I tried to stay at the Koch talk today. I had read his piece
for the talk with a care probably greater than that with which it was written,
and intended to ask him the questions below. What I heard was the beginning of
one of the worst talks I have ever heard at Cal. This is the abstract;
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.7089.pdf
Within 15 minutes, he
had made sufficient basic errors to
convince me that cycling home 5 miles in the rain was going to be infinitely less
painful than sitting through any more.
For example, Descartes did not say anything resembling “I am conscious, therefore
I am”; what he said is that an evil spirit could not stop him from at least
construing himself as something.
My questions were based partly on some empirical tests we
did of this theory in 2010. We published these in FOM 1;
and in a peer-reviewed Springer journal in 2011;
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/257779809_Consciousness_is_Cheap_Even_if_Symbols_are_Expensive_Metabolism_and_the_Brains_Dark_Energy
Let’s look at my
questions on the article. In the first place, however, there is a problem with
the work “phenomenological” that he uses. It can imply “phenomenology” in the
Husserlian sense; it can also imply the exact opposite, a phenomenalist
approach to science. Koch/Tononi clearly do not know this; a phenomenalist
approach to consciousness would indeed be a breakthrough
This apparent casuistry could be passed over, were it not
for the fact that Koch goes on with a similar queen of Tarts (words mean what I
want them to) approach to information.
His “informational” model is not about information in the Shannon
sense, but an undefined conceptual mush. That changes when he talks about compression
of the EEG signal or, as Tononi put it in the 2010 NY Times, measuring consciousness in bits.
T also claimed that epilepsy would show a minimally entropic
signal; this is plain wrong. So what, I ask Christof in this forum, would
constitute a refutation of this theory? Popper famously argued that Freudianism was
unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific…….
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