Good comments. I'm not sure there is a 'standard' or 'conventional' view of information. Physical scientists have adopted the term as a placeholder awaiting a theory of everything physical. Awhile back I linked an article by Lee Smolin who could not at that time understand how information theory derived from cybernetics applied to physics. It seems to me that computer scientists agree on the ways in which they use the term/concept 'information'. But computers are a long way from universes and living organisms. To appeal to 'information' as the glue that holds HCT together, Pharoah is going to need the support of neuroscience of the cognitive sort at a minimum, but it won't be sufficient to the extent that P is building his theory in terms of nature and life. Given Panksepp et al's progress in Affective Neuroscience, which is being widely applied by biologists, psychologists, neurophenomenologists, and philosophers pursuing consciousness studies, it's likely that HCT will meet resistance from informed readers if it does not in some way accommodate, or at least recognize, the force of phenomenological and biological arguments.
-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
- Status
Good comments. I'm not sure there is a 'standard' or 'conventional' view of information. Physical scientists have adopted the term as a placeholder awaiting a theory of everything physical. Awhile back I linked an article by Lee Smolin who could not at that time understand how information theory derived from cybernetics applied to physics. It seems to me that computer scientists agree on the ways in which they use the term/concept 'information'. But computers are a long way from universes and living organisms. To appeal to 'information' as the glue that holds HCT together, Pharoah is going to need the support of neuroscience of the cognitive sort at a minimum, but it won't be sufficient to the extent that P is building his theory in terms of nature and life. Given Panksepp et al's progress in Affective Neuroscience, which is being widely applied by biologists, psychologists, neurophenomenologists, and philosophers pursuing consciousness studies, it's likely that HCT will meet resistance from informed readers if it does not in some way accommodate, or at least recognize, the force of phenomenological and biological arguments.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I am by no means informed, heh, when it comes to information, but I agree: physical scientists do seem to use the term in the sense that P is; that is, as a process, maybe pattern, of cause and effect.
Whereas computer and systems scientists use it in the sense of a pattern that has meaning in a system.
I could be wrong on both accounts.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
This seems helpful:
Physical information - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When clarifying the subject of information, care should be taken to distinguish between the following specific cases:[citation needed]
Physical information - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When clarifying the subject of information, care should be taken to distinguish between the following specific cases:[citation needed]
- The phrase instance of information refers to the specific instantiation of information (identity, form, essence) that is associated with the being of a particular example of a thing. (This allows for the reference to separate instances of information that happen to share identical patterns.)
- A holder of information is a variable or mutable instance that can have different forms at different times (or in different situations).
- A piece of information is a particular fact about a thing's identity or properties, i.e., a portion of its instance.
- A pattern of information (or form) is the pattern or content of an instance or piece of information. Many separate pieces of information may share the same form. We can say that those pieces are perfectly correlated or say that they are copies of each other, as in copies of a book.
- An embodiment of information is the thing whose essence is a given instance of information.
- A representation of information is an encoding of some pattern of information within some other pattern or instance.
- An interpretation of information is a decoding of a pattern of information as being a representation of another specific pattern or fact.
- A subject of information is the thing that is identified or described by a given instance or piece of information. (Most generally, a thing that is a subject of information could be either abstract or concrete; either mathematical or physical.)
- An amount of information is a quantification of how large a given instance, piece, or pattern of information is, or how much of a given system's information content (its instance) has a given attribute, such as being known or unknown. Amounts of information are most naturally characterized in logarithmic units.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
Is "kind of cute" good cute or bad cute?
I think HCT is consistent with MH (Heidegger)... there is a nice link.
The idea is that an individual is not separate from its environment. That is, the environment does not provide information to the self, the two co-existing side by side.
Rather, the mind and body is an informed construct. That is, M/B is an evolved product of exchange with the environment.
I have not expressed this very well, but I think of there being an equivalence there...
Is "kind of cute" good cute or bad cute?
I think HCT is consistent with MH (Heidegger)... there is a nice link.
The idea is that an individual is not separate from its environment. That is, the environment does not provide information to the self, the two co-existing side by side.
Rather, the mind and body is an informed construct. That is, M/B is an evolved product of exchange with the environment.
I have not expressed this very well, but I think of there being an equivalence there...
Isn't that the goal of a research program announced this last year in England, about which you were hopefully enthusiastic. Has it progressed yet beyond theory?
addseo1115
Paranormal Novice
It's a great forum. I have really enjoyed with all of your posts. Thank you to make me happy.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
What is Polyglottery, What is the Path of the Polyglot, Polyglottery, The Path of the Polyglotâ
Polyglottery is a scholarly discipline. It embodies a quest to develop an encyclopedic mind and to philosophically understand the nature of your own consciousness through the passionate, in-depth, and respectful study of as many different languages as possible, focusing both upon their diachronic evolution as actual entities and upon the intellectual heritage they have left in the form of great texts. As an academic discipline, Polyglottery is the direct descendent and heir of Comparative Philology. However, whereas Comparative Philology had a tendency to focus inwards upon the origins of the Indo-European family in a nationalistic sense, Polyglottery faces outwards towards expanding the individual scholar’s horizons by imparting the ability to read classic texts of Great Books in the tongues of other civilizations.
