[The following is a draft that I wrote a good decade ago, never completed. The title reveals that I had ambitious intentions for where my line of thought would go. But, being human, the 20th century morass of “information theory” and “representationalism” nonsense was too much, and I could never stay interested long enough (or stay focused enough) to cut through the complex silliness and complete the work. Here I present the draft as is, adding a final farewell line.]
“Know thyself” is good advice, even for today. Sometimes what you don’t know about yourself can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and I suspect that is the case for some physicists and philosophers who in the last few years have latched onto “information” as if it were a fundamental property of the universe along side matter and energy.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF
Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
Others have jumped on the information bandwagon, including David Chalmers, whose December 1995 article in Scientific American suggested,
Perhaps information, or at least some information, has two basic aspects: a physical one and an experiential one. This hypothesis has the status of a fundamental principle that might underlie the relation between physical processes and experience. Wherever we find conscious experience, it exists as one aspect of an information state, the other aspect of which is embedded in a physical process in the brain.
Chalmers goes on to enthuse,
The idea is at least compatible with several others, such as physicist John A. Wheeler’s suggestion that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. The laws of physics might ultimately be cast in informational terms…. It may even be that a theory of physics and a theory of consciousness could eventually be consolidated into a single grander theory of information.
Chalmers does admit a few roadblock, for example,
A potential problem is posed by the ubiquity of information. Even a thermostat embodies some information, for example, but is it conscious? There are at least two possible responses. First, we could constrain the fundamental laws so that only some information has an experiential aspect, perhaps depending on how it is physically processed. Second, we might bite the bullet and allow that all information has an experiential aspect—where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience, and where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience. If this is so, then even a thermostat might have experiences, although they would be much simpler than even a basic color experience, and there would certainly be no accompanying emotions or thoughts. This seems odd at first, but if experience is truly fundamental, we might expect it to be widespread.
How did we get here? One clue may be in the definition of information used by Chalmers. It is a definition that comes right out of the 1940s.
The abstract notion of information, as put forward in the 1940s by Claude E. Shannon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that of a set of separate states with a basic structure of similarities and differences between them. We can think of a 10-bit binary code as an information state, for example. Such information states can be embodied in the physical world. This happens whenever they correspond to physical states (voltages, say) and when differences between them can be transmitted along some pathway, such as a telephone line.
Now, this is clearly not my definition of information, or anything close to it. For one thing, the way I define information precludes it from being “embodied in the physical world”. In the world I live in, thermostats neither contain nor manipulate information, and consequently the possibility of thermostat consciousness is inappropriate: a joke rather than a live possibility. But you see, I am not a philosopher.
Chalmers is careful with his definitions, typical of his profession. Consider, for example, how he defines consciousness:
Consciousness involves the instantiation of phenomenal properties. These properties characterize aspects of what it is like to be a subject (what it is like to be me right now, for example, or what it is like to be a bat), or what it is like to be in a mental state (what it is like to see a certain shade of green, for example, or what it is like to feel a certain sharp pain). Whenever there is something it is like to be a subject, that subject has specific phenomenal properties. Whenever there is something it is like to be in a mental state, that state has specific phenomenal properties.
I understand each of the word Chalmer uses. No problem following the grammar and sentence structure. I even have a very clear idea of exactly what each word ought to refer to. My problem is that I can’t make Chalmers words clearly fit anything in my world. Part of it, of course, is the ambiguity introduced by terms like “involves” and “characterize aspects”. There is evidently some relationship between consciousness and “phenomenal properties” —or at least their instantiation. And what is it that has these phenomenal properties? It is a subject. Or rather “something it is like to be a subject.” Or at least, “whenever there is something it is like to be a subject” then that subject has phenomenal properties.
Why the roundabout phraseology? Evidently Chalmers is trying to avoid some difficulty in his definition (if it is a definition—is it?). But the result is not only do I not know what difficulty he is trying to avoid, I also end up unsure what the words “subject”, “phenomenal” and “properties”—much less “consciousness”—refer to in Chalmers world. He did include a couple of examples, indicating that “subject” includes “me” and a “bat”. Does subject also include tree and rock, or is it limited in his lexicon to species with consciousness? And if the latter, what is the difference between subjects with their phenomenal properties and mental states and their phenomenal properties?
Intentionality, a favorite word of philosophers, is somehow closely related to consciousness, according to Chalmers. In discussing intentionality, he says, “As with phenomenal properties, we can regard representational properties as being instantiated by either subjects or by mental states.”
Oh my! There seem to be a lot of actors in Chalmers world.
Another quote, which helps explain representationalism:
I will take representationalism to be the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to certain representational properties (or that they are equivalent to certain representational properties; see below). We can say that pure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to pure representational properties, while impure representationalism is the thesis that phenomenal properties are identical to impure representational properties. In practice, almost all representationalists are impure representationalists, for reasons to be given shortly. Some representationalists, such as Dretske and Tye, occasionally put their view by saying that phenomenal properties are identical to certain represented external properties, such as physical redness. As I am putting things, that would be a category mistake: phenomenal properties are by definition properties of subjects or of mental states, and physical redness is not (or need not be). I think that this is simply a terminological difference, however. For example, Dretske defines phenomenal properties (“qualia”) as the properties we are directly aware of in perception, and concludes these are properties such as colors.
Which Chalmers finds compatible with his version. So there are phenomenal properties and there are representational (both pure and impure) properties, and these are identical to each other (or maybe only equivalent), and both types can be instantiated either by subjects or by mental states. Or at least by something that it is like to be a subject or that it is like to be a mental state.
Goodbye 20th century scientific supernaturalism! You make my head spin.
