[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by Tor

First off, I don't endorse everything Stapp says. As he introduces process 0, one possibility to account for this process 0 is via the Whiteheadian philosophy.

I'm not a big fan of this myself, but everything until he tries to describe where process 0 comes from, is independent of Whiteheadian philosophy. And this first part is the major part of his book! The chapter Whiteheadian Quantum Ontology comes at the end of his book and is only 15 pages!
To say that his book really is about updating Whiteheads process philosophy to be compatible with QT is just plain wrong. It's a small part at the end and not the major point he makes.

Stapp also says this about the Whiteheadian approach:



It is this later Whiteheadian part that you refer to when you talk about mind-dust.

This statement is independent of Whitehead and is the one I feel more comfortable with:






Well, I'm not embracing the emergence idea here, so no problem for me. I see process 0 as something that exists in a mental realm that is part of our natural universe. To me, the quantum description shows that the universe is more like "a great thought" anyway.




To me free-will is incompatible with determinism. Maybe there is something that gives us certain desires, but how and in what way we chose to act on this is our free choice.



I do think there is sufficient data to question the materialistic view of mind/consciousness/brain. The science done by people like Dean Radin passes my criteria of good science. As to case-studies/field studies, they are not as "hard" as laboratory tests. But if the number of cases that are collected get very high, and the quality of these case reports is very high, then one should take these seriously also.
One analogy is the case reports of ball lightning. Because someone actually took the case reports seriously, this phenomena is now starting to get reproduced in the lab.

I think I'll jump out of this discussion now. I've made my point and I'm not trying to convince anyone to come to the same conclusion as I have, although I do think there are good reasons to go in that direction. I believe people have truly free choices to do and think whatever they like

Again Tor, you're repeating what I've said about Stapp's book. The majority is about the measurement problem in QT, other speculation on QT and his speculations. He then uses some fallacious arguments from William James and ones from determinism and "free-will" which he thinks requires a conscious "Self", giving him process 0. There really is "no meat" here to the issues that need addressing.

He then needs to make his approach general and can't do that without Whitehead but this essentially means the "Self" he starts with goes away. You do point out that the mind-dust "micro-self's" isn't what he wants and I can see why, hence my remark about their knowings of QT basis issues.

I guess, this means that these knowings aren't needed because they were not around in the distant past or that QT is incomplete. Stapp should have just written less about some things and more on other things.

As to the parapsychology experiments of people like Dean Radin. I am assuming just for the sake of argument that they show the existence of psi even though I don't believe they do. My point is that the data from these experiments are third-person data and if you believe the qualia theory of subjective experiences then by definition they are not something science can ever test for. Parapsychology isn't all that relevent. There is more but this should be enough to get you started.

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