From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Jun  2 17:05:43 2000
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 19:59:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov

Subject: Reply to Pat Hayes(15/5) (fwd)

To: pat hayes 

On Mon, 15 May 2000, pat hayes wrote:

> >On Mon, 15 May 2000, Stanley Klein wrote:
> >
> > > [Henry]
> > > >If conscious events are nonidentical to brain events, 
       and
> > > >brain events (along with the effects of the physical
       environment) are the sufficient
> > > >causes of the  brain events then one  should not,  
       I  think,
> > > >say that the conscious  events cause the  brain events.
       The latter
> > > >already have their  sufficient causes. This means that 
       the occurrence
> > > >of the  conscious  events makes no difference at all 
       in the  course
> > > >of the physical  events, and hence are not their causes.
> > >
> > > [Stan]
> > > Henry, I'm afraid you are on weak ground on this one. The
> > > philosophers have beaten on this one quite a bit. 
      My suggestion is
> > > that when we get back from Paris that we go have a chat 
      with Searle.
> > > One of Searle's favorite examples is the carburator. 
      He points out
> > > that the efficacious causes of the carburator's actions 
      are best
> > > stated in terms of high level causes (valves, sparks, 
      chambers) but
> > > there is also a low level set of causes (iron, carbon, 
      hydrogen,
> > > oxygen atoms colliding and combining and such).


> >[Henry to Stan]
> >If conscious events are nonidentical to physical events, 
   as we both agree
> >they are, then there is an essential difference between 
   a conscious event and a
> >piston event, as the later is understood within classical 
   physical theory. According to classical physical theory
> >each piston event is a physical event: it, itself, is 
   describable in terms
> >of mathematical quantities localized in spacetime. 
   Conscious events are
> >we agree, not identical to physical things. I have no 
   trouble with the
> >idea that moving a piston causes the atoms in it to move. 
   But using
> >analogies is an exceedingly bad way to argue, because they 
   often are
> >nonanalogies, as in this case.

> [Pat]
> I have to agree with Henry here. Personally, I have no 
  problems with 
> asserting that conscious events *are* physical events 
  (in the same 
> sense, I hasten to add in case Aaron is listening, that 
  computational 
> events and particular games of chess are physical events); 
  indeed, 
> that seems to me to be the only possible position which is 
  consistent 
> with materialism. But Stan, like most agnostics, wants to 
  have things 
> both ways. Nah, come on, Stan, fess up: do you believe in 
  ghosts or 
> don't you?
> 
> Henry's theory put ghosts firmly back into the picture. 

[Henry]
A ghost is a disembodied entity. I am talking about a stream of
conscious events that is closely entwined with activities of 
some human
brain. I am talking about the pain you feel when you hit your 
finger with
a hammer, or burn it on a stove, or cut it with a knife. 
I am talking
about the effort you feel when trying to lift some heavy 
object. Such an
experience is not ghost, for it is causally closely tied to 
a human
brain and does not exist apart from that brain. These 
experiences are
things that are studied by psychologists, and by 
(neuro)scientists who do experiments in psycho-physics. 

[Pat]
> They are the things that pose the questions. 

[Henry]
In my preferred model the brain produces the potential or 
possible
question, represented in the physical theory by the 
projection operator
P(t), and consciousness is associated with a consent to let 
that question
be posed, and a "knowing" of some "content" that is 
actualized by the
action S(t+)=P(t)S(t-)P(t), in case nature's answer is `Yes".

[Pat]
> They are nonphysical and intentional, 
> eternal and ineffable, but are mysteriously connected to 
  physical 
> things. They have willpower. They achieve physical effects 
  by 
> nonphysical means 

[Henry]
By a means that seems to be expressible in terms of the
concepts of quantum theory, though it seems not to be expressible
in terms of the the concepts of classical physical theory. 

[Pat]
>(but subtly, so you wouldn't be able to notice the 
> difference.) 

