--------------------------------------------------
Jorge Nobo is a Whiteheadian philosopher who I met
at the Whiteheadian Silver Jubilee Symposium
in Claremont. We have been corresponding ever since.
The following exchange was useful to me.
----------------------------------------------

From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Mon Jul 23 08:27:56 2001
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 12:36:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: nobo jorge <zznobo@washburn.edu>
Cc: hpstapp@lbl.gov
Subject: Nobo-Stapp Dialog(1)

Dear Jorge,

Your comments are very useful and greatly appreciated.
I basically agree with them, but would like to write 
down my reactions, more to clarify and record my own 
thinking for myself than to inform your thinking.


On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, nobo jorge wrote:

> Dear Henry,
> 	I have inserted some comments below. In making them, I also have
> in mind your Ann Arbor talk and your most recent exchange with Searle. I
> have deleted much that I am in agreement with and on which I need not
> comment at this time. I will make my comments in several installments.
> 
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov wrote:
> 
> > Paris Talk: Newsome Version. (May 21, 2001, Paris)
> > _________________________________________________________
> > [At the workshop I had a long talk with Bill Newsome,
> > Stanford Neuroscientist. He identified passages
> > of my paper that made no sense to him, and that he thought
> > would not be understood by other neuroscientists. This version
> > of my paper is directed at readers more like Bill than
> > the targets of the original version.]
> > ___________________________________________________________
> >
> >
> >
> > Science has improved our lives in many ways. It has lightened
> > the load of tedious tasks and multiplied our physical powers,
> > and thus contributed to a greater flowering of our creative
> > capacities.
> >
> > However, it has led also to a sense of malaise among those
> > who sometimes stand back from the pursuit of material ends and
> > seek to satisfy their yearning for a better understanding of
> > how we human beings fit into the scheme of things, and
> > how we should conduct our lives.
> 
> 	I do not blame scientists for this, but I do blame philosophers
> who have been all too willing to let science set arbitrary limits for
> philosophy despite the latter's more encompassing evidence, concerns and
> methods.
> 
> > This problem stems fundamentally from the fact that the
> > physical sciences have, until recently, focused primarily
> > on describing the behavior of matter.
> >
> >
> > The basic idea of modern science was "materialism". This is
> > the idea that the physical world is composed basically of
> > tiny particles of matter interacting with each other
> > according to "laws of nature", and that these laws completely
> > determined the course of physical events for all time
> > from the state of the universe at early times.
> > These laws did not acknowledge the existence of our conscious
> > thoughts, ideas, feelings, and efforts, and even excluded the
> > possibility that supernatural agencies, such as gods or
> > spirits, could influence the course of physical events. Matter
> > was asserted to be governed by matter alone, acting in
> > accordance with impersonal, local, mechanical laws.
> 
> 	The very last point you make is not quite on target and involves
> something of a contradiction. For most thinkers of this period, laws
> govern matter, but are not themselves material. So, for them, matter is
> not governed by matter alone. 

Yes, I should have said "governed by impersonal, local, mathematical
laws that acknowledged the existence of nothing but matter alone,
which is assumed to be completely described by mathematical quantities assigned
to space-time points, and in particular to trajectories of pointlike, or 
nearly pointlike, particles and the electromagnetic and gravitational
fields.

> It is true that any physical state would be
> explained by some prior physical state and some set of laws governing the
> transition from the earlier to the later state. But the nature of the
> "governance" raised important philosophical issue. If the laws were held
> to be merely descriptive of what was observed to have happened, they could
> provide no basis for their universality and, hence, no basis for
> induction. If they were taken to be prescriptive, several vexing problems
> immediately arose: how can insentient matter follow prescriptions? by what
> force do the prescriptions bind or obligate? who or what does the
> prescribing? Not surprisingly, most of these thinkers, including Descartes
> and Newton, opted for a theological answer. God was the lawgiver and his
> omnipotent fiat sufficed to account for the "governance" of matter by law.
> True, Lamettrie and others did not think much of this type of explanation.
> But is it any more illuminating to say that the laws are impersonal.
> local, and mechanical? It's no wonder that Peirce says somewhere that laws
> are the very things that most require an explanation. That they are habits
> of nature is a step in the right direction, but requires that the ultimate
> constituents of reality involve, at a minimum, activities of taking into
> account and of deciding.
> 

