Originally posted by TheWill
reply to post by NorEaster
you broke my brain.
"I think, therefore I am"?
I think I understand what you are saying - we think not only of situations in the abstract, but our actual selves in the abstract, too, more than just the ability to recognise that I, as a physical entity, am like another, and so what another can do, I can (observational learning), but the thought that I am in fact more than a physical entity, I am me.
Like I said, you broke my brain. I shall have to re-examine what you said after supper, and perhaps I'll make a little more in a second reply, once I've digested both food and text.edit on 16/1/2011 by TheWill because: (no reason given)
Information - like activity - has a broad range of manifestations. It's easy to recognize it in activity. A ball rolls across the floor. Simple enough, but if examined, this scenario reveals several layers of organized activity holons that are joined together as the activity holon represented by the informational fact that a ball rolls across the floor. These are a few layers.
1. The event unit collective of the ball's predictable movement across the floor
2. The parting of gaseous molecules that provide predictable resistance to the ball's momentum, preventing that momentum from being endless
3. The activity holon that is the ball itself - including the atomic structure brought into writhing and relentlessly morphing existence by the frenetic activity of the sub-atomic bits that pitch in to do what's needed to maintain the ball's seemingly stable and concrete spherical presence.
Of course, we can examine the floor itself and the planet and all that, but I think the point is made. Activity can be simple - a straight movement from point A to point B. Or it can be the matrix created by multiple layers of organized activity that combine to become and mainatin matter. Imagine the matrixing involved in the thinking activity of the human brain. Hard to really quantify the layering involved, but it obviously exists.
Information also exists in a variety of physical manifestation, but instead of being active organization, information is the result of active organization. The more sophisticated the organized activity, the more sophisticated the information holon. The truth is that information emerges as a direct response to event, and let's say that the event is the human brain's moment to moment realization that it exists within the physical environment that contains it. Imagine that string of information bursts.
We call those bursts - as they collect with other bursts from the same author, as they do - human consciousness. The lifetime of these bursts gathering together as a unique and identified collective becomes a whole that lives on after the death of the brain itself. We call it eternal life, and in a very real sense, it is. Information fully represents the event that brings it into existence. This includes the conscious and aware nature of the hyper dynamic corporeal brain. We call this information spirit. We name a lot of things that we don't understand.
I hope this helps.
I knew I was wrong with "matrixes", but my spellcheck never offered an alternative, and I
really needed that plural to make the point. I'll never forget that word now.
