Posts Tagged nature as mind

Information Theory and Metaphysics

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on March 10, 2011


Courtesy of listener Matt Gantner, here’s a Scientific American article on “Why Information Can’t Be the Basis of Reality.”

The author, John Horgan, criticizes information theorists like James Gleick who posit that information is somehow the basic structure of the universe (which seems to be a modern variation on Anaxagoras’s idea that mind, or Nous, is the fundamental component). Horgan argues that information requires someone to be informed, i.e. requires consciousness, which is obviously not in any ordinary sense present at the sub-atomic level. This is similar to Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument against the idea that “mind” can be understood as symbol manipulation (discussed here).

What do you think? Is Horgan missing something?

-Mark Linsenmayer

, , , ,

34 Comments

Consciousness and Unity (a Froot Loopian perspective)

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on August 31, 2010

Just so I’m not just harshing on the religious right, this seemed an opportune time to post a video I ran across during my search for consciousness/mind-related videos a few months back:

One of the major interpretations of mystical experience is that in it, we shake off the individual ego and somehow are able to merge with a larger unity. Read the rest of this entry »

, ,

7 Comments