Information & consciousness

One of the reasons I'm so interested in information is the link to consciousness. Consciousness is surely on the front line of our struggle to make sense of the world, it is one of the really big problems. See what Dennett wrote in 1969:

THOSE who are convinced of the futility of philosophy are fond of pointing to its history and claiming that there is no progress to be discerned there. In no area of philosophy is this claim easier to support than in philosophy of mind, the history of which, when viewed through a wide-angle lens, appears to be a fruitless pendulum swing from Descartes' dualism to Hobbes’ materialism, to Berkeley’s idealism, and then back to dualism, idealism and materialism, with a few ingenious but implausible adjustments and changes of terminology. The innovations of one generation have been rescinded by the next so that despite a growing intricacy of argument and a burgeoning vocabulary of abstruse jargon, supplemented in each era by the fashionable scientific terms of the day, there have been no real and permanent gains.

The question that defined the pendulum is what the relation is between mind and body, and the problem that set the pendulum in motion was Descartes' dilemma of interaction. If, as seems plausible at first glance, there are minds and mental events on the one hand and bodies and physical events on the other, then these two spheres either interact or not.

"Content and Consciousness", D. C. Dennett, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969

Of course since that was written 40 years ago it could all of changed - maybe the problem of the mind has been solved, but I don't think so.

Information surely lies at the boundary of these two spheres.

In the London Review of Books there was recently a review of a work by the philosopher Galen Strawson [1]. There's lots of really intriguing ideas in there, like the suggestion that

...the subjective experience of the self does not require that it persist beyond the lived present, which lasts for less than a second

so not only am I not that same person when I wake up in the morning as the person who went to sleep the night before, but I am a different person from one second to the next.

Not only does the self not persist across gaps in consciousness; it also doesn’t persist across the shifts in the content of consciousness that occur constantly in the course of waking life.

But that's not really what I wanted to highlight here. What I want to raise (which I have just discovered was not in that LRB article, but in an earlier one [2]!) is Strawson's panpsychism:

Strawson ... stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience

Having been reading about native American religions over the Christmas it is quite nice to come across a (modern, Western) philosopher with an argument that might support the idea that trees, rocks and rivers might be conscious, but it is a lot to swallow and I'm not quite there yet!

One of the steps in the argument that leads Strawson to panpsychism is that he doesn't believe in emergence. So, since we are conscious, so too must the stuff we are made of also be conscious. And since that stuff is the same stuff that trees, rocks and rivers are made of, so too might they be conscious. Well, I think that is where I can point to a straightforward disagreement: I do believe in emergence. I think information is an emergent property. The information carried by the bits in a digital communication channel is not in the bits, but 'emerges' from the order in which they are put together.

Refs

1 The I in me, Thomes Nagel, review of Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics by Galen Strawson, London Review of Books Vol. 31 No. 21 · 5 November 2009 pp33-34

2 Headaches have themselves Jerry Fodor review of Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al, LRB v29 n10 24 may 2007)

ICT4D: Information and communication technologies for development

The following is something I drafted for use elsewhere, and didn't use. Someone asked me today whether you can embed audio in blogs, so this is really a test of that.

Back in 1999 the BBC made a programme for the OU on the ways in which cellphone technology was being harnessed to get phones to people in the townships of South Africa. One of the contributors, Peter Dzingwa, ran a ‘phoneshop’ – a shipping container furnished with phones connected to the mobile network and used as payphones – and was full of enthusiasm:

"I think cellphones are what Africa has been waiting for....(South Africa) came to a standstill for 40 years. There was no development there, a lot of guns going off....now the cellphone has actually made them lift those 40 years and be smack right in the middle of everybody's communication system, which I think is a fantastic thing." [1]

The statistics and the stories coming from countries not just in Africa but across the developing world since then seem to suggest that his enthusiasm was fully justified. Indeed, some of the statistics are quite dramatic. Subscriber growth rates in developing countries have been more than 25% a year, and half the world’s population now use a mobile phone [2].

Mobile phones have taken off in developing countries in a way that other new technologies haven’t. Personal computer ownership doesn’t yet seem to be having much of impact, with even the much-publicised ‘One Laptop Per Child’ programme struggling to make a significant impact beyond one or two countries where the government have backed national programmes.

There are many reasons behind the relative success of mobile phones, including details like the fact that you don’t need to be literate in English or another major language – you can talk in your own language – but more generally this is a technology that people have been able to adapt to their own needs. Phones are ‘general purpose’ tools that their owners use however they want to and for whatever purposes suits them.

Hannah Beardon, an independent consultant on development, discussed this in a recent interview for the Open University:



This isn’t the whole story, though. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and, as Hannah explains, the introduction of new technologies changes things



A version of this post also appears on the Open University open2.net blog

Further study:

T324, Keeping ahead in ICT,

Environment, Development and International Studies curriculum

ICT and Computing curriculum

Sources

1 From Breaking down barriers, and Affordable technologies, available from iTunesU

2 ID21 Insights 69, September 2007. Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

3 Extract from interview about mobile phones for development, recorded for T324, Keeping Ahead in ICT, full interview

4 Extract from interview about ICT for development, recorded for T324, Keeping Ahead in ICT, full interview