So that even while you recognise something like the 'explanatory gap' or 'the hard problem of consciousness', you think physicalism is a pretty safe bet regardless

I don't think that characterization describes the view I promoted so well. I think the explanatory gap is significant enough to question physicalism but I think that if that explanatory gap can be explained away as being due to limitations or quirks of information processing then there is no reason to think that explanatory gap is a consequence of some intrinsic ontological distinction.

I think rather than an argument explicitly for physicalism, it is a counter to arguments used against physicalism specifically that use irreducibility to say that the mental and physical are different. But since the idea of what the physical actually is is a bit up in the air or ill-defined I don't think the argument can be used as a way of ruling out idealist, panpsychist or neutral monistic who might just say something like physical things are actually just mental things. But I think the main significance is the argument is a defence for the physicalist against irreducibility.

I think what should be abandoned is the metaphysical assumption of some kind of dualism where over here sits physical things and over there sits mental things and they are totally separable. In that regard, the idea that matter generates consciousness is based on a faulty assumption.

I think what should be abandoned is the metaphysical assumption of some kind of dualism where over here sits physical things and over there sits mental things and they are totally separable. In that regard, the idea that matter generates consciousness is based on a faulty assumption. — Apustimelogist

OK, but if the materialist/physicalist model of reality keeps failing to explain consciousness (either by explaining how it happens, reducing it to brain states, or arguing successfully it doesn't exist at all), how long before we ditch the metaphysical assumption that non-conscious mindless stuff exists?

I get what you're saying. The problem is that this implies that not everything can be explained in physical terms. So, this cuts against many common formulations of physicalism, such that "a complete physics can, in principle, explain everything."

Now maybe, as you suggest, we should not be surprised that such versions of physicalism fail. Perhaps we can suppose some sort of ontological monism, such that minds emerge from physical nature, but we need a certain type of predicate dualism to describe all of reality. But then what exactly is it that makes nature "physical?"

If physical facts can only describe one set of things in the world, then it seems like "physical" is a subordinate category, and that a higher category should subsume both the physical and the mental aspects of reality. Moreover, if physical facts can't describe everything, then it doesn't seem like we have causal closure, and if we don't have causal closure, I don't see the point of physicalism.

The question then becomes: what does physicalism explain that other ontologies cannot and how does it differentiate itself from objective idealism aside from a bald posit that nature is essentially "physical?" Objective idealism can be as naturalistic as physicalism, so that cannot be the relevant dividing line. The dividing line would seem to be the claim that there is something that is ontologically distinct, a substance or process that is "physical," and that this physical substance/process somehow supervenes on all that is mental in a way that is relevant enough to be worth positing. That is, physicalism has to have some sort of extra explanatory value to it after we allow that it cannot explain/describe all aspects mental phenomena.

But going the other way seems easier since all our knowledge of what we call "physical" is necessarily part of first-person experience.

I for one, am not even sure what physicalism is supposed to mean in terms of ontology anymore (although I think it's an extremely strong thesis re philosophy of mind, i.e. "that the body is essential to mental phenomena."). The natural sciences increasingly tend to describe things in terms of process, not substances. What is supervenience in the context of a process metaphysics? I don't know if it even makes sense. But without supervenience and causal closure, the idea that everything has a sufficient reason that can be described in the language of physics, I am not sure there is an ontology left to call "physicalism." At that point, "physicalism," just seems to be a stand in for "monism," "realism vis-a-vis the existence of an external world," and "naturalism," but none of these effectively differentiate it from idealism and the latter two don't even differentiate it from dualism alone.

So maybe the lesson is just to abandon "physicalism" and embrace "naturalism, monism, and realism?"

@RogueAI

explaining how it happens

A: In my view, rejecting the duality of mind and body makes explaining how conscious happens an invalid question.

reducing it to brain states

B: I personally don't believe that consciousness can ever be reduced to brain states but I don't think this is a fault of a physicalist model but can plausibly be explained away as a consequence of limitations or quirks in information processing.

arguing successfully it doesn't exist at all

It depends what is meant here. Imo the natural sciences point to dualism being false because 1) science has found no evidence of separable mental substances that are separable from physical phenomena. 2) science seems to suggest that physical constructs are sufficient for intelligence, perception, cognition etc.

So I think science suggests something like monism. I think its then reasonable for someone to take a physicalist world view since the constructs we find in the natural sciences are the kinds of things a physicalist universe would be based on in principle. I think maybe a physicalist might say that they aren't denying we experience things just that they are nothing above the physical.

