Is a warm beer more intelligent?

Given that consciousness is energetic and causal and given David Chalmer’s Principle of Organization, does that entail that a warm bottle of beer is more intelligent than a cold one?

The POI holds that an appropriate configuration of information is necessary and sufficient for consciousness.  This relies on the Dual Aspect Theory of Information of Chalmer’s, that states that information, suitably arranged, has a felt, or qualic, nature as well as the informational one.  The atomic quantum theory holds that the interchange of two particles with identical state vectors changes no property or quality of that system, two like particles are indistinguishable.  Chalmer’s theory falls prey to arguments against functionalism, but a weak version of the POI might be salvageable.

Given that particles, electrons, atoms, photons, et cetera, are interchangeable and given that consciousness is associated with higher energy states of systems in the brain we see that the particular identity of each constituent of the system does not matter.  Also, while we move through space at an enormous velocity, our consciousness remains collocated with the body.  So the energy that consciousness uses to exert or sense, two contemporaneously, mutually exclusive options, is tied to or associated with particular material structures in the brain.

Thus, the weak POI holds that particles, atoms, molecules, et cetera, in an arrangement that looks like a brain give rise to consciousness.  Does this solve the problem of other minds?  What this weak version does not hold is that a system, say a domino arrangement, which, for arguments sake, we have set up to model the information flow in Thomas Hobbe’s brain while he was writing the first letter of the 42nd word on page 99 of of the first edition of Leviathan, when set in motion acquires the consciousness of Thomas Hobbes for that brief duration.  The domino set models the information but does not have the same qualitative (energetically speaking) properties as the arrangement of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Sulfur, et cetera, that we find in the human brain.

This weak version of the POI relies on more that information.  The energetic structures which give rise to states which represent (!) the information much also be organised appropriately.  Here, then, we rescue the Dual Aspect Theory of Information, but the information is relegated to a limb of the duality.  The same energetic structure (matter in motion) gives rise to (i) an informational interpretation, and (ii) a proto-qualic state.  This information is strongly correlated to the felt, or qualic, state brought about by such and such energy levels associated with such and such components with the organisation of the human brain.

On Mad Pain and Martian Pain: My Experienced Pain is Concrete — Even more trouble with Functionalism

David Lewis (1980) talks about two sorts of non-standard pain. Mad pain has a type-identity relationship with normal pain without the normal human behavioural (functional) outputs. Martian pain has a functional relationship with normal human behaviour, but is implemented differently. By trying to account for these different situations, both of which we want to call pain, he tries to define pain as something which happens to normal members of a natural kind.