Replies to Klein, Globus, Josephson, Sarfatti, Hayes, and Sloman.

Date:    Thu, 20 Aug 1998 00:54:16 -0500
Subject: [q-mind] Stapp replies to Klein (Heisenberg choice) and Globus (

Subject: Replies to two postings:
- Stan Klein's "Who is making the Heisenberg choice?"
- Gordon Globus' "Orchestration"

[Stan]
I think we have a problem here. The question is 'who is choosing which
question to ask next'. You say it is done by a 'subjective' evaluation of
the possible projected possibilities. That is sounding like there is a mind
or a God outside of the Feynman rules that govern the neural activity.
......
 I had thought you wanted to keep God or mind away from  the
subjective collapse events.
.....
 So having the 'next question' be the guiding force using the Quantum Zeno
effect doesn't solve the problem of how to get free will.

[Henry Stapp replies:]
Who chooses? The whole person chooses!

But "The whole person chooses!" is not the same as "The brain
chooses!"

Nor is it the same as "The soul chooses!"

This "person" is the mind/brain (or mind/body) system. There is no outside
soul, hovering around, that is not an integral aspect of the interactive
mind/body complex.

The Feynman rules are only part of the dynamical story: one must consider,
in order to complete the quantum account, the effects of the collapse.

My principles are that "The thought itself is the thinker" [See Mind, Matter,
and Quantum Mechanics, pg. 22 ]

"The felt `self' is simply part of the experience." [MM&QM, pg, 160]

In the vonNeumann/Wigner ontologicalization of the Copenhagen interpretation
one retains the basic Copenhagen commitment to bring human experience
explicitly into the theoretical structure as a basic reality. But by accepting
the proposition that the entire world of particles and fields is concordant
with the quantum rules, one is able to bring the collapse associated with
increments in human knowledge into human brains: i.e., to make the projection
operator P_e  associated with a human experience e act directly on the
degrees of freedom associated with the human brain that is directly
dynamically linked to that experience e.

Three processes that enter onto the quantum dynamics:

Process (1): The deterministic evolution in accordance with the Schroedinger
(or, in the Heisenberg picture, the Heisenberg-) equation of motion. In
the classical limit only this process survives: ``God" and "Human
Mind/Consciousness" are squeezed out.

Process (2): The random process that determines which answer, Yes or No,
will be given by Nature to the posed question: "Will experience e occur?"
This is the "Dirac choice" on the part of Nature.  Somebody might call this
"God's choice", but that terminology carries too much excess baggage.

Process (3): "The Heisenberg Choice". The choice on the part of the
person as to which aspect of nature he will probe and experientially
register.

The three processes can be called the deterministic, the random, and the
personal processes, respectively.

I do not view the personal process (the Heisenberg choice} as in any way
outside natural process.  I adhere to the

"naturalistic principle that the actually occurring experiences be specified
by (supervene on) the physical universe, specified by the evolving quantum
state of the universe." [From the target article " Whiteheadian Process
and Quantum Theory of Mind"]

But the vonNeumann/Wigner ontology leaves the personal
choice not fixed by the prior physical state of the universe.

So what specifies this choice that is not determined by "the physical".

To answer this question some creative input is needed: it is not fixed
by the vN/W ontology: a guess is needed.

To keep the ontology as lean as possible, and also to accomodate in
the most straightforward way my feeling that "I" can influence what "I"
do, where the first "I" means some whole that includes my mind, I have
proposed the following dynamical assumption:

The present experience e influences its successor in TWO causal ways:

(i) The present experience e, if actualized by nature's choice, reduces
the quantum state via the rule S-->(P_e S P_e), in accordance with the
basic pragmatic quantum rule that the reduction brings the state into
accord with the new knowledge specified in e. As discussed in MM&QT (pg.
150ff ) a principal function of the actualized state is to set the
conditions that will result, via the action of process (1), in the
occurrence of the condition for a later possible experience.
But the structure of the brain [MM&QM pg. 152] entails that what will be
generated by process(1)  is a superposition of states corresponding to
different alternative  possibilities for the next possible experience e'.
The present experience e has an intentional aspect [MM&QM pg 151].
This forward-looking or "projective" aspect [MM&QM pg. 151] of e
controls in part the upcoming experience e' via process (1).

(ii) But there is also in the present experience e an element that is felt
as the "willful action of choosing what to attend to".  The fact that this
feeling is present in e is a consequence of the causal chain that leads up
to e. The suggestion here is that this feel within experience e of a
"willing" to attend next to some possible experience e' has, itself a
direct causal effect via process (3). This action specifies the "loose
connection" that is otherwise not specified by the dynamics.

Thus the influence of e upon its successor e' acts via two different channels.
The first is via process (1). This would completely control the course of
events in the classical limit. However, there is an essential looseness in
the quantum dynamics when one backs off from that limit: SOMETHING needs
to be added to complete the dynamical structure.

To fill this dynamical gap. I am proposing that the feeling within an
experience e of a "will to attend to a possible experience" does have
a causal efficacy that acts in parallel to the causal effects carried by
processes (1) and (2).

I do not see any "soul" here. I am dealing with the causal process that leads
from one experiential aspect of a mind/brain system to the next, proposing a way
to complete the otherwise incomplete quantum dynamics, in terms of the
elements that already enter into that dynamics.

The key point is this:

Although the parallel process via process 3, fixed in this way, is causal,
it is not locally causal; it acts via experiences that act via nonlocal
operators that act on the whole brain, in order to bring the brain into
accord with a possible experience. This causal connection is not via the
generalization to the quantum realm of the local causal process that
occurs in the classical limit. It is via the nonlocal structures that are
are the structures of the entire brain that correspond to experiences.
This causal process is not representable as merely the net effects of many
tiny local processes, each acting solely under the influences of
local conditions in its neighborhood. In this sense it is not the brain
that chooses: it is the mind/brain that chooses.

*************************************************************
From: Gordon Globus <ggglobus@uci.edu>
Date:    Fri, 14 Aug 1998 03:02:28 -0500
Subject: Orchestration

[Gordon Globus]
Henry's recent posts further distance him from a random consciousness and
now attempt to specify how the selection takes place. There is "subjective
evaluation," a "mental effort," a "freedom of choice," which while not
countermanding in the slightest the basic statistical rules of quantum
mechanics, "can give a human observer great power to direct the activities
of his brain" (3-4 Aug 98). So instead of a mechanical process of winner
take all, a free subjectivity takes control. Henry's view has soul enough.

