Re: An analogy for Qualia
On Jan 5, 12:29 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 9:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Sure, our belief in simulations can make them seem quite realistic to us. That doesn't make them real though. And so simulators join a long long long list of things that you say are not real. Simulators are real, and the experience generated by them is real, but the experience is not really what we are led to believe is what is being simulated. That's why they are called 'flight simulators' and not 'aircraft'. If X contradicts your philosophy you just declare that X is not real; that's what the opponents of Galileo did, they insisted that everything rotated around the Earth but when they looked through Galileo's telescope they could clearly see that Jupiter's moons rotated around Jupiter NOT the Earth. So what was their response to this powerful evidence? You guessed it, things seen through a telescope were not real. I think I'm actually playing the Galileo role. What I am pointing out is not real is the obsolete misinterpretations of observations, not the observations themselves. I am questioning the assumption of their reality, revealing the emperor's nakedness, and suggesting a coherent alternative worldview which explains the observations more completely. Why even have robots? Why not just make a simulation of outer space and decide that it's real? Only one reason, we can't make a good enough simulation for that because we don't have enough INFORMATION. If our contemporary knowledge of physics is so complete, then that should be all the information we need. We don't have to guess Incorrect, you should have said I don't have to guess, you have no way of knowing if I or anybody else really understands anything, all you know is that sometimes we behave as if we do. Not necessarily. Just because the logic of my conscious intellect dictates that it cannot know anything unless it has been explicitly told doesn't mean that there aren't other epistemological resources at our disposal. We don't have to question that people who seem to be human might not be human. that neurons have understanding, because we are associated with them and we have understanding. There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, if you divide understanding into 100,000,000,000 parts is the the result still understanding? If you divided even the largest library on Earth into 100 billion parts you'd be lucky to have a part that contained even one single letter. Is the letter Y a library? Dividing human subjective understanding into fragments isn't the same as dividing an object into fragments. I think what you get is a qualitative change in the depth and richness of experience. If you take a mirror reflecting the sun and break it into a thousand pieces, each piece still reflects the sun and can be used as a mirror also. It's not really important to know how it feels on these other levels of perception external to ourselves, but it is important to see the difference between sense, feeling, or detection, and a physical mechanism. The mistake our modern view makes is to gloss over the insurmountable chasm that separates subjective experience on any level and objective mechanics of any complexity. We do have to doubt that transistors have understanding because they don't produce any results which remind us of an organism which has understanding like ours. Solving equations playing Chess winning at Jeopardy and asking Siri questions on a iPhone certainly reminds me of organisms which have understanding like I do, but I have no way and will never have a way of knowing if any of these thing's understanding is really real, and given what a good job they do there is no reason for me to care. And I could say exactly the same thing about my fellow human beings. The reason to care is the same reason to care whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or not, only this is much more important since it is the difference between a worldview which sees us as we actually are and one which denies any possibility of life, order, awareness, or significance. It's [the brain] nothing like a computer which drops the contents of RAM as soon as electricity is cut off As anyone who has ever used a flash drive could tell you not all RAM acts that way. I didn't say all RAM. My point is that there are many ways that the brain is nothing like a computer. There are no discrete registers used as memory locations, no computations being completed and stored as fixed values. It doesn't work like that. It's a biological community. Mind is doing things too. It has analogs to current and power (sense and motive), relativity (perceptual frame), entropy (negentropy-significance) which relate to electromagnetism in an anomalous symmetry. Analogs? Ah, so you're a fan of analog processes, then welcome to the exciting world of analog computing. Not analog
Beyond quantum theory: a realist psycho-biological
article copy from Arxiv.org Ronald ‘Beyond quantum theory: a realist psycho-biological interpretation of reality’ revisited Brian D. Josephson Cavendish Laboratory, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK Abstract It is hypothesised, following Conrad et al. (1988) that quantum physics is not the ultimate theory of nature, but merely a theoretical account of the phenomena manifested in nature under particular conditions. These phenomena parallel cognitive phenomena in biosystems in a number of ways and are assumed to arise from related mechanisms. Quantum and biological accounts are complementary in the sense of Bohr and quantum accounts may be incomplete. In particular, following ideas of Stapp, ‘the observer’ is a system that, while lying outside the descriptive capacities of quantum mechanics, creates observable phenomena such as wave function collapse through its probing activities. Better understanding of such processes may pave the way to new science. Keywords: complementarity, subjective–objective parallelism, the observer, state vector collapse, epistemology Michael Conrad was