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[Jon Zingale]

EricS,

Philosophically, I most closely identify with what I perhaps could call
phenomenological-materialism. For me all ideas we have, we have exactly
because they are *afforded* by the world. There may not be unicorns, but
horses and animals with horns do exist. Unicorns then are *afforded*. The
role of
the trump card in a game of bridge† is nowhere to be found in the atomic
structure of the card, but the role is *afforded* by our world. Straight
lines
and symmetry groups may be nowhere measured, but are exactly accessible
to us because we exist in a world which *affords* them. For me, this is how
I
thinly justify not needing a spiritual or platonic meta-physics. Also on a
personal
level, I *do* believe that mind is public. I am interested in following
this line, in part,
because I wish to understand exactly how wrong I am.

While Tononi (in the development of his IIT)
<https://www.academia.edu/39597783/Integrated_information_theory_of_consciousness_an_updated_account>
aims to be very clear about
the *reducibility floor* of consciousness, he also puts forth positive
assertions
about what consciousness is/isn't. For example, Tononi claims that
*The internetis not conscious exactly because it isn't fully integrated*.
The technical details of
his concept of *fully integrated* can be summarized as the observation that
when I
go to a wikipedia page there aren't bits of my email and other webpages
mixed in.
He, like I believe we are attempting here, is working to develop a formal
model of
consciousness. It may be that we are committing the sin of naming things and
abstracting, and that we will ultimately have in our hands nothing but a
silly-horribly-
wrong tool. I feel that doing this kind of work is a wonderful break from
binge
watching another season of 'Eureka'.

Frank,

You and Nick have been arguing for and against (respectively) the private
nature
of mind as long as I have known you both. I apologize if placing you in
these
examples was in bad taste. I certainly believe you have a rich and beautiful
mind, and I will be careful in the future to not trivialize it by using your
mind in examples. For the record, anything I had said in regards to your
mind,
I meant to say about my mind as well.

Glen, Steve,

If I understand Glen's comprehension of strings example, there are many
arbitrary
functions which can act as a *choice of representative* for a given
*extensional*
transformation. To some limited extent, the claim that *the mind is not
opaque* may
be the claim that there are more structured categories than Sets with
arbitrary
functions which are applicable to the mind/behavior problem. If we had such
a
category, I might go so far as to define a fiber over each point on the
holographic
surface and consider liftings to a bundle or sheaf. Now while
simultaneously **ducking**
fistfuls of hay from various strawman arguments posed, I suggest that it
may be
reasonable to define a connection (damn, are we back to covariance) on the
bundle.
Doing so could be one meaningful way to interpret *tracing a thought*.

With regards to the discussion about our holographic surface, I could use
more
clarification on the lossy/lossless property. I assume we agree that
sorting is
not dual to shuffling. For instance, defining the type of a shuffling
algorithm
does not require Ord
<http://zvon.org/other/haskell/Outputprelude/Ord_c.html> to be a class
constraint, where it *is* required for sorting.
If we are claiming that the information found on our holographic surface is
complete, I would like to think we are claiming it to be lossless‡. At the
end
of the day, it may be the case that we will never know the ontological
status of
information reversibility through a black hole. Am I wrong about this? If
our
holographic surface isn't reversible, is hashing perhaps a better analogy?

If in the limit of behavioral investigation we find no more semantic
ambiguity than
the semantic ambiguities we experience when attempting to understand an
others
language, I may wish to consider the question closed in favor of the mind
being
public. I do suspect we would run into many many more (perhaps unresolvable)
problems along the way, but this exercise is exactly an exercise to me.
Learning
the nature of these problems is reward enough.

Jon

†) This example coming from Rota's lectures on 'The end of objectivity
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/end-of-objectivity-a-series-of-lectures-delivered-at-mit-in-october-1973/oclc/32972152>
'.

‡) Bzip is a great example of a seemingly lossy algorithm that amazingly
enough
is not. The fact that the Burrows-Wheeler
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform> transform
is invertible and is statistically useful
more-often-than-it-is-not provides a high bar for what can be accomplished
with data
compression.
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