From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Jun 23 08:30:46 2000 Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 21:53:49 -0700 (PDT) From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov To: psyche-d@listserv.uh.edu Subject: Re: Emergence It has been a long time since I have contributed to this forum. However, the question of "emergence" seems crucial. It is clear from recent postings that philosophers have been busy on this matter, and I really ought read all the books and articles mentioned before venturing an opinion. But the posting of Michael Schmitz seems close enough to my own position to embolden me to express my own long-held views, which go somewhat beyond what Michael set forth. It is, I believe, crucial, for reasons given below, to distinguish approaches based on the classical-physics conception of reality from approaches based on quantum-physics. Let me start with the former, and accept the broad concept of reductionism embraced by Schmitz. It might be called constituentism: what happens to big things is a consequence of their microscopic constituents interacting in accordance with the microlocal laws of classical physical theory. However, complex assemblies of micro-elements can have novel properties described by novel concepts, and---because of the interwining of properties, concepts, and entities---novel entities. Let this be called the "emergentist" position. It opens the door, a priori, to a novel entity/property "consciousness", which did not always exist, but came into being only when systems supporting it came into being. A conscious feeling is thus not required to be identically the very same thing as a motion of tiny "particles", but can be something else whose causal powers come, however, strictly from the causal consequences of its constiuent parts interacting via the basic laws of physics. This approach seems to me eminently reasonable: it needs no mysterious supernatural intervention. This emergentist position seems to me to be able to cope with the various level of science, such as thermodynamics, meterology, biology, physiology, neuroscience, etc. and also real economic systems and computer systems, etc. But there is a big difference between these cases and consciousness. The point is that the properties of the particles of classical physics are basically properties pertaining to locations and motions in space and time. They are representable in terms of the Cartesian coordinates of the particles (and values of the electromagnetic field), which are idealized versions of the locations of tiny solid objects. As such they are what might be called external properties: properties observable in principle by an infinitely keen-eyed observer who stands far away from the objects, and sees spacetime properties, and relations between such properties, that are independent of the observer and the observations, and are fully expressible in terms of mathematical relationships that devolve eventually to the Cartesian coordinates of the particles of the assembly of constituents. These relationships can become extremely complex, in principle. But they all have a common property: they are all "external properties" in the sense defined above. There is no jumping outside this category, and a sudden obtaining of a representation of how some system "feels", internally. The system of classical physical concepts did not initially involve the notion of the internal experiential feel of the system, and the combinations of external viewed-from-afar spacetime properties retain this character: bringing in internal feels would be a process completely different in kind from the one that worked in the other cases. It seems to me, therefore, that the emergentism that can account for the "physical" sciences is different in kind from what is needed to achieve the internal qualities of experiential feels, insofar as one bases the construction on the concepts of classical physical theory. The situation is completely changed if one starts from the quantum concepts. The essence of quantum theory is a radical change in the conceptual base. The foundation is shifted from the concept of solid particles located in spacetime to a structure that represents objective information interacting with subjective knowledge. The original Copenhagen interpretation renounced the effort to understand or describe reality, and even excluded biological systems from consideration. Hence that form of quantum theory is not the appropriate vehicle for dealing with deep ontological issues. The genius of John von Neumamm swept aside the obscurities of the original formulation, and, along with Wigner and Pauli and other thinkers who demanded logical clarity, brought to rational fruition the basic insight of the founders, namely the insight that one must formulate the basic theory of nature as a theory about information and knowledge, not as a theory about tiny localized objects. von Neumann and Wigner effectively formulated quantum theory as a theory about the dynamical interaction between an objective field of information and the subjective increments of knowledge that constitute the streams of consciousness of the observers. Quantum theory IS, therefore, essentially a theory of the mind-brain connection. One is no longer forced to try to build a connection that is essentially ruled out by the physical premises. Rather the whole conceptual structure is revised to put at its center the dynamical relationship between the objective external aspects of nature and the subjective internal aspects of the observers. Henry P. Stapp From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Tue Jun 27 16:08:19 2000 Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 17:02:29 -0700 (PDT) From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov To: psyche-d@listserv.uh.edu Subject: Re: Emergence [Michael] Henry Stapp wrote: "It might be called constituentism: what happens to big things is a consequence of their microscopic constituents interacting in accordance with the microlocal laws of classical physical theory. However, complex assemblies of micro-elements can have novel properties described by novel concepts, and---because of the interwining of properties, concepts, and entities---novel entities." Thank you for this nice summary. The only exception I take is that you see the picture I described as essentially rooted in classical physical theory, while I think the quantum level should be part of the picture. ... don't really understand QM well enough! So I can only express my hope that these problems could be solved and QM be integrated into