You can certainly notice the huge *apparent* difference 
whenever you make an effort and your body responds. Due to
the large uncertainties in our knowledge of the positions
and velocities of all the particles and fields that, according
to classical physical theory, constitute a human brain, 
no one at present can make a detailed calculation of what
a  whole conscious brain would do if it were adequately
described by classical physical theory. So no one can say, on the
basis of empirical evidence, that the subtle quantum effects associated
with mind are absent. But allowing them to be present does explain,
in a natural way, various features of the relationship between
a person's experiences and his behaviour, including the noticeable efficacy 
of our efforts to move our limbs, as well as the more subtle features
described by Wm. James and by Harold Pasler that I have noted in
my recent paper "A Quantum Theory of Mind. Classical theory can never
really explain such causal connections, for mind is not contained among its
primary elements, except as a passive bystander. The best it can do is to 
postulate that a physical activity that is a cause of some 
effort-induced bodily motion IS, the very same thing as the 
experienced effort that we feel is causing the motion. 
Such an a poteriori explanation is not as good as an a priori one,
and is not logically satisfactory, because the concepts of classical physical
theory are already logically complete without adding on this identity
postulate, which identifies things logically constructible from
the basic concepts of the theory with things, such  as "painful feelings", 
that are not.




>They have been around, in one form or another, 
  since the 
> dawn of time, and are what keep the world going. Without 
  them the 
> universe would dissolve into an exponential cloud of 
  unrealised 
> possibilities, but they keep prodding it with questions to 
  keep it 
> sharp. Henry calls them consciousnesses, but he's often 
  said that the 
> things that we call conscious - us, mostly - are only one 
  kind of 
> them, and there must be a lot more, since they have been 
  around since 
> the big bang in one form or another, "ghost" or "spirit" 
  seems like a 
> better word than "consciousness" for these things.
> 

[Henry]
My primary interest is with human consciousness, since
our only direct access to consciousness is via our
own consciousness: human science is based on human
knowledge.

But human brains evolved from simpler brains, so one must,
in any naturalistic account of nature, allow simpler 
streams of consciousness to be associated with simpler 
organisms. The richness that characterizes
a human conscious event probably surpasses in many ways that 
of the analogous events associated with monkey brains. Hence
the the word "consciousness", which we associate with our
human inner lives, becomes less and less appropriate as one 
moves down the phylogenic tree. I use the word
"proto-consciousness" to name the simpler analogs of 
human consciousness. But I refrain from any serious
speculation about it until we have acheived a more secure
science of human consciousness.

[Pat]
> However, I would caution you that this picture, while it 
  may be 
> relevant to spiritualism, is hardly consistent with the 
> Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition. 


[Henry]
I have steered a very wide berth away from all religious ideas.

I am interested primarily in the science, though also in the 
impact on cultural issues of moving from a classical to a 
quantum conception of man and his relationship to the world 
we inhabit.

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Jun  2 17:06:25 2000

To: pat hayes 
Cc: kleinlist



On Tue, 16 May 2000, pat hayes wrote:
[Stan said]
> >The amazing hypothesis that continues to gain validation from the 
> >neuroscience community is that mind is an emergent property of 
> >neural interactions. That doesn't mean that the emergent property 
> >isn't efficacious, just as emergent liquidity is efficacious in how 
> >water does its thing. Consciousness is reducible and also 
> >efficacious.
> 

[Pat]
> A thought on this (and on Henry's awful intellectual nothing-buttery 
> mistake). It might be worth asking, of consciousness, what physical 
> properties it *is* efficacious for. Henry claims that the causal 
> closure of a classical model implies that there is no room there for 
> consciousness to be causally efficacious. He is just plain, 
> crashingly wrong about this,

My claim is only that if one accepts that classical physical 
theory gives an adequate basis for mind-brain dynamics, 
and rejects the identity-theory thesis that each conscious 
experience of a person is the very same thing as some aspect 
of the physical description of nature (or of
the person's brain) THEN conscious experiences are not 
causally efficacious: such non-physical things cannot be 
causally efficacious, within the classical physical theory 
of physical causation, because their presence or absence 
*makes no difference* in any physical activity

[Pat]
> in fact; but even if this line of 
> reasoning were correct, all it would show was that 
  consciousness was 
> ineffective at the relevant level of description. This 
  seems to me to 
> be empirically true, in fact. I do not think that I can make 
> particular atoms move by the effort of my will. I can of 
  course make 
> macroscopic changes of one kind or another (like moving 
  my fingers), 
> and each such change is instantiated as *some* collection 
  of atomic 
> movements: but exactly what collection is not under my 
  control and 
> invisible to my awareness. 

[Henry]
I am speaking about the causal efficacy of an experienced 
`effort to move a finger': can such an effort actually cause
the finger to move, if we accept classical physical theory
as valid, and also assert that the effort is NOT anything 
that can be described in physical terms.

The effort induces the physical change S(t+)=PS(t-)P
[or perhaps the effective reduction via the QZE of H
to PHP + (1-P)S(1-P)], and P acts on MACROSCOPIC
degrees of freedom of the brain, not on microscopic
degrees of freedom. The analog at the Copenhagen level
is "the CENTER OF MASS of the pointer": P acts only
on degrees of freedom that are empirically noticeable.
It does not act on microscopic variables.


