Template:Causal intervention and symbolic language

Living things — biological organisms, but also cellular automata etc) necessarily have encoded into them a set of “instructions” for their own replication: this is an operating condition for being a replicator: the organism functions a bit like a Turing machine. The physical substrate in which the substrate is encoded is not important tot he replication process in a material sense, only in a symbolic one. The instructions themselves are “substrate neutral”: could be encoded in DNA, cells, ticker tape or code.

Now, philosophy nuts: recall from your God, Mind and Free Will intro lectures the materialist “clincher” that proved consciousness must be wholly material: there is no evidence for non-material causal interventions in the physical world. If there were, there would be some kind of injection or leakage of energy into the physical system. But there is not: energy is conserved. A non-material consciousness to would invalidate the laws of thermodynamics: non-material consciousness breaks rules of thermodynamics, in other words. Game over.

But, hold on: this is, as Daniel Dennett articulates it, {br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}. Evolution is an algorithmic process. It is, in its most abstract sense, a manipulation of symbolic logic. And isn’t this *exactly* what a symbolic language does? It operates on a figurative level: it injects meaning independent of the substrate in which it is articulated, without the need for any physical causal intervention? Thermodynamics are irrelevant.

If you analyse a Turing machine in purely thermodynamic terms (the transfer of energy inside a physical brain, or across a CPU) you are missing almost everything important about the machine.

The heat energy of a sentence is not what is meaningful about it.

Hamlet’s phrase: “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” has less physical energy content — at the limit, less total information content — than the four paragraphs that precede it.

But it doesn’t, does it? Those seven words are far richer, more meaningful, and culturally significant than the entire output of this wiki: at last count, 4,499 articles containing tens of thousands of lines of pompous, deluded text.<ref>Oh but paradox: This wiki contains — twice — the expression “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — three times! —

Any research program that stops there — as materialism does — has missed a pretty big part of the picture.