Dear Edwin,
Thank you very very much for perusing my essay, and offering your views on it. Thank you again for striking on one of the most important contentions of mine that 'information must have a reality of its own'. Yes indeed, I too do not mean it to be something like a particle. I do take it though, as an associated property with a physical entity, almost like charge or mass, but without a physical means to probe it.
I do agree that a specific information gets created with interaction. The realism of information can be seen in several ways. As you may have noted, "If an interaction among physical entities results in an observable state S, then S must correlate with the cause and the context of the transition to the state S." Can we deny this correlation? And, the state S correlates with what, 'a piece of information (relation)' about the context of the interaction under natural causation, what ever that may be. It does not require a language. In fact, if the state S did not correlate with this information, we could not interpret it by any means. A 'no correlation' would mean that state S appeared from no where (a void), without any causal connection. Natural causation is the source of this information, whether or not an interpreter exists.
Now, let us bring in an interpreter like us to derive an information from the observation of state S, which would constitute a third person perspective. We use our mental faculty along with the prior knowledge (model) of the universal phenomena. Could the mental faculty have an existence, if the elements of the brain (neurons) could not 'represent' or correlate with information? That is, even before any application of any model happens, the neurons represent information. We just cannot take away the fact that these elements were doing information processing even before any model or language emerged to articulate the information in certain framework. Taking your example forward, "One if by land...", not only the whole construct required a history, even each word of it cannot have a meaning unless brain represented their correlation with elements of prior observations. I am taking it to the level that a visual grapheme of word 'land' or the aural utterance of the same have connection with correlated information, otherwise even the term 'land' is meaningless. All I am saying is that information, and the method of processing existed even before we gained our faculty of interpretation.
IMHO, can we observe a state that does not correlate with any information? If not, then we would have to accept that information has a reality of its own (I am not talking about any particular information, e.g. while talking about 'mass' one does not talk about a particular value of mass).
Now, all I am saying is that this is the missing element that has kept the humanity from understanding the genesis of 'mind'.
Since you have taken time to comment on a few elements, therefore, allow me to do justice to your effort. You inquired,"If I understand your use of 'conjunction' and 'disjunction', you're defining logical operations for processing conditions." Certainly, their direct operands are conditions of positive, negative, and null correlation, but these operands refer to the correlation with absolutely arbitrary semantics, discrete, non-discrete, simple, complex, or abstract. A generic object can be defined in terms of components, their inter-relations, or even the relation of the whole object with others within a system. By having independent positive, negative, and null correlation with each of these elements any object (semantics, relation, process) can be fully defined (constructed). I am sure, you have also noticed the process of emergence of abstraction, which has no limits whatsoever. Take any semantics (object) and see if its construction can be entirely mapped with these correlation values. I am saying that this is what creates a natural language of processing, that takes place at each interaction of physical entities. Then, all that is needed is to organize a system that carries out appropriate correlation processing to give rise to arbitrarily high level semantics.
"But then you take the big step! You say this creates a specification-free-want, which I interpret to mean an aim, intention, or goal." Yes, you are right, if I made this statement without a prior emergence of a 'want' in terms of hard coded requirement of a highly abstract semantics at a high level of emergence, it would indeed mean a leap. I am sure, we all must have felt the pinch of 25,000 characters limit, but may I request you to revisit the section, "Directed Aims and Intentions", and if you still feel, this statement is unwarranted. I would appreciate that very very much.
Separately, I wish to bring your attention to the following points. (1) Does not this disjunction of conjunction of correlation values map directly to the neural organization, that seems to be doing precisely this? (2) We all have hit the wall with respect to the emergence of 'mental states', but does not this information processing mechanism leading to limitless abstraction and complexity appear to be leading us to the highly abstract notions, relevant for the mental states? (3) May be the attention of the scientific community has been taken away by two very deep notions, that information is the outcome of an act of modeling by an intelligent interpreter, and the information is relevant only in the quantitative sense as per Shannon, and that it is always coded in discrete and digital form.
I welcome your comments, and if you gave more of your valuable time, we could take it forward.
With best regards,
Rajiv
