Consciousness
Consciousness in Two Information Fields
As two-field creatures we are conscious in two distinct kinds of information. Our body is conscious in the physical information field terms of its sensory representational capabilities. Mind is conscious in its descriptive information terms. Because mind’s information is independent of the information of its bodily supports, it cannot have ‘sensory feels.’ But it can describe that its body is having its feels. Creatures without mind have their sensory experiences but lack mind’s capabilities that would enable them to describe it is them having their feels. They just have their sensory experiences, acting and reacting as body’s embodied information permits.
Consciousness
As two-field creatures we are conscious in two distinct kinds of information. Our body is conscious in the physical information terms of its sensory representational capabilities. Mind is conscious in its descriptive information terms. Because mind’s information is independent of the information of its bodily supports, it cannot have ‘sensory feels.’ But it can describe that its body is having its feels. Creatures without mind have their sensory experiences but lack mind’s descriptive abilities that would enable them to describe themselves as the ones having their feels. They just have their sensory experiences, acting and reacting as body’s embodied information permits.
The failure to recognize that the conscious experiences of mind and body are informationally distinct has led to numerous confusions. By keeping our information facts straight, we are able to resolve these confusions including the mind-body problem, the mind from matter query, and the hard problem of consciousness.
The mind-body problem revolves around the issue of mind’s reducibility to physical terms, an impossibility given mind’s descriptive nature. Reduction is possible within information fields but not across.
The mind from matter query asks how mind can arise from material entities. In fact, it can’t. Mind arises as the culmination of the progression from information assignment to symbolic representation to symbol systems to the aware and self-aware system of mind. Mind is a purely descriptive information system whose information is independent of the information of the tokens and processors – the material entities – that physically enable the system of meanings.
The hard problem asks how ‘I’ can have my conscious feels? In fact, the I who asks the question is the descriptive self of mind who can’t have feels. And the body that has the feels can’t be descriptively aware of itself as having its feels. We are two selves, each with its informationally distinct conscious experiences. ‘I’ know that my body is conscious of its feels because my mind can describe this fact. In physical information field terms alone, there is no need for an extra something beyond the bodily feel itself to give rise to our conscious experiences of those feels. Our conscious experiences of our feels are in the information terms of the physical correlates giving rise to those feels – in the information terms of the forms, functions, and bodily performances selected by evolutionary processes. Physical field information is the information of its physical correlates.