[Pat]
> Similarly for water and liquidity. The 
> liquidity of water is causally effective at a level of 
  description 
> where liquidity is a property, viz. a macroscopic level. 

[Henry]

It is important to distinguish 
`natural emergence' from `supernatural emergence'. By 
`natural emergence' I mean the natural condition that 
when we build complex systems out of simple parts there may 
come a stage where a new kind of connection or process, not 
formerly possible, becomes now possible, simply because
the more complex structure allows more complex arrangements 
of the component parts.

A `supernatural emergence' would be the emergence of a property
that cannot be fully described simply in terms of the new 
possibilities of arrangements of the component 
classical-physical parts.

The emergence of a painful FEELING from a brain completely 
describable in terms of the paricles and fields of classical 
electrodymanics would be a `supernatural emergence":  one 
cannot pass from, or deduce from, or extract from, a complete 
description of the classical physics elements of a brain the 
existence of a painful experience.

I can imagine a classical-physics type  of model in which a 
macroscopic amount of some physical substance acts like a 
liquid (fills containers, bottom up, etc.)
Then liquidity would be a macroscopic property of this 
substance,
and it  could be said to  be causally efficacious. This is 
all completely
understandable deductively within classical physics theory.
Liquidity would then be a naturally emergent property. 
No problem there. The macroscopic properties are describable, 
explanable, and understandandable in terms
of the  properies of the microscopic parts.

[Pat]
> If one 
> insists on reducing everything to microphysics, then of 
  course there 
> is no property of liquidity, because there are no liquids 
 (only 
> particles and fields), 

[Henry]
Aggregates of small things make big things whose properties are
understandable simply in terms of the properties of the 
small parts.


[Pat]
> so at that level (which is where Henry seems 
> to retreat to whenever this discussion arises) it would be 
  a mistake 
> to claim that liquidity was causally efficacious. 

Not so! The big things are made of little ones, but that 
does not
forbid one from considering big things, and the properties 
that they have
by virtue  of being made up of little things with known 
causal properties.


[Pat]
> Nevertheless it is 
> so, at the macroscopic level, just as the macroscopic 
  structure of a 
> carburettor is causally effective. 

Right! No problem in principle understanding carburettors 
classically, and understanding the possibility of thinking
of causality both from the bottom up as well as the top dowm
perspective:  physical connections go both ways.

[Pat]
> This point has nothing to do with 
> the difference between classical and QT physics, by the way,
  and 
> applies to them both: it has to do with the logical 
  structure of 
> arguments about causality.
> 

[Henry]
Yes! Certain properties of large things are describable, 
explanable,
and understandable simply in terms of the properties of its 
parts.

But `experiences' and `feelings' are not describle, 
explanable, and understandable simply in terms of the 
classically specified properties of the local elements 
of classical electrodynamics.

On the other hand, human experiences are built into the 
basic ontological and causal fabric of orthodox 
(i.e., Copenhagen and vN/W) quantum theory. That is what 
makes quantum  theory so pertinent to mind-brain study.


> This is also relevant to Henry's claims for the relevance 
  of QT to 
> consciousness. His theory (cf. his discussion of the QZE) 
  predicts 
> that the role of consciousness is to put a 'question to 
  nature' which 
> is represented in the mathematical theory as a 
  Hilbert-space operator 
> P. But this P is a specification of the position and 
  momentum of 
> subatomic particles (or the energy density corresponding to 
  the 
> probability that such a position and momentum will be 
  measured when 
> the question is put, or some such: no matter, the point 
  applies to 
> all such QT exotica). This seems obviously inappropriate 
  as a way to 
> describe the contents or effects of consciousness. I have no 
> consciousness of the subatomic structure of my own brain; 
  when I act, 
> I do not specify the details of that subatomic structure. 
  At this 
> level of description, my consciousness is indeed causally 
  impotent 
> and blind. 

That is not the way quantum theory works. In Copenhagen quantum
theory the experimenter sets up the experiment so that the 
two possible outcomes correspond to two empirically (i.e., 
experientially) distinct possibilities, say seeing the 
pointer on the device swing to the right or not seeing that.
The experiences are never experiences of what atoms are doing:
they are always experiences of the kind that we can
actually have. But they are represented within the formal 
theory as projection operators P the act on the physical  
state S of the system: S-->PSP reduces the prior state to 
the part of itself that is compatible with the experience
that corresponds to P, and thus P acts on the macroscopic
physical  variables of the brain that are directly
connected to experiential realities. P act macrolocally! 

