On 10-08-2019 09:49, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 5:34 PM smitra <[email protected]> wrote:
On 10-08-2019 00:53, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 3:22 AM Jason Resch
<[email protected]>
wrote:
On Friday, August 9, 2019, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 8:59 PM Jason Resch
<[email protected]>
wrote:
What role do you see decoherence playing in consciousness? In
other
words, could you explain why shedding IR photons into an
external
environment necessary for the mind to be conscious?
Consciousness is a classical phenomenon since the brain is a
classical object (not in a state of quantum coherence). So
decoherence, and the emergence of the classical from the
quantum, is
essential for consciousness. Just as to be conscious is to be
conscious of something, such as the external world.
You appear to be extrapolating a causation from the appearance of
a
correlation:
"The brain is classical, and the brain is conscious, therefore
all
consciousness must be classical."
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
Show me consciousness that does not involve decohered classical
matter, such as in a brain.
That's trivial. The brain is an object that exists in our universe
which
is described by quantum mechanics. Classical mechanics is a
falsified
theory that yields good approximations for macroscopic observables
due
to fast decoherence. The number of physical degrees of freedom
involved
in the entangled state the brain is part of is finite due to
locality.
This means that the brain plus a finite (but extremely large)
number of
physical degrees of freedom is always in a pure state.
But when you cannot reach, or ignore, some of this larger number of
degrees of freedom, you end up with a mixed state. That is how
decoherence reduces the pure state to a mixture on measurement --
there are always degrees of freedom that are not recoverable -- those
infamous IR photons, for example. The brain does not take all this
entanglement with the environment into account, so it is a classical
object.
And that step of tracing out the environmental degrees of freedom is
where we make a mathematical approximation in order to be able to do
practical calculations. But as you have said in this thread, the
mathematics we use to describe a system is not necessarily a good
physical representation of the system. It's not up to the brain to
decide to not take entanglement into account. We may describe the brain
as a classical object, but that doesn't make it so.
Saibal
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