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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  It is foolhardy to attach too much objectivity to the linguistic description of "wvaefunction collapse". Some interpretations do not assign an objective reality to the wavefunction. Some interpreations do not involve a "collapse". All interpreations are mathematically equivalent. |
Well first, I am not alone in thinking about what collapses the wave function. Also, the only interpretation (to my knowledge) that does not require a collapse is the many worlds interpretation. This interpretation duplicates the entire universe to avoid a collapse. After avoiding N collapses is has made 2^N-1 new universes - I would sooner believe in purple farting unicorns (but lets not go there again) than that! Unless you go for that interpretation of QM, the wave function collapse is real!
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Originally Posted by Chris Noble This still doesn't solve the fundamental problem dualism it just tries to hide it with smoke and mirrors. You can't have your woo and eat it too. If mind stuff can interact with physical stuff then it is physical too. |
I have admitted to Paul that there is a sense in which this is a fair criticism - you move consciousness off into another realm and then free it from all constraints. However, mental stuff could obey vastly different laws which might allow (for example) for some mixing of consciousness and account for many of the phenomena discussed on Skeptiko. If consciousness is just an elaborate electrochemical process going on in the brain, then it is constrained by the ordinary laws of physics, and there is a surprising amount of evidence to the contrary - think of the presentiment experiment, or indeed any Ψ phenomena.
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Originally Posted by Chris Noble
If nobody understands what conciousness is then why are you so sure that physical science cannot explain it?
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Because the failure to understand consciousness is not for want of trying. Enormous sums of government money were poured into Artificial Intelligence at one stage, on the assumption that consciousness was essentially equivalent to a computation, and very little came out of all that effort. The speculations that people are making here are to a large extent a response to that failure. Read Roger Penrose's books, Particularly 'Shadows of the Mind' for more perspective on this.
David