- Edited
Jose Luis Perez Velazquez
To clarify, I DID in fact note in my essay that “unlike conscious experience, awareness and knowledge, the physical world, including any physical correlates of consciousness, is potentially measurable.”
Conscious experience, awareness and knowledge is never measured: only any physical correlates of consciousness are measurable. Measurable aspects of the world are (e.g.) categories like mass, relative position, voltage, charge etc. What you get from measurement are numerals (symbols) that apply to a measurement category (also represented by symbols).
So, if you tried to measure the physical correlates of very bad pain, you might say that the pain is 9.5 on a scale of 10, or something like that. But “pain= 9.5/10” tells you almost nothing about the living conscious experience of pain: you can’t reverse engineer or re-construct the pain experience out of “pain= 9.5/10”.
“numerical exactitude is alien to the diversity of organic evolution”
I don’t agree with A. T. Winfree's perspective, that you quote. As physics has shown, numerical exactitude and law of nature relationships are the firm foundation upon which the world is built. I think that “organic evolution” has shown that there are additional aspects of the world that are needed to explain the behaviour of living thing. This is because the survival of living things, even tiny primitive worms, relies on the logical analysis and collation of information coming from their environment.
But the logical analysis and collation of information (which applies to categories of information, and the numbers that apply to these categories) is an aspect of the world that can’t be derived from laws of nature (which are merely fixed mathematical relationships between these categories of information). So, this implies that an aspect of the world that can perform logical analysis and collation of information is as fundamental and necessary an aspect of the world as are the laws of nature.