Recent content by Al

What I meant is that the universe, as a sytem, contains its whole history. Even if the intrinsic properties of two or more entities within may be identical, their relative postions, speed, energy, etc., when considered as a whole, tell the story of the system. Of course, I agree. For...

If we want to stay formal we need to consider the lowest possible level, since the system "properties" must arise from the properties of its components. In other words, a fundamental property must play at all levels of the universe, since those "levels" are man-introduced, arbitrary...

Now a physicist friend of mine actually told me it was the other way around: disorganized states are the most complex ones and the ones that need more descirbing. Indeed to described the ordered system, you just need to describe: a) one box, as they are identical b) one of each blue and red...

Well my point was to try to go from your point to something more "fundamental". what I mean is to know if information correspond to a physical reality and hence exists, or if its a reducctionist concept created by men to help them comprehend reality. This is for exemple, the case of life. Life...

Information remains: the heat differential on the keys would tell you in what order did you touch them, that differential will have an effect on the air pressure of the room, which in turn will effect the climate of your city, and in term condition the evolution of the universe itself. Same for...

I have a big problem with the concept of informationd, and it is the fact that it does not seem to correpond to a physical entity. Rather, it seems that a given state of a particular system is considered to be information as long as it can be interpreted. Exemple, a if a take a computer disk...

We still don't know if its really impossible to look from other person's subjective persepective. We cannot exclude that in some future a technology can be developed to wire two brains together (some animals can do it, ants, for instance). I wonder what would the two people experience then. I...

Maybe because the physics explanation of reality is incomplete?

Why would the properties of birth and death different? why would death be transitional and not birth? Would not death better be compared to the transition that ocurred when life first appeared in the universe? I confess, the question was a bit of joke, but I think that we must try to escape the...

It may yet be important to the future of the group, by helping for exemple to raise progeny that share part of its genetic patrimony. That's why many species produce asexuated individuals (ants, bees...). Besides that fact, they're not fundamentally differnt from the breeding individuals. Now...

I think you cannot apply the same argument to life and conciousness. Life is a definition, while experience is appalling, self-imposing reality. If you tell me you experience life, its just a tag you put on the fact of experiencing. Maybe "conciousness" is just another tag, but when you reduce...

Thanks, Mentat, for making my point so clear. The difference of analyzing conciousness and any other phenomenon, as life, is the fact that the phenomena are defined by us, and they correpond to physical realities but not as we define them. "Life", "combustion", "chemical reaction" are...

Thing is, life (exception made of conciousness) can be entirely described in terms of other physical phenomena. There is no transcendental difference between a living cell and an automaton built to perform the same function and set in motion. This is particularly stressed by observation of...

OK, i realize my first post may have sounded presumptous, which was not the intention. I apologize. But the question was honest, as I have heard the illusion argument from more than one neurobiologist and I find hard to accept that conciousness doesn't exist since I experience it. They explain...

Assigning a property to matter implies that we can appreciate the property in all matter, if not to the same extent. Conciousness is subjective, we cannot appreciate it in other brains. We can only inferre it from the behavior of the others by comparison with our own experience. So defining...