Yes! We feel that we obey the laws of man because we feel that
we should. But where does that feeling come from, and how does
it influence what we actually end up doing: are feelings---imbedded
in actual decisional events---primary realities, or are the
primary realities unfeeling universal mechanical laws that control
unfeeling simple local mathematically characterized entities. The
physical sciences based on the latter idea worked very well for several
centuries in the realm of inanimate matter, and it was natural to try to
see how well it works in inanimate and conscious systems: that was the
agenda of science, or at least some scientists. But the complexity
of such systems precludes empirical "proofs" at the level
possible for simple inanimate systems. That might have left
the issue forever irresolvable, had not the classical physics
approach collapsed in the very realm that it should have 
worked best: atomic physics. This failure could be coped with
at the practical level by adopting the pragmatic expedient of 
simply dividing the world into parts where different laws hold.
But scientific ideal demanded rational coherence---if only to  
to make the laws well defined and unambiguouly applicable to
every possible situation that could arise---and an arbitrary
slicing of the physical world into two parts where different
laws hold does not fill the bill. This posed an immense difficulty
for the physicists of that era. The rational difficulty must
not be minimized and brushed aside. There was a real problem
that did not admit any simple solution: two sets of incompatible
laws. The classical laws were complete, but wrong: the quantum
laws were incomplete. The mathematical structure of these laws
was in the form of a "20 questions game" WITH THE QUESTIONER
STANDING OUTSIDE THE QUANTUM-MECHANICALLY DEFINED SYSTEM, and the 
answerer delivering only statistical answers. After arduous
analysis the founders were led to the radical conclusion that
to construct a rationally coherent science one must bring
"the observer" into the physical theory. Actually, this
observer was also an actor in the game, as Bohr often 
emphasized: it was he that decided which question would be asked.
Thus:
  
> > Planck's discovery led by the mid twenties to a complete
> > break-down, at the fundamental level, of the material
> > conception of nature. A new basic physical theory was
> > developed principally by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,
> > Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born, and it brought "the observer"
> > explicitly into physics. In order to cope with some strange
> > features of the data, physical theory was construed to be not
> > an attempt to describe nature as she existed apart from human
> > agents, but rather a human endevour to create mathematical
> > rules that would allow human scientists to make reliable
> > predictions about correlations between their experiences
> > under certain specified kinds of conditions. This new approach
> > is called "Copenhagen quantum theory".
> 
> 	If reality as a whole is a web of interconnected constitutents,
> nothing exists apart from anything else. We are always disturbing, and
> being disturbed by, the rest of reality. Is it correct to say that quantum
> theory factors in some of the human disturbances and statistically
> correlates them with possible outcomes?

"Copenhagen quantum theory" is construed to be a human endeavour
designed to make predictions useful to human beings. So it is
" correct to say that quantum
> theory factors in some of the human disturbances and statistically
> correlates them with possible outcomes."


> 
> > This turning away, by science itself, from the tenets of the
> > objective materialist philosophy lent support to
> > Post-Modernism. That view, which emerged during the second
> > half of the twentieth century, promulgated, in essence, the
> > idea that all "truths" were relative to one's point of view,
> > and were mere artefacts of some particular social group's
> > struggle for power over competing groups. Thus each social
> > movement was entitled to its own "truth", which was viewed
> > simply as a socially created pawn in the power game.
> >
> > The connection of Post-Modern thought to science is that both
> > Copenhagen Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory had retreated
> > from the idea of observer-independent objective truth: science
> > in the first quarter of the twentieth century had
> > not only eliminated materialism as a possible foundation for
> > objective truth, but had discredited the very idea
> > of objective truth in science. Yet if the community of
> > scientists have renounced the idea of objective truth in favor
> > of the pragmatic idea that "what is true for us is what
> > works for us," then every group becomes licensed to do the
> > same, and the hope evaporates that science might provide
> > objective criteria for resolving contentious social issues.
> 
> 	I am not entirely sure what you mean by objective, or by objective
> truth, in this context.  I certainly do not think that relativity theory
> in any way sanctions or justifies the "relativitstic" or "subjectivist"
> rantings of many so-called postmodernists. In postmodernist treatises,
> there is an unjustified tendency to equate objective with absolute and
> subjective with relative. I take this tendency to be unjustified because,
> for some relevant meanings of these terms, something may be both objective
> and relative or both subjective and absolute. For example, at a very basic
> onto-epistemic level, I take these terms to have the following meanings: e
> exists objectively (or e has property P objectively)  if there is a
> publicly available method for ascertaing that e exists (or that e has
> property P) and anyone who uses that method correctly--regardless of
> gender, age, religion,ethnicity, social status or what have you--will
> obtain one and the same result. On the other hand, e exists subjectively
> (or e has property P subjectively) if there is no publicly available
> method for ascertaing that e exists (or that e has propety P) or, if there
> is such a method, different results are obtained by those who use the
> method correctly. Given these meanings, the area of the classroom next
> door is an objective property, but whether the classroom is large, medium,
> or small is not.
> 	Similarly, e exists absolutely (or e has property P absolutely) if
> the existence of e (or e having property P) is independent of the
> existence of anything else. On the other hand, e exists relatively (or e
> has property P relatively) if the existence of e (or e having property P)
> is dependent on some other existent. Given these meanings, in traditional
> theology, God exists absolutely and the world relatively.  Also, in
> relativity theory, the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute.
> whereas spatio-temporal dimensions and relations of material things are
> relative.
> 	These are working definitions in need of more precision and
> supplementation. But they suffice to show that some truths are both
> relative and objective.  Fesque (a popular grass around here) is not
> edible relative to a human being and is edible relative to cattle.
> Similarly, cow's milk is edible relative to some human being and indedible
> relative to others. But all these truths are objective since ascertainable
> by publicly available methods.  With these or similar meanings in mind, I
> take the pronouncements of relativity theory to be objectively true in a
> way that gives no justification for, and indeed as inimical to, the
> so-called relativism and subjectivism of post-modern humanists.

