SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Spacetime events and objects aren't all that exists, a new quantum interpretation suggests.
[...] In the new paper, three scientists argue that including "potential things on the list of "real" things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of "reality" is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum's mysteries disappear. In particular, "real" should not be restricted to "actual" objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or "potential" realities, that have not yet become "actual." These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are "ontological" — that is, real components of existence.
"This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of 'what is real' to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility," write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.
[...] In their paper, titled "Taking Heisenberg's Potentia Seriously," Kastner and colleagues elaborate on this idea, drawing a parallel to the philosophy of René Descartes. Descartes, in the 17th century, proposed a strict division between material and mental "substance." Material stuff (res extensa, or extended things) existed entirely independently of mental reality (res cogitans, things that think) except in the brain's pineal gland. There res cogitans could influence the body. Modern science has, of course, rejected res cogitans: The material world is all that reality requires. Mental activity is the outcome of material processes, such as electrical impulses and biochemical interactions.
Kastner and colleagues also reject Descartes' res cogitans. But they think reality should not be restricted to res extensa; rather it should be complemented by "res potentia" — in particular, quantum res potentia, not just any old list of possibilities. Quantum potentia can be quantitatively defined; a quantum measurement will, with certainty, always produce one of the possibilities it describes. In the large-scale world, all sorts of possibilities can be imagined (Browns win Super Bowl, Indians win 22 straight games) which may or may not ever come to pass.
This could be an amazing breakthrough - and it would also reconcile Einstein's 'Left Shoe' construction.
Somehow, reading this paper also made me think of software design!
Read the article at sciencenews.org
Read the paper at arxiv.org
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @09:26AM (42 children)
David Chalmers [consc.net] would beg to differ there. The first sentence does not necessarily follow from the second sentence, because philosophers like Chalmers do not believe that first person consciousness can be reduced solely to mental activity.
Regarding this new theory, this sounds awfully reminiscent of Many Worlds. Is the difference that this extends into the future whereas other flavors of Many Worlds are only considering the present and past? Probably a naive question, but I'd need to brush up on my quantum physics to do better. I'm sure I'm in good company on here though in that regard!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @10:33AM (5 children)
I think you'd rather have to brush up your philosophy. I certainly know a lot about quantum mechanics, but I can only guess at what this is intended to mean. Basically it sounds to me that they just want to redefine the term "real" to include events that didn't yet happen, but might happen in the future. With that redefinition the contradiction between the positions "the wave function is real" and "the wave function is just a catalogue of potential measurement results" vanishes.
However I suspect it's just an apparent resolution, because redefining words doesn't resolve the underlying problem. Those who claim the wave function is real very definitely use the old meaning of "real", and reinterpreting them with the new meaning of "real" just changes the claim.
But maybe there's a philosopher here who can prove me wrong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:53PM (2 children)
Aristotelians! Aristotle, Metaphysics [tufts.edu]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:40AM (1 child)
According to Google:
Methinks something's been lost in translation! : (
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Thursday October 05 2017, @11:22PM
Follow the link provided, click on the word "focus" next to where it says "English". If you can use Google, you can use Perseus.
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Wednesday October 04 2017, @09:19PM (1 child)
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @08:05AM
Note that this also works if you don't give the wave function ontological status, but consider it just a description of knowledge. If we know that the light is either on or of, it doesn't follow that we either know that the light is on, or know that the light is off. This holds without any speculation about potentialities (it works both when the light does have a definite state — which we might not know — and when it doesn't — in which case we of course cannot know it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @12:20PM (32 children)
And that is relevant why? A lot of people believe things. Chalmers doesn't know what first person consciousness is (I looked to make sure), so he surely wouldn't be able to determine a priori that a phenomenon, which let us note is sufficient to explain said consciousness, doesn't actually explain it.
