From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Sep 24 17:28:06 1998 Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:51:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Henry Stapp To: quantum-mind Cc: kleinlist , 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" , keith@imprint.co.uk, stan klein , patrickw@monash.edu.au, phayes@ai.uwf.edu Subject: Stapp replies to Sarfatti about attention. From: Jack Sarfatti Subject: Reply to Uzi Awret and Henry Stapp on Attention (q-mind:16 Sep 1998 ) [Awret; previous] The brain and attention The important point to realize here is that one does not need to go beyond standard QM to explain attention. As a matter of fact one does not need QM to explain attention." [Stapp: reply to Awret above] I was using attention, not trying to explain it. [Sarfatti] You need to be able to explain it, otherwise your physical theory of experiential qualities is seriously incomplete. I have a very simple non-adhoc explanation of "attention" it is simply the active Level 2 i.e. occupied basin where the Level 1 Bohm worldline happens to be at any moment. [Stapp] I thought that in your theory occupancy of basin pertains to consciousness in general, not just the very special aspect called "attention". In any case, I have written many pages of description of what, according to my theory, is happening in the brain when a conscious experience occurs. [See e.g., sections 6.4 through 6.6, of MM&QT]. The key ideas include body-world scheme and projected body-world schema, patterns of neural activity that are the brains representation of the body and world in its present and intended state; the manner in which tendencies for the actualizations of such patterns become installed in brain structure in the course of bodily development and life experience; memory, feedback and feedforward, facilitation, and updating via attentional acts; metastable configurations and fatigue (p.42). This is, of course, merely a description of the overall theoretical framework: a hopefully useful basis for empirical and theoretical elaboration. [Stapp-previous] Attention is an aspect of the causal mind/brain process. It is caused by aspects of that process, and is part of the cause of other aspects: it is in the causal loop. My point was that quantum theory can naturally give to attention an "extra" causal efficacy, by allowing it to govern the otherwise undetermined Heisenberg choice. [Sarfatti] A further advantage of my theory over Stapp's is that the Heisenberg choice is no longer "undetermined", [Stapp] I said "otherwise undetermined". [Sarfatti] It, together with the Dirac choice is at least partly self-determined in the self-organizing Level 3 loop. [Stapp] What determines it, in my theory, is the attentional aspect of earlier experiences, per se. This constitutes an essential ontological shift. The attentional aspects of the earlier experiences are experiential aspects of the causal mind/brain process, and they are causally determined by what has happened earlier in the mind/brain. But the basic question is the *nature* of this causal linkage, and in particular to what extent an experience itself, which is certainly a reality, can enter into the causal network in a way that cannot be reduced either to a local-deterministic causal process---as it can in classical theory---or to the combination of the local-deterministic Schroedinger equation and the random quantum (Dirac) choices. Can these complex realities, our experiences, enter into the causal process in a way that is not fully reducible to the aspects of nature represented within the quantum state? More specifically, can a fully rational and practically useful science accommodate the possibility that the causal mind/brain process involves mind in a way that is not fully reducible to a causal description in terms of brain alone? We have been conditioned by our experience with classical physics to believe that our conscious experiences must enter into a rational scientific description either as an epiphenomal sideshow, or as an alternative description of some process that is fully reducible to a process causally described purely in terms of "physical" variables. In the pragmatic quantum theory that I have been describing the mental "supervenes" on the physical, in the sense that given the physical description over a course of time, including the collapses S-->(P_e S P_e), one can in principle reconstruct the course of experiential events e. Yet even if the (Dirac) choices on the part of nature are regarded as causally determined by some (unknown and global) process, the purely physical description will not be causally closed: the full causal description will involve connections that are not reducible to the variable of the quantum mechanical description. I have illustrated this abstract possibility with the concrete example involving the quantum zeno effect, where the Heisenberg choice about which question to pose, which in this pragmatic approach is a question about which of the possible experiences e is to be attended to by the mind/brain system, is fixed directly by the attentional aspects of earlier experiences associated with that system. This illustration shows that one need not, within quantum theory, follow the path forced on us by classical physical theory: the mind aspect of the mind/brain need not be parasitic on the brain aspect. The relevance of this is that you, Jack, are following the basically classical point of view that conscious experience ought to be defined to BE some physical process, with the causal structure expressed by a purely physical process. That is perhaps a reasonable thing to do. I would question the advisability of bringing in the Bohm world line. But beyond that there is the deeper question of the logical soundness of following the path of trying to imbed experiential reality, with all of its richness (e.g., pain, partriotism, morality) within that highly circumscribed part of it can be broadly described as "geometric" (assignment of numerical values to locations in some `space') as contrasted to imbedding the geometric within the experiential: that is the essential innovation of quantum theory vis a vis classical physical theory. Quantum theory showed how all of the regularities in our experience that were accounted for in classical physical theory, and a host of other regularities that could not be accounted for by classical physical theory, COULD by accounted for within this reversed logical foundation: no understanding is lost or compromised by adopting the broader logical framework, which eliminates the puzzle of how something so narrowly conceived as a geometric structure can BE something so intuitively much richer as a general conscious experience: how can a pattern of neural firings BE a pain. There is nothing within the geometrically formulated physical theory that naturally entails such a jump, which seems, then, to be an ad hoc appendage, rather than a rationally integral part of a cohesive theoretical structure. The essence of the advance from classical physical theory to quantum theory was the recognition that one COULD shift the theoretical foundation, and actually bring the theory into closer allignment with actual empirical practice, by making our experiences, per se, the basis of theoretical framework, rather than trying to exclude them or equate them to something else. Having thus legitimized our conscious experiences one must face the broad question of how these realities fit into the causal mind/brain process.