From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Tue May  8 14:12:07 2001
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 18:48:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: Stanley Klein <klein@spectacle.berkeley.edu>
Cc: Brian Josephson <bdj10@cam.ac.uk>,
     Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>, dansmith@clark.net,
     pzielins@ix.netcom.com, tsmith@innerx.net,
     Ravi Gomatam <rgomatam@bvinst.edu>, wfreeman@socrates.berkeley.edu,
     nick herbert <quanta@cruzio.com>, hameroff@u.arizona.edu,
     keith@imprint.co.uk
Subject: Re: Are Consents Free? Bohm, SSQ and Newsome


A deluge has descended upon us, on this list. 
I shall comment only briefly about claims about my position.  


[Dan Smith]
>Although Henry talks a lot about consciousness, it is just talk, after
>all.
>Consciousness plays no ontological, consequential role in his theory.
 
The main objective of my work is to show how consciousness can become
causally efficacious if one accepts a von Neumann-type quantum
theory, and exploits the QZE. The choices to consent or not consent
is "free" in the sense that it is  not determined by any known law 
of QT. Hence it can be determined by "the person", which is the unity
that constitutes his body/brain and the stream of conscious events 
that is connected to his body/brain.  The important thing is  that
this allows the person's stream of conscious experiences to play a
significant and irreducible role in the determination of his  
physical activities. This means that science can no longer
be rightly asserted to claim, as it  did when classical physical theory
reigned, that our every act was determined before we were born by local
mechanical laws that never acknowledge the existence of the experiential
dimension of the human person.

So my position is exactly the opposite to the one ascribed to me.


> 
> [Dan Smith]
> Henry's philosophical mentors have been ... and D.
> Dennett.  

My position is certainly very different from Dennett's!

> 
> [Stan]
> Henry owes very little to Dennett. Dan, I don't think you fully 
> understand Henry's revolutionary position, as Kathy has pointed out. 
> The full implications of the quantum approach are not appreciated by 
> philosophers. Henry has been the strongest clearest voice (maybe 
> following Bohr?) in trying to make this clear. In my 1991 paper "The 
> Duality of Psycho-Physics" (which I hope to put on the web this 
> summer, but send me your mail address for a copy) I was saying the 
> same thing, less eloquently than Henry. The dualistic nature of the 
> quantum ontology removes it from the Zombie trap, in my opinion.  I 
> don't understand why more philosophers don't understand the 
> importance of what Henry is saying. I suspect it is maybe because he 
> goes to far with the efficacious QZE.
> 

Von Neumann's work, alone, does not make clear whether the collapses
associated with the conscious experiences actually allow consciousness
to be causally efficacious in the physical world, or how that
efficaciousness can be achieved. I do not claim that QZE is the only
possible avenue to the efficacy of consciousness. But I think it is 
incumbent upon anyone who claims that QT allows consciousness to be
efficacious, without violating any quantum rule, to show how this can be
done.

> 
> [Brian]
> >A full cognitive account, in cognitive language, of the NS might 
> >have the bases of decision built in, but I believe this fails 
> >because its identification of mind and brain is incorrect, the 
> >essential nonlocality of nature being the problem ignored in 
> >classical physics.  We thus need a new physics for which Henry's 
> >thinking is a start, though his unwillingness to take nonlocality as 
> >seriously as he should because of its paranormal overtones is a 
> >limitation in his model.

I certainly take nonlocality seriously. I am the physicist who
has done  the most the make clear the fact that nature must
be nonlocal. [EPR and Bell left open some loopholes.]
I do not go into paranormal phenomena because my own minor
efforts to check it out have always left me more dubious than before. 
But the dependence within the brain upon the projection operators P 
makes the dynamics nonlocal in principle, even though the direct evidnce
tends  to be suppressed by the way QT works.

[Stan]
> 
> Summary:
...
> I think we also need to avoid tacking on unnecessary 
> baggage (like efficacious QZE). There are plenty of miracles already 
> within mainstream quantum mechanics (properly interpreted as Henry is 
> doing superbly if one ignores the QZE part).
> 

QZE is  certainly within mainstream QT!


>Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 00:43:47 -0700
>From: Stanley Klein <klein@spectacle.berkeley.edu>
>To: hpstapp@lbl.gov and others
>Subject: Are Consents Free? Bohm, SSQ and Newsome

>I'd like to make three comments on Henry's latest emailing.

>1) Some of you got an email exchange between Henry and me on April 
>15-16 that involved a very important shift in the dialog away from 
>quantum vs. classical to von Neumann vs. Bohm. The quantum vs. 
>classical distinction is messy since we all know classical mechanics 
>is wrong, even though for issues of consent and veto classical neural 
>models might be sufficient. On an ontological level it is good to 
>shift the discussion to comparing the vN nonrelativistic collapse 
>ontology that Henry likes with the nonrelativistic Bohm ontology that 
>many people think is equivalent to vN. Henry thinks otherwise. In our 
>recent emailings he comments that he thinks it is possible that once 
>minds enter the picture with their collapsing ability to 
>orthogonalize states and effect outcomes through the Zeno mechanism, 
>the predictions of the vN ontology and the Bohm ontology might be 
>different. This, if true, would be an important advance in physics as 
>well as in understanding consciousness. I'd be interested in hearing 
>whether Henry has changed his mind on this over the past 20 days. Do 
>you still think nonrelativistic vN and Bohm can give different 
>predictions for human decisions?

Yes! In Bohm theory the Schroedinger  equation holds, whereas the
QZE causes it to not hold.  

