The Centrality of information (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 23, 2014, 19:32 (3595 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Information is immaterial. That is the key point. Think of your plays as your intellectual property, stated that way because they are not material. To me the information in DNA is the same. Your brain made up your plays. What did it for DNA, which is a code, and codes come from brains. It is Nagel's philosophic point. Perhaps I have done it better than the writer I referred you to.-I have no problem understanding that information is immaterial. So is all thought. I don't know of anyone who thinks that thought is a material substance. My objection is to the fact that the author somehow thinks this is evidence that the source of consciousness is also immaterial, that nature may be "non-material", that Darwinian evolution is wrong, and that the watchmaker is not blind. Presumably you can't find a link either, so let's forget the article and discuss what you have written, which encapsulates a major problem for those of us who are interested in the nature of consciousness.-You say that my brain made up my plays. My brain is a material substance (some might say that mine is particularly thick!). The implication of your statement is that my plays are the product of chemical interactions between the cells that make up my brain. Terms like "code" and "information" won't help us, and if anything tend to obfuscate the issue. The question in this case would be how material substances can produce thoughts. However, on past threads we've discussed whether the brain is a producer or a receiver. In other words, whether the chemical interactions within the brain create the immaterial thoughts, or there is an immaterial energy which does the thinking and sets the brain in motion. Of course the latter brings us to dualism, but it also links up with your God hypothesis and my panpsychist hypothesis. Your first cause is conscious energy which makes matter and is within all matter; in my hypothesis, energy makes matter and becomes conscious both of and within the matter it has made. In both hypotheses, the source of consciousness is energy (immaterial), not matter, and so the material brain is not the producer of thought but the receiver, which opens the door to psychic experiences and even the possibility of life after death.
 
So does matter produce conscious energy (making consciousness an "emergent" property), or does conscious energy control matter (dualism)? Or, intriguingly, does matter produce conscious energy which in turn controls matter? Unfortunately, even if we knew the answers to these questions, we still wouldn't know HOW consciousness arises from materials or from energy. Same old brick wall.