After publishing the previous comment I just found this interesting reply from Bernardo, Mar 5, 2017:
"By postulating a material world outside mind and obeying laws of physics, physicalism can explain the patterns and regularities of perceptual experience. But it fails to explain experience itself. This is called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and there is now vast literature on it (e.g. Levine 1983, Rosenberg 2004, pp. 13-30, and Strawson et al. 2006, pp. 2-30). In a nutshell, the qualities of experience are irreducible to the parameters of material arrangements—whatever the arrangement is—in the sense that it is impossible even in principle to deduce those qualities from these parameters (Chalmers 2003).
As I shall elaborate upon in Section 4, the ‘hard problem’ isn’t merely hard, but fundamentally insoluble, arising as it does from the very failure to distinguish abstraction from reality discussed in this paper. As such, it implies that we cannot, even in principle, explain mind in terms of matter. But because the contemporary cultural ethos entails the notion that mind and matter constitute a true dichotomy, one is liable to conclude that there must also be a symmetric ‘hard problem of matter’—that is, that we cannot even in principle explain matter in terms of mind (as shown in Kastrup 2015, pp. 10-36, this is a false conclusion). The natural next step in this flawed line of reasoning is to look for more fundamental ontological ground preceding both mind and matter; a third substrate to which matter and mind could both be reduced.
It is for this equivocated reason that the adherents of ontic pancomputationalism posit that pure information processing is what makes up the universe at its most fundamental level (Fredkin 2003). As such, their position entails that computation precedes matter ontologically. But “if computations are not configurations of physical entities, the most obvious alternative is that computations are abstract, mathematical entities, like numbers and sets” (Piccinini 2015). According to ontic pancomputationalism, even mind itself—psyche, soul—is a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information processing (Fredkin forthcoming).
To gain a sense of the epistemic cost of this kind of abstraction, consider the position of physicist Max Tegmark (2014, pp. 254-270): according to him, “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage” (p. 255). Only the mathematical parameters used to describe the behavior of matter are real. In other words, Tegmark posits that reality consists purely of numbers—unanchored information—but nothing to attach these numbers to. The universe supposedly is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them,” which “can be described in a baggage-independent way” (Ibid, p. 267). He attributes all reality to a description while—paradoxically—denying the existence of the very thing that is described in the first place.
Clearly, ontic pancomputationalism represents total commitment to abstract concepts as the foundation of reality, despite the innate human tendency to attribute reality only to what is concrete. According to it, there are only numbers and sets. But what are numbers and sets without the mind or matter where they could reside? It is one thing to state in language that numbers and sets can exist without mind and matter, but it is an entirely other thing to explicitly and coherently conceive of what—if anything—this may mean. By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carrol did—that the Cheshire cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is an entirely other thing to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means.
Information is defined as the number of different states discernible in a system (Shannon 1948). As such, it is a property of a system—associated with the system’s possible configurations—not an entity or ontological class unto itself. Under physicalism, the system whose configurations constitute information is a material arrangement, such as a computer. Under idealism, it is mind, for experience encompasses different qualitative states that can be subjectively discerned from one another. Hence, information requires a mental or material substrate in order to be even conceived of explicitly and coherently. To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of any semantic value; a language game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of and, thereby, known as such. But in what way can we know information uncouched in mind or matter?
Although ontic pancomputationalism is an admittedly extreme example, the same attempt to replace concrete reality with mere abstractions lies behind both physicalism and the alleged mind-matter dichotomy, as I shall argue next. So if you consider ontic pancomputationalism absurd, the ontological intuitions underlying contemporary culture should give you pause for thought. At the root of this concerning state of affairs is a generalized failure to recognize that every step of abstraction away from the concreteness of direct experience—the primary datum of reality—implies a reduction in epistemic confidence. As such, they can only be justified if the facts cannot be explained without them, lest we conflate science and philosophy with meaningless language games. "
Source:
https://groups.google.com/g/metaphysica ... VdJQtdDwAJ