----- ----- -----

Obviously some people have said that the natural sciences more or less only describe the behavior of things not what things actually are intrinsically - they are free to posit that this stuff is phenomenal. But I think in light of points A and B above and the difficulty of creating a coherent, non-trivial definition of what conscious phenomena actually is, I don't think someone who identifies as a physicalist can be accused of failing to explain anything anymore than a physicist can be impelled to explain why anything exist at all and there isn't just nothing.

The physicalist is therefore not necessarily be saying that "non-conscious, mindless stuff" doesn't exists just that it wouldn't be anything above the physical and anything about it that can be meaningfully explained about it can be done through constructs from the sciences.

I might even go as bold to say that this kind of physicalism I am envisioning might be compatible with someone who believes that the universe is phenomenal as long as they believe that there is nothing more to explain about it than through the constructs we find in the natural sciences, which I think would probable render their concept of phenomena a bit explanatorily redundant and inaccessible, perhaps useless.

Consciousness can be reduced to the body for the simple reason it cannot be reduced to anything else. In fact, it has to be reduced to the body for the notion of consciousness to make any sense in the first place. When we discern whether someone is conscious or not we examine the body. When we use the term "conscious" we are describing bodies. And since no other object, substance, or thing exists in the body but the body, save for perhaps some flora or food waste, it ought not be reduced to anything else and it ought not be inflated to anything else. They might try to reduce it to the flora, I suppose, but I think that task would turn out to be silly indeed.

One of the problems with anti-physicalism is not only that they cannot reduce it to anything, but that they refuse to, and this is a clear indication that the project is doomed. It's just a surprise that it's taking so long.

The problem is that this implies that not everything can be explained in physical terms. So, this cuts against many common formulations of physicalism, such that "a complete physics can, in principle, explain everything."

I am not sure I totally agree. In the OP I suggest that irreducibility is a natural consequence of the fact that experiences are representational. I then don't think that it is coherent for a representation to be reducible to things that cannot be identified with what is being represented, like with the photo example: a photograph of Everest contains information about everest, it does not contain information about the medium the photo is on, how the photo got there, what physical processes enable us to see the information in the photo etc.

It doesn't seem coherent to me that we should be able to gleam that information if the photo was a veridical representation of Everest. That the photo doesn't contain this information is not a fault, its exactly what the photo is supposed to do. The fact that experiences cannot be reduced to the physical then is not some kind of epistemic gap that it should be possible for us to breach; no, if experiences are representational then it is impossible to explain this in the same way that a round square is a logical impossibility. We should not expect physicalism to explain this kind of thing.

At the same time, it might be possible for the physical to demonstrate this kind of thing in principle through things like machine learning where we design an architecture for some artificial intelligence and describe the information it can process, describe the limits of what it cannot process or explain. This is speculative but I think that is a plausible avenue which is a surrogate for an explanation; for instance, if we create an advance A.I., it might start to say that it has experiences that it can't explain consistent with what we say about how our own experiences are irreducible.

Obviously, someone may just say that experiences emerged somewhere along the development of this A.I. but then the interesting part would be if we can explain why the A.I. is saying these things purely through the dynamics and mechanics of its architecture without recourse to explicit experiential constructs, which is exactly how a physicalist might want to explain away the irreducibility. If we cannot help but find our experiences irreducible as a consequence of the nature of what our brains are doing, then we may have just explained away irreducibility without needing to say that this irreducibility is because the mind and brain are distinct entities.

But then what exactly is it that makes nature "physical?"

If physical facts can only describe one set of things in the world, then it seems like "physical" is a subordinate category, and that a higher category should subsume both the physical and the mental aspects of reality...

The question then becomes: what does physicalism explain that other ontologies cannot and how does it differentiate itself from objective idealism aside from a bald posit that nature is essentially "physical?"...

The dividing line would seem to be the claim that there is something that is ontologically distinct, a substance or process that is "physical," and that this physical substance/process somehow supervenes on all that is mental in a way that is relevant enough to be worth positing. That is, physicalism has to have some sort of extra explanatory value to it after we allow that it cannot explain/describe all aspects mental phenomena. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think from my perspective, it's not so much about some kind of physical substance as the kind of models we have about the world. As you say, the idea of a physical substance is ill-defined and vague; however, the models that have emerged in the natural sciences seem to be successful and I think that is what we should follow when trying to decide the best way to describe things that actually exist.

