Comment by objectivistbrit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by objectivistbrit | Hacker News Reader

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objectivistbrit

Indeed.

  That’s the content of consciousness, and it’s no longer a
  fundamental mystery. It’s information, and we know how to build 
  computers that process information.

The fundamental error here is trying to explain consciousness through the concept of information. The thing is, information can't be explained except by reference to consciousness. A physical entity X (e.g., a radio signal) might hold information for a conscious agent Y, but X doesn't intrinsically hold information in the absence of an agent.

I know there's a growing trend in modern physics to treat information as a real physical property, akin to matter or energy, but I hold that this is a category error, akin to treating "risk" as something you measure in the world, rather than a measurement of your own uncertainty about a situation. They're both examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy, projecting properties properly belonging to the mind out into the world.

Dualism gets a bad rap, but you can posit a non-religious form of dualism, whereby matter & consciousness are both natural elements of the universe, but possessing different properties. Perhaps future science will be able to explain their relationship in more detail.

Attempting to dismiss consciousness, on the other hand, by taking monist reductionism as axiomatic (everything is matter, consciousness isn't real), end up with the proponents attributing properties of consciousness to matter, and ultimately flopping back over into monist idealism (everything is consciousness) and precisely the mysticism they were trying to avoid.

So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

Information is indeed a physical property that is independent of consciousness. Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

  So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

It didn't. DNA is simply a complex structure, which, placed within another complex structure (a cell, containing appropriate amino acids), creates further complex structures (proteins).

  Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

I don't know. However, I disagree that information needs to be an independent physical property for consciousness to evolve.

The steelman [1] version of your view, I guess, would be that "information" is equivalent to "complexity". Certainly consciousness relies on complexity, but it's not equivalent. Hurricanes are very complex, but certainly not conscious. Some say that complex systems like waterfalls and hurricanes perform complex information processing, but I think this is wrong.

There's a fundamental difference between a human processing information (say, a bronze age man reading about metallurgy from a wax tablet and using the knowledge to craft a sword) and the actions of DNA, or hurricanes, or waterfalls.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

Information is a state--a given pattern of matter and energy--that is characterized by its statistical likelihood.

There are a vast number of states that a few picograms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous can be in. There are far fewer states that can qualify as the DNA molecules that encode your particular genome. Therefore, your DNA encodes information.

Now, no one called that "information" until we came along, but that doesn't mean it did not exist before humans. Gravity didn't have a name either until we came along.

Physically, there is no difference at all between what humans do and what hurricanes and waterfalls do. All physical systems are governed by the same physical laws, i.e. quantum mechanics and general relativity. Information does not violate either one.

Please explain how all forms of energy (especially potential, but also kinetic) is a real physical property, and not virtual "information".

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