Classifying Minds
&gt; I claim that a brain is purely an information processing machine<p>You&#x27;re not exactly wrong, James, but you don&#x27;t realise how much you&#x27;re already assuming what you&#x27;re trying to argue for.<p>Information isn&#x27;t merely some object in pure mathematics. In that -log(p(e)), you have already decided what outcomes to see as the same. There&#x27;s no &quot;pure information&quot;, it&#x27;s always information <i>over the space of events we care to distinguish as different</i>.<p>When you&#x27;ve decided what differences in the universe are worth caring about, what further insight is there to be gained from declaring brains to be information processors? Given a sufficiently odd (and specific) choice of what differences to care about, you could probably truthfully declare damn near anything to be an information processor.