My view is that a key missing part here is the solipsism angle. QM itself is perfectly reversible with no significant difference between future and past, but our perception of it is not. We can't remember the future. I believe that's where the "time arrow" ultimately comes from. But just because we don't perceive QM phenomena fully, doesn't mean that they collapse perfectly to our "classical" point of view.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @12:43PM (13 children)
could everyone please stop saying that the laws of the universe are perfectly time reversible?
take any system of moderately realistic interacting particles.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to more probable states, call it N.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to less probable states, call it M.
generally N > M; furthermore, M becomes negligible as the size of the system grows.
the above is true in both classical and quantum mechanics.
therefore, even if you study an abstract universe with no people in it, you will still see that entropy increases, i.e. there will be a "past" and a "future".
even for individual particles, because they will be more likely to interact with particles in particular states at different points in time.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:00PM (9 children)
I suppose, if time runs backwards:
could everyone please stop saying that the laws of the universe are not perfectly time reversible?
take any system of moderately realistic interacting particles.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to more probable states, call it N.
count the amount of trajectories that lead you to less probable states, call it M.
generally N M; furthermore, N becomes negligible as the size of the system grows.
the above is true in both classical and quantum mechanics.
therefore, even if you study an abstract universe with no people in it, you will still see that entropy reduces, i.e. there will be a "future" followed by a "past".
even for individual particles, because they will be less likely to interact with particles in particular states at different points in time.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:03PM
Damn HTML! That was supposed to be:
generally N < M
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:41PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:46PM (1 child)
I wondered about that. Really, in both directions equality should be an option. I was just reversing AC's rules.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:17PM
Scratch that, the point was clear. They're talking about more probable states being arrived at with a greater frequency than less probable, as a general trend, so as I understand it N=M would be less likely to occur.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:54PM (4 children)
I'm the one who made the original NM comment.
I studied nonlinear dynamics for my PhD and I am still working actively within the field.
I don't have the time to find the references now, but you could, for instance, start from having a look at this book: http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/p036. [worldscientific.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @12:13AM
For an analogue, I recently looked at constructing minimal reversible Turing machines from irreversible ones. One way to do this is to add a second tape to a single tape Turing machine (keeping in mind that Turing machines with multiple tapes are Turing equivalent to Turing machines with one tape) where you push bits off one way to store the information needed to reverse the Turing machine's computations, possibly including its internal state. The reversible machine is equivalent to a normal quantum system with no sense of direction of time, the computation can go forward or back losslessly. But the irreversible Turing machine creates a direction of computation since information is destroyed in the natural, forward, entropy-increasing direction. When we consider the above example of the reversible Turing machine which models an irreversible Turing machine by shoving bits one way onto a second tape, that's equivalent to pushing the information lost from the irreversible Turing machine onto that tape as information.
One could think of it as an event horizon where from the point of view of the original reversible machine, the lost bits of information are pushed to and don't return. Or from a thermodynamic point of view, using the second tape as a cold sink to pump information to in order to power the irreversible Turing machine in some abstract sense.
Anyway, we have two different points of view of this computation as both reversible and irreversible. And looking at it from the irreversible point of view while on the reversible machine, means that information is lost by pushing it to a place of no return - equivalent to the information destruction of the original machine. So going back to our situation, maybe entropy isn't actually changed. It just appears that way to us because we can't see where the information lost to us goes. The future (or indeed anywhere shoved out of the past of our light cone) is one such place lost information could hide. And just like an event horizon of a black hole doesn't perfectly hold information (due to information leakage via Hawking radiation), maybe these other hiding places aren't perfect either, resulting in unexpected interactions with the otherwise lost information.