This is a very unhappy solution, as Stan Klein and others have pressed. Stan
asks forthrightly, "Who is making Heisenberg's choice?" (11-12 Aug 98). It
sure sounds like a good old Cartesian subject...and this will not do
nowadays, fast approaching the fin de millenium.

[Henry Stapp replies:]
My model certainly does contain the mind/consciousness associated with the
mind/brain system [which is the "person"] as an explicit real element in
the  description of this system of two interacting differently described
components. It is a tremendous advantage for the scientific study of the
mind/brain system to have a theoretical framework that has at its
core these two differently described components, linked by a mathematical
rule S-->(P_e S P_e), and with a specific statistical rule that is fixed
by the demand that the theory account for the accurate predictions of
quantum theory.

The reference to mind within this theoretical framework does not
entail or refer to any `soul': it is about the character of the
causal linkages between the experiential and physical aspects of the
mind/brain system, as these aspects are described in the quantum
theoretical description of the system in question.

Experiential aspects of the mind/brain system do exist, and are
explicitly represented within this theoretical framework in
psychological terms, and they do have causal effects outside the
processes (1) and (2).  But occurrence of mind within this
quantum-theoretical description of a mind/body the in no way entails
the existence of an"overseer", or any entity or quality that can
exist apart from this mind/body system of which it is an integral
part.

*******************************************************

This quantum approach  open up what seems to be a coherent and consistent
way for experiences per se to get into the causal loop in a non-trivial
way that differs significantly from what the classical ontology allows.

Thus the key question is: Is the classical limit able to account for all
possible data?

At present all that can be said is that there seems to be a coherent
logical possibility that the classical limit COULD be inadequate, and
that consciousness COULD enter in this nontrivial way.

I am trying to conceive of some sort of objective test that would
empirically distinguish between these two quite different kinds of causal
structure.

Henry P. Stapp

**************************************

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Aug 20 10:20:38 1998
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 09:48:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Henry Stapp <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
To: Brian Josephson <bdj10@cam.ac.uk>
Cc: kleinlist <A.sloman@bham.ac.uk>, brings@rpi.edu, brucero@cats.ucsc.edu,
    chalmers@paradox.ucsc.edu, ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu, hameroff@u.arizona.edu,
    hpstapp@lbl.gov, "jeffery m. schwartz" <jmschwar@ucla.edu>,
    keith@imprint.co.uk, klein@adage.berkeley.edu, patrickw@monash.edu.au,
    phayes@nuts.coginst.uwf.edu
Subject: Re: "Who makes the Heisenberg choice?"

On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Brian Josephson wrote:

> --On Wed, Aug 19, 1998 4:46 pm -0700 "Henry Stapp" <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
> wrote: 
> 
> > [Stan]
> > I think we have a problem here. The question is 'who is choosing which
> > question to ask next'. You say it is done by a 'subjective' evaluation of
> > the possible projected possibilities. That is sounding like there is a
> mind
> > or a God outside of the Feynman rules that govern the neural activity.
........
> > 
> > My principles are that "The thought itself is the thinker" [See Mind,
> Matter, 
> > and Quantum Mechanics, pg. 22 ]
> > 
> > "The felt `self' is simply part of the experience." [MM&QM, pg, 160]
> > 
> 
> Some comments on this:
> 
> 1) I believe, on the basis of my memories of Tuscon II, that Goswami has an
> elaborate scheme for explaining QM which is similar to what Henry (?) is
> stating here, that there is some kind of global entity that does the
> choosing.
> 
> 2) It is worth drawing attention to the ideas of complexity and emergence
> which seem to be relevant.  According to a general consensus at ECHO III
> earlier this month, emergence is unpredictable and goes along with the
> development of some kind of unity or cohesion (paper by Collier and Muller
> of Newcastle, Australia).  Unity/cohesion is a necessary concomitant as if
> it were not there what emerged would disintegrate after a short time but it
> may arise unpredictably.   Also, according to a paper by Cottam, Ranson and
> Vounckx of VUB Brussels) this is similarly implicated in a quantum jump, and
> some kind of awareness is involved because such systems need to make
> representations in order to cope with threats to their integrity.  They in
> fact appear to identify the quantum state with such systems of
> representation.
> 
> 
> Brian
> 
>  * * * * * * *      Prof. Brian D. Josephson :::::::: bdj10@cam.ac.uk
> * Mind-Matter *   Cavendish Lab., Madingley Rd, Cambridge CB3 0HE, U.K.
> * Unification *  voice: +44(0)1223 337260/337200 fax: +44(0)1223 337356
> *   Project   *         WWW: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10
>  * * * * * * *
> 

Dear Brian,

Goswami was inspired by my ideas, but he went off in a definitely
different direction, connected to Eastern Thought. His tack, and the
Hindu ideas upon which it is based, may turn out to be correct, but I am
trying to stay with a lean ontology directly based upon the discoveries
of science in this century. 

Complexity, emergent phenomena, nonlinear dynamics, chaos, fractals, etc.
are all based essentially on classical mechanics. Although the behaviors
they deal with do have certain characteristics that resemble features of
consciousness, the basic ontology remains classical: the evolving world is
imagined to be built up out of particle-trajectories and evolving local
fields. There are a lot of words being put out that try to make people
forget that, but the bottom line is unchanged: consciously experienced
feelings are not logically a part of the basic conceptual framework, and
all that one can deuce is physical behaviour (at the atomic level): the
"painfulness" that accompanies certain brain activities is not extractable
from the classically restricted logical input.

But since experience is put, at the fundamental level, into the vN/W
ontologicalization of the Copenhagen pragmatic formulation of QM the
situation there is essentially different. One has a specified place
for our experiences, and that place, and the mathematical rules
associated with it, was fixed by the demand that the ontology account for
the pragmatic rules. Moreover, we now see how our experiences, so
represented, can enter in an essential way into the dynamics.

Henry

***************************************************

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Aug 20 13:56:36 1998
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:52:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Henry Stapp <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
To: Brian Josephson <bdj10@cam.ac.uk>
Cc: kleinlist <A.sloman@bham.ac.uk>, brings@rpi.edu, brucero@cats.ucsc.edu,
    chalmers@paradox.ucsc.edu, ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu, hameroff@u.arizona.edu,
    hpstapp@lbl.gov, "jeffery m. schwartz" <jmschwar@ucla.edu>,
    keith@imprint.co.uk, klein@adage.berkeley.edu, patrickw@monash.edu.au,
    phayes@nuts.coginst.uwf.edu
Subject: Re: "Who makes the Heisenberg choice?"