an unusually gifted scientist. My experience with him was that if one had a question about anything one could go and ask him about it and get back a clear explanation of the issue concerned, no matter what field it belonged to. And if one was working on an idea of one’s own and wanted some feedback, he would always come back with deep insights. I will leave to others in this volume the task of explaining his many innovative ideas, and focus here on some specific ideas that we worked on together. One of these was the idea from Eastern Philosophy that in certain states of consciousness the subjective states of the mind, irrespective of learning, closely reflect objective reality, a state of affairs contrary to that of the usual assumption, whereby the contents of the mind reflect objective reality — page 1 — purely as a consequence of what one has learnt about it. Such an idea had been discussed by Fritjof Capra in his book the Tao of Physics (Capra 1983), concerned with the deep parallels that appear to exist between patterns found in objective reality as revealed by modern science, and patterns found in deeper personal experiences as revealed by meditation or mystical experience and reported by the mystics. A related theoretical idea, based on Whitehead’s process philosophy, was developed by Stapp (1982, 1985). This is the idea that reality evolves by a mind-like process, decisions made by this process being apparent in the context of ordinary physics as the collapse of the wave function. In our Urbino conference paper (Conrad et al. 1988) we tried to take this idea further (see Table 1), proposing a number of logical correspondences between the two modes of description (in the original paper we called the right hand side biological, since we regarded phenomena such as signals, decisions and regulation as characteristically biological, a theme developed in more detail in Josephson and Conrad (1992)): [table 1 about by here] The details of quantum physics and biology are very different, but we argued that they might nevertheless be derivative of some common underlying subtler background process, in the same way that waves and particles emerge from a common subtler domain, that of quantum mechanics, and in some cases share certain features such as propagation along a trajectory. Quantum mechanics would then be the specific theory that emerges as a good description in some domain of nature, whilst more biological accounts would be relevant in some other phenomenal domain. We thus envisaged the possibility, highlighted in some of the writings of Bohr (1958), that biological and quantum accounts of nature might, like the wave and particle accounts, of certain phenomena, be complementary rather than, as with the conventional view, the first being entirely derivative of the latter. We finished our paper with considerations of knowability (in which discussion our coauthor, Dipankar Home, played a major role), it being our view that the form of a scientific domain is — page 2 — very much influenced by its paradigm. Biology concerns itself largely with processes, while quantum mechanics is concerned fundamentally with quantifiability. As already noted, these aspects may be complementary and also incompatible. Quantum mechanics achieves its quantitative aspects by an averaging process, but this may lead to neglecting characteristics of individual cases which may be relevant in the case of a biosystem, provided we are prepared to recognise the uniqueness of the individual case instead of treating all cases of a class as if they were the same. This may point to a fundamental inadequacy in the quantum point of view, as we illustrated by consideration of a classical gas where the options exist for statistical or deterministic accounts, there being an epistemology acknowledging only statistical properties or properties
Re: Beyond quantum theory: a realist psycho-biological
On Jan 5, 3:58 pm, ronaldheld ronaldh...@gmail.com wrote: Keywords: complementarity, subjective–objective parallelism These are the first two keywords for good reason. Subject-object symmetry is fundamental. from Eastern Philosophy that in certain states of consciousness the subjective states of the mind, irrespective of learning, closely reflect objective reality, a state of affairs contrary to that of the usual assumption, whereby the contents of the mind reflect objective reality purely as a consequence of what one has learnt about it. A good point, and one which supports the idea of multisense epistemology. We have other ways of knowing about ourselves and our universe than what our conscious intellect might assume. proposing a number of logical correspondences between the two modes of description (in the original paper we called the right hand side biological, since we regarded phenomena such as signals, decisions and regulation as characteristically biological, a theme developed in more detail in Josephson and Conrad (1992)): [table 1 about by here] The details of quantum physics and biology are very different, but we argued that they might nevertheless be derivative of some common underlying subtler background process, in the same way that waves and particles emerge from a common subtler domain, that of quantum Yes. I found that biology seems to belong on the right hand side also, or, more provocatively, the Eastern or Orienting side. My interpretation differs in that this side is not limited to biology, it's jut that since we are biological, our orienting qualities are closely associated with biology so that biological qualities are identified with anthropic qualities. phenomenal domain. We thus envisaged the possibility, highlighted in some of the writings of Bohr (1958), that biological and quantum accounts of nature might, like the wave and particle accounts, of certain phenomena, be complementary rather than, as with the conventional view, the first being entirely derivative of the latter. Exactly. The square peg of quantitative analysis does not always fit the round whole. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