That the theory is built on these mappings between possible 
human experiences and operators acting on macrofeatures
of a mathematical description of a physical system may sound 
weird and unphysical, but that is how Copenhagen quantum 
theory is constructed, and why it works so well at the 
practical level.

In the vN/W theory the experience is, still, a possible 
human experience, and now P act on the state of the brain 
of the person who is having the experience. This projection 
operator will pick out a macroscopic activity of the brain
that is compatible with the experience, and this
macroscopic activity will be described in terms of macro-
variables: variables that correspond to large-scale features
of the brain activity.

In Copenhagen quantum theory the mapping between experiences
and operators is, in the final analysis, a matter of 
calibrating devices. It is a sort of trial and error 
empirical process of refinement of the mapping function. 
In vN/W quantum theory the process is basically
the same: the developing organism `notices' empirical 
connections between various `feels'  (e.g. the empirical
connection of a certain characteristic feeling of `effort' 
with the subsequent feeling/seeing the arm rise)
and thus a web of interconnected `meanings' of various feels 
gets set up by empirical trial and error and refinement. 


> Of course, when I do act, the results, being physical, are 
> in fact what might be called subatomically realised; they 
  supervene 
> on the physical. But the details at that level are unknown 
  to me, 
> even in principle. I doubt if any direct act of any 
  biological brain 
> (ie without using specially constructed apparatus outside the  brain 
> itself) could possibly specify any component of one of 
  Henry's P's.

The empirical process of experiencing the effects of various
effortful states allows the organism to establish a network
of relationships between intentional feels, which cause 
associated actions S_b-->P_bS_bP_b, and the experiential 
consequences of those intentional feels. [I have put in the 
subscripts b (represented by _b) to emphasize that these
operators are all restricted to the degrees of freedom
of the brain.]

 
> So, far from being a plausible place for conscious 
  awareness (of, 
> say, to use one of Henry's own examples, the blueness of 
  a color), 
> these operators seem to be necessarily something that 
  could not 
> possibly represent the contents of consciousness or the 
  intent of 
> volition.
> 

On the contrary, these operators P, which when activated cause
reductions S_b-->P_bS_bP_b, which cause subsequent noticeable
courses of bodily activities (or, perhaps, subsequent 
courses of brain activities), which in turn cause the 
experiences associated with the effects those activities, are
the natural representation within the brain of the feels that
cause them to be actualized. I can see no other dynamically
and developmentally and evolutionarally plausible 
kind of correspondence.

> This seems to me to be the most doubtful part of Henry's 
  account. 

It seems to me the most obviously correct part of my account:
It is completely natural that each experience should be 
associated
with the change S_b-->P_bS_bP_b that it causes, and that 
the experience that causes the change should acquire meaning 
to the person through the way that this experience is
juxtaposed to subsequent experiences due to the physical 
linkages between the physical events that are associated 
with these experiential events.

> As 
> one might expect, it's just outside the actual physics. 

Its intertwined with the physics, because the physics specifies
firstly the causal link between experiential feel F and its 
physical effect S_b-->P_b(F)S_bP_b(F)=S_b', and secondly the 
physical evolution of the resulting new state S_b'.

> Physics can't 
> be directly relevant to consciousness in this simplistic 
  way, because 
> consciousness isn't *about* the very small things that 
  physics deals 
> with. 

Physics deals with the way the whole universe evolves, and 
with the way
whole brains evolve, and with the direct effects of 
conscious experiences on whole brain states, and with the 
propensities for new conscious
experiences to emerge from the evolving whole brain states.

> As Stan says, consciousness seems to be an emergent 
  property of 
> neural interactions. 

Stan's ideas are not rationally consistent, as you also
seem to recognize.

Stan rejects the identity theory claim that a feeling is
identically the very same thing as a physical feature
of the brain (or of the world)
If that idea is combined with the presumption that classical 
physical
theory is adequate for dealing with mind-matter interaction,
then the emergence is not `natural emergence', with could make
consciousness efficacious, but is rather `supernatural emergence', which
makes consciousness epiphenomenal. It is not natural emergence
because the conscious feel,  in distinction to the liquidity
of water, or the functioning of a stream engine, is not 
describable, explanable, and understandable as simply certain 
properties of an aggregation of local classical physical parts.

