1 of 1- ArmandoAlvarez
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Offline - Registered: 7/09/2015
- Posts: 48
The reality of information
I think I am on to something here, and I think it might be useful in discussions with materialists to make them question their position, but I don't know where it leads. I think it may have something to do with intentionality, but I don't really understand intentionality.
My idea is that you can convince a materialist that information is real beyond the matter that composes it. Consider Hamlet. If you have a printed copy of Hamlet, it is accurate to say it is "nothing more than" a collection of various atoms. It is not made of anything else. And yet, it is an insufficient description of the book to only discuss the matter that it is made of. Hamlet is Hamlet whether it's printed on parchment, encoded on a Kindle, or memorized by an actor. It doesn't matter if it's written in the 16th century spelling, Shavian script, encoded in binary, or again, memorized by an actor, it's the same play. It doesn't matter if the printed book is beaten up, it's the same play. The condition of the matter composing the book only begins to affect its essential nature as a part of the play if it affects the information therein, such as if pages are missing, or if there are many misprints.
I think this might be a useful analogy when discussing the soul, but I'm not sure how to develop it. I also think it might be useful to bring up the idea that information can have causal powers to a certain extent on material reality, such as when people stop at a stop sign, but again, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Thoughts?
- Greg
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Re: The reality of information
Well, materialists will want to find some sort of reductive (if not eliminative) account of information. That is the project, for instance, of Fred Dretske, who wants to found a state's bearing informational content on its being reliably caused; reliable causation results in states with information because, by looking at the state and knowing the relevant causal laws, the state "says something". A thermostat is so constructed that it reliably reflects the temperature in the room, owing to thermodynamic laws, the properties of the material out of which it has been constructed, etc.
He would apply the same sort of account to Hamlet. What is common to Hamlet printed on parchment, encoded on a Kindle, or memorized by an actor? Well, we would say: its content, its information, the meaning of the words that comprise it, its intentionality. Dretske could say, I suppose that these are of course different media, but the same psychological laws have led to Hamlet being expressed in these various ways, so those psychological laws also account for its sharing its content with a certain work of art that is part of our culture.
Ultimately, he wants to provide an account of intentionality of cognitive states in general in terms of causal necessity.