Structure & Quality: Conceptual and Formal Foundations for the Mind-Body Problem
This work addresses the foundational problem of consciousness for philosophy and cognitive science, offering a novel conceptual framework that is incremental in building on existing theories.
The paper tackles the hard problem of consciousness by exploring the relationship between structure and quality, developing information-theoretic measures and a Q-S space to analyze their fidelity, resulting in a five-fold categorization of possible relationships and implications for philosophical debates.
This paper explores the hard problem of consciousness from a different perspective. Instead of drawing distinctions between the physical and the mental, an exploration of a more foundational relationship is examined: the relationship between structure and quality. Information-theoretic measures are developed to quantify the mutual determinability between structure and quality, including a novel Q-S space for analyzing fidelity between the two domains. This novel space naturally points toward a five-fold categorization of possible relationships between structural and qualitative properties, illustrating each through conceptual and formal models. The ontological implications of each category are examined, shedding light on debates around functionalism, emergentism, idealism, panpsychism, and neutral monism. This new line of inquiry has established a framework for deriving theoretical constraints on qualitative systems undergoing evolution that is explored in my companion paper, Qualia & Natural Selection.