> If Henry thinks that all emergent properties of 
> large-scale structures are somehow rendered impossible by 
  classical 
> physics, 

I certainly do not think that. Liquidity and the functioning of a stream
engine are natural emergent properties, and they are causally
efficacious.

> then he is denying a hell of a lot more than phenomenology: 
> on this view, *all* emergent properties of all large- and 
> medium-scale mechanisms from the trebuchet and crossbow onwards would 
> be somehow outside the scope of classical understanding.

These are all examples of `natural' emergence, which I embrace.

> 
> Stan goes on:
> 
> >Luckily quantum mechanics allows redefinition of who is 
   the observer 
> >so the split can be placed such that consciousness is also 
> >irreducible. QM is really neat in that way.
> 
> Actually this is exactly where QT fails 

I completely agree with you,  Pat, that Stan's movable
slit idea is a swindle. I pursue the vN/W ontology, which fixes
the ontology rather that allowing it to be moved around to 
fit different
problems. Most physicist who believe that basic physical theory
should strive to give more than just a set of mysterious rules
try to fix in some way the ambiguity in where `potentiality' 
changes to `actuality'. vN/W resolve this ambiguity
by NOT break the unified physical world into differently
described parts: they put the cut in the unique place 
where it naturally belongs, i.e., between brains and minds.


> Maybe I should be pleased that Henry and Stan (and Kathryn) 
  have made 
> the religious meme so clear in recent postings.

I have strictly avoided all comment on religious questions.

Henry


From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Jun  2 17:06:52 2000
To: Stanley Klein
Subject: Relative Ontology?



On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Stanley Klein wrote:
> 
> [Stan]
> I haven't talked to many physicists about relativistic 
  ontologies. 

[Henry]
I think a better term is `relative ontology' (what EXISTS is 
relative
to viewpoint) rather than `relativistic ontology', since the 
latter
term suggests merely compatibility with the technical 
Lorentz covariance
requirements of the special theory of relativity, rather 
than the idea
that what exists is not definite. 

> I 
> did, however, get the very clear impression that D'Espagnat 
  was a 
> supporter of it in several of his comments in Paris. Henry, 
  wouldn't 
> you agree? He seemed to like the moveable split. He didn't 
  want to 
> fix the position where potentiality changes to actuality.
> 

When I spoke against your idea that we should facilitate dialog
between relgious leaders and neuroscientists by saying reality
was one thing when talking to one group but another thing 
when talking to
the other, and explaining that this inconsistency was 
justified by
quantum theory, and I thus  decried the idea of 
`relative ontology',
D'Espangnat did say the some philosopher had endorsed that 
idea. But
philosophers make their living by defending, with erudition and eloquence,
patently absurd ideas: it's a good way to gain fame. That some
philosopher should defend this idea does not mean that it is 
a good or
valid doctrine. I am striving to arrive at a thoroughly 
rational and 
consistent conception of nature and our place within it, 
so the idea that
what is true depends on who you are is unacceptable to me: 
it goes against the basic idea that science should strive 
for an objective conception of reality that is equally true 
for all.

 D'Espagnat does seem to be inclined in a different direction.
His view "veiled reality" tends to
promote the view that quantum phenomena are so strange that 
nature simply
cannot be understood: it is "veiled". I am trying to push 
back that veil,
and do not accept his view that deeper probings cannot reveal 
more, or his apparent endorsement at the meeting of the notion
that self-contradiction is acceptable in science. 

Of course, the pragmatic Copenhagen outlook does renounce 
the attempt to
understand reality (better), and accepts on an equal footing 
different
formulations that give predictions that are FAPP equivalent. 
But the vN/W formulation tries to do more: it move in the 
direction of constructing a rationally coherent conception
of an integrated reality that includes our human 
streams of consciousness.


> The problem with the notion of fixing it between mind and 
  brain is 
> the question of how to make that placement unambiguous. 
  Is it only 
> humans? What about the great apes that Singer has put in 
  the news 
> lately. And how old does the human have to be before it 
  qualifies in 
> having a mind. Is there an ability to do weak collapses for 
  immature 
> minds like monkeys or infants. These seem to be nasty 
  problems for 
> someone who believes in a fixed placement between mind and 
  brain.
> 

Nature must decide these matters. The fact that we human beings
now lack the data and competence to be able to answer to 
these questions 
of detail does not prevent our using the theory for 
human mind-brains, which is what vN/W QT allows.

