Hi all,
I'm new here, and the last few days I read through a couple of threads,
especially the one I now reply to. I'm kind of amazed and pleased that
the quality of the discussion is sometimes quite high...
I'd like to get back to the first messages of this thread, where Ross
said: "... for what is information but patterns of value?" and Bo and
maybe someone else agreed: "Information is value". I'd like to comment
on this from the point of view of experience. My experience is
patterned, and that pattern can be put in (qauntum) bits, and qualifies
information. But don't you loose something there? Philosophers (see
David Chalmers' Homepage) sometimes talk about Zombies, nonliving things
that can process (neural) information just like we supposedly do, and
can react to stimuli just the way we do. The thought-experiment now is
that these zombies don't have to have experience (that's why they're
called zombies)... if the color red can be put in a binary code, why
would nature bother to let us have experiences of red?
It's been a while since I've read Lila, but didn't Pirsig say that SQ is
always a few steps 'behind' DQ? He somewhere gave a methaphor: the
essence of experience is the head of a train, and all our intellectual,
structured or patterned games we normally do is like being in the
trainwagons. I'd like to think that there is a 'noncomputable' (a la
Penrose) element in our thoughts that is our will, and that it is the
summit of our experience, the head of the train. And, as Pirsig seems to
suggest, that this summit can't be formulated in terms of information.
Information is only to be found in the trainwagons...
Would anyone like to comment on this?
Happy new year, Patrick.
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