While I do agree with your conclusions, still the way that relativity
theory is formulated as a dependendence of things that had formerly been
regarded as absolute truths on the condition of the observer does seem
to lend some sort of support to the idea that moral truth is similarly
dependent upon the condition of the experiencer.


> 	Incidentally, what I have referred to above as "subjective" may be
> better termed "non-objective," reserving the term subjective to describe
> the content and activities of that aspect of our experience that we take
> to be, at any given moment, our most basic and inner self--that which is
> currently attending and emotionally responding to other aspects of our
> experience.  For I certainly want to say, with Searle, that there are all
> sorts of objective truths about human subjectivity (or consciousness).
> 
> > This philosophical shift has had profound social ramifications.
> > But the physicists who started this mischief were generally
> > too interested in the practical developments in their own
> > field to get involved in these philosophical issues. Thus
> > they failed to broadcast an important fact;
> > already by mid-century, a development in physics had occurred
> > that provides an effective antidote to both the `materialism'
> > of the modern era, and the `relativism' and
> > `social constructionism' of the post-modern period.
> 
> 	This relativism is not the relativism of relativity theory. That
> is the gist of the point I was trying to make above.
> 	I'll continue my comments at a later time.
> 		Regards,
> 			Jorge
> 
> 

But the issue is really the question of the connection between
experience and other absolute truths/realities. Experience
is certainly dependent on the condition of the person.
So what conclusions, if any, about absolute physical or
moral truth can be drawn from it. The issue is complex
enough to allow all sorts of sophistries to be advanced
by person's who hold that certain social agendas trump
all else. I believe that a clearer conception of nature
based squarely on the basic general findings of
science, as rationally put together by von Neumann, that
puts experiences into nature in a mathematically
coherent way  is needed to provide a basis for addressing
the basic issues. Von Neumann's key step of building reality,
insofar as it is yet addressed by physics, out of 
psycho-physical events (Process I) is a huge advance.
It seems very much in line with Whiteheadian thought.
But it is not yet clear whether the integration of the
experiential (psycho) and spacial (physical) aspects
is done IN OR BY the events themselves, in which lawfulness 
itself is rooted (e.g., in feelings), or whether the general
lawful process is outside the events and creates
new events on the basis of the prior ones. I try,
as a physicist, to avoid getting sucked into 
speculations about these issues, which are, however,
issues that philosophers need to think about.

