Abstract
Conscious Experience, Physical States and Information -- And Something About a Dead Cat
After a brief introduction as to why someone like me works for the phone company, this talk will summarise a few of the ideas and approaches which feature in my book Mind Out of Matter (Kluwer Academic 1998). These fall roughly into three parts, although depending on participants' interests and preferences, I may be cajoled into expanding on some areas and/or deleting others.
PART 1: TAKE PHYSICALISM SERIOUSLY!
Arguing that Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment about the colour-blind neuroscientist is not an argument against physicalism but a testament to its consequences, I suggest that theorists in the cognitive sciences ignore basic physical boundary conditions at their peril. Time permitting, I will touch briefly on the incoherence of standard 'mental state' talk and propose a simple fix.
PART 2: SCHRODINGER'S CAT IS DEAD
While it's tempting to look to the mysteries of quantum mechanics to help explain the mysteries of the mind, the most common attempts to integrate quantum theory with mind science -- either by appealing to special computational properties of superposed neural structures or by crediting minds with the ability to reduce state vectors -- are at odds with basic dynamical features of quantum systems.
PART 3: MIND-FINDING
Using some tools from algorithmic information theory and a rough map of the philosophical landmines, the final part of the talk addresses the problem of where we should look to find a basis for real phenomenal experience in a physical world seemingly populated by two kinds of things: those which have conscious experience and those which don't. It offers an answer to first-person questions like 'what am I?' and 'who or what exactly is it that is having experience when my experience is occurring?'.
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