Arouet
Member
I am going to describe a concept that is simple and not technical. Please address it as a skeptic should - trying to grasp it in its own context but expect back-up reasoning. (The back-up IS technical and open to falsification)
When you say "fundamentally different things", the conversation moves to ontology and away from practical science. However, in terms of pragmatic math methods for measurement of natural observations - there are "different levels of abstraction". Simply, this means that you can't count apples and oranges. Apples are an abstraction with a different level of criteria than oranges. The functional goals of bio-information processes are not movement and metabolism. Counting force and mass work for those. When ideas and emotional responses are at hand - looking at logical organization, affordances in the environment and intentional communication are the measurables.
Back-up for LoA definition see:
http://philpapers.org/rec/FLOOTM-2 Please note that this paper has been cited 158 times.
Thanks Stephen. Yes, I was talking about ontology - isn't whether mind=brain an ontological issue? I will read the paper and let you know my thoughts. From the excerpt I didn't see anything that was incompatible with what I wrote but I'll read the whole thing carefully and hopefully we can get on the same page because I suspect to some extent we've been talking past one another. I'd like to try and bring it together.