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by evdev 2440 days ago
The content of this whole wing of thinking is "you have to have a brain-like system to have a brain-like thing". Which, fair. But what's crazy-making about it is that people have decided this sort of insight says something about mathematics and metaphysics, which it does not.

For example, this:

This observation which they refer to as the “hard problem of content” or the “covariance-is-not-content principle” is that systems acting on covariance information, while acting on information, do not constitute content-bearing systems, because to bear content is to embody claims about how things stand, when in fact they merely embody capacities to affect the world.

is just complete nonsense, and to extract the charitable reading I put in quotes above, you have to read closely for paragraph after paragrah to see that what's going on is the word "content" is reserved to mean "things brain-like things do in a brain-like way to other brain-like things in a context built for brain-like things."

Again, okay! But: it's wildly misleading to frame this as being about mathematical logic or the metaphysics of symbols, syntax and semantics.