I guess I am a bit confused about the process of encoding phenomenological data into bits. If a physicalist is doing it, they might include (from a computationalist perspective) unnecessary detail about the movement of subatomic particles. If a computationalist is doing it, they might (from a physicalist perspective) exclude important detail about EM fields that affect qualia. Or is there a common ground on which both perspectives can agree?
Trying to answer my own question: the obvious way is to have everything encoded, down to every quantum fluctuation. In that case, the computationalist hypothesis has to explain all of the thermal noise in addition to consciousness, which seems unfair to me, since it is a theory of consciousness, not of physics.
I guess I am a bit confused about the process of encoding phenomenological data into bits. If a physicalist is doing it, they might include (from a computationalist perspective) unnecessary detail about the movement of subatomic particles. If a computationalist is doing it, they might (from a physicalist perspective) exclude important detail about EM fields that affect qualia. Or is there a common ground on which both perspectives can agree?
Trying to answer my own question: the obvious way is to have everything encoded, down to every quantum fluctuation. In that case, the computationalist hypothesis has to explain all of the thermal noise in addition to consciousness, which seems unfair to me, since it is a theory of consciousness, not of physics.