For me, it is very explicit that physical models are constructs which have been created by us, biological machines. I am not sure scientific models allow us to do more than predict things in some type of fashion which is directly situated and embedded in our own experiences. There isn't necessarily even a strict dividing line between predictive scientific models and other types of models in our experience; in modern neuroscience, the brain is a predictive machine which mediates all our models whether in the sciences, humanities, the way we use language, folk physics, our understanding of social situations or our own mental concepts etc.

There is therefore room for all sorts of constructs in our mind and they are just that - models! For me its trying to pick the best ones for some purpose, not necessarily turning these models into concrete substances. There is not necessarily a strict difference between models we have for things in physics, chemistry, biology, economics etc, and I don't want to say these each have their own fundamental substances either. I am agnostic, even anti-realist perhaps on that kind of thing, nonetheless there seems to be a strong intuitive picture that emerges in the natural sciences about how some constructs e.g. ones in physics seem more fundamental or to have more primacy than others. The value of physicalism then is in the value and power of physics in the natural sciences.

Someone might say this kind of physicalism is difficult to explicitly differentiate from an objective idealism but then again to say you are idealist seems to me to be adding something extra on top of the advocacy of these models in the natural sciences as opposed to just taking the explanatory value of those models at face value.

Obviously all these models are actually embedded and situated in experience as has been said. The physicalist would then say that this experience is identical to the physical just that there is no coherent way of making the reduction from the information represented in conscious experiences and the models of the physical we have constructed in conscious experience, also situated in those representations. The point of the OP is supposed to be that if irreducibility can be explained away as due to the nature of information processing in our brains then the identity between experiences and the things in physics can be defended, we just have an inherent inability to explain it in the same way that a machine learning architecture has inherent limits on what it can do or how self-reference has inherent limits.

So maybe the lesson is just to abandon "physicalism" and embrace "naturalism, monism, and realism?"

Yes, I think you could view it this way though I think the argument in the OP can also be used to defend physicalism. I think it depends on someone's inclinations; yes, physicalism is poorly defined but terms like "monism" or "naturalism" are no better I don't think. Yes, maybe it would be more true to say something like we cannot access the fundamental ontologies of nature but I also think physicalism does capture something more about my inclinations than the other labels, and captures how physics does seem to take a central role in my understanding of what exists. In some ways its actually a more honest characterization of my views and attitudes than something like neutral monism

Only I would resist the idea of meaning being immaterial. I'm sympathetic to view that kind of deflate the status of meaning as a thing. — Apustimelogist

Why resist the idea of "meaning" as an idea (ideal) instead of an object (real) --- an abstract symbol rather than the concrete thing symbolized? If Meaning was a material object we would be able to see & touch it. AFAIK, there is no Meaning apart from a conscious observer. Likewise, Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of constructing meanings relevant to the observer.

From my perspective, Meaning is the output (product) of mental processing (computation) , not in the sensory input (raw data), or the material cogs & conduits of a mechanical Brain. That's why immaterial meanings must be transformed back into material forms (data, spoken language, typographic words) in order to convey the immaterial meaning from one mind to another. Matter is the vehicle not the content of Meaning.

However, Materialists are still searching for the hiding place of ideas & feelings in the the gray matter and white matter of the brain. What they find though is simply electrical/chemical activity that is correlated with meaningful images & ideas. But, the researchers still must infer the metaphysical meaning that corresponds to the physical activity. They can't see or touch it, but must imagine the meaning associated with physical behavior. They show images of localized brain activity, must must provide labels to convey the meaning.

As the OP implied, Meaning is Noumenal (map), and not reducible to Phenomena (terrain). So, Meaning is not a Thing, but a mental representation of a thing : a symbol, analogy, metaphor. That perspective doesn't "deflate" the status of Meaning, it elevates meaning from mere "isness" to "meaningful" & "significant" to Me. :smile:

Symbolic systems are among the oldest inventions of nature. Evolution could never have gotten off the ground without the molecular genetic system, which is a paradigm example of a symbolic scheme. The double helix is a symbolic structure, essentially an extended proposition, which contains the description of an organism’s entire body plan. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 150). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
He doesn't really develop the idea, but it converges well with biosemiotics. — Wayfarer

Yes, but as Pinter himself says on page 148 : "a symbol is a placeholder". So, we need to avoid confusing the material Symbol (reference ; pointer) with the meaning symbolized (referent). Some BS researchers seem to equate the brain terrain with the mind map. Semiotics is relevant to my own philosophical notion of Enformationism ; but as a science, it tends to equate Mind with Matter, and biological code (cypher) with the chemical carrier. :smile:

Is semiotics bullshit? :
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7tSrFR54hT2FwXto8/is-semiotics-bullshit

THE SIGN IS NOT THE MEANING

I don't know how well what I am about to say will come across but ...