There is a huge difference in kind between saying that we 
do not yet know
the rule for the conditions under which proto-consciousness 
appears, and saying that we do not yet know how an experienced 
feeling can
BE an aspect of a classically conceived brain activity. The 
classical
conception of nature is so trivially simple and specific 
that we can KNOW,
a priori, that no aspect of a brain activity, as it is 
conceived of in
classical physics, can BE, say, a searing painful feeling: 
feelings, by definition, simply are not parts of the 
classical-physics conception of the physical world
as an aggregation of locally interacting localized parts, 
and there is no reason, within that
conceptualization of the physical world, to say that a 
feeling IS some
aspect of the physical world. But there is no way for us 
to know, a
priori, the conditions under which a quantum potential can 
produce or lead
to a proto-experience: the answer to that detailed question 
is not
embedded in the vN/W conception of the quantum universe, as 
we now understand it.


> There are some issues about the moveable split that I don't 
> understand. Henry, I look forward getting together with you 
  to 
> clarify them. I also really want to understand better how 
  the QZE 
> isn't affected by low level entanglements with the 
  environment. I had 
> thought that low level entanglements was equivalent to 
  low level 
> collapses FLOUP (for lifetime of universe purposes), and 
  that should 
> eliminate the QZE. I need to learn what goes wrong with 
  this line of 
> thinking. If low level entanglements are not equivalent to 
  low level 
> collapses FLOUP, then I would probably have to give up the 
  moveable 
> split interpretation.
> 

Then you "probably have to give up the moveable 
split interpretation." 


> Let me ask this: Suppose there were low level vN/W 
  collapses at the 
> submillisecond level. Could there still be a QZE at 
  the 100 msec 
> level?
> 

I am assuming that the environmental decoherence acts as per 
Tegmark's
estimates of 1/10^20 sec, and the rate of re-posing the same 
question,
repeatedly, is of the order of one per 10 milliseconds.

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Fri Jun  2 17:07:25 2000

To: Stanley Klein

Subject: Other Ontologies



On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Stanley Klein wrote:

> Pat, I can see why you wanted to send your comments about Cramer's 
> Transactional Interpretation three times. You might say it was 
> because of all the bouncing emails, but I suspect it was because you 
> wanted us to check out Cramer. I did check it out and I was impressed.
> 
> Henry or Bruce, what's the story about Cramer?? Is there any merit to 
> it? It sounds a little like Aharanov's way of looking at things. Why 
> hasn't it been discussed more over the past 15 years?
> 
> Stan
> 

Pat has emphasized several times that there are other
ontologies besides the vN/W QT that I use, and has mentioned
Cramer's Transactional interpretation several times. He uses it to
argue that quantum theory, per se, does not need to involve "the
observer", and hence to dismiss the orthodox (Copenhagen/vN/W)
interpretations as confused rubbish.

Actually, the thinking of the founders (Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli,
Dirac) and of von Neumann and Wigner, is far more acute than
that of Cramer: they rightly realized that the observer must be brought
in.

Bringing the minds of observers into basic physical theory went against
250 years of scientific tradition, and was not easily accepted by the
founders and by the rigorously minded von Neumann and Wigner.

Many modern physicists are likewise repelled by this reversion,
and want to go back to the traditional ideas of Galileo, Descartes, and
Newton. 

Bohm's model hidden-variable model was the first reasonably
successful attempt to go back. Other well-known attempts are those
of Everett, of Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber(GRW), and of Cramer.

Let me focus on Cramer's theory.

First a minor point: all the talk about the "transaction" sealed
with a "hand-shake" , and "backward-in-time propagation"  is
a colorful but superfluous verbage: one gets essentially the same theory
by just using the von Neuman theory in the Heisenberg picture, and saying
that the collapse occurs at the measuring device, where the  "transaction"
takes place. In the new state (after the collapse) one will have
expectation values that correspond to what may be viewed either as
backward propagation from the region of the measurement/transaction to the
region of the source, and forward propagation of the other particles
emerging from  that source, or forward propagation of all particles
from that source, with the condition of a proper match at the 
region of measurement/transaction. Nothing new is really added: von
Neumann has it all. But Cramer places the transition from `potential' to
`actual' at the device, which is where common sense would place it.
Indeed, Heisenberg, distinguishing "what is really happening"
from the formal mathematical theory, by using the words "potential" and
"actual" to  refer to the former, also specifies that the transition
from `potential' to `actual' occurs at the measuring device. So Cramer
is essentially just using von Neumann's more ontological viewpoint of the
significance of the formalism, along with the common-sense idea that the
collapse actually occurs in association with the macroscopic mechanical
device. Thus Cramer's interpretation is essentially  incorporated
into the vN interpretation by asserting that the measuring device
is a "player/participant/collapser/transactioner"

Cramer's interpretation is trivially incorporatable into the
vN interpretation by just specifying that the device is a 
"participant/player/collapser".