On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Brian Josephson wrote:

> --On Thu, Aug 20, 1998 9:48 am -0700 "Henry Stapp" <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
> wrote: 
> 
> > Complexity, emergent phenomena, nonlinear dynamics, chaos, fractals, etc.
> > are all based essentially on classical mechanics.
> 
> Dear Henry,
> 
> 
>         Many thanks for your thoughts; let's try to take these issues
> further.  I think I would begin by questioning part of the assertion above,
> specifically that emergent phenomena are 'based essentially on classical
> mechanics'.  As things are going now this is not clearly the case.  People
> talk in terms of descriptions in general, and the ways in which in an
> emergent situation a different description may become necessary, which,
> contrary to the usual situations and working priciples of the physicist, may
> not be logically derivable from the previous one.  The discussion can be
> ontology-neutral.  So in discussions based on emergence we are starting over
> again just as one had to do when quantum mechanics came in.  But it may be
> that this new trend will be less offensive to one's intuitions than QM is
> liable to be (but only once we have understood why certain dogmas _had_ to
> be given up)!
> 
>         It may be that the way things will go (which is qualitatively the
> same kind of thing as you are trying, though very different in detail) will
> be in redefining what is 'obviously the case', and in making certain
> principles axiomatic rather than things to be pondered and battled over with
> one's conscience.  For example, the concept of everything communicating with
> everything else may imply a shift in perspective, as will the idea of
> systems developing the potential for things to happen, unseen and unknown to
> us.  But also just the idea coming from emergence that we ought not think
> that our thoughts can ever genuinely reflect what is; that was just an
> illusion deriving from particular successes of the distant past which
> scientists have needed to cling to to avoid loss of face.  Then one's
> philosophy can start to accept the need for a more realistic and more
> pragmatic direction.  Explanations will still be needed, but will be more
> consistent with the real human condition.
> 
> 
> Brian
> 
>  * * * * * * *      Prof. Brian D. Josephson :::::::: bdj10@cam.ac.uk
> * Mind-Matter *   Cavendish Lab., Madingley Rd, Cambridge CB3 0HE, U.K.
> * Unification *  voice: +44(0)1223 337260/337200 fax: +44(0)1223 337356
> *   Project   *         WWW: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10
>  * * * * * * *
> 

*******************************************************************

Dear Brian,

Yes, it is indeed true that "Emergentism" does try to divorce itself from
classical physics.

That tack is, in fact, in line with Bohr's reluctance to push QM
into biology: he believed that biology would be ``compatible'' with
the laws of QM, but that other principles, "biological principles",
would be needed to construct an adequate science of biology.

Brian Flanagan [in Q-mind] recently produced a quotation from Wigner
that was along that same line.

I also endorse that idea: since we cannot solve even the three body
problem, we surely cannot deduce from the basic principles of physics
the behavior of an alert human brain. Lots of other "biological
principles" will be needed to construct an adequate predictive
biological science. Linus Pauling contended that even Chemistry
needed extra principles: Physics alone is not enough for practical
science. Agreed!

What to do? Must we abandon the idea of a crisp ontology, and simply
descend to a mushy "emergent levels" ontology?

What about the principle that all the sciences should be "compatible"
with the basic principles of physics?

This requirement of "compatibilty" can be interpreted in either a strong
or weak sense.

"Strong Compatibility" means that all science is to be consistent with the
assumption that the world can be considered to be built out of particles
and local fields that obey the basic rules identified in physical theory,
even though the complexity of most systems, and our lack of exact
information about them, precludes the possibilty of actually confirming
this strong theoretical assumption, or using it to actually deuce the
detailed behaviour of most systems. 

"Weak Compatibility" means only that no empirical finding will/can ever
reveal a definite failure of the notion that the world is built of
particles and local fields that behave in accordance with the principles
identified by basic physical theory.

"Emergentism"  probably tends in the direction of accepting only
"Weak Compatibility". And I believe most "Emergentists" would say
that this compatibility would be with quantum theory only insofar as one
was concerned with atomic-scale phenenomena: that quantum ideas
would become increasingly irrelevant as one moved up through the hierarchy
of emergent levels. 

Science certainly rests on practical success. And the downfall of
classical mechanics, outside its own domain of appicability,
certainly does undermine the idea that there is some basic underlying
structure. As I said at the end of my 1972 article on the Copenhagen
interpretation [MM&QM , pg. 70] "For him [the pragmatist] progress in 
human understanding would more likely consist in a web of interwoven
complementary understanding of various aspects of the fullness of nature."

On the other hand, progress in science is often achieved by following
a clear theoretical line that covers, in a logically coherent way, a vast
amount of data, rather than abandoning it prematurely.

Classical mechanics, though not completely correct, generated a tremendous
increase in understanding because it was pursued with tenacity. And when
it did give way to a more comprehensive theory, it was incorporated in a
completely rational way into the new theory: it was essentially the limit
of the new theory when some small parameter in nature was set to zero.

I think the correct lesson to be learned from the fate of classical
mechanics is not that a beautiful and coherent logical structures that
covers a vast range of phenomena should be cast aside, in favor
of a  practical approach, based different schemes for different
regimes. The idea that one must start anew, without trying to retain as
much as possible from what has been learned from three hundred years of
science, and compacted into a few principles that appear to be compatible
with all known data, is a recipe for chaos in science. The emergentist may
say that 

> in discussions based on emergence we are starting over
> again just as one had to do when quantum mechanics came in. 

But when quantum mechanics came in we did not "start over again".
We retained what we had before, beatifully integrated into the
new theory! 

In that case, we were faced with clear contradiction between the older
theory and empirical data, and it was the focus provided by those
contractions that allowed the creators of quantum theory to pull
out of the infinite realm of conceivable theories the incredible
solution we call quantum theory.

In the present situation there is no known failure of quantum theory.
To find our way through the infinite realm of conceivable theories
it is prudent to cling tenaciously to this elegant creation of science,
rather than abandon it willy-nilly without reason 

Probably a prime underlying reason for considering the abandonment
of the crisp ideas of basic science, and embracing the still very
fuzzy notion of "emergence" is the prevailing idea that basic physics
cannot adequately deal with consciouness. So some idea of a bunch of
level that will bridge the gap between physics and consciousness is
brought in. But that prevailing idea is based on a failure to recognize
that whereas classical theory cannot naturally accomodate consciousness,
quantum theory provides a perfect place for it.