I don't really understand what immaterial meaning ... means. To me, meaning is like a construct we use to refer to our own understanding and knowledge which is directly embedded and enacted in the dynamics of experience...

In other words, meaning is just use. Use is just dynamics of experience which reflect dynamics of neural activity.

Meaning can therefore be deflated in terms of being implicit in these dynamics as opposed to being an explicit thing

Thanks btw!

I am not sure I totally agree. In the OP I suggest that irreducibility is a natural consequence of the fact that experiences are representational. I then don't think that it is coherent for a representation to be reducible to things that cannot be identified with what is being represented, like with the photo example: a photograph of Everest contains information about everest, it does not contain information about the medium the photo is on, how the photo got there, what physical processes enable us to see the information in the photo etc.

I think part of the problem is your analogy. It's not analogous to the claims of physicalism, and it's making claims that physicalists would not accept.

The photograph absolutely does have information about the medium that it is made of. I can subject a photo to all sorts of chemical tests. I can identify what it is made out of, what it dissolves in, etc. I can discover fingerprints and DNA on the photograph, which will help me determine its history. I can identify how it is that the image of Mount Everest appears there. If I am a physicalist, there is a causal, physical history linking the image to the mountain.

Information theory has generally not been thought to be incompatible with physicalism per say. There is nothing mysterious about how a photo plate comes to encode information about the light that was allowed to reach the plate. From the photo I can likely determine what time of day the picture was taken at, the weather as the picture was taken, etc. The film itself will tell me what type of device was used to take the picture and I can then use my computer, a physical device, to find all sorts of information on the exact physics that would allow a person with a camera to create such a picture.

how the photo got there

How the photo got to where it is has a physical causal history per physicalism. If it is in an unlikely place, say in a locked drawer, I can surmise that a human being put it there because any other way for the picture to end up in that place is exceedingly unlikely. The location of a photo absolutely does contain information about where the photo came from and how it got to where it is. For example, if the photo was created using antiquated technology, and shows sign of having aged, I will know the photo was taken many years ago. Based on the glaciation seen in the photograph, I might even be able to date it to within a single year or few years.

You seem to be setting up some sort of dichotomy between the "image" on the photograph and the physical photograph. But physicalism is an ontology that explicitly denies that any such dichotomy exists except in our minds. Film is physical. It encodes information about the pictures taken with it by virtue of physical processes. And, in comparison to how minds are generated, the physical processes involved in photography are very well understood in physical terms and arguably already reducible to them.

As you say, the idea of a physical substance is ill-defined and vague; however, the models that have emerged in the natural sciences seem to be successful and I think that is what we should follow when trying to decide the best way to describe things that actually exist.

Right, but science itself often doesn't make any sort of ontological claims at all. When physicists do make ontological claims, they increasingly seem to be embracing various forms of immaterialism, mostly ontic structural realism, rather than physicalism. Certainly, you can do away with physicalism without doing away with science, which is why the development of what physicalist philosophers have considered to be major problems have themselves gone unnoticed in the scientific community. Problems that might be fatal to physicalism, such as "how to coherently define supervenience" simply don't matter to science because physicalism is not a prerequisite for science.

I have to go but I will reply to this in a couple of hours!

There are two questions you can ask of the photograph:

1. How do you explain the informational content of the picture?
2. How can the material photograph host the content of the picture?

1 is not subject to a physicalist argument around the properties of the photographic material, but 2 is. But for phenomenal experience, the 2 question cannot (as of yet) be answered in terms of the physics of brains. Pointing out that 1 also cannot be answered by brain physics (and that it shouldn't be expected to be), doesn't seem salient to the anti-physicalist argument that 2 cannot be answered.

The photograph absolutely does have information about the medium that it is made of. I can subject a photo to all sorts of chemical tests. I can identify what it is made out of, what it dissolves in, etc. I can discover fingerprints and DNA on the photograph, which will help me determine its history.

But I am talking about the information contents of the actual image, you are talking about features of the physical object the image has been projected on. I can produce the same image on different paper or have it on a digital screen and identify the contents of the image; those contents are not directly related to the physical composition of a photograph you can hold in your hand and cannot be reduced to it, which is the main point.