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:51AM (2 children)
Don't the latest discoveries in the application of entropy to time reversal prove that the inexorable move to disorganization forces the arrow of time forwards? Honestly curious - and I can dig up the articles if your're interested.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:05AM (1 child)
I thought that was exactly what I said.
any realistic multi-particle system will have a "forward in time" direction, because part of phase space is more likely to be visited than other parts.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:43PM
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:37PM
If time was running backwards, you wouldn't be surprised to see a broken vase reassembling itself into an unbroken one, because all your memories of witnessing the breakage would be unwriting themselves as the event took place (In reverse time, should that be gave place? I was going to say "event unfolded" but it would be "folded"). You would experience the consequences of your actions before the decisions you made that caused them but as khallow points out, your memories would still appear to run forwards in time from past to present which suggests that a backwards flow of time would be completely indistinguishable from a forward flow.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:54AM (1 child)
The funny thing is if you do the same argument backwards (that is, given the current state, what was the state in the past), then you get that up to now, the entropy most likely decreased. Which is exactly because the fundamental equations are time reversible.
Well, until you get to quantum field theory. The CPT symmetry together with the (experimentally confirmed!) CP violation implies a T violation. That is, at that level the laws are not symmetric under time reversal.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:51AM
I believe that's what I was trying to do by copy-pasting the original N vs M comment and flipping all the logic (suggesting decreasing entropy with time) but unlike the parent poster I don't have a degree level knowledge of the physics involved and on reflection I wasn't really qualified to comment.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:51PM (17 children)
One could take issue with your phrase in bold which I think is an assumption. Chalmers made a compelling argument that first person consciousness cannot be reductively explained (I'd have to get back to you with the exact specifics); whereas all currently modeled physical phenomena can be.
You're right he doesn't know what first person consciousness is in the sense that he hasn't been able to develop a complete theory that describes it (a tall order, for sure) but in his literature he is very careful to fully clarify the term and every other term he introduces.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:31PM (16 children)
Given how little we understand consciousness, said mental activity is in the right places at the right times which is good enough.
As to reductive explanations of consciousness, we already have physical observations of varying degrees of consciousness from dead through coma and sleep to awake and aware of oneself. These also tend to correlate well with mental activity with mental activity increasing as one gets more conscious. They've even been able to identify specialized functions of various brain structures and increased mental activity associated with various physical and mental tasks, some which involve consciousness. A great deal of said reductive explanation has already been done.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @02:44PM (15 children)
Good enough for most materialists, sure. As I'm sure you know, it starts to fall apart when you start imagining transporter beam experiments and other edge cases like that.
Yes but that's what Chalmers specifically sets out as being part of the "Easy Problem of Consciousness" as opposed to the "Hard Problem" which concerns the distinction between first and third person perspective, personal identity and qualia (although I'm personally not entirely convinced that qualia can't be reductively explained. Color is certainly a fundamentally strange experience though that doesn't seem like it can be deconstructed).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:45PM (14 children)
What is there to fall apart? The mechanics of the transporter beam would decide where the mental activity is at a given time.
Sorry, he hasn't shown there are "hard" problems here. It's worth noting here that physical explanation seems quite sufficient. Mental activity in one person doesn't correlate with mental activity in another (they've tried hard to show it for ESP experiments, for example). Thus, there is a natural creation of first person versus third person viewpoints since we each have our own internal mental activity which we don't share with others.
As to color experience, what's supposed to be strange about it? For example, we've done experiments with neural networks which are very crude approximations of what we think the human brain works like. "Training" a neural network is a analogous process to learning. And we see that we get a little bit of difference every time. There is a subjective aspect to the training of a neural net, which depends on how we train it and how it responds (if the internal processing of the neural network is not wholly deterministic). Similarly, with color we see both objective and subjective aspects as would be expected, if human learning is like neural network training. Further, human experience of color (and basically all perceptions) tends to link to past experiences of color (sometimes with crossover into other perceptions), as we would expect. Again, where's the hard problem when it's all rolled up into the "easy" problems?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:28PM (13 children)
Sure, but it's a question of whose mental activity it is. If you step into the transporter beam and it produces a perfect physical copy of your body and brain, including all neural and synaptic patterns, thoughts and memories, whilst leaving the original non-copied you still alive for a few seconds, would you honestly be comfortable with this original non-copied you being killed, even though the new khallow would believe nothing was wrong and neither would anyone else in the world after that? If you're not comfortable with that, what about if the original was destroyed at the exact moment that the copy was created? What about if it was a gradual piecemeal transition where the new clone is grown attached to you and bits of you are killed off as it replaces them?
