>>13800264How is the information processing the effectful thing here, then? It is a property downstream from the fundamental building blocks of reality, which are various field dynamics that manifest as matter/energy, or for simplicity's sake, let's just call it "matter".
You can have matter without information processing. But do you suppose there can be information processing outside the physical universe? That is the wildest kind of platonism. Now THAT seems like a category error to me, or perhaps a map/territory one, to presuppose just because we can talk about abstract objects and processes in a meaningful fashion, that their substratum of instantiation suddenly becomes arbitrary, instead of fully dependent and *emergent* from the physical universe.
So why isn't the information processing the weakly emergent phenomenon of matter, and via inference, matter a strictly necessary condition for consciousness, whereas information processing would be merely a sufficient condition -- it, however, itself relying necessarily on the presence of matter? Information processing clearly supervenes on matter. Consciousness is a property of matter, not naive information processing.
For the record, I am new poster and I believe consciousness is the internal experience that any matter in principle has, but meaningful operation (most significantly, memory-oid phenomena, as a subject otherwise would not experience time and thus sequences of events) can of course only be done on it if one has a brain, in the same manner as one is unable to write a poem as a fetus.
