My main criterion for whether a computational property is objectively present in a physical system, or is a matter of interpretation, is whether it involves semantics. Pure physics only gives you state machines with no semantics. In this case, I think quicksort comes quite close to being definable at the state-machine level. “List” sounds representational, because usually it means “list of items represented by computational tokens”, but if you think of it simply as a set of physical states with an ordering produced by the intrinsic physical dynamics, then “sorting a list” can refer to a meta-dynamics which rearranges that ordering, and “current pivot position” can be an objective and strictly physical property.
The property dualism I’m talking about occurs when basic sensory qualities like color are identified with such computational properties. Either you end up saying “seeing the color is how it feels”—and “feeling” is the extra, dual property—or you say there’s no “feeling” at all—which is denial that consciousness exists. It would be better to be able to assert identity, but then the elements of a conscious experience can’t really be coarse-grained states of neuronal ensembles, etc—that would restore the dualism.
We need an ontology which contains “experiences” and “appearances” (for these things undoubtedly exist), which doesn’t falsify their character, and which puts them in interaction with the atomic aggregates we know as neurons, which presumably also exist. Substance dualism was the classic way to do this—the soul interacting with the pineal gland, as in Descartes. The baroque quantum monadology I’ve hinted at, is the only way I know to introduce consciousness into physical causality that avoids both substance dualism and property dualism. Maybe there’s some other way to do it, but it’s going to be even weirder, and seems like it should still involve what we would now call quantum effects, because the classical ontology just does not contain minds.
I identify with your desire to solve the problem “mathematically” to a certain point. Husserl, the phenomenologist, said that distinct ontological categories are to be understood by different “eidetic sciences”. Mathematics, logic, computer science, theoretical physics, and maybe a few other disciplines like decision theory, probability theory, and neoclassical economics, are all eidetic. Husserl’s proposition was that there should also be eidetic sciences for all the problematic aspects of consciousness. Phenomenology itself was supposed to be the eidetic science of consciousness, as well as the wellspring of the other eidetic sciences, because all ontology derives from phenomenology somehow, and the eidetic sciences study “regional ontologies”, aspects of being.
The idea is not that everything about reality is to be discovered apriori and through introspection. Facts still have to come through experience. But experience takes a variety of forms: along with sensory experience, there’s logical experience, reflective experience, and perhaps others. Of these, reflective experience is the essence of phenomenology, and the key to developing new eidetic sciences; that is, to developing the concepts and methods appropriate to the ontological aspects that remain untheorized, undertheorized, or badly theorized. We need new ideas in at least two areas: the description of consciousness, and the ontology of the conscious object. We need new and better ideas about what sort of a thing could “be conscious”, “have experiences” like the ones we have, and fit into a larger causal matrix. And then we need to rethink physical ontology so that it contains such things. Right now, as I keep asserting, we are stuck with property dualism because the things of physics, in any combination, are fundamentally unlike the thing that is conscious, and so an assertion of identity is not possible.
For more detail, see everything else I’ve written on this site, or wait for the promised paper. :-)
My main criterion for whether a computational property is objectively present in a physical system, or is a matter of interpretation, is whether it involves semantics. Pure physics only gives you state machines with no semantics. In this case, I think quicksort comes quite close to being definable at the state-machine level. “List” sounds representational, because usually it means “list of items represented by computational tokens”, but if you think of it simply as a set of physical states with an ordering produced by the intrinsic physical dynamics, then “sorting a list” can refer to a meta-dynamics which rearranges that ordering, and “current pivot position” can be an objective and strictly physical property.
The property dualism I’m talking about occurs when basic sensory qualities like color are identified with such computational properties. Either you end up saying “seeing the color is how it feels”—and “feeling” is the extra, dual property—or you say there’s no “feeling” at all—which is denial that consciousness exists. It would be better to be able to assert identity, but then the elements of a conscious experience can’t really be coarse-grained states of neuronal ensembles, etc—that would restore the dualism.
We need an ontology which contains “experiences” and “appearances” (for these things undoubtedly exist), which doesn’t falsify their character, and which puts them in interaction with the atomic aggregates we know as neurons, which presumably also exist. Substance dualism was the classic way to do this—the soul interacting with the pineal gland, as in Descartes. The baroque quantum monadology I’ve hinted at, is the only way I know to introduce consciousness into physical causality that avoids both substance dualism and property dualism. Maybe there’s some other way to do it, but it’s going to be even weirder, and seems like it should still involve what we would now call quantum effects, because the classical ontology just does not contain minds.
I identify with your desire to solve the problem “mathematically” to a certain point. Husserl, the phenomenologist, said that distinct ontological categories are to be understood by different “eidetic sciences”. Mathematics, logic, computer science, theoretical physics, and maybe a few other disciplines like decision theory, probability theory, and neoclassical economics, are all eidetic. Husserl’s proposition was that there should also be eidetic sciences for all the problematic aspects of consciousness. Phenomenology itself was supposed to be the eidetic science of consciousness, as well as the wellspring of the other eidetic sciences, because all ontology derives from phenomenology somehow, and the eidetic sciences study “regional ontologies”, aspects of being.
The idea is not that everything about reality is to be discovered apriori and through introspection. Facts still have to come through experience. But experience takes a variety of forms: along with sensory experience, there’s logical experience, reflective experience, and perhaps others. Of these, reflective experience is the essence of phenomenology, and the key to developing new eidetic sciences; that is, to developing the concepts and methods appropriate to the ontological aspects that remain untheorized, undertheorized, or badly theorized. We need new ideas in at least two areas: the description of consciousness, and the ontology of the conscious object. We need new and better ideas about what sort of a thing could “be conscious”, “have experiences” like the ones we have, and fit into a larger causal matrix. And then we need to rethink physical ontology so that it contains such things. Right now, as I keep asserting, we are stuck with property dualism because the things of physics, in any combination, are fundamentally unlike the thing that is conscious, and so an assertion of identity is not possible.
For more detail, see everything else I’ve written on this site, or wait for the promised paper. :-)