Best regards,

Henry

**************************
Reply to Sarfatti.

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Aug 21 10:53:10 1998
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 10:48:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Henry Stapp <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
To: quantum-mind <quantum-mind@listserv.arizona.edu>
Subject: Re: Back Action vs Orch OR--Sarfatti replies to Hameroff

Jack's reply to Stuart contains the following exchange about the
properties of the theory that I described in an earlier target
article:

 [Jack (8/18)]
 ".. in exact agreement with my above heuristic model."

 [Stuart]
 "Your heuristic model makes no testable predictions so
 "exact agreements" come easily."

 [Jack]
False. My model makes a very precise prediction that directly disagrees
with Stapp's prediction. You cannot say my model makes no testable
predictions without also saying that Stapp's model does not as well.
Thus, my model says unequivocally that the Dirac choices must be biased
whenever there are experiential qualities that Stapp calls "e". Indeed,
I claim that these non-random symbol strings that are these sentences
are in fact the outputs of biased post-quantum Dirac choices. If Stapp
were right then one could only have random symbol strings like the
output from an ensemble of radioactive nuclei producing perfectly random
sequences.

.........

 [Stuart]
 "However testable predictions are required to evaluate
theoretical frameworks."

 [Jack}
Agreed. Again my testable predictions include so far:

 1. Biased Dirac choices as the explanation of the non-random symbol
strings like these sentences accompanied by experiential qualities "e".
Conflict with Stapp's theory. It is irrational to claim that my theory
has no testable predictions.

*********************************************************

In a letter submitted to this forum directed to me, but largely an account
of his own model, Jack made essentially the same claim about my model:

[Jack Sarfatti]
>The main point
>is that your orthodox theory is a test of my unorthodox one. 
>If, in fact, you can
>explain inner experiential qualities without biasing Dirac choices,
>then my theory is not necessary.

*************************************************************

In what sense do I "explain" inner experiential qualities?

My approach is to accept the basic premise of the Copenhagen
interpretatiom that our experiences are real, and are the basic
realities of the scientific description. They are introduced
ab initio, and are related to the mathematical formalism via the
rule that the occurrence experience e is associated with the reduction
S-->(P_e S P_e), which:

(1) reduces the state S to the part of that state that is compatible
with the knowledge actualized by the experience e, and

(2) occurs with probability Trace S P_e/Trace S.

Rule (2) is the normal rule pertaining to the "Dirac Choice": it gives 
the normal statistical predictions of quantum theory. Any baising of this 
rule would in principle produce violations of the predictions of quantum
theory.

One of the main features of this normal rule is that, in conjunction
with appropriate boundary condition, it precludes the possibility of 
faster-than-light and backward-in-time "signals" (i.e., sending of 
controlled messages) 

If some purported phenomena violates these rules about signal transfer
then a possible way to explain the phenomena would be to bais the
probability rule.

But the assertion of the validity of quantum theory is essentially the
assertion that this rule is not baised.

My theory is based on the postulate that this rule is not biased:
i.e., that quantum theory does not fail. And it ties inner
experiential qualities to brain activities in a specified way.

In this sense my theory yields "inner experiential qualities"
without biasing the statistical rule.

Does this "explain" inner experiential qualities?

My theory puts these inner experiential qualitities into the theory at 
the outset in a way that:

(1) explains what happens to the brain when one does  occur,  

(2) specifies the probability for one to occur under the
pertinent specified conditions, 

(3) specifies in statistical terms the further consequences of its
occurrence. 

I think this is what one wants from a scientific theory.

So I believe my theory does "explain" inner experiential qualities
in a scientifically satisfactory way without baising the basic statistical
rule, i.e., the Dirac choice. 

This brings us back to your assertion: 

> > > If, in fact, you can
> > > explain inner experiential qualities without biasing Dirac choices,
> > > then my theory is
> > > not necessary.

I conclude that your theory is not necessary!

Since this conclusion seems clear I asked:
 

Do you mean explain paranormal phenomena? 
 
[Jack replied] 
>I mean ALL experiential qualities both ordinary and
>paranormal. Quite simply, I claim that these sentences which
>are nonrandom symbol sequences of classical Shannon "c-bits"
>cannot be generated as the output of any experiential
>quality without a biasing of the Dirac choices away from the
>statistical predictions of orthodox quantum theory.
 

The issue was about "inner experiential quality"
My theory (the vonNeumann/Wigner ontologicalization of the Copenhagen
interprtation) specifies that the "output of any experiential quality"
is the brain activity that evolves from the reduced state P_e S P_e.
I emphasized that experiences have intentional aspects: an experience
may be essentially an intention to understand or probe more deeply, or to
try to explain some understanding to somebody else. Since the projection
operator P_e projects on some macroscopic activity involving much of the 
brain, the experience e would seem to be able to generate a pretty complex 
message, particularly since, as the target article shows, the experience
itself can enter into the generation of its causal consequences,
without baising the Dirac choice.

So I challenge you to ACTUALLY PROVE,  not merely assert,
your claim that WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF MY MODEL

> these sentences which
> are nonrandom symbol sequences of classical Shannon "c-bits"
> cannot be generated as the output of any experiential
> quality without a biasing of the Dirac choices away from the
> statistical predictions of orthodox quantum theory.
> 

You must also explain why the validity of that conclusion
entails that my theory cannot explain inner experiential qualities.

I want to remind you that the brain/body that I am talking
about (even forgetting mind) is a very nonrandom structure,
a  product of maybe a billion years of evolutionary development
that, even without mind, would have caused it to produce
very nonrandom actions. And in a society of similar brain-controlled
systems able to cooperate and fight for survival 
and, by issuing sounds and making gestures, able to influence the
behaviors of its fellow zombies, such mindless systems would surely
develop nonrandom behavior, including the issuing of nonrandon
signals to its robotic companions. The quantum versions, with
brains generating superpositions of brain "templates for action"
would, if collapses occur to brains with single templates for action,
be able to select from a variety of nonrandom patterns of action, including 
the generation of nonrandom bit strings, if it communications to its
fellows are in bit strings. This is how nonrandom bit-string generation
would come about in my model. This is the scenario that you must prove to
be false.

