of nature. Human minds presumably have natural causes and thoughts/subjective meaning are part of this natural world. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting that the only place outside human activities and animal communications that something like transmission of information occurs is in living organisms and DNA, isn't it?
but the mind is never a direct object of perception.
Is this the case? Doesn't water eroding topsoil generate information about its passage in the form of riverbeds? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Aren't our own minds the objects of direct perception? Arguably this is the only thing we observe directly, depending on how you define direct. Light, apples, cars, these are all filtered through the mind, Kant's old trancendental and all. — Count Timothy von Icarus
We can observe that other creatures are conscious and presume that they too have minds, but the mind is never a direct object of perception. — Wayfarer
. But in the non-organic realm, what sense does it make to speak of information at all? — Wayfarer
If it is state, there is certainly state without interpretation.
Having information rest solely in the minds of observers seems at risk of becoming subjective idealism. The information has to correspond to and emerge from external state differences or else how can we discuss incorrect interpretations of any signal? — Count Timothy von Icarus
I would argue that information exists "in the wild," as discernible differences. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I do have a theory of how "computation is instantiated in the world". But first, I must take issue with "computation" as a Definition rather than an Action*1. If you can accept -- as a philosophical postulation -- the notion that Evolution is a process of Computation (a la Tegmark), then my own unorthodox thesis might make sense.how computation is instantiated in the world. . . . . Computation is what defines mathematical/abstract objects rather than it being some activity that you do with them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Doesn't that imply that a discerner is a necessary condition for "discernible differences"?
a riverbed wouldn't store information of the passage of water, but then its physical state, which seems identical to the total information that can be taken from it, is somehow different? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Having information rest solely in the minds of observers seems at risk of becoming subjective idealism. The information has to correspond to and emerge from external state differences or else how can we discuss incorrect interpretations of any signal? — Count Timothy von Icarus
All due respect, I think the error you're making is that of metaphysical naturalism - the assumption that the world would exist, just as it seems to now, were no humans present within it. But even that apparently empty world is still organised around an implicit perspective. Take that away and you can't imagine anything whatever.
The axioms define the numbers, just as, in a universe with different constants, an electron would not be an electron and would behave differently. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.