Of course, there is then the question of which states the collapse 
is into. 

For a device that was built to measure some property, which is
displayed by a motion of a pointer we have no qualms about 
saying
what the possible states are: the builders designed the 
device to measure
some specified property. But what if some big lump of 
matter is `just there', and that a photon gets absorbed by it?
Is this a collapser? What are the preferred states? What is 
the Yes-No question?

We are thus driven back to the basic questions of what 
determines
which systems are "collapsers", or "transactors", and what 
decides what the Yes-No question is, for some general 
macroscopic lump of matter that is a collapser? 

These are the questions that
the founders, and von Neumann and Wigner, recognized as the 
essential
questions. To resolve these questions in a way that provided 
a practically useful science they brought in the *users* 
of the theory.

What really is the rationale for trying to construct a theory
of nature without us in it? We are in it! And we seem to play 
a dynamical role in it. Why try to root out consciousness, 
and revert to a theory with no natural place or need for 
consciousness, when the data seems to force us to a theory 
in which we play a role similar to the one that we
actually seem to play?

And if we accept Cramer's theory, what does it say about the
quantum effects in our brains? What `transactions' are 
occurring there? His theory would root the observer out of 
`us human beings', and reduce us to quantum zombies! 

But to keep each one of us from being a superposition of 
many experiential different possibilities one must have 
collapses somewhere in our body-brain, and that requires
some process or rule for "choosing the question".

Even if Cramer could succeed in finding some mindless way of
choosing the question, why is that a better way? Would 
such a theory, yet to be devised, be an improvement on a 
theory that recognizes our thoughts, explains in terms of 
the in-built dynamical structure how our thoughts 
are related to our actions? Why reject a mindful solution
in favor of a mindless one?

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Mon Jun  5 16:14:41 2000
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 16:09:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov

Subject: Re: Other Ontologies (fwd)

To: pat hayes



On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, pat hayes wrote:

> >Pat has emphasized several times that there are other
> >ontologies besides the vN/W QT that I use, and has mentioned
> >Cramer's Transactional interpretation several times. He uses it to
> >argue that quantum theory, per se, does not need to involve "the
> >observer", and hence to dismiss the orthodox (Copenhagen/vN/W)
> >interpretations as confused rubbish.
> 
> Well, I apologise for being overly strong in my rhetoric. But the CI 
> is certainly very puzzling and philosophically unsatisfactory, as I 
> think even its own inventors admitted.

Yes! That is why I go over to the von Neumann/Wigner interpretation,
which can be construed as a partial descriptions of reality.
This reality has physical aspects and psychological aspects, and dynamical
rules that connect them.


> 
> >Actually, the thinking of the founders (Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli,
> >Dirac) and of von Neumann and Wigner, is far more acute than
> >that of Cramer: they rightly realized that the observer must be brought
> >in.
> 
> The impression I get is that they (at least Heisenberg, Dirac, von 
> Neumann and Pauli) were very unhappy about "bringing in" the 
> observer, and did so only with considerable reluctance, but saw no 
> alternative.

Yes.

> 
> >Bringing the minds of observers into basic physical theory went against
> >250 years of scientific tradition, and was not easily accepted by the
> >founders and by the rigorously minded von Neumann and Wigner.
> 
> It continues to be against scientific tradition, and is still 
> unacceptable, particularly when it plays no actual role in the 
> physical theory itself but only in the philosophical explanation of 
> what the theory means, an explanation which is widely - almost 
> universally - acknowledged as unsatisfactory.

A physical theory does not stand alone, apart from and understanding that
allows one to use it. The Copenhagen interpretation is basically an
attempt to try to formulate the background ideas that would allow
working physicists to use the mathematical rules in a consistent way
without getting involved in contradictions. It is and was very successful
in achieving that objective, and continues to be taught and used, in
effect, today.


> 
> >Many modern physicists are likewise repelled by this reversion,
> >and want to go back to the traditional ideas of Galileo, Descartes, and
> >Newton.
> 
> Cheap shot. Wanting physics to be about the physical universe is 
> hardly wanting to turn the clock back three centuries.
> 

I did not mean it to be perjorative, but merely descriptive: the basic
ideas of those founders was to get mind out of physical theory, by
focussing on mathematical descriptions of quantities localized in
spacetime: These "physical" aspects were to be separated from the
psychologically described aspect of nature.