the picture. (Perhaps somebody could help or show why there is no hope.) [Henry] Physicists made heroic attempts before the creation and acceptance of QM to try to stay with classical concepts, but were forced against their prejudices, intuitions, and traditions to go to an informtion- based, rather than particle-based theory. Even David Bohm, who came closest, emphasizes that his formulation is based on a field of objective "information". This switch from a conception of nature based on tiny particles to one based on objective information and subjective knowledge, and the laws that connect them, automatically accounts for all the data that is explained by classical physical theory, plus a lot more. [Micheal] With regards to the relation between QM and c[onsciousness], I have essentially the same problems with your arguments as with those of Stuart Hameroff. You also want to show through arguments at a more conceptual level that c must be 'fundamental' in the sense that it should be part of the subject matter of QM, [Henry] Not "should be" but "is in fact". The founders of quantum theory did "in fact" formulate the theory as basically about correlations between what human observers can know, and no satisfactory alternative has been created or discovered, in spite of huge efforts. The proponents of ALL alternative approaches confess that their approaches are either basically Copenhagen-like or are not fully satisfactory as yet. In view of this factual situation, I am proposing that we should try accepting what the physicists seemed to have been forced to recognize: nature is not coherently understandable if it imagined to be built out of miniturizations of the "solid well-located physical objects" that we imagine that we see about us. [Michael] and that I think cannot work. Surely the theories of physics primarily aim at unconcious, even inanimate entities external to human observers, [Henry] Quantum theory may "aim" at other things, but the primary realities of QT are our conscious thoughts. Most physicists are interested primarily in observations "on external physical objects", and quantum theory is formulated so that these observations are formulated in terms of "classical descriptions" of the gross features of big systems or big devices: the personal way that individual observers experience their observations of those gross features is not important. But HERE we are interested not just in the gross features in the behaviour of a brain that many outside observers can see, but in the inner micro-dynamics that is controlling this gross behavior. Quantum theory says that once one goes down to the level of the micro-dynamics the idea of localized particles no longer works: one must consider the "particles" as basically quantum objects, not as tiny solid localized objects, and then determine by careful arguments and estimates to what extent classical ideas hold. For a brain one finds, in this way, that quantum effects are very important in, for example, the diffusion of calcium ions that trigger vesicle release in a nerve terminal. This introduces quantum effects at a very basic level of brain dynamics. This means that the brain must be defined, basically, as an objective information field that interacts by means of specified rules both with the external obververs who might be observing it, perhaps by means of measuring devices, and also with the consciousness of the person to whom the brain belongs. [Michael] and the concept of the c of the observer is a concept entirely different from those concepts. [Henry] Yes indeed! That is exactly the problem with those classical concepts, in this context of trying to understand the connection between brain and consciousness. [Michael] But still whether the behavior and states of a conscious organism like that of a human being can be explained through the resources of QM or any physical theory is a purely physical question, to be decided by physicists purely on the basis of their data, standards, methods and assumptions. (Or perhaps I should better say: just as purely in this case as in others.) [Henry] Yes, except that the data will involve connections between physical measurements on brains and other parts of the body, and data about psychological states. So specialists in many fields become involved. [Michael] If it is objected that c has been left out, the answer is that hands, eyes, cells, hearts etc. have also been left out. [Henry] Not at all. The objective informational field contains all the extant information about these bodily parts: everything that according to classical "emergentist" ideas (as characterized above) would be part of the physical world, is described now by the objective informational field, and the macroscopic observed features would be essentially the same as in the classical "emergentist" approach. But the micro-dynamics would be different: the quantum dynamics of a brain has a necessary and natural place for efficacious consciousness to enter, and to affect the evolution of the objective informational reality. [Michael] Of course c is in various ways 'important', 'fundamental' and 'special', but with these words one must be careful not to use them out of context. For example, c is special in that it is through c that we know about the physical and other facts we talk about, but it is not thereby necessarily special from the point of view of either classical physics or QM. So I think that the introduction of c entities into QM could only be justified at the physical level itself. [Henry] What we HAVE from physics is the form of dynamical laws that work. These laws specify the interaction between a physical world that is represented as an objective informational field and subjective increments in human knowledge. The objective physical world is a compendium of subjective bits of knowledge. Thus ontology and epistemology are merged. No way is known to return to classical ideas. So why not accept the idea that physicists have been forced to adopt, which specifies a natural connection between ontology and epistemology, rather than clinging to classical ideas that physicists have found to be unworkable in physics, and which have led philospophers into a dark labyrinth from which they seem no closer to emerging than they were at the birth of classical physics some three hundred years ago. Henry From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Tue Jun 27 16:14:27 2000 Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 19:23:26 -0700 (PDT) From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov To: Stanley Klein Subject: Re: a question