RE: The Theory of Consciousness: A New Era of Science
Thanks for your thoughts. Again I'm glad to see cool philosophy problems discussed on steemit and getting some attention!
The idea that consciousness is information sounds to me to be the "functionalist" approach to consciousness. Dennett and the Churchlands, for example, would agree that in many meanings of the term "consciousness" it's basically a kind of information-processing. But when it comes to the "what-it's-like" sense of consciousness - the qualia - there seem to be convincing arguments that consciousness in that sense could not be pure information-processing. Dennett agrees and says consciousness in that sense does not exist - mental states are just information processing. So are you a Dennettian eliminativist after all? Or do you mean something else by "consciousness"? Or do you have some response to those arguments?
I also think it's worth being careful of contradictory solutions if you're literally searching for truth instead of something that sounds metaphorically suggestive but doesn't actually mean anything. It sounds deep and suggestive to say "I am nothing" and "I am everything", but both seem literally false upon a moment of reflection. Descartes has given pretty good reason to convince yourself you exist (so you're not nothing - nothing can't write steemit posts), and you clearly aren't strawberry ice cream or the Tower of Pisa, so you're not everything either. If you're just trying to evoke a kind of wonder or emotional response without actually trying to figure out what's true, then this can be poetically effective, but it is a very different goal from trying to figure out what consciousness is.
As we will see next time it is not just any old information that can do the trick. And in the end it doesn't imply computational functionalism, which is what Searle and others have been targeting. Dennett is a pessimist par excellence, trying to disenchant the world maximally - to me it seems he is getting old and weary and is bitter that he never found a solution to all the paradoxical questions he posed with Hofstadter when he was younger. Churchland is another beast altogether, and I think he misunderstands his own position as an eliminativist. As we will see I have a lot of common ground with him. Unfortunately, Churchland is enveloped by the same pessimism that Dennett and his wife Patricia are particularly aggressive in advocating, which leads him astray on certain crucial issues. Ultimately I think there is a neat solution around all these spiritual quagmires.
Okay, well I'm curious - especially to see what kind of information-processing does not count as what Dennett called "maximally bland computationalism" - which includes e.g. quantum computing.
And I don't think Dennett is a pessimist - he still clearly thinks the world is a wonderful place. You might think the world is wonderful even if it doesn't have unicorns in it without thereby being a "pessimist" for saying there are no unicorns, and Dennett similarly thinks it's wonderful even without qualia in it.
But I will await your neat solution!