Re: Quote of the week

Posted by Eric Charles on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Quote-of-the-week-tp6442957p6493083.html

I think Tom is right that the path to solving mysteries like this is often to look outward rather than inward. Part of the point of William James's somewhat mysterious "Stream of Consciousness" expositions was to point out that at the most basic level experience is a unified whole -> i.e. the experience of "the firecracker at the ball game after a win" is more basic than the experience "firecracker". While it is useful for some purposes, it is unnatural to break up experience and consider individual "experienced things" in isolation. Thus, there is novelty to be found not just in the difficult to discern differences between each firecracker, but also between firecrackers-in-context.

Eric

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 11:27 PM, Marcos <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Yes, but that firecracker -- as data not information -- needs to be
> understood in some context of space/time.  A firecracker in my
backyard
on a
> 4th of July afternoon is quite different than a firecracker of equal size
> throw at cops during a riot.
>
> Could it be that what you call a "observational/informational
gradient" is
> what I call context?

No, I don't think so.  The notion of "context" exists within the
domain of the cognitive, although within that domain, one might
imagine that there are domains of gradients of their own which exists
in the social sphere.

But in this case, I'm talking at the level of raw data.  In the same
way that potential and kinetic energy reflect or are symmetric each
other (in the sense that the total amount at any given time is
constant), that, similarly, that the total sum e (energy) +  H
(information) always stays constant within a closed system.

So in the given example, the actual physical, energetic vibrations are
turned into data by tickling the fine hairs of the human listener.
And, furthermore, it would seem that the brain was the universe's
answer to the "entropy problem" as we seem naturally inclined to
continue repeating explosion after explosion because at some level
deeper than the cognitive, the brain is cataloging all that data and
rewarding us (at least boys) for the novelty (in the
information-theoretic sense) that it confers with each explosion even
though there's hardly anything new at our own cognitive level.
Consciousness was nature's way of solving the problem of "the heat
death of the universe", or alternately, those universes which didn't
have observers simply died out long ago and we're one that remained.

marcos

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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

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