Extremely well said! Also, referring to the sentence just prior: "Computers are information machines. They transform one batch of information into another. Computationalists often describe the mind as an 'information processor.' But feelings are not information! Feelings are states of being."
Our previous conversation about the duality of state/process comes to mind. Coming from a professor of computer science, you'd think Galernter would understand that a state of being is just as validly considered a process of being. The information being processed while feeling (e.g. wistful) is the enteroceptive machine transforming one batch of information into another. On 01/09/2014 09:32 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > "But feelings are /not/ information! Feelings are states of being. A > feeling (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) has, > ordinarily, no information content at all. /Wistful/ is simply a way to > /be/.'' > > If there was no such state of being estimated in a transpersonal way > then there would not be word for it. > > American Heritage Dictionary: > > wistful: > 1. Full of wishful yearning > 2. Pensively sad; melancholy > > Does anyone seriously deny personality? That there exists relatively > unique neural connectivity that makes Me different from anyone else? > It hard makes me a `roboticist' to observe that the these unique > aspects, after subtracting off all that is known about personality, and > what I infer to be similar in other people (e.g. based on > stimulus/response experiments and modeling in everyday life), says to me > that I'm not excessively unique. I'm again and again struck by how easy > it is to find examples of people (say, in the media) that seem eerily > like me and even seem to me `ahead' of me on acting on their feeling. > If anything, this recognition of my humiliating smallness motivates me > to get up off my ass and find something about my life trajectory that > adds unique value. > > One thing that gives meaning to human life is to have each add a little > bit to pool of written history and technology -- to make the subjective, > objective. -- ⇒⇐ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
