Dr. Rovelli,
Your essay is one of the best I've read so far. How information comes to be processed does seem to be one of the main puzzle pieces to the mystery of agency in evolution. I really like the concept of relative information as a way of narrowing down the phase space of a given system to only its possibilities. It confuses me a bit here as it would seem that subtracting the allowed possibilities from the entire phase space of all conceivable relationships would yield only the un-allowed states. I'm hoping that as I digest this concept it will become clearer to me.
The essay begins to lose traction at the point where you define the notion that meaningful information serves as the ground for the foundation of meaning. It becomes circular at this point (by inspection).
Consideration of the various forms of information and correlation are steps in the right direction. But it does not quite span the explanatory gap. Nothing I have ever read does this. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing. Your objective description of the internal and the external 'truth' relation between the internal state of an organism and the external state of its environment gets close to the heart of it. As an observer (conscious subjective scientist) intelligently observing (performing computations on and extracting meaningful correlations between naturally patterned bits of information) another observer (the presumably sentient object of study), the meaning is projected from subject to object. But how did the object acquire its agenda; the feeling of need for a selected condition to accrue? From whence comes the sense of existential threat?
If I may offer my own phenomenal definitions: a sentient being is nothing more than an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Intelligence is the quantitative and qualitative capacity to process and organize information. By this definition, the computer Watson is highly intelligent. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject.
It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized picture of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise?
Jim Stanfield