I emphasize that my only intention here is to defend my own model from what I
believe to be false assertions about it, not to comment on your model. 
So your answer can and should demonstrate only that my model cannot 
appropriately accomodate inner experiential qualities without baising the 
Dirac choice: you need not entangle your proof of this purported feature
of my model with claims about your model. That would be a logically improper 
move.

*****************************************************************
Reply to Pat Hayes.

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Aug 21 11:14:36 1998
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 22:54:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Henry Stapp <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
To: Pat Hayes <phayes@coginst.uwf.edu>
Cc: kleinlist <A.sloman@bham.ac.uk>, bdj10@cam.ac.uk, brings@rpi.edu,
    brucero@cats.ucsc.edu, chalmers@paradox.ucsc.edu, ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu,
    hameroff@u.arizona.edu, hpstapp@lbl.gov,
    "jeffery m. schwartz" <jmschwar@ucla.edu>, keith@imprint.co.uk,
    klein@adage.berkeley.edu, patrickw@monash.edu.au
Subject: Re: Sarfatti Back Acts on Stapp (fwd)

Dear Pat,

When I wrote---in my response to Sarfatti---the following passage I was
actually responding to you, imagining that this way of putting things 
would get around your objections. So I do really appreciate your making
the effort to explain to me why you think I am wrong. The issue is
so fundamental that I really do want to strive for closure. 

> >I have great trouble with the idea that one of my experiences
> >is simply something else. I have no problem with the idea
> >that a tornado is simply a collection of particles moving
> >in a certain way, or that physical temperature is simply
> >mean kinetic energy, or that physical light is simply
> >electromagnetic waves. But in those cases I am comparing
> >two different ways of understanding what I conceive to be
> >one physical reality that is distinct from these two
> >experiential graspings of it. So there is no problem in having two
> >different understandings of something else. But each experiential
> >understanding is exactly that understanding itself: it is not something
> >else.
> >
> 
> Hi Henry
> 
> I have no idea what you and Jack Sarfatti are arguing about, but I was
> struck by the above passage in your msg. I think that here you make a basic
> philosophical error (one that many others also make, so yours is the
> majority view, let me hasten to add.) As you say, in the cases of the
> tornado and the temperature we have two ways to understand one physical
> reality. And I also agree with you that experience is real, and not
> something outside the physical universe: we don't observe reality from
> outside, but are ourselves part of the reality we experience. But then I
> see no reason why this experiential understanding is not on exactly the
> same epistemic footing as our other understandings. 

I grant that all experiential understandings are on a par: Each is a coming 
into being of a certain ``feeling''. Each has its own particular
``quality'' or ``feel'', which constitutes a certain knowing. All these 
knowings are, in that sense, on the same epistemic footing.

I moreover grant that some of these knowings can be described as
knowings about "earlier knowings", whereas other knowings can be described
as knowings about "the color of that leaf". Still others can be described
as knowings about "a classical picture of nature in terms of imagined
trajectories through spacetime of many tiny particles". 

> Just as with the
> tornado: there is something real, and we can form various understandings of
> it. An experiential understanding is *one* way to understand some part of
> nature; but this does not exclude the possibility of other ways to
> understand that same part of nature. 

You introduce the reasonable assumptions: (1) that there is something
real; (2) that we may have understandings of such realities; and (3)
that experiential understanding are real, so we may have experiential
understandings also of them. So you ask what is the difference in
principle between these two cases: Why are the experiential understandings
are so different, as a matter of principle, from the other supposed
realities.

Why cannot an experiential understanding of "an experiential
understanding" and an experiential understanding of "a complex brain
activity" be two different experiential understandings of the same
reality?

I first want to make as clear as possible the meaning of "experiential 
understanding". I injected the word "experiential" to make it clear that I
intended "understanding" in the sense that this understanding "is a
quality of an experience".  This "understand" is not to be interpreted
behavioristically: Thus someone might claim that if I speak to my robot
housekeeper that definitely has no consciousness the words: "Go
to the kitchen and wash the dishes", and he does exactly that, that this
robot "understands my words". That is a perfectly good way to use the word
"understand". And in this sense of "understand" Searle's  Chinese Room
"understands" Chinese: it behaves appropriately. But I am talking about
understanding in the sense of the coming into being of a certain
experiential reality: the coming into being of a feeling that has a
certain quality that we desribibe by saying that the feeling is the
feeling of understanding something.] 

> Just as the tornado has alternative
> accounts (some of them in a sense explanatory relative to others, although
> this sense of 'explanatory' is subtle and not a simple matter of
> reduction), so our experiential understanding may have alternatives.

This is getting close to the heart of the matter.

I would say that the particle are understood in terms of trajectories
through spacetime conforming to certain (dynamical) rules.
The tornado is then understood in terms of a horde of particles moving
along some such  trajectories because all of the destructive and
related properties (results of measurements pertaining to)
tornados can in principle be deduced from a particle model of the tornado.
Thus from the list of ``basic realities'' or irreducible realities" we can
strike out "tornadoes", because all of the properties that we ascribe to a 
tornado are explained and accounted for in terms of the trajectories of
all the particles in the universe, simply be virtue of the defining
qualities of these particles, assuming that these particles really do
exist and obey the dynamical laws ascribed to them by classical mechanics,
PROVIDED it is also assumed that certain motions of the particles in the 
brain are accompanied by certain corresponding experiences. This adjunct 
to classical mechanics is needed to explain the connection of this
description in terms of these trajectories to our experiences about
the world,

We see here, however, a certain difference in principle between a tornado
and a conscious experience. We did, of course, need to put somewhere into
our way of understanding the physical realities some postulated connection
of the physical realities to our experiences. That postulated connection
was needed to understand why there was any connection at all between the
particle trajectories postulated to exist in classical mechanics and
conscious experiences. All the "readings" (in the sense of positions of 
pointers on measuring devices etc.) are specified just in terms of the
basic defining properties of trajectories in spacetime: the real physical
properties associated with the tornado, as it is represented in classical
mechanics, are completely subsumed within the properties of the particle
trajectories: all the physical properties of the tornado are subsumed in,
and can in principle be deduced from, the properties of the particle
trajectories as they are described in classical mechanics. And this
classical description provides a complete-in-principle causal description
of those tajectories.