Polyglottery can best be described as a wedding of resurrected Comparative Philology with Great Books education. For those who may not know, Comparative Philology was the term for what was done with both languages and literature when these were studied in tandem throughout the nineteenth century; it involved not only the comparative grammatical study of closely related language families, but also the cultures and literatures that these languages produced. As its core training, Comparative Philology demanded the in-depth study of many languages. Towards the twentieth century, as other fields of Linguistics developed, Comparative Philology was engulfed by them and, under the newer term of (comparative) historical linguistics, it is now only a relatively minor and unimportant branch of the whole discipline. Today, although the term "Linguistics" sounds as if it has to do with languages, it most often does not concern the actual study of foreign languages. Indeed, with the disappearance of Comparative Philology as an independent discipline, there is now no place for anyone who wants to study multiple foreign languages within the established academic paradigm, and the production of reference works such as dictionaries, grammars, and language manuals is not considered to be "research."
Polyglottery is a scholarly discipline. It embodies a quest to develop an encyclopedic mind and to philosophically understand the nature of your own consciousness through the passionate, in-depth, and respectful study of as many different languages as possible, focusing both upon their diachronic evolution as actual entities and upon the intellectual heritage they have left in the form of great texts. As an academic discipline, Polyglottery is the direct descendent and heir of Comparative Philology. However, whereas Comparative Philology had a tendency to focus inwards upon the origins of the Indo-European family in a nationalistic sense, Polyglottery faces outwards towards expanding the individual scholar’s horizons by imparting the ability to read classic texts of Great Books in the tongues of other civilizations.
Polyglottery can best be described as a wedding of resurrected Comparative Philology with Great Books education. For those who may not know, Comparative Philology was the term for what was done with both languages and literature when these were studied in tandem throughout the nineteenth century; it involved not only the comparative grammatical study of closely related language families, but also the cultures and literatures that these languages produced. As its core training, Comparative Philology demanded the in-depth study of many languages. Towards the twentieth century, as other fields of Linguistics developed, Comparative Philology was engulfed by them and, under the newer term of (comparative) historical linguistics, it is now only a relatively minor and unimportant branch of the whole discipline. Today, although the term "Linguistics" sounds as if it has to do with languages, it most often does not concern the actual study of foreign languages. Indeed, with the disappearance of Comparative Philology as an independent discipline, there is now no place for anyone who wants to study multiple foreign languages within the established academic paradigm, and the production of reference works such as dictionaries, grammars, and language manuals is not considered to be "research."
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
By integrating information, aka, knowledge, aka meaning, into fundamental physics, I wonder if CT can offer a (new) approach to the mind/body problem? Pretty exciting.
In the video above, they give a very brief overview of why information/knowledge (albeit of the non-personal kind) is crucial for life.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Heres a Scientific American blog post about the CT model. I havent read the entire thing yet, but seems to be a good overview/explanation. (Ive read at least one critique that things the whole thing is BS.)
The comments at the end are good in that people see the need for intelligent, conscious beings to make the whole thing work. Im sure DD realizes this as well on some level.
To What Extent Do We See with Mathematics? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
@Pharoah there are parallels to HCT in this approach re how "meaning" arises via the evolution of replicators.
The comments at the end are good in that people see the need for intelligent, conscious beings to make the whole thing work. Im sure DD realizes this as well on some level.
To What Extent Do We See with Mathematics? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
@Pharoah there are parallels to HCT in this approach re how "meaning" arises via the evolution of replicators.
Last edited:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Unfortunately, it looks like on the first few paragraphs are included in this file.
S
smcder
Guest
Yes, you should be able to take whatever text you want and "save as other". I can't do it all!
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Ok. I'm not sure what youre suggesting. Are you saying I can save a PDF file as a txt file? Or copy/paste from a PDF into a txt file? Are you suggesting I manually convert the PDF into a txt file for copying and pasting? Haha Im not sure what you mean. Sorry!
S
smcder
Guest
Here you go ...
S
smcder
Guest
You may want to open in Word and clean up a bit - you can do a find/replace "special" paragraph marks - replace with blank space and that will go a long way, but its readable now
S
smcder
Guest
I'd leave it as is - especially if you are going to c/p shorter sections - then you can throw those in Word and find/replace paragraph marks ... if you do the whole file at once, it becomes one big paragraph.
S
smcder
Guest
You can even just copy out of PDF and paste into the forum directly ...
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
Ive just begun chapter three of Mind and Life. (Im a very slow reader to begin with and I have precious little quiet time to read.)
At the start of ch 3, he contrasts the computationalist and dynamicist approachs to cognition. Very good stuff as I wasn't (and still am not) clear on either approach.
The end of ch 1 and all of ch 2 covered phenomenology. Incorporating 1st-person descriptions of consciousness is something I have come to (consciously) appreciate via this discussion, however, it is very difficult material to read. The terminology used to express the concepts is challenging, and I always feel like I have no reference point in trying to understand the terms; they seem so arbitrary.
However, as I find Thompson's non-phenomenology based writing to very clear, concise, and easy to comprehend, I trust that if I am going to learn about phenomenological philosophy concepts, Thompson is my best bet.
Its a good book so far. Im anxious to continue.
Ive just begun chapter three of Mind and Life. (Im a very slow reader to begin with and I have precious little quiet time to read.)
At the start of ch 3, he contrasts the computationalist and dynamicist approachs to cognition. Very good stuff as I wasn't (and still am not) clear on either approach.
The end of ch 1 and all of ch 2 covered phenomenology. Incorporating 1st-person descriptions of consciousness is something I have come to (consciously) appreciate via this discussion, however, it is very difficult material to read. The terminology used to express the concepts is challenging, and I always feel like I have no reference point in trying to understand the terms; they seem so arbitrary.
However, as I find Thompson's non-phenomenology based writing to very clear, concise, and easy to comprehend, I trust that if I am going to learn about phenomenological philosophy concepts, Thompson is my best bet.
Its a good book so far. Im anxious to continue.
- Status