Vedanta - Discussion Forum I (introductory))

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<!--QuoteBegin-Sridatta+Jul 17 2004, 10:50 AM-->QUOTE(Sridatta @ Jul 17 2004, 10:50 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> And is there any <b>relation between "information content" and  consciousness? </b>There are some other fascinating instances of information encoding like in the case of protein folding -- all the information required for the 3-d conformation of a protein is encoded within its primary sequence. So, they are able to put themselves together in a jiffy : less than a minute after they are formed, proteins automatically fold into their preordained shape. (Lo! a string of beads becomes a globular mass!)
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Though your post raises many points of interest, I do not want to distract the focus of this thread. But regarding the above point you may want to look at Chalmers' works if you have not already done so. I have been recently trying to think of the synthesis after my husband pointed me in this direction and being a Hindu the parallels were interesting.

Warning-
They are large verbally intensive works.

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/p...oving.html
http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/p...acing.html


Since you raise all these biological issues I would like to point to something in this context. Is there something like a collective consciousness in the social animal- ant, some spiders or lion or ape? I think answering this issue of collectivity in consciousness is necessary to test if the model of Advaita is ultimately correct or not.

Apologies to everyone else for detracting from this thread's main focus.