You're right, nearly everybody rejects the claim that any sort of neutral monism can also be materialistic monism. One of the main attractions of neutral monism is that it isn't materialism.
This is debatable UE because in my view information and computation are essentially physical - but I've never been very interested in labels - its too easy to get bogged down in nebulous semantics. What I find satisfying about an information theory-centric philosophy is that you can actually use it to dissolve distinctions between various competing philosophies that have been at each other's throats for centuries. My form of neutral monism doesn't really negate materialism at all. It merely says there is a deeper physical explanation than matter and energy, i.e., the physicality of information and information processing which I would guess emerges from some form of cellular automata that really gave rise to everything there is.
Have you ever written about your 0/1 philosophy here? If so I'd like to review it because Dawkins search doesn't work so I can't find it. But what rather stunned me is that as I recall it, my ideas would map onto it quite well. You really had no idea, when it came down to it, what your 1/0's really were. Well, it's information pal.
This is an unsupportable assertion. You believe that consciousness is a form of IP. I don't even know what this claim is supposed to mean.
Geez, I've already written reams about this - I'm not sure I even want to do all that work again.
So let me try something simpler for the time being using your reasoning by analogy to .13
It's like we are sitting in front of the screen in a cinema and we are trying to work out what we are looking at. Eventually we figure out that the contents of what we are looking at is being determined by the contents of the reel of film - we learn that if we damage the film then similar damage occurs to the picture we see. Then somebody asks the question, but what is the screen itself? That isn't being produced by the reel of the film. If we start claiming that "the screen arises from the reel of film" or worse, ""the screen IS the reel of film" then we are talking nonsense. The truth is that the screen is itself - a screen - and we are missing a crucial piece of the system - the projector and the lamp inside, which between them turn the image on the reel of film into an image on the screen.
We have a similar situation with consciousness and brain activity. ...
First let me say I enjoyed the irony that you didn't seem to realize that the example you gave is a form of analog information processing - in its parts and entirety ;-) It is the totality of the analogu computational system that produces the image we see on the screen. The same with the brain. The brain is the entire theatre with the screen, the projector, the film, the electricity, etc. Are you trying to suggest that some of the missing pieces for generating consciousness lie outside the brain? Are you like some Christians I've argued with that the brain is really a transmitter/receiver for consciousness from God or elsewhere? If so, show me some evidence as I'm not aware of any.
In this sense, trying to break consciousness down into component parts may be meaningless and incoherent. It may only exist as a whole sum of parts - as I believe - another reason why I believe p-zombie arguments are incoherent. It's like a chair in that sense, how much can you take away from the chair before it isn't a chair anymore? I think consciousness is like that.
We both believe that qualia are not information - at least in the sense that they cannot be conveyed as a message beyond the "I". I am surprised you didn't see the deeper implications of what i was trying to prove. If so, I must believe that information can give rise to something that is not information. This is a paradox i don't know the answer to but suspect will be found as we explore what is at the essence of self-referentiality - whether it be based on recursion, mirroring, halting, or some, as yet unknown computational process we have not yet formulated but which I believe must still be consistent with being a Universal Turing Machine. (e.g., you can't extract information from an infinite loop).
Again, I assert you are confusing ontology with epistemology. One can argue and provide lots of empirical evidence that brain activity is a form of information processing and that such activity gives causal rise to consciousness. We know we can empirically stimulate and depress brain computation and impact conscious experience in predictable ways. But we both agree that qualia contain no information. Without information there can be no knowledge. Yet somehow, you appear to believe that there is another realm or substance that explains it. All you can potentially absolutely explain about consciousness is its causation - in my case by empirical inference. Materialistically, we can perhaps go beyond this to some degree if it were possible to create a mind-meld machine. Here, the necessary condition would be that our brains are sufficiently similar in architecture that we could infer that we experience qualia in the same or similar ways. Probably a safe assumption in most cases. Otherwise, if you had a identical twin brother UE and neither of you had ever had any sort of trauma do you think it probable that his blue might look like your red?
Let's discuss an alternative analogy UE. Let's look at the IP that generates the image on the screen you're looking at right now. I'm sure you'd agree that software acting in real-time (a process like digestion to address your other issues) "gives rise" to these images you're viewing. The software and these images can be mapped onto each other but they really aren't the same "thing" (this is dangerous reification) are they? So what? Why don't you find that a huge mystery? Because it isn't one and neither is consciousness in that sense. The thing that is still mysterious (unknown to science) about consciousness is simply that we don't yet know how software can be made self-referential to be aware of the images it's creating in the same way you can see and think about what's on this screen. But I'm confident neuroscientists and AI scientists like myself will one day figure that out by studying and simulating brains. There are probably many ways to solve that problem just as there are many forms of software to generate these images. Evolution found one way, I'm sure we can find others. And when we do, we will infer that the AI we create is conscious not primarily because it can imitate us but because we understand the underlying causation. That is the only sound empirical evidence we can muster and the only way we can infer that our fellow humans are conscious today - because we know we're all built of similar architectures and processes which manifests itself in our languages, arts, and all analogies of behavior we express.
And did rather well at Dawkins', wouldn't you say?
Yes and no. You were certainly the most learned philosopher there and I learned a great deal from you and even more in my own studies so I could handle your arguments and references. I think I could give you a run for your money today on that score as I think I did shortly before we both left (for different reasons).
I heard of your banning from Dawkins after I left. As far as I can tell their reasons were unfair and unjustifiable and their move towards censorship was a big reason why I resigned from there before you left. Your problem at Dawkins, in my view, is that you tried too hard to control debate and pigeonhole arguments. To some extent that was warranted because many people made little or no effort to understand the references and paradigms you brought to the table. But with the few who did, myself included, if somebody didn't buy your interpretation of Kant or Wittgenstein etc. or, even worse, argued they were wrong, you wouldn't engage in an open-minded or respectful dialogue. I hope that has changed.
As you may recall, I also tendered my apologies to you for how I treated you when you infuriated me before I left. That still stands and I hope we can engage with each other here in good spirits.
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