Some materialists are completely comfortable with the thought of being subjected to such an experiment. Others believe it would kill them and don't wish to altruistically care about the future of their clone. The fact is, physics doesn't give an answer to these questions. You need a theory of consciousness.
You're conflating objective data about colors (be they frequencies of light or patterns of neural activity monitored in a test subject's brain) with the private subjective experience a person has of a color. For all you know I could perceive green as you perceive red. There's no way to tell because the experience remains private and cannot be communicated by any objective, third person account.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @01:29AM (12 children)
This theory of consciousness would be merely a study of the qualms of people subject to the experiment. In the first two experiments, if you chose not to destroy the original, you end up with two consciousnesses though of identical characteristics. That indicates right there that you're duplicating rather than transferring consciousness from one place to another.
The third approach is different since there isn't a way to create a second consciousness. It's a standard Ship of Theseus [wikipedia.org] homotopy [soylentnews.org]. The answer out is that human consciousness is already housed in an organ that changes with time, including some degree of dying and regeneration. So we already know that consciousness is retained under the transformation because it's happening to all of us every day to a lesser degree.
Read my post! I do not make that conflation!
Mapping of external values (like colors of an input image) to different internal states is a typical subjective neural network issue. Thus, even in this simple model, we already see the problem that you're concerned about above.
This is not a "hard" problem. It is an ill-defined problem. For example, suppose I were to insert a nest of electrodes into two brains so that simulation, say due to observation of color by one subject would result in some sort of corresponding activity in the second subject's brain. So say this were good enough that every sensation were somehow exactly transferred to the second exactly as the first subject experienced it. Now suppose you change it so that the second person experiences red and green are swapped, internally, but everything else remains the same.
Now hand this experiment to me with a switch that toggles between the two modes of experience and ask me to determine which one is the perfect copy of sensation? From my point of view, while there might be a lot of weird stuff going on due to the mismatch, sooner or later I would determine that the key difference is perception of colors. But which is which at that point? I'm going to guess that it's the color sensations of the second subject that is more similar to the actual colors perceived by the first subject. But that doesn't mean that's the right choice. Maybe red and green were switched in the first place, and the swap made the color perception more similar!
The problem here is that to a clueless external viewer, different mappings of one person's perceptions and experiences to another's are equally valid as long as you can sort out what the first person was experience from the description given by the second. There's no way to distinguish these mappings as being more or less valid except through lossiness of the experience which leaves a lot of room. So, for example, stating that one's person's perception of red would look like green to another is ill-defined in the absence of any natural mapping of consciousness. A mapping of red to red or swapping to blue, for example, is just as valid a mapping of consciousness.
The only way we really can do it is by mapping external perceptions of one person to the corresponding external perceptions of another. And at that point, red is red and so on. The perception of the thing is what determines the mapping of the consciousness, and we lose most of the subjectivity that we're trying to find.
Another way to look at this is that we have numerous ways to alter consciousness, say via drugs, simulation of the brain, and certain unusual experiences. These can be thought of as transformations (temporary or permanent) of a consciousness back on itself. And they can result in all sorts of weird crossover between senses, flashbacks, weird behaviors and emotions, etc. Just with that, we have some inkling of how attempts to map one consciousness to another can differ. And no one can say any of these self-mappings are invalid.
You need some sort of context in order to construct natural mappings. Else it's similar to mapping a pile of symbols to another pile of symbols. There's many, many equally valid ways to do that. That context will only going to come from modern neurology and similar fields. And one of the most obvious, mapping via similarity of described sensation, eliminates a good portion of the subjectivity that one is attempting to observe.
In summary, the claim that subjective consciousness between two people can differ in an observable way depends on a huge assumption that there is a natural way to map between the two consciousnesses at that level which isn't going to throw the observation. But as we see, there isn't such a unique way, particularly with the huge variety of ways there are to alter consciousness (some which might contaminate attempts to construct a mapping between consciousnesses).