Yes, it's true that that image is not totally independent of other factors; after all, the type of camera and resolution etc will have an effect on the image but these largely still come from the same interactions during the photo-taking process by which the image of Everest was stored - it is still information of the image which is independent of the physical medium an image is projected on and so cannot be reduced to it.

how the photo got there

I wasn't very clear at all when I said this because I didn't anticipate it to become a topic of the convo but I actually mean't to say the actual physical process by which the photograph was created in the moment through light reflectance and absorption and what ever complicated physical processes are involved. This can't be inferred just from looking at an image.

The film itself will tell me what type of device was used to take the picture and I can then use my computer, a physical device, to find all sorts of information on the exact physics that would allow a person with a camera to create such a picture.

Yes and this is what we have done in neuroscience but the point is that that physical information is not directly inferrable from the image itself, it relies on additional empirical observations extraneous to the features of the image, e.g. the arrangement of color parameters that form what we can identify as the image.

You seem to be setting up some sort of dichotomy between the "image" on the photograph and the physical photograph. But physicalism is an ontology that explicitly denies that any such dichotomy exists except in our minds. Film is physical. It encodes information about the pictures taken with it by virtue of physical processes. And, in comparison to how minds are generated, the physical processes involved in photography are very well understood in physical terms and arguably already reducible to them.

Well I don't think there is necessarily a dichotomy in the way you suggest since the information in the photograph is being perceived and interpreted through a physical process - whatever person or perhaps even machine, computer program etc is reading the image.

But the point is that to read the information in the photo, whatever machine has to be designed to distinguish arrangements of color parameters or inputs that map to those arrangements. That information is the contents of the image but nothing in that arrangement will tell you about the medum that image is projected on. I can imagine a circle, see it on a computer screen, see it on paper. What tells me that that image is a circle and differentiates it from non-circles has nothing to do with some kind of medium it is represented on.

When physicists do make ontological claims, they increasingly seem to be embracing various forms of immaterialism, mostly ontic structural realism, rather than physicalism

I think this is splitting hairs really for the purposes of the part you quoted because whether you're talking about ontic structural realism or physicalism, you're not changing the central role of physical constructs in the universe amongst other constructs. If you look at people like James Ladyman, they are expressing the same kind of sentiment as in that quote; they try to produce a more rigorous characterization of reality which can essentially be used as a vehicle for their naturalism, empiricism.

I would say that information content isn't a thing in and of itself but is about what an observer can distinguish.

My point is not really 1 or 2 but an inversion of 2 - how can an observer infer the material content from the image.

The photo thing I think isn't so much supposed to be an analogy for the physical and mental per se but of the relationship between representations and the mediums that hold them. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the information is about what is being represented and nothing else. Experiences are representations of things in the outside world. If they had information about what is going on inside your head they would be bad representations and our neural architecture isn't designed to represent that information. There is no reason to expect that the representations of our experience should be reducible to whatever is going on inside our heads if they serve the proper function of representations.

What's your take on Mary's Room?

I can produce the same image on different paper or have it on a digital screen and identify the contents of the image; those contents are not directly related to the physical composition of a photograph you can hold in your hand and cannot be reduced to it, which is the main point...it is still information of the image which is independent of the physical medium — Apustimelogist

These are good arguments against physicalism, apparently being deployed in support of physicalism. :roll:

Not at all, the metaphor has a completely physical basis so how can it be an argument against physicalism?

I think Mary's Room is a very good argument against the reducibility of experiences to physics but I don't think that it entails that this is because experiences are some kind of thing out in the world being missed out on.

I would expect that in principle we can derive Mary's reaction of "aha, now I know what it is like to see red" from a complete physical description of her brain processing. If her ability to see color is mediated by physical photoreceptors and physical communication via neurotransmission then her new knowledge of red is due to physics, not some unique experiential thing like qualia which she has a kind of special ability to detect. Similarly, her inability to make the reduction from red to physics is something that is a consequence of her brain activity and the type of information she is processing in that activity.

Her new knowledge of red then may not be a physical fact in the trivial sense that it is not part of her understanding of physics, but it is not necessarily a consequence of something about reality that is being missed in a particularly significant way. What she can or cannot perceive is a direct consequence of physics.