But the existence of "feelings" cannot be deduced from those principles,
as described in physics text books. An extra assumption that goes beyond
the basic meaning of a collection of trajectories in spacetime of tiny
particles is needed to make a connection between the physical and
experiential aspects of nature.

> Perhaps, for example, our experience of seeing green *is* a motion of
> physical parts. I have no problem with this, and see no reason why it is a
> category mistake. 

Whether two things belong in the same or different categories does depend
on how the categories are defined, and how finely they discriminate.

One option would be to place in one category the smallest set of
properties that are causally complete. But if nature conforms to the
principles of classical physics then the physical properties described in
classical physic belong to, and exhaust. one category, whereas 
"experiential understandings" or "knowings" of these properties are
dynamically, and epistemologically different: the latter are not
logically or dynamically linked to the former except via some extra
strangely disconnected postulate, and the former have by themselves no
epistemological status. 

You wish to identify as the same thing two things that are logically
distinct at the outset, in a situation where there is no possibility
that the properties that define one could logically entail the properties
that define the other [in the way that the basic defining properties of
all the trajectories in spacetime of all the particles (and local fields)
in the universe determine all the properties of a tornado.] 

> In fact I find it eminently plausible: my experience of
> seeing color is almost certainly encoded as a pattern of activity in my
> visual cortex.
> 

The claim that an experience is "encoded as a pattern of activity"
in the body/brain of some individual is different from the claim that
the experience IS that pattern of activity. There are 
crucial questions of directions of causal influence that get
eliminated in dropping the distinction between "encoded in" and
"IS".

The vonNeumann/Wigner ontologicalization of the Copenhagen interpretation,
(at least as I construe it) does entail that conscious experience
supervenes on the physical, as represented by the evolving quantum state 
of the body/brain. But a present conscious experiences is, in general, not
fixed by any prior quantum state of the universe.

> >An experience of "greenness" is an experience of greennes, not something
> >else: it is not a motion of physical parts. The idea that an experiential
> >understanding IS something else is a "category error".

> However, you are making a category error in talking of "green-ness". One
> cannot experience green-ness: it is proper (though I think a mistake) to
> say that one can *have* a green-ness experience, but what one *experiences*
> is seeing a color.
> 

I agree that the better terminology it to say merely that 
"a green-ness experience occurs" 

> You say that the experiential understanding is the understanding itself.
> But our experience is not cut off from the rest of the word, isolated and
> serving only to comprehend itself in a kind of epistemic closed loop. Our
> experience is experience *of the world*. We look at it, hear it, smell it,
> feel its temperature, and so on. Even our private experiences - emotional
> memories, say, or the pleasure of dozing - can be said to be experiences of
> the state of our own bodies; and as Im sure you agree, our bodies are part
> of the world. When I drove across the Mojave last week and admired the
> color of the sagebrush contrasting with the red hills, my experience was
> not of 'greenness', but of a particular green. It is a color I know well,
> and know how to reproduce on canvas: I can recognise it almost like
> recognising a face. I have no idea how to paint 'green-ness', and wouldnt
> know it if I saw it.
> 
> I think this error - to assume that our experiences are something different
> from what we actually experience - might arise from the inviolable
> *privacy* of our experience. 

I agree with you that our experiences are exactly what we
actually experience.
 
> I use the following example to illustrate the
> point to my students. Imagine someone who says that his hand is green; it
> looks pink to the rest of us, but he says it is green. Let's assume that he
> is honest, sane, not colorblind, and so forth. How could we persuade him he
> was wrong? After all, colors are properties of surfaces (and maybe ambient
> light), so there should be a matter of objective fact here. But he insists
> that, in spite of what we all say, and what our color-meters say, and in
> spite of all the evidence that we can mount to tell him it is pink, the
> hand still *looks* green to him. What can we say about this situation? It
> seems that he must be the sole final arbiter of how things *seem* to him to
> be; only he has access to his particular view of the world. If we had some
> way to get inside his mind, as it were, and see things as he sees them, we
> could judge whether or not he was seeing colors wrongly, or
> misunderstanding what "green" means, or just caught in some curious
> psychological aberration; but we dont have such access, so we can only take
> him at his word. The hand looks green to him, even though in fact it is
> pink. OK, he is seeing the world slightly wrong: his perception is not
> veridical in this one respect.
> 
> So far, everything is fine. But now it is easy to take an apparently small,
> but dangerous, further step, and say that since he isnt lying, etc., then
> *he must be right about something*. What? What he is right about - and who
> can say he is wrong? - is that *his experience* is that of a green hand.
> But this is fatally ambiguous. It could mean that the hand looks to him as
> though it were green; that is, it looks the same color to him as a hand
> that is, in fact, green; or it could mean something like this: that he is
> having an experience of green-ness (together with an experience of
> hand-ness, maybe). That's the mistake. Now we have stepped into the swamp
> of 'qualia'. Suddenly we are not talking of experiences of seeing hands and
> colors (experiences which might be non-veridical, as everyone who has
> pushed their eyeball with their finger knows), but of hand-qualia and
> colored-ness.  An entire virtual ontology has suddenly been invented,
> consisting of internal 'things' that are private and ineffable, not part of
> the external observable world, not themselves experienced or sensed or
> perceived (one cannot experience a quale, of course, since quales are
> supposed to be the very stuff of experience itself: rather, one somehow
> "has" them, in some way which is utterly mysterious but at the same time
> utterly immediate - a combination which , if taken seriously, is almost
> guaranteed to result in a kind of vortex of incomprehension) and yet are at
> the same time the most directly known things possible; all our sensory
> knowledge is supposed to be filtered through this invisible cloud of
> private shadows in our own local cave.
> 
> But this is just malarkey. This entire apparatus of "green-ness" and all
> the other 'stuffs' of experience is completely unnecessary, and if we throw
> it away then a whole lot of seemingly knotty 'hard problems' simply vanish.
> We can describe all of human life without ever stepping into that swamp.
> The green-hand man's view can be accomodated quite properly by using the
> first way of interpreting "his experience of a green hand", ie that he is
> seeing the hand as being green, without invoking a "green-ness experience"
> for him to "have".  (And, incidentally, there is no evidence to suggest
> that experiences are private objects which are completely known to us.  If
> anything, the empirical evidence from psychology suggests that our
> knowledge of our own experiences, like the rest of our knowledge of
> ourselves, is sketchy, partial and often wrong.)
> 
> Experience, like life and combustion, is a *process*; a process of
> comprehension of something, a way in which information about the world can
> become real in a mind. Experiencers are physically real (and made up,
> ultimately, of moving parts) and much of what they experience concerns
> other parts of the physical world (sometimes parts of themselves): but none
> of this requires us to alter physics to accomodate "experiences" as a
> separate ontological category. Acceleration is real, but we do not find a
> need to invent a new category of 'acceleration-ness' to intervene between
> objects and their changes in velocity. In crudely linguistic terms,
> "experience" is a verb, not a noun.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Pat

