Hi Patrick and welcome to the MOQ discussion group:
You wrote:
> 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".
Count me in with those who agree information is a value pattern.
>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...
Completely agree with one minor exception. Instead of our will being at
the head of train our aesthetic sense is at the front, constantly
sweeping and appraising the raw data of experience.
But I could be wrong. It is an interesting question. I hope others will
chime in with their opinions.
Platt
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