Also, most neuroscientists are still at the classical level: they
have not advanced  to either  Bohm or von Neumann.

[Stan]
> 2) In today's "Are Consents Free" thread Henry said:
> "My  point is that we are probably a long way from being able to trace
> out the deterministic causes behind the choice to consent or veto.
> Given the complexity and non-linearity of the brain dynamics,
> which tend to lead to "chaos", and hence to "effective indeterminacy",
> coupled with the irreducible quantum uncertainties in the timings
> of the released units of neurotransmitter, it seems to me highly
> unlikely that the choice between consent and no consent could be
> determined by the quantum evolution via the Schroedinger equation,
> and this evolution contains ALL that classical determinism can give. "

> I agree with Henry that it will be difficult to do experiments on the 
> brain dynamics of choice.  But neuroscientists are constantly doing 
> difficult experiments. I have a dim recollection that Bill Newsome is 
> part of this round of Science and the Spiritual Quest (SSQ). If so, 
> you should ask him about his experiments on how monkeys make 
> decisions about what they see. Newsome has been able to locate groups 
> of neurons that are involved in the decision making process. I 
> suspect that you will discover in chatting with him that it may be 
> possible within our lifetime to test whether there are aspects of 
> decision making that require collapses. That is, Libet's veto and 
> consent circuitry may be able to be understood in terms of standard 
> neural networks without the need for a mental realm outside of 
> standard brain processing.

The point I was making needs to be re-stressed:
Suppose one finds that consent C is always preceded by some particular  
neural activity N. Does thus mean that N caused C?

Besides the usual Humean doubt there is the "EPR"  effect to contend with.
If a device is probing the brain then the device state  becomes
entangled with the brain state; alternative possible brain states  will be
linked to corrsponding device states. Suppose one branch  of  the brain
corresponds to consent, the other to non-consent.  If consent is  given
and nature's reply is  Yes, then there will be a collapse to the branch
that lead to that  Yes answer, and the device, when it is recorded,
will indicate that the brain was already, BEFORE THE EVENT, in the 
state that corresponds to this Yes answer, even though vN QT
permits that question to be  posed  and answered only later. So
although I believe Newsome's experiments will be interesting and useful,
and I will certainly pursue this when we meet in  Paris,
it is not clear how decisive they will be.   I suspect that when we
examine the brain activities that lead up to the making of a difficult
decision , this decision will be tracable back to some brain activity 
that  seems  to  rise out of the sea of quantum uncertainties, associated
with the release of neurotramsitter from nerve terminals.

So  I am not just saying that it will be "hard" to  demonsrate 
the deterministic neural origins of our  deeply pondered decisions:
it is virtually certain to be strictly impossible to trace back to see
how such a choice actually rises from the neural pandemonium. So the
choice between theories will have to be made on grounds other than 
direct  empirical "proof". I am putting forth vN QT with QZE as a
rationally coherent contender, which does allow the whole conscious 
person to be causally efficacious, and that "explains" a lot of empirical
data from psychology, as described in:
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/vnr.txt.

Although  QT itself does not determine just how the various aspects
of the whole human  person enter into  the determination of the choice to
consent or not consent, it seems plausible that the state of the person's
brain will enter into the determination. And we "feel" that our feelings
also enter into this determination. QT would also allow "nature" to enter
into this determination. Since the person's brain is,  within vN QT,
essentially the enfleshment of his thoughts [each reduction injects into
the state of the person's brain precisely the structure that represents
a thought, idea, or feeling] it is clear that the description of the 
process of  choice in psychological terms is closely connected to
the description in neural/brain terms: the psychological description
is the description in terms of the enfleshed thoughts that are the
components of the thought whose possibility of occurrence is being
consented too, whereas the neural/brain description is in terms
of the enfleshment of these thoughts. 

[Stan]
> 3. After having said all that in item 2, I need to post a reminder 
> that I do strongly believe the dualistic quantum ontology (both vN 
>  and Bohm) has dramatically changed the status of the human person 
> from where it was with the Newtonian ontology. I believe that Henry 
> is making the clearest, most forceful statements about that change. I 
> just feel it is too bad that he carries it a little too far, 
> unnecessarily, with the Zeno business. He loses mainstream scientists 
> by that choice. SSQ would benefit from a mainstream approach that 
> still has the almost the full power of Henry's writings.


If I am not in line with mainstream neuroscientist then it is because
most neuroscientist want to stick with the more familiar classical
physical theory as their physics foundation. And if I am not in  line with
mainstream quantum physics is it because most quantum physicists want to
keep what they do divorced from the complexities associated with brains
and consciouness, if they possibly can. Neither group wants to get
involved with things they are not familiar with. But both are ignoring
serious logical problems in the foundation of their respective fields.
So if I am not pursuing the  "mainstream" course it is because
most neuroscientist and  most  quantum physicists  are resisting
the linking of their two fields, in spite of the fact that this
linking is sorely needed  by both.  

If a quantum theory of consciousness is going to be developed
then I doubt that Bohm is more mainstream than von Neumann.
von Neumann brings consciousness explicitly into the dynamical framework,
whereas Bohm's approach was a way of AVOIDING the references to
consciousness that Copenhagen (and von Neumann) QT took  as basic.
QZE is an automatic part  part of von Neumann QT: it is not some
strange add-on. And it explain a lot of data. 

If you, Stan, have some other mechanism that can imbue our conscious
thoughts  with the power to change average values of physical properties,
staying strictly within the quantum rules, I would be  happy to include it.



[Peter]
> To render epiphenomenal is to effectively deny.

But my chief objective is to render consciousness NON-epiphenomenal!


Henry