Structure & Quality: Conceptual and Formal Foundations for the Mind-Body Problem

Summary

A fresh perspective on consciousness suggests that the key to understanding the mind-body connection lies in examining how structure relates to quality, rather than physical versus mental states. By developing mathematical tools to measure how structural and qualitative properties interact, researchers revealed five distinct ways these properties can relate - offering new insights for artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

Abstract

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.

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