 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> IHMC, University of West Florida		(850)434 8903   home
> 11000 University Parkway			(850)474 2091   office
> Pensacola,  FL 32514			(850)474 3023   fax
> phayes@ai.uwf.edu
> http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes

I regard experience as process, and agree, as emphasized by Wm, James
that introspection is fallible. But this does not solve the question
of the relationship between the physical world described in terms of
spacetime trajectories of tiny particles (and changing local fields)
and this process. Given certain motions of these particles and fields
in some body/brain certain experiences occur. Also certain physical
processes akin to combustion occur. But the complete description
of the trajectories and the changing field completely specifies every
aspect of this "combustion" process, at least according to the classical
idea of what this process is. The "combustion process" is only separated
from the full physical process by our way of separating it out: there
is really nothing more to say than is said by the complete physical
description in terms of the trajectories and the changing local fields.
But the "qualities" or "feels" that characterize the exprerience process
are not specified: the complete physical description does not logically
determine whether the "quality" or "feel" of painfulness is occurring
or not occurring, although it might say a lot about behaviour. There is
in this sense a difference in principle between something like a "rapid
combustion" and something like a "painful experience."

But then the essential question of the nature causal connection
between  experiential process and physical process can at least 
be posed: this it is not an issue that can be defined away or proved,
by a philosophical analysis, to be no real question at all.

The very fact that the causal connections are different within a concrete
naturalistic quantum ontology from what is suggested by approaches that
claim that there is no real issue here shows, I believe, that there is a
real issue concerning the connection between physical process and
experiential process: philosophy alone is not enough to resolve this
deep ontological question. It is not enough to sit in one's study and
ponder: one must take into account empirical evidence about how the world
actually is.

> 
> PS. I notice that elsewhere in your message you refer to the need for
> science to accomodate human experiences. But, as we have aired in earlier
> correspondence, your notion of experience has to be much broader than just
> human experience: it must, for example, include something like "experience"
> going on during the early stages of the universe, before there were stable
> hydrogen atoms.

Yes! But I do not go the pan-psychism root: I believe that 
"experiences" occur only under special circumstances, which I have
described at least roughly.

*******************************************************************
Reply to Aaron Sloman

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Aug 21 11:16:11 1998
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 19:56:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Henry Stapp <stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov>
To: A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
Cc: bdj10@cam.ac.uk, chalmers@paradox.ucsc.edu, ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu,
    hameroff@u.arizona.edu, jmschwar@ucla.edu, keith@imprint.co.uk,
    klein@adage.berkeley.edu, patrickw@monash.edu.au,
    phayes@nuts.coginst.uwf.edu
Subject: Re: "Who makes the Heisenberg choice?"

Good to hear from you again, Aaron.

On Thu, 20 Aug 1998 A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk wrote:

> 
> Greetings all. I am just about to go away to a conference for a few days
> (on "thinking with diagrams") , but thought I'd stick my oar in.
> 
> I think Henry (like many others) is simultaneously
> 
> (1) a "conditional reductionist" who believes that IF complex things can
> be brought into existence by producing appropriate assemblages of atoms
> etc, THEN really they are "nothing but" atoms -- what I previously
> called "the nothing buttery fallacy", which implies that poverty, crime,
> democracy, scientific research, political conflicts, are all nothing but
> states and motions of lots of atoms),

In my ontology there are the physical aspects, which behave in accordance
with the rules of QM, and there are "experiences", the paradigms
of which are our consciously experienced feelings, ideas, and thoughts.
When we talk about or consider such things as poverty, crime, etc.
what is happening is that an experiential process is occurring in which
concepts connected to those words are occurring. This process is causally
connected to a brain/body. But there is also an an external reference to
some other mind/bodies who may be "living in poverty" or "victims of
crime". These reference can be both to the physical aspects of poverty,
such as shanties with no sanitation and roofs that leak, or of crime, such
as battered bodies, and also to the psychological state of the victims.
Our understandings of these physical and experiential factors can be
very simple or very complex. But aside from the physical aspects of all
physical  systems, and experiential aspects of those physical systems
that have experiential aspects, there is, in my proposed ontology. 
nothing else. No "poverty" disconnected from all physical and experiential
realities.

I note that in empirical studies of the mind-brain connection there are
experiences, and presumed experiences, and measurements of physical 
properties, which are supposed to be the properties that physicists
study. The interacting system of physical process and experiential
process, i.e., the mind/brain, is very complex, and a host of auxilliary
concepts created by neuro-biologists are essential to in order to bring
us any understanding of this complex organ. But those concepts, though
enlarging our experience/understanding of the brain, in no way contradict
the postulate that the organ IS a highly organized physical/psychological
system that conforms to the causal rules specified by the 
vonNeumann/Wigner quantum ontology..

> 
> (2) a "concept essentialist" who thinks he really REALLY knows as a
> result of direct experience what consciousness is and can tell on the
> basis of that knowledge that nothing else could be it, like someone who
> argues that because he knows from experience of simultaneity exactly
> what simultaniety is, or from experience of continuity exactly what
> continuity is, etc., nothing else could be it.
> 

Argument by analogy is notoriously fallible. One must show that every
relevant factor is the same is the two situations that are claimed to be
analogous. "Continuity" can refer to a certain experiential quality of a
line drawn on a piece of paper without raising the pencil from the paper.
Mathematicians have found it useful in mathematical analysis to use this
word to stand for one (or possible some other) property of a collections
of idealized points in an idealized space. But each experienced
understanding of the term IS that experienced understanding itself: it may
be more or less vague, and it may shift around and drift around, but
that does that mean that it is not possible to build a coherent theory on
the following premise:

"The object of every thought, then, is neither more nor less than all that
the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated
the matter, and however symbolic the manner of thinking may be."
[Wm. James: See MM&QM pg.10]
 
James emphasized also the fallability of our recollections.