I think what should be abandoned is the metaphysical assumption of some kind of dualism where over here sits physical things and over there sits mental things and they are totally separable. In that regard, the idea that matter generates consciousness is based on a faulty assumption. — Apustimelogist

I don't think Dualism is a "faulty assumption" for dealing with complex reality (Epistemology). But I can agree with your implicit criticism of the common "metaphysical assumption" of a Matter/Mind partition, imagined as the ultimate & final fact of reality (Ontology). That binary perspective is prevalent because it's just commonsense to view a material object (Brain) and its metaphysical function (Mind) as two separate classes of things. Those discrete conceptual categories are also where Science (matter ; mode) and Philosophy (mind ; essence) divide and conquer.

However, in my own personal Ontology, and from a Cosmic perspective, there is only one universal "Essence" (substance) in the world. I'm referring to Spinoza's Substance Monism*1, in which everything in the world is a part of a unitary infinite Ultimate Essence : Deus sive Natura (God or Nature). In my own cosmology though, I call that peak of the pyramid : BEING*2. He used Aristotle's concept of "Substance" in the sense of an Essence (uniform Platonic Form) from which all physical & metaphysical forms (particular things) emerge.

I call my personal worldview Enformationism, because modern science has discovered that everything in the world can be reduced down to Information*3, in the sense of the creative power to transform, which we commonly call Energy. To Enform is to transform from undefined Potential into definite Actual things. Get it? : Energy (causation) + Information (program or code) = EnFormAction. Instead of Spinoza's term "God" though, I tend to refer to that Single Source of enforming power as The Programmer or The Enformer.

Therefore, my philosophical Ontology is Monistic, but for the practical purposes of Science, it's convenient to think in terms of tangible Matter/Physics/Quanta (the modes of Being), and to leave the intangibles Mind/Essence/Qualia for impractical Philosophy to wrestle with. You can call that compromise : Dualism within Monism (i.e. Parts within the Whole). :smile:


*1. Substance Monism :
According to Spinoza, everything that exists is either a substance or a mode. A substance is something that needs nothing else in order to exist or be conceived. Substances are independent entities both conceptually and ontologically. A mode or property is something that needs a substance in order to exist, and cannot exist without a substance. . . . .
The most distinctive aspect of Spinoza’s system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substance—God or Nature—is the only substance that exists.
https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/

*2. BEING :
In my own theorizing there is one universal principle that subsumes all others, including Consciousness : essential Existence. Among those philosophical musings, I refer to the "unit of existence" with the absolute singular term "BEING" as contrasted with the plurality of contingent "beings" and things and properties. By BEING I mean the ultimate “ground of being”, which is simply the power to exist, and the power to create beings.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

*3. Information is :
*** Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world. Physical Energy is the form of causal Information we are most familiar with.
*** For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
*** When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

I would expect that in principle we can derive Mary's reaction of "aha, now I know what it is like to see red" from a complete physical description of her brain processing. — Apustimelogist

But this is the hard problem, which suggests that a complete physical description of Mary's brain would not entail the experience of red.

Suppose there is a blind man, blind not because his eyes are defective, but because his brain lacks the ability to visualize. Suppose he learned every physical fact of Mary's neurology. Would he then know what it was like for Mary to see red for the first time? No, he cannot experience red, he lacks the requisite neural machinery. All the physical facts about light, light's interaction with brains, brains, cannot equal the subjective experience of red, as this experience depends on a brain able to generate it.

depends on a brain able to generate it. — hypericin

It is the “it” that is the hard problem. Generates is also problematic.

Intriguing! I have at times thought about conceptualizing reality in terms of information. I think I have quite a way to go before I can consider myself to have a precise well-thought out kind of manifesto about what I actually believe about reality or how I should view it. Still have to think out a lot of kinks.

And yes I agree with you in the sense that I don't think its necessary to get rid of a divide between mental concepts or the notion of experience vs. physical ones.

Yes, the physical description doesn't entail knowing what red is like and vice versa but notice how her saying "aha, I know what it is like to see red" is caused by brain activity which is causing her motor neurons to fire and let out those words. It is photoreceptors and neural activity as a consequence that allow her to even see red. Clearly, the only reason she knows what red is like is because of her biology.

