Hi Brent,
Does your reasoning allow for the chance that Tegmark's paper is rubbish?
Does your reality allow for these sorts of realities?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/quantum-birds/ ?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/quantum-photosynthesis/ ?
Birds eye’s are a tad bit hotter than our brains...
If the entanglement that I am considering is nothing more than randomness,
then we should have any random noise source added to a computation would be
fine for supervenience. Is that your claim? I do not see how it change
Maudlin’s construction and not preserve the assumption of the principle of
locality and the non-relativity of simultaneity. It may just double down on an
already bad bet! Why do we want our brain to be classical so badly? I am
somehow not grasping the evolutionary viewpoint on this issue.
Onward!
Stephen
-----Original Message-----
From: Brent Meeker
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 11:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
Note that the kind of entanglement you're talking about is the same as
randomness. Bohm's version of QM makes this explicit. There's a
deterministic wave function of the universe so that everything effects
everything else instantaneously (which is why there's no good Bohmian
version of QFT) and quantum randomness is just a consequence of our
ignorance of the complete wave function. But Tegmark's paper shows that
quantum effects must be very small and the brain is essentially
classical - which makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint. You want
your brain to be classical, except for a very rare randomness to avoid
the problem of Buridan's ass - and you don't even need brain randomness
for that, there's plenty of randomness in the environment.
Brent
On 1/31/2011 6:27 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> You just happened to mention the 800kg Gorilla in the room! While
> we can rattle off a sophisticated narrative about decoherence effects
> and quote from some Tegmark paper, the fact remains that entanglement
> is real and while we can argue that its effects could be minimized, we
> cannot prove that it is irrelevant to supervenience. This is a
> game-changer for physical supervenience arguments. But the problem is
> much worse! It is becoming harder to how up Tegmark's prohibition on
> quantum effects. Just recently an article appeared in some
> peer-reviewed journal discussing how entangled states are present for
> macroscopically significant periods of time in the eyes of birds.
> Don't they have a higher average body temperature than humans?
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: David Shipman
> Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 7:41 PM
> To: Everything List
> Subject: Re: A comment on Mauldin's paper “Computation and Consciousness”
>
>
> On Jan 30, 4:13 pm, 1Z <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Jan 25, 9:04 am, "Stephen Paul King" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>> > Dear Bruno and Friends,
>>>
>>> While we are considering the idea of “causal efficacy”
>>> here and not hidden variable theories, the fact that it
>>> has been experimentally verified that Nature violates
>>> the principle Locality. Therefore the assumption of
>>> local efficacy that Mauldin is using for the supervenience
>>> thesis is not realistic and thus presents a flaw in his
>>> argument.
>>
>> Local supervenience doesn't have to be argued from
>> fundamental physics. It can be argued from neurology.
>>
>> Mental states arent affected by what goes on outside
>> the head unless information is conveyed by the sense
>
> This isn't true, is it?
>
> So we have two particles (A and B) that are entangled.
>
> Entanglement is never destroyed, it is only obscured by subsequent
> interactions with the environment.
>
> Particle A goes zooming off into outer space.
>
> 10 years later, Particle B becomes incorporated into my brain.
>
> The next day, an alien scientist measures the entangled property on
> Particle A.
>
> This will have an immediate non-local effect on Particle B won't it?
>
> And since B's state has been altered, and it is part of my brain, then
> my brain state has been altered as well, hasn't it?
>
> Maybe only a tiny amount, obscured by the many environmental
> interactions that the two particles have been subjected to since the
> initial entanglement, but in a way that is real and at least
> conceivably significant.
>
> And if that is true, then to the extent that mental states supervene
> on brain states, my mental state would also have been altered by non-
> local effects.
>
> Or is that wrong?
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
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