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:56AM (1 child)
Yes. The internal relativistic map can only be created in terms of the individual experience. That is the result of having individuality and a unique point of view.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:28AM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @08:24AM (3 children)
There will never be an exact mapping. Only a best fit.
For example, one person might connect red predominantly with communism. This means that in the reaction of his brain there will be certain correlations between the reaction on the colour red and the reaction to other symbols of socialism. While another person might be more reminded of a sunset. Which implies completely different correlations. And a third person might predominantly connect the colour with certain fruits. Which gives yet other correlations.
Or a more drastic example: For some people who grew up in war, the sound of an airplane is linked to fear. For most other people, it isn't. The perception of that same sound is therefore very different for both types of people (for one group, it's a fearful experience, while for the other it isn't).
Note also that there are more subtle differences also at an earlier level: "Red" is not a strictly defined set, but a set with fuzzy borders. That is, a colour near the border of that set that one person identifies as red will not be identified as red by another border. Note also that different cultures disagree on the number of colours they see in a rainbow; that difference is certainly not because their rainbows are physically different, and also not because their eyes work differently.
Or in short: My red is not the same as your red, even though we both will probably agree that a ripe strawberry is red. Indeed, my red today is not exactly the same as my red yesterday.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)
What makes one fit better than another? For example, suppose using the duplication technology mentioned elsewhere, I just duplicate the first person and fit to the duplication, ignoring the second person altogether (or perhaps slide the second person into the piranha tank while claiming the duplicate was the second person all along)? That's best fit.
Obviously, you're not speaking of those sorts of shenanigans, so there are constraints on that fitting. But what are those constraints? "Oh, this red looks green to you now? Let's adjust the mind link so it looks the right shade of red." Some choices of fittings would hide the very details that supposedly go into the first person differences.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
More agreement. For example, a fit where both have some "activation" in the "communism area" is better than one where one has that activation and the other hasn't. Think of it like a map where borders are drawn (and don't take that analogy too literal). If one contains the borders of Germany of 1937 and one contains the border of Germany of 2017, then the enclosed regions agree better than if one contains the borders of Germany of 1937 and the other contains the borders of France of 2017. Therefore Germany 2017 is a better fit to Germany 1937 than France 2017, even though the regions differ considerably.
So someone suddenly seeing "green" when being showed "red" would, for example, associate the colour he sees with gooseberries rather than strawberries, with Islamic countries rather than communist countries, with a forest rather than with a sunset, with "go" rather than "stop", etc.
Reading your comment again, I now suspect you are thinking I talked about a fit to an "ideal red". I didn't; such an "ideal red" doesn't exist. I mean a fit between two person's view of the colour red (the better the fit, the more do their concepts of "red" agree"), or in the case of someone suddenly seeing red as green, the fit of his new perception of red to his old perceptions of red and of green. If that person's new perception of red more closely fits that person's old perception of green than it does its old perception of red, then that person now percepts red as green.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @08:16PM
No, it's more viewing a shade of red, switch gets flipped so now the same shade is viewed through the perception of a second person, and then adjusting till it gets close to the initial perception.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:19AM (4 children)
I'd strongly suggest that we don't already know that. We all accept it as fact because it doesn't seem useful to consider that we may cease to exist to be replaced by another consciousness at any moment. The mere thought could probably drive one insane. We cannot know for sure though and that gap in our knowledge is another indication of the limitations of a materialist view that the transporter thought experiment was intended to highlight.
I made no claim that it could differ in an observable way. This is key, because observation here implies an attempt to acquire objective data about the person's qualia from a third person perspective. A key point upheld by philosophers like Chalmers that deny materialism is that the most fundamental quality of a first person experience like the color red cannot be observed by (or communicated to) a third party.