On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, Stanley Klein wrote: > > >[Henry] ... > > > >But this raises the serious problems of why it is there at all, and how > >did evolve properly if it has no consequences. > > > [Stan] > If the reductionist program works for qualia (a decent possibility, > even though it is not obvious at this point) then the identity theory > would hold. > In order to explain behaviour one would most likely want > to go to the emergent level that included efficacious consciousness. When one speaks of "emergence" within a classical-physics context one should distinguish "natural emergence" from "supernatural emergence". The former just expresses the fact that complex structures made of assemblies of classical-physics particles can have novel properties that arise from complex conditions on possible spacetime dispositions of the parts of the assembly. Thus one can discuss steam engines, and the growth of plants, and possible movements of pieces and a chessboard, and the connections between input and output currents of an electrical system, etc, in terms of space-time structure, and introduce the concepts that are appropriate for describing the interesting degrees of freedom of the spacetime structures of these physical systems. Those properties expressible in terms of the conditions on spacetime structure are properties that would be visible to a sufficiently sharp-eyed far-away observer, and be explainable by him as an identification of pertinents feature that inhere in the assembly simply as an expressions of the spacetime arrangement of the parts and the physical constraints on this arrangements of the parts: one can always describe a single physical systems composed of many particles in a host of different rationally equivalent ways, some of which may be more useful than others in some siuation. But the existence of "a painful experience (or a painful experiencing)" is not rationally equivalent to the existence of a certain kind of collection of trajectories of classically conceived particles: the former is not, in terms of its defining characteristics, just a re-expression of the latter. So the term "emergence", which is completely unproblematic when used in one context, should not be used to sneak in a an entity or property that is not, as a property of an assembly of classically conceived particles itself, just an identification of certain spacetime structural conditions. Henry From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Tue Jun 27 16:16:29 2000 Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 22:37:45 -0700 (PDT) From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov To: Stanley Klein Subject: Re: a question On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Stanley Klein wrote: .....> > [Stan] > In my comments that you quote above I did two things. > > 1) In my first sentence above I said: IF the reductionist program > works for qualia. That IF was important. At this point many clever > people are disagreeing about whether the reductionist program can or > can't work for qualia. I am asserting that if one starts from a classical-physics conceptualization of the physical world as a collection of tiny localized bits of solid stuff (plus EM field) then one can retain "reductionism" in the form that says that "what happens to big things is a consequence of their microcausal elements acting in accordance with the microcausal laws", and that one can embrace "natural emergence", which recognizes that the existence of properties that are identifications of complex structural spacetime arrangements and conditions, but that one cannot get from this sort of emergence the emergence of "a painful experience". I say that this is clear and obvious: the classical-physics ontology supports all sorts of features that are identifications complex spacetime structural properties and conditions, while consistently allowing the denial of the existence of inner states characterized as how a physical system experiences itself or feels: e.g. whether it is sad or happy. One cannot, however, consistently deny, simply by fiat, the the existence of a condition defined in terms of a spacetime structure of the component parts of a system. For the very definition specifies spacetime conditions that may or may not hold. The defining characteristics that are specified by the assertion "the system feels happy" do not share this feature. > As I recall, in one of your recent postings > you hinted at the possibility that the vonNeumann choice might be > achieved from within the system, thus giving an identity type theory. Quantum theory is an altogether different starting point: the basic stuff of the theory is objective information in interaction with increments of knowledge. This basis may have all the elements needed for a complete causal description, even though the contemporary theory has some choices whose causal roots are not specified. > At this point we don't see how qualia might be reducible to atoms, > but that doesn't mean it can't happen. > The assertion of the existence, in a classically conceived system, of "a feeling of saddness" does not contain within its meaning itself, any specification or condition on the locations of the constitient particles of the system. This "feeling of sadness" is an added feature or property that is not a consequence, within the conceptual structure of classical physical theory, of the constiuent particles interacting in accordance with the law of classical physics. Since this "property of feeling sad" is not a consequence simply of the constituent particles acting in accordance with the laws of classical physical theory the property is nonefficacious: it can be omitted without making any difference to the course of physical events. > 2) In the second sentence I am only talking about behavior. The > behavior associated with pain involves screaming, higher pulse rate, > lots of adrenolin in the blood, much hightened neural activity in the > brain, inability to relax, decreased reading speed. Most all > neuroscientists believe that these behaviors are reducible to the > action of neural activity and standard biochemistry. Do you question > that reduction of the behavior and activity associated with pain? If > you do think that the pain behavior can't be reduced to the activity > of atoms, then we are onto something important. Behavior is reducible to the activity of atoms, as described by the objective informational quantum state. The deeper question is: What is the role of a person's experiences in the dynamical evolution of this objective informational quantum state? Henry