Dennett's predecessor brings it all together

[pelastration]

It can be interesting to look to: digital versus analogue.
Digital can never give all the fine-tuning of the analogue world.
Dennett only looks to the digital aspects.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Originally posted by pelastration
It can be interesting to look to: digital versus analogue.
Digital can never give all the fine-tuning of the analogue world.
Dennett only looks to the digital aspects.

Pelastration, could you document that assertion about Dennett? I've read a number of his books and never saw any such limitation.

 

[pelastration]

Interesting. Neural science on BBC.
While looking to a hand moving (ie. take a coin, shooting a gun) on a movie ... the brain zone controlling ' the sense of touch' is also activated.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/sci_act.shtml

direct link to download the realone file: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ram/sia.ram

 

[pelastration]

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
Pelastration, could you document that assertion about Dennett? I've read a number of his books and never saw any such limitation.

Thanks selfAdjoint,

It was not coming directly from him but: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge82.html

Quote: "Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker speaks of "a new understanding that the human mind is a remarkably complex processor of information." To Pinker, our minds are "organs of computation." To philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, "the basic idea of computation, as formulated by the mathematicians John von Neumann and Alan Turing, is in a class by itself as a breakthrough idea." Dennett asks us to think about the idea that what we have in our heads is software, "a virtual machine, in the same way that a word processor is a virtual machine." Pinker and Dennett are talking about our mental life in terms of the idea of computation, not simply proposing the digital computer as a metaphor for the mind. Other scientists disagree (See below: "Is Life Analog or Digital" by Freeman Dyson), but most recognize that these are big questions." end quote.

I maybe over-interpreted. ;-). But I don't like Dennett. So ...

Now that page gives a discussion on digital vs analogue, and Smolin makes this nice remark: "So while the holographic principle says that no observer in the universe can access more than a finite amount of information, that information may be stored in a way that cannot be represented digitally by any computer that could be built inside the universe."