A POOR HEREDITY OF PHYSICALISM WITH REGARD TO THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS: WAYS OF METHODOLOGICAL CORRECTION
Pavel Nikolaevich Baryshnikov
Pyatigorsk State University, 9 Kalinin av., Pyatigorsk, 357503 Russia
Keywords: физикализм, вычислительная теория сознания, психофизическая проблема, причинность, информационный реализм, семантика данных, physicalism, computational theory of mind, mind-body problem, causality, informational realism, data semantics
Abstract
The history of a computer metaphor in empirical and theoretical doctrines concerning consciousness and the brain is complex and ambiguous. It is difficult to deny a heuristicity of analogies between principles of computer work and some cognitive processes in the human mind. However, weaknesses of computationalism were inherited by some points of physicalist approaches to explaining the nature of consciousness. Along with a traditional criticism of physicalism, there arises a line of an anticomputationalist kind. The article considers attempts to rehabilitate physicalism with the help of informational realism through a special ontological status of information objects and special characteristics of data semantics. One of our tasks was to show that these attempts just emphasized the gap between semantics and ontology of information. In this context, a particular status is acquired by the concept of informational significance which makes it possible to connect physical properties of a process with properties of a repertoire in an abstract algorithm "representing" this process.
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