Now imagine a p-zombie Mary, identical in every single way biologically except for the fact she does not have experiences. She hasn't got certain kinds of photoreceptors so she.. or her biological machinery at least... cannot distinguish wavelengths of light at all. She suddenly gets gene therapy which allows her to produce the pigments necessary to distinguish wavelengths of light ... "aha, now I know what its like to see red!". Zombie Mary is going to say this because she has identical Biological machinery to normal Mary even though she does not even have experiences. Not only that, but because she has the same biological machinery, the causal dynamics of brain activity is going to lead her to say things like "I cannot reduce these colors to the other physical facts I know about the world". Zombie Mary is going to know everything that Mary knows about her experiences without even having them. Without even having experiences she might be able to evem understand and anticipate other people's experiences... tell them that they will find a particular picture beautiful or that a perfume smells of a mix between strawberries and roses, which other people would agree with.

Isn't it strange that Zombie Mary knows all these things about experiences without having them. Does Mary actually having experiences make a difference to her knowledge of those experiences which come about due to neural activity? It doesn't seem so. Why would Zombie Mary find that experiential concepts are difficult to reduce to scientific concepts when she doesn't even have experiences?

This picture of a Zombie Mary is kind of incoherent in that a Zombie Mary knows all about experiences and Mary's actual experiences seem to have no causal effect on what she knows or even reports about her own experience. What this picture tells me is that even though Mary discovered something new, this has nothing to do with a novel thing appearing before her eyez but about changes in her brain. The reason why she might not be able to reduce this experience to physical concepts is similarly to do with the brain and the nature of the information the brain processes. I think this is closer to the idea that Mary gains a new ability rather than learning a new fact about something novel that exists in the universe.

The only way to make the picture coherent, so that Mary's experiences are not redundant when it comes to her knowledge of her own experiences, is to collapse the dualism between physical and mental. Her experiences and neural activity effectively must be the same thing to respect the fact that her experiences are causally efficacious but also that her biology is clearly what causes her information processing abilities and accounts for her knowledge of her experiences. The irreducibility we find then doesn't reflect an ontological distinction because clearly her seeing red for the first time isn't about a new different kind of thing to the physical. Instead, it is of an epistemic nature in the context of information processing in the brain/mind; she has physical and mental concepts which are constructed in a certain way, but these are concepts created effectively through statistical machine learning in her brain to understand what she perceives; they don't necessarily reflect the actual intrinsic nature of the world. She cannot perceive the intrinsic nature of the world that is independent of the particular structure of her senses or the brain/mind she that receives information from it.

Instead, it is of an epistemic nature in the context of information processing in the brain/mind; she has physical and mental concepts which are constructed in a certain way, but these are concepts created effectively through statistical machine learning in her brain to understand what she perceives; they don't necessarily reflect the actual intrinsic nature of the world. She cannot perceive the intrinsic nature of the world that is independent of the particular structure of her senses or the brain/mind she that receives information from it. — Apustimelogist

This just restates the problem that is supposed to be revealed. And let's not dwell on Mary, I just mean the implications of any of these thought experiments. That is to say, it's not about the information processing, but why it is that the information processing is accompanied by "what it's like" qualities. That is to say, a zombie is basically behaving internally (neuronally) and externally (outward movements) just like a normal human, except there is no visuals, hearing, etc.

You can come back and say, that this makes no sense in some causal way that mental causes physical, or what not, but that is the point. What is it that there is mental causing or associating with anything physical?

One can't hide behind words like "integration" or "illusion" or any such thing because that always belies another thing that must be explained for what that is. In other words, one doesn't want to commit a homunculus fallacy of explaining away the problem by simply shifting it to another phenomenon that is subject to the same question (of "what" is the mental event X and why is it accompanying or how is it one and the same as the associated physical events?).

Assume two photos of the same size. Is there the same amount of information no matter what the picture is? How do you calculate the maximum amount of information a picture can have?

This just restates the problem that is supposed to be revealed. — schopenhauer1

I disagree because the problem as usually is seen as telling us about ontology, and I am rejecting that view. The disparity in her concepts or in the types of information she perceives should not necessarily be equated to facts about the world of the world. This would assume she has direct access to the world, which she clearly doesn't because she is only capable of knowing or perceiving what she does because of the specific structure of her brain and how it interacts with the world. I think this is enough to say that her conceptualizations and knowledge cannot be seen as being objective.

And let's not dwell on Mary, I just mean the implications of any of these thought experiments. That is to say, it's not about the information processing, but why it is that the information processing is accompanied by "what it's like" qualities. That is to say, a zombie is basically behaving internally (neuronally) and externally (outward movements) just like a normal human, except there is no visuals, hearing, etc. — schopenhauer1

For me, the purpose of the zombie thought experiment is that the idea that there is some separation between "what it's like" qualities and information processing is totally incoherent. If this were the case then it would render "what it's like" qualities totally causally redundant since the zombie with no experiences knows everything about the experiences their non-zombie counterpart has and comes out with the same philosophical quandries about the hard problen of those experiences (even though it doesn' have any). It makes no sense as it would mean that even though I am seeing and experiencing things right now, those visceral "what its likes" have no bearing on my knowledge and my reports about my own experiences.