Henry


From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Mon Jul 23 08:28:21 2001
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 15:53:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: nobo jorge <zznobo@washburn.edu>
Subject: Re: Paris talk & Stapp to Newsome on Putnam (2)

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, nobo jorge wrote:

> Inserted below is a second installment of comments, questions, and
> suggestions.
> 
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov wrote:
> 
> > Paris Talk: Newsome Version. (May 21, 2001, Paris)
> >
> > Von Neumann's theory, unlike the transitional ones,
> > dynamically integrated the empirical data of our subjective
> > experience with the mathematical structures of theoretical
> > physics, and was compatible with the existence of a
> > psycho-physical reality embodying observer-independent
> > objective truths.
> >
> > Let me explain how von Neumann accomplished these things.
> >
> > The earlier Copenhagen approach applied the principles of
> > quantum theory only to relatively small systems, and used
> > classical concepts to describe the rest of nature.
> > This procedure of treating different parts of the physical
> > world in logically incompatible ways worked beautifully at
> > the practical level, but introduced severe logical
> > difficulties. These logical difficulties were evaded in
> > Copenhagen quantum theory by renouncing the search for
> > objective reality: "if it works, that's good enough."
> > But von Neumann demanded logical coherence, and this meant
> > treating the entire physical universe, including our bodies
> > and brains, quantum mechanically, and connecting
> > a person's conscious thoughts to activities in his brain in
> > accordance with laws provided by the theory itself.
> 
> 	For me, as I think for you also, the metaphysical question is how
> to carry out von Neuman's project without lapsing into mind-body dualism,
> epiphenomenalism, or ontological reduction of subjective experience to
> purely physical brain-states.
> 
> > This new integral conception of the human person departs
> > radically from the earlier scientific picture of man in
> > three important ways:
> >
> > 1. It is based on A NEW CONCEPTION OF MATTER that differs
> >    profoundly from the old one, which is provably false.
> >
> > 2. It automatically produces a bona fide, rather than
> >    illusory, FREE WILL.
> >
> > 3. It allows for THE CO-EVOLUTION OF OUR MIND AND BRAIN from a
> >    primitive beginning to its present complex form.
> >
> > These three changes add up to a rationally coherent conception
> > of the human person that differs greatly from the
> > caricature that arose from materialism.
> >
> > To appreciate these changes one needs, first of all, to
> > understand the new idea of matter, where by "matter" I mean the
> > "stuff" out of which the physical universe is  made.
> >
> > The quantum conception of this stuff is radically different
> > from the idea of matter postulated by Isaac Newton and
> > his successors. The properties of "quantum matter"
> > lie "mid-way" between those of classical matter and mind:
> > the "stuff" of the physical universe has acquired certain
> > mind-like characteristics.
> 
> 	I am not in disagreement with you. But if this were the first
> thing I read by you, I would find in it all sorts of dualistic overtones.
> Is there a non-physical, or mental, universe in addition to the physical
> universe? Are there two kinds of matter: the classical variety that has no
> mind-like characteristics and the quantum variety that does have mind-like
> characteristics?
> 	It gets a little worse in your Ann Arbor lecture, where you say
> that "brain is 'physical'" and "mind is 'experiential'." You then
> explicitly characterize the physical as that which is quantifiable and
> localizable in space and time. Also, as examples of the experiential you
> give things that traditionally have been thought to be non-quantifiable or
> non-localizable and hence, with Descartes, to be mental. This sounds very
> much like matter-mind dualism, with experience substituting for mind.
> 	Returning to the Paris talk, "stuff" and "matter" have
> connotations that I thought you were wanting to avoid. At least from what
> I understand of your theory, you cannot get any so-called "quantum matter"
> by tacking mental qualities or feelings onto classically conceived matter.
> Moreover, I thought you took anything remotely resembling classical matter
> to be either a derivative abstraction from the ontologically basic
> processes and becomings of quantum reality or a construct based on some
> set of such abstractions. In any case, it seems to that this kind of
> language invites your audience to bolt up the wrong conceptual tracks.
> Perhaps it would be better to say that quantum reality is midway between
> classically conceived mind and classically conceived matter.

I do want to maintain that a conscious thought is not something else:
i.e., it is not identically the very same thing as a bunch of classically
conceived particles moving about in some special way that has some sort
of functional property: it is not a "high-level property of a brain
consisting of classical particles and fields." In the first place, nature
has no such classical elements. I do want to say that a conscious thought
is what it appears to us be. James stressed that thoughts are "fallible"
in the sense not necessarily always giving an accurate picture of
something else, or of being reproducible. Dennett used this "fallibility"
to somehow discredit immediately felt experiences. I think the problem
of physics and of philosophy is to understand as best we can the role
in nature of these immediately felt experiencs, recognized as real aspects
of nature, rather than trying to talk them away. So I would not like to
say "classically conceived mind": the basic qualities of our thoughts,
ideas, and feelings are similar to the thoughts, ideas, and feeling
of someome who does not have any idea what "classically conceived"
means.

