EricS, Philosophically, I most closely identify with what I perhaps could call phenomenological-materialism. For me all ideas we have, we have exactly because they are *afforded* by the world. There may not be unicorns, but horses and animals with horns do exist. Unicorns then are *afforded*. The role of the trump card in a game of bridge† is nowhere to be found in the atomic structure of the card, but the role is *afforded* by our world. Straight lines and symmetry groups may be nowhere measured, but are exactly accessible to us because we exist in a world which *affords* them. For me, this is how I thinly justify not needing a spiritual or platonic meta-physics. Also on a personal level, I *do* believe that mind is public. I am interested in following this line, in part, because I wish to understand exactly how wrong I am.
While Tononi (in the development of his IIT) <https://www.academia.edu/39597783/Integrated_information_theory_of_consciousness_an_updated_account> aims to be very clear about the *reducibility floor* of consciousness, he also puts forth positive assertions about what consciousness is/isn't. For example, Tononi claims that *The internetis not conscious exactly because it isn't fully integrated*. The technical details of his concept of *fully integrated* can be summarized as the observation that when I go to a wikipedia page there aren't bits of my email and other webpages mixed in. He, like I believe we are attempting here, is working to develop a formal model of consciousness. It may be that we are committing the sin of naming things and abstracting, and that we will ultimately have in our hands nothing but a silly-horribly- wrong tool. I feel that doing this kind of work is a wonderful break from binge watching another season of 'Eureka'. Frank, You and Nick have been arguing for and against (respectively) the private nature of mind as long as I have known you both. I apologize if placing you in these examples was in bad taste. I certainly believe you have a rich and beautiful mind, and I will be careful in the future to not trivialize it by using your mind in examples. For the record, anything I had said in regards to your mind, I meant to say about my mind as well. Glen, Steve, If I understand Glen's comprehension of strings example, there are many arbitrary functions which can act as a *choice of representative* for a given *extensional* transformation. To some limited extent, the claim that *the mind is not opaque* may be the claim that there are more structured categories than Sets with arbitrary functions which are applicable to the mind/behavior problem. If we had such a category, I might go so far as to define a fiber over each point on the holographic surface and consider liftings to a bundle or sheaf. Now while simultaneously **ducking** fistfuls of hay from various strawman arguments posed, I suggest that it may be reasonable to define a connection (damn, are we back to covariance) on the bundle. Doing so could be one meaningful way to interpret *tracing a thought*. With regards to the discussion about our holographic surface, I could use more clarification on the lossy/lossless property. I assume we agree that sorting is not dual to shuffling. For instance, defining the type of a shuffling algorithm does not require Ord <http://zvon.org/other/haskell/Outputprelude/Ord_c.html> to be a class constraint, where it *is* required for sorting. If we are claiming that the information found on our holographic surface is complete, I would like to think we are claiming it to be lossless‡. At the end of the day, it may be the case that we will never know the ontological status of information reversibility through a black hole. Am I wrong about this? If our holographic surface isn't reversible, is hashing perhaps a better analogy? If in the limit of behavioral investigation we find no more semantic ambiguity than the semantic ambiguities we experience when attempting to understand an others language, I may wish to consider the question closed in favor of the mind being public. I do suspect we would run into many many more (perhaps unresolvable) problems along the way, but this exercise is exactly an exercise to me. Learning the nature of these problems is reward enough. Jon †) This example coming from Rota's lectures on 'The end of objectivity <https://www.worldcat.org/title/end-of-objectivity-a-series-of-lectures-delivered-at-mit-in-october-1973/oclc/32972152> '. ‡) Bzip is a great example of a seemingly lossy algorithm that amazingly enough is not. The fact that the Burrows-Wheeler <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform> transform is invertible and is statistically useful more-often-than-it-is-not provides a high bar for what can be accomplished with data compression.
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