Where your view differs from that is that you believe that every aspect of a sensation can be exhaustively captured by patterns of physical activity in the brain. Personally, I'm still somewhat on the fence on that particular issue.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:38PM (3 children)
That's a gap in knowledge that can't be addressed by philosophy. We similarly can't know if the Universe is only 10 minutes old and we've only been fooled into thinking the universe is much older by fake memories.
I do however. Even if he is truly right about the difference between third and first person perspective, we still can observe via first person perspective. That is, have one being experience these multiple perspectives. We already allowed by assumption that the being wouldn't be able to fully describe the differences, but they should be able to observe for themselves.
I've stayed away from the denying of materialism thing. But how is anything different, if Chalmer is right or not about non-observable speculation related to perception and experience? By definition, it would have no bearing on our experiences or perceptions, which it supposedly is about. That strikes me as completely irrelevant, cloud castle construction as a result. You certainly can't build a theory of consciousness on that.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:23PM (2 children)
Yeah, it certainly seems that no such theory can be tested with physical experiments. This is almost by definition because the aspect of first person consciousness under discussion is considered to have no effect on thoughts or behavior - possibly no effect on the physical world at all. All that can be done instead is to suggest new axioms, decide which align best with your own philosophical beliefs and with what we do know about nature, and investigate what would and would not be true if you accept them. It becomes an exercise in "what ifs" and in ruling things out. For these reasons it's understandable why a lot of scientists and philosophers reject it as a waste of time. I personally am hopeful that such ground work could pay off in the future however or uncover interesting new truths.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:39PM (1 child)
Or like with QM and various philosophical notions of reality and observation, the ground work will simply be redone by people who have actual experiment to back their musings. It's like speculating about a major crime or disaster as it happens. You don't have much knowledge to work off of. At the time, that might be relatively valuable, but it's going to be near worthless compared to what will come in the future. Someone could just come back in a few days or weeks and get information so complete, that it would be a waste of time to consult the initial speculations.
Anyone who actually figures out the various philosophical experiments we've bounced around, will have a far more complete picture of consciousness, the first person perspective, etc than we will now.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @09:09PM
Agreed : )
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 05 2017, @10:55PM
I had intended to draw this discussion to a close rather than take up more of your time, but there's one idea I don't think I described fully.
When we talk about an experience of the color red, that can mean one of two different things:
1. The immediate, vivid quality that is perceived directly as what fills a spatial area of the mind's own visual field when they look at a red object.
2. All of the further thoughts, non visual sensations, memories and emotions that the person's brain (and perhaps reflexes) associates with redness.
maxwell demon gives some really good examples of 2.:
Under 2 I would also include the association with the word "red".
khallow it sounds like the switch in your experiment is swapping in a different configuration for 2 whilst leaving 1 unchanged. Is that right?
1 I think represents the most fundamental, indivisible first person experience of the color and is the bit that Chalmers would say is unavoidably private and cannot be examined by a third party. We can fool the person's visual field by messing with the inputs - at the simplest level putting colored glasses over the person's eyes or, as per your example, interfering with the signals in the brain's neurons, but the suggestion is that we cannot alter how a true red signal is experienced by the mind as described in 1.
Furthermore, I suggest that any change in 1 that is not accompanied by a change in 2 would never be noticed by the person. Today I could be experiencing green as I experienced red yesterday, but I cannot possibly tell because the color green still makes me think of grass and leaves and the word "green" and when I summon memories of looking at those things in the past, they look this color to me now, but it's not possible to remember what color was in my mind's visual field when I thought of them yesterday, because summoning a visual memory requires a fresh use of the visual field.
In exactly the same way, if I experience red as you experience green, according to 1 but not 2 then no amount of wiring up with electrodes between our brains will reveal that, even to either of us, if Chalmers is right about qualia.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:03PM (1 child)
Pages 1 and 2:
(Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:59AM
Feynman used the many worlds to solve a mathematical problem. If you read the paper you would quickly see the improvement.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:34PM
Dementias and other brain conditions present a pretty harsh reality that this philosophichal wanking wants us to believe in.
people have been trying to philosophize away from quantum mechanics since its beginnings.