Psychons and Intentyons, Part 2: Zeros and Ones

Suppose that David Chalmers’ soul experiences the thought “Consciousness is the biggest mystery.”  If interactionism is correct, the thought “Consciousness is the biggest mystery” may not, at least initially, be represented by a computational judgment in Chalmers’ brain.  The sentence might originate in Chalmers’ soul.

Chalmers’ soul is not satisfied with thinking this thought; it wants to get the thought in writing, and eventually publish it as the first sentence of a book called “The Conscious Mind”.  But to do that, it needs Chalmers’ fingers to type the sentence on the computer.  And Chalmers’ fingers are controlled by Chalmers’ brain.  So in order to put its thoughts in writing, Chalmers’ soul must find a way to communicate this thought to Chalmers’ brain.

How could this be accomplished?  Could psychons somehow be pressed into service to deliver this message from the soul to the brain?  Text that is stored in a computer, or sent over a computer network, is usually encoded in ASCII or Unicode.  ASCII and Unicode are abstract protocols.  They are conventions for interpreting sequences of bits -- zeros and ones -- as sequences of text characters (that is, letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.)  ASCII doesn’t care what the bits are made of.  They can be made of flip-flops, capacitors, photons, checkers pieces, or psychons.

Of course, we don’t currently have devices that can encode text in psychons, because we don’t have hardware that can generate psychons.  But if the psychophysical interaction mechanism could generate psychons, it could generate a series of psychons that could encode text in the ASCII protocol.  Chalmers’ brain could then detect those psychons, decode the message, and instruct Chalmers’ fingers to type it on the computer.

Is this mechanism -- oversimplified and fanciful as it is -- vulnerable to the psychons objection?  The “story about the causal relations between psychons and physical processes” indeed does not “invoke the fact that psychons have phenomenal properties”.  In fact, the psychons no longer have phenomenal properties; they have intentional properties.  (That is, they have semantics, or meaning.)  At this point, “psychon” is a misnomer; a better term would be “intentyon”.

Could we somehow subtract the intentional properties of the intentyons from this story, “yielding a situation where the causal dynamics are isomorphic”?  Could we subtract the phenomenal facts about Chalmers experiences and obtain a story that is somehow isomorphic or equivalent?

If we subtract the intentional properties from the intentyons, we get a random stream of particles.  We would be two steps away from explanation: we would be oblivious to the pattern that needs to be explained.  If we were to subtract the conscious thought that the intentyons were generated to encode, we would be subtracting the explanation for the pattern.  So both the intentional properties of the intentyon stream and the phenomenal facts about Chalmers’ experiences are “explanatorily relevant”.

The most outlandish element in my story is the suggestion that the message is in ASCII.  So the message is probably not in ASCII or Unicode, but any character encoding will do; A could be 0, B could be 1, and so on.

I am not claiming that this story is true in all its details.  Rather, this story is an example of a class of possible psychophysical mechanisms that are not vulnerable to the psychons argument.  In the following post, I intend to give another such example.