OK, thanks, Gregg,
Now I understand, nice blog post. But to me you are not quite drawing the line between the objective, and the subjective ways of gaining knowledge, quite in the right place.
Objective perception is always done from afar, where subjective is direct awareness of intrinsic physical qualities, computationally bound into conscious awareness.
Objectively obtained information is necessarily substrate independent, as the information is represented by many different physical links in the chain, each one of which requires correct interpretation to gain the information.
Whereas subjective redness, for example, just is – no interpretation, since we directly apprehend it.
Let’s assume, for a minute, that science will demonstrate that it is glutamate, reacting in a synapse, that has a redness quality. (If it is something else, substitute glutamate with whatever it is, in our brain, that has the redness quality we can directly apprehend.)
Given that, objective observation (Mind 1) results in a description of how glutamate behaves, and the same glutamate behavior, directly subjectively apprehended (Mind 2) is redness.
So far, so good,
Mind 1, or the brain, objectively observed from afar, results in only abstract descriptions of behavior of intrinsic properties.
Mind 2: the same stuff, subjectively directly apprehension of it’s intrinsic qualities.
But when you say the Mind 3 domain includes both of these, your “domain” doesn’t match up with the subjective/objective domains I think of at all.
If anything is “intersubjective”, there must be knowledge of one’s self, AND knowledge of others, all in one brain, computationally bound into any kind of intersubjective conscious awareness.
So, to me, your “Overt actions” drawing where the “public self” of each brain extends outside the brain and connects “out there” is leaving out a critically important part. If you want to accurately represent physical reality, not just the way we think about it, there should be two copies of each of these, an inversion of each in each brain. In other words, the knowledge of another person, is in the brain, and only updated via information that comes through our senses.
But, anyway, I understand why one may want to optimize, and only draw this picture as if it is one person’s knowledge, because what I’m talking about is focusing on a different domain than what you are talking about? So, in your domain, it is simpler and communicates more effectively to draw it as a single image. But if you want to understand real consciousness (i.e., if you know something, there must be something in the brain that is that knowledge in the brain.) Your domain is leaving out a critically important part.
Objectively obtained information and subjectively directly apprehended qualitative information about reality are never intermixed in any kind of a mind 3, except to think of them as being the same thing. Mind 1 being observing the physics of consciousness from afar, and Mind 2 being subjectively directly apprehending the same physics.
I'm having a feeling of deja-vu. We've already had this conversation, before, right?
Brent