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Originally Posted by Open Mind  Which other interpretation is not 'pure speculation'?
So do you prefer the most favoured instead? What is the most favoured today? Over 60% of physicists (in 1998) preferred the Many Worlds Interpretation .... ...yes they prefer an incalcuble number of worlds spllitting into an infinity  Yes the ultimate violation of Occams Razor with an infinity of entities.  So here I propose a new updated Occams Razor modified for the materialist's 'favoured' viewpoint .... '...entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, except when we desperately need another theory to avoid consciousness being amongst equations  '
Hey isn't countless universes where justabout anything can happen rather like 'hallucinations' hehe | Oops, that was bad wording on my part. I didn't mean to imply the Stapp's process 0 conscious "Self" was the only speculation that is not implied by QT and my points don't require it to be the only speculation. Moreover, after this initial speculation Stapp adds even more speculation and neither of these are testable! Stapp has to avoid the anthropocentric nature of QT with this add-on conscious "Self", so he then takes the "Self" away by embedding it all in Whitehead's process philosophy. The bafflement of Leibniz's mill has really led him astray! Quote:
Originally Posted by Tor Pure speculation? He uses the orthodox von Neumann quantum framework as his foundation. The speculation part must be the introduction of the process 0 (that has to do with our free will), which I think is a necessary step.
No interpretation is derived from quantum theory. The interpretations exists because we don't understand what the heck is going on when we look at the mathematical theory by itself and compare it with experiments. Everything is fine for all practical purposes, but beyond that we're lost. As I said before, I think Stapp's view of things is a step in the right direction.
No. Process 1 is the probing action that acts upon process 2 to select the basis vectors. Or to put it another way, it partitions process 2 into a countable set of discrete (and orthogonal) components.
Process 3 is nature's statistically specified choice of the outcome of the action selected by the prior process 1 probing (nature's response to our probing).
Process 0 is what Stapp thinks decides when a Process 1 action occurs. It is what he thinks is closely connected to our free choices.
Process 1 is the one that Stapp describes as non-local.
Here we just disagree (or maybe not?). I believe consciousness is more fundamental than what is the mainstream thought today. I don't know what lies at the bottom of the universe. But I wouldn't be surprised if most of the phenomena we know of are emergent properties of this bottom/medium or whatever we should call it. Maybe something that has mind like and matter like properties embedded in it, maybe something that can't be compared to such categories at all.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure matter isn't the fundamental "substance". | Tor, thanks for reminding me again about Stapp's processes. You're correct in describing them but this still does effect anything else I've said.
Stapps arguments, like the one from "free-will", are wrong and misguiding and that's probably why he speculates about the need for this "process 0" being "tacked on" to QT. After all, QT doesn't logically require it and he knows it.
Plain old fashion materialistic determinism or mechanistic determinism is compatible with a free-will worth having, one that allows us to have moral choices and thus be responsible for them. I guess this wasn't apparent to him or he really wants something more like a substance dualists self and that kind of self is not a scientifically testable hypothesis.
Quantum approaches to consciousness are likely "dead-ends" or steps backward and I've posted why in another thread and below: Quote:
More than a quarter of a millennium ago, Leibniz posed the challenge to our imaginations with a vivid intuition pump, a monumentally misleading grandfather to all the Chinese Rooms (Searle), Chinese Nations (Block) and latter-day zombies.
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for. (Leibniz, Monadology, 1714: para. 17 [Latta translation])
There is a striking non sequitur in this famous passage, which finds many echoes in today's controversies. Is Leibniz's claim epistemological-we'll never understand the machinery of consciousness-or metaphysical-consciousness couldn't be a matter of "machinery"? His preamble and conclusion make it plain that he took himself to be demonstrating a metaphysical truth, but the only grounds he offers would-at best-support the more modest epistemological reading.2 Somebody might have used Leibniz's wonderful Gulliverian image to illustrate and render plausibl& the claim that although consciousness is-must be, in the end-a product of some gigantically complex mechanical system, it will surely be utterly beyond anybody:s intellectual powers to explain how this is so. But Leibniz clearly intends us to treat his example as demonstrating the absurdity of the very idea that consciousness could be such an emergent effect of a hugely complex machine ("Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for").
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...What all these views have in common is the idea that some revolutionary principle of physics could be a rival to the idea that consciousness is going to be explained in terms of "parts which work one upon another," as in Leibniz's mill.
Suppose they are right. Suppose the Hard Problem-whatever it is-can be solved only by confirming some marvelous new and irreducible property of the physics of the cells that make up a brain. One problem with this is that the physics of your brain' cells is, so far as we know, the same as the physics of those yeast cells undergoing population explosion in the dish. The differences in functionality between neurons and yeast cells are explained in terms' of differences of cell anatomy or cytoarchitecture, not physics. Could it be, perhaps, that those differences in anatomy permit neurons to respond to physical differences to which yeast cells are oblivious? Here we must tread carefully, for if we don't watch out, we will simply reintroduce Leibniz's baffling mill at a more microscopic level-watching the quantum fluctuations in the microtubules of a single cell and not being able to see how any amount of those "parts which work one upon another" could explain consciousness.
If you want to avoid the bafflement of Leibniz's mill, the idea had better be, instead, that consciousness is an irreducible property that inheres, somehow "in a simple substance," as Leibniz put it, "and not in a compound or in a machine." So let us suppose that, thanks to their physics, neurons enjoy a tiny smidgen (a quantum, perhaps!) of consciousness. We will then have solved the problem of how large ensembles of such cells such as you and I-are conscious: we are conscious because our brains are made of the right sort of stuff, stuff with the micro je-ne-sais-quoi that is needed for consciousness. But even if we had solved that problem, we would still have the problem illustrated by my opening illustration: how can cells, even conscious cells, that themselves know nothing about art or dogs or mountains compose themselves into a thing that has conscious thoughts about Braque or poodles or Kilimanjaro? How can the whole ensemble be so knowledgeable of the passing show, so in touch with distal art objects (to say nothing of absent artists and mountains) when all of its parts, however conscious or sentient they are, are myopic and solipsistic in the extreme? We might call this the topic-of-consciousness question.11
I suspect that this turn to physics looks attractive to some people mainly because they have not yet confronted the need to answer this question, for once they do attempt it, they find that a "theory" that postulates some fundamental and irreducible sentience-field or the like has no resources at all to deal with it. Only a theory that proceeds in terms of how the parts work together in larger ensembles has any hope of shedding light on the topic question, and once theory has ascended to such a high level, it is not at all clear what use the lower-level physical sophistications would be. Moreover, there already are many models of systems that uncontroversially answer versions of the topic question, and they are all computational. How can the little box on your desk, whose parts know nothing at all about chess, beat you at chess with such stunning reliability? How can the little box driving the pistons attached to the rudder do a better job of steering a straight course than any old salt with decades at sea behind him? Leibniz would have been ravished with admiration by these mechanisms, which would have shaken his confidence-l daresay-in the claim that no mechanistic explanation of "perception" was possible. ...
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Last edited by mszlazak; 11-25-2007 at 01:51 AM.
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11-23-2007, 06:09 PM
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