At the same time, if brain activity is the cause of my reports and knowledge but is only caused by other physical causes then how am i getting knowledge of those disembodied experiences that are inherently different from and don't interact with the physical. The fact that my experiences and also my knowledge of those experiences line up is totally coincidence which seems absurd and requires a convoluted way of conceptualizing how reality works. This is a much deeper problem than simply the irreducibility of consciousness - another word for it is epiphenomenalism and it just seems totally an incoherent way of viewing how reality works. The simplest solution is that the separation between "what it's like" and information processing doesn't really exist - there is no duality.

Why do we still think of there being some inherent difference? Because our information processing apparatus makes us think there is; afterall, we do not have direct access to what the world is really like. I think a lot of philosophical thinking in this area seems to assume that we just have direct access to things but I don't see how this can be the case when our thought, perception, concepts depends directly on our brain. I don't even think we should assume that just because we experience something we have direct access to knowledge of what is actually going on. Why should we assume this kind of thing comes for free? Does it come for free for cats, insects, fish? I don't think our brain structure or perhaps even any type of brain structure can allow us to satisfactorily answer the question of "what" is mental event X. At the same time I think we can deduce logically that a fundamental dualism between the mental and physical could be illusory.

But I am talking about the information contents of the actual image, you are talking about features of the physical object the image has been projected on. I can produce the same image on different paper or have it on a digital screen and identify the contents of the image; those contents are not directly related to the physical composition of a photograph you can hold in your hand and cannot be reduced to it, which is the main point.

Yes, it's true that that image is not totally independent of other factors; after all, the type of camera and resolution etc will have an effect on the image but these largely still come from the same interactions during the photo-taking process by which the image of Everest was stored - it is still information of the image which is independent of the physical medium an image is projected on and so cannot be reduced to it.

I don't disagree that there is a useful distinction to be made between the "image" and the physical photograph. We can think of the image as the "Shannon Entropy," a collection of variable discrete differences that is substrate independent.

But physicalism says that the physical subservienes on any such information. That is, all representation is representation only in virtue of the physical properties of the system that holds the representation. Thus, while we can abstract the picture from the photograph, and we can say that there are isomorphisms between different copies of the same image, these are causally irrelevant. All cause can be explained in purely physical terms, the causal closure principle.

So what you're describing seems to be more an argument against physicalism than a way to save physicalism. Physicalism without causal closure and superveniance doesn't seem to be physicalism. Physicalism says that everything that can be known about seeing red is physical. There is nothing else. Perhaps experiencing red is a different experience than knowing "how red is experienced." This is fine, but it's going to lead you to physicalism with type or predicate dualism (which may or may not be physicalism depending on who you ask).

Now you do have scientific theories where information is essential, "it from bit," views in physics, Deacon's "absential phenomena," which are born of what "is not physically present," etc. But generally information based ontologies, at least those that say that information is ontologically primitive, are taken to be "immateriality," and not physicalism.

If physicalism isn't going to fall to Hemple's dilemma and define itself as "just whatever currently has evidential support," it seems like it has to pick a hill to die on, and superveniance is the most obvious hill.

To be fair, I think similar sorts of problems show up for idealism. I am inclined to think that the problem might be substance metaphysics writ large, with both physicalism and idealism making the cardinal error of following Parmenides in thinking of static being-as-substance, instead of Parmenides being-as-flux-shaped-through-logos. Maybe these even helps get at cosmological issues because, while stabilities of matter have begining and end, the Logos is necessarily without beginning or end, as cause and effect is the ground from which before and after can even exist (for a bit of a non-sequitor).

The simplest solution is that the separation between "what it's like" and information processing doesn't really exist - there is no duality. — Apustimelogist

Then indeed this is just another name for a form of panpsychism. If that is the case, then this poster was right:

The question then becomes: what does physicalism explain that other ontologies cannot and how does it differentiate itself from objective idealism aside from a bald posit that nature is essentially "physical?" Objective idealism can be as naturalistic as physicalism, so that cannot be the relevant dividing line. — Count Timothy von Icarus