> The answer to (1) is to produce a lot of counter-examples and analyse
> them in precise detail. It's not all just about a mushy "emergent
> levels" ontology. Some of it is about the mathematical inevitability of
> higher level phenomena whenever lower levels have a certain kind of
> mathematical form, whether built out of this or that kind of stuff, or
> something else.

Certainly complex systems built from simple ones can be understood by us
in different useful ways. But the utility of a high-level description
does not in itself entail that a causal connections of a new kind needs
to be added: new structural features can arise out of the original causal
connections acting in more complex  circumstances. 

> 
> Some interesting biological examples are in Stuart Kauffman's book "At
> Home in the Universe". But physics and chemistry also have examples: is
> a tidal wave just a lot of molecules moving roughly vertically or is
> there something else involving transfer of a huge amount of potentially
> destructive energy horizontally?
> 

There is no problem, or mysterious new principle, involved in
understanding the energy carried by the moving wave. The water higher
up has potential energy because it has been raised up against the force
of gravity. The wave motion moves this potential energy along until the
wave bashes against an obstruction. No new principle, or kind of causal
connection, needs to be added: we need not throw out the laws of physics
quite yet..

> The answer to (2) is to point out in very great detail the hidden,
> normally unnoticed, but ultimately undeniable complexities in even the
> "simplest" of experiences, which make it *that* kind of experience
> rather than some other. Most of these complexities have to do not with
> the actual content of the experience but with the implicit possibilities
> for other experiences inherent in it. (This is not unconnected with the
> analysis of the notion of geometrical continuity.)
> 
> I.e. any experience is inherently something that involves a possibly
> huge collection of counterfactual conditionals.
> 
> Different organisms, and people at different stages of development (or
> with different kinds of brain damage) have experiences consisting in
> different collections of possibilities for variance. E.g. as I am partly
> colour blind each of my colour experiences is what it is because it is
> part of a less rich space space than my wife's colour experiences.
> 

I have no trouble with the claim that experiences can be wonderfully
intricate: that does not entail that they are something else.

> (Rebutting arguments about swapping, constantly changing, or possibly
> absent qualia (in alleged zombies) takes a bit longer: mainly convincing
> the people who promote them that they are being incoherent without
> realising it, like the people who wonder whether the whole universe is
> shrinking undetectably, or the novice physicist who wonders whether two
> events *really* are simultaneous even though their time relations as
> described by physicists vary according to frame of reference.)
> 

There is indeed a lot of confusion out there. But I would
contend that within a classical-physics conceptualization of
nature a physical system could be physically identical to
a conscious  human being and not be conscious: there simply is no
principle within classical physics that specifies whether or not
a physical system is conscious. Zombies are not excluded by the
principles of classical physics. 

> If I ever manage to finish my book on consciousness I'll have managed to
> show that a particular collection of experience-constituting
> counterfactual conditionals requires a particular sort of information
> processing architecture to exist, which itself could probably be
> implemented in (supervenient on) many different types of physical
> infrastructure. (I am not sure: multiple realisability is partly an
> empirical question.)
> 

Hmm! The notion of "experience-constituting counterfactual conditionals"
sounds interesting, but odd.

> Incomplete draft material making the case that most people who THINK
> they know what they mean by "consciousness" and "experience", etc. are
> just (unconsciously) fooling themselves, can be found in a very long
> paper called "The evolution of what?" listed, with other things, in:
> 	ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html
> 
> Anyhow all of this stuff makes the nature of consciousness of the kind
> that we (partly) know about largely independent of the ultimate
> constituents of the universe: it has a life of its own!
> 

> Henry's search for a simpler, flatter, ontology is motivated by a
> particular construal of science which happens to be shared by quite a
> lot of physicists and some philosophers, but which is not the only one,
> and is by no means obviously the correct one.
> 

True! But it is often a good thing to try the simple idea first,
particularly when it is supported by three hundred years of science,
is compatible with all known data, brings consciousness in automatically,
and is incredibly beautiful.

> And as I've said before, if he does manage to find a good way of
> improving fundamental physical theory by enriching it with the things he
> wants to call "knowings" or whatever, we can applaud that, but it will
> have nothing to do with my knowing that it's time for bed, or the
> housefly knowing that something large is moving rapidly towards it, etc.
> 

Why do you say that? I am supposing it will allow us to know what is going
on in your your brain when you know it is time to go to bed.

> Regarding the earlier discussion of conflicts of motivation: the
> philosophy of science that wants an ultimately flat ontology tries to
> analyse conflict in terms of collections of more or less opposing
> forces. But there are many other kinds of conflicts. In a committee
> there can be powerful conflicts of opinion, of motivation (not just
> personal motivation, but motivation regarding what's best for a
> department, or country, etc.), of intention. If you want to understand
> conflicts of motivation in in individual humans a more profound insight
> will be gained by studying strife-ridden committees than by studying
> springs and levers attempting to push or pull things in different
> directions. Members of a committee do not apply physical forces to one
> another: the use more powerful kinds of forces (arguments, threats,
> pleas, exhortations, etc. etc.)
> 

So ideas have force? 

Maybe ideas DO IN FACT have force!

Maybe we do not have to explain away such an `absurdity' by
explaining how this odd illusion comes about. Ideas having force might
sound like a crazy idea, were it not for the fact that quantum
theory, which accepts ideas as real aspects of mind/brain systems,
and specifies almost completely the nature of the mind/brain connection,
naturally leads to this conclusion that ideas do literally have force:
they `push around' certain physical aspects of the brains with which
they are associated.

> The real insight comes from understanding the true nature of the
> different counterfactual conditionals battling for realisation in a
> complex information processing architecture. Lots of people wrongly
> think we understand computers because we can make word processors, the
> internet, etc.
> 

Counterfactuals are about possible worlds. In classical mechanics
there is one actual world, and that's that.

Quantum mechanics is all about possible worlds. There is no actual
physical world: the actual lies in the  realm of "knowings".

If you really think counterfactuals are essential then you should
go to the theory that makes them basic, rather than stick to a world
in which they are against reality. I'll bet your book will get completed
satisfactorily only if you bring it into line with the world as it is.

> But we have barely begun to scratch the surface of the variety of deep
> ontologies of causally interacting information processing virtual
> machines.
> 
> Come back in about 50 years for the next instalment.
> 

I can't wait that long. Speed up!

> Cheers. Must go.
> Aaron
>