> 	My own take on this is that, as classically conceived, mind and
> matter either are derivative abstractions from streams of human experience
> or are constructs based on sets of such abstractions. But I theorize also
> that all streams of human experience are anayzable into discrete segments,
> or occasions, of concrete experience constituting a species of existents
> belonging to the self-same genus to which belong the species of existents
> into which quantum reality is to be ultimately analyzed. It then naturally
> follows that quantum reality will exhibit, as abstractions from its own
> concrete nature, both classically conceived material characteristics and
> classically conceived mental characteristics. But, and this is important,
> you will never obtain concrete human experience, nor concrete quantum
> reality, by adding up, or juxtaposing, abstract 'material' and 'mental'
> propeties. The nature of what is truly concrete always transcends the set
> of all abtractions obtainable from it. This, it seems to me, is the
> ultimate fact behind the unity of a moment of human experience, the
> unity of a quantum event, and the unity of the universe.
> 

I want the word "experience" to be as divorced as possible from
what philosophers might say about it, but to be the name of 
the feelings that are the basic substance of all of our inner lives
as they are immediately felt. They may be ontologically inseparable
from associated processes in ACTUAL brains, and hence be mere
"aspects" of actual mind/brain (psycho-physical) real events.
But these aspects have a `self-knowing' quality that gives
them a quality of realness that is independent of how we conceive
them to fit unto/into brains. But in (vN) quantum theory the
experiences come as integral aspects of the basic events (Process I).

> > But how can anything lie "midway" between mind and
> > classically conceived matter? The two ideas are so
> > totally different and incommensurable that it seems that
> > nothing could share properties of both.
> 
> 	They are not so totally different. For instance, mental and
> physical properties, or mental and physical events, are both temporally
> localizable, and this regardless of whether we are speaking of Einstenian
> time or of supersessional chronolgy. Also, at least phenomenologically,
> a token of either type can cause a token of the other type. And tokens of
> both types are found in any once concrete moment of human experience. In
> any case, this pseudo-problem is avoided altogether once the mental and
> the physical are understood as abstractions from human experience.

My preference is to say that a "pain", or a "painful experience" is not
an abstraction, but the real thing itself: an aspect of a stream of
consciousness.

> 	Incidentally, Descartes not only did not rule out one and the same
> entity having both sets of properties, but in fact insisted that this is
> precisely the case with the human being. What he did insist was that,
> since thought and extension could each be conceived of without conceiving
> of the other, each could exist separately from the other. His created
> universe contained all three possibilites: angels (purely mental); bodies
> other than human ones (purely material); and human beings (both mental
> and material properties. Descartes did conceive of man as the union or,
> better, the fusion, of two substances. But his own system offers no
> metaphysical ban, and certainly there is no logical ban, to one substance
> having both sets of attributes. Spinoza saw that and made God, or Nature,
> the one and only substance underlying all attributes.
> 

That is informative to me. And I think that it is significant that
von Neumann's Process I is a psycho-physical event, with no clearly
specified implication of the causal flow. On the other hand, there
is a functional role that needs to be filled somehow, namely the
choice of the question associated with that event. That choice
is not specified by the Schr. process, process II, which can be
characterized as the "physical" aspect of the process, since it
is determined by local mathematical laws that are the quantum
analogs of the laws of classical physics. 
 
> >Indeed, many earlier
> > thinkers had surmised that nature ought to be built out
> > of some intermediate kind of stuff, but the way to achieve
> > this was finally grasped by quantum physicists only
> > as a consequence of their intense and unrelenting efforts to
> > comprehend the baffling character of the empirical data.
> 
> 	Here you could invoke the aid of James. It is possible to improve
> on his metaphysics of experience. But I doubt any one can improve on his
> phenomenological descriptions of the nature of experience (or of
> consciousness, as he also calls it in a less felicitious, but more
> widespread, terminology). Here is a passage that beautifully captures most
> of what I have been trying to say:
> 	"A conscious field PLUS (italicised in the original) its object as
> felt or thought of PLUS an attitude toward the object PLUS the sense of a
> self to whom the attitude belongs--such a concrete bit of personal
> experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts
> .... It is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of
> the KIND to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents
> of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line connecting real
> events with real events." (from Varieties of Religious Experience)

Please give me a more detailed reference to this interesting quote.

> 	Hope all this is of some use to you.
> 		Jorge
> 

Very!

Thanks,

Henry