> >Bohm's model hidden-variable model was the first reasonably
> >successful attempt to go back. Other well-known attempts are those
> >of Everett, of Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber(GRW), and of Cramer.
> >
> >Let me focus on Cramer's theory.
> >
> >First a minor point: all the talk about the "transaction" sealed
> >with a "hand-shake" , and "backward-in-time propagation"  is
> >a colorful but superfluous verbage: one gets essentially the same theory
> >by just using the von Neumann theory in the Heisenberg picture, and saying
> >that the collapse occurs at the measuring device, where the  "transaction"
> >takes place.
> 
> Well, Cramer spends quite a lot of time arguing that this is 
> misleading, since it places the transaction at a particular time, and 
> an important part of his intepretation is that the completed 
> transaction cannot be located at any particular time. 


In the vN/W QT, in the Heisenberg picture, the collapse does not occur
at a particular `time' (part of spacetime), but is an event that spans
spacetime, just as Cramer's transaction does. The event occurs in
`process time', which is akin to Cramer's `pseudotime'.
Cramer asserts that in the TI the collapse of the state vector
is to be interpreted as the completion of a transaction.
(The full transaction occurs not at the measuring device: it occurs over a
spacetime region, just as does the collapse event in the Heisenberg
picture.)

> 
> >In the new state (after the collapse)
> 
> But in the TI there are no collapsings, because there are no 
> superposed states to collapse. 

There certainly are collapses in TI: when the transagtion is completed
the state vector is different from what it formerly was.
> That is one of the beauties of the 
> interpretation. In the TI, the cat in Schrodingers box really does 
> either live or die (with 50% probability)

This is because the collapse is supposed to occur in conjunction
with a transaction involving some particle and some potential
absorber, namely the particle dectector. But that means that something
has singled out that detector as more than just an aggregation of
quantum particles that can exist in a superposed state. There are many
experiments, now, in which the superposed states of singe atoms
are prepared by absorption of photons, and are later detected. So
when experimental conditions permit tests to be performed atons do not
act like collapsers, even though a "transaction" dialog with the photon
emitter can be constructed. Standard quantum theory asserts that there
is no collapse in such a circumstance, and experiments performed in the
last decade strongly support the correctness of that prediction.
So we have here the root question: what determines when the "absorber"
collapses the state vector, considered as something real, and hence
definite. 

> and when one opens the box 
> nothing collapses: one simply sees whatever chance and time have 
> wrought. The thing that killed the cat wasnt your opening the box, 
> but the geiger counter really getting the alpha particle. 

Was it the whole Geiger counter, or some atoms in it? What is it that
makes the difference between the aggregation of atoms, none of which
collapses, and the whole Geiger counter that does?

> Once that 
> happens, all indeterminacy is finished, and the cat stays 100% dead, 
> whether the box is open or closed. Its all to do with alpha 
> particles, nothing to do with information.
> 
> >one will have
> >expectation values that correspond to what may be viewed either as
> >backward propagation from the region of the measurement/transaction to the
> >region of the source, and forward propagation of the other particles
> >emerging from  that source, or forward propagation of all particles
> >from that source, with the condition of a proper match at the
> >region of measurement/transaction. Nothing new is really added: von
> >Neumann has it all.
> 
> To me, the prettiest part isnt that anything is added, but that so 
> much wierdness is removed. You are right that one can describe the 
> whole process in terms of forward propogation plus a 'proper match', 
> but this condition is now somewhat magical. If all propogation is 
> forwards, how can the 'proper match on arrival' conditions impose 
> anything on results detected earlier? One has to attribute intention 
> to the photons, or send them back in time to try again, or say that 
> they tried doing it both properly and improperly but one of the 
> options collapses away to nothing. But Cramer's interpretation 
> removes the need for such magic.
> 

Cramer stresses that just the interpretation changes not the formulas.
The basic formula is the overlap integral 

Integral Psi_1 Psi_2* dv      (Cramer 11b) Rev. Mod. Phys. 58. 647 (1986)

Here Psi_1 is an initial state and Psi_2 is a possible final state.

But then the usual key question arises: what determines/chooses 
the set of possible orthonormal states Psi_2? One must have some
particular orthonormal set of possible states Psi_2 in order to get the
probabilities to add up to unity! But at atom can absorb a photon with
`horizontal' polarization or with `vertical' polarization, with respect 
to an continuum of different "horizons", by rotation of coordinate
axis, or one might choose two directions of circular polarization.
One must pick out some particular basis in order  to make the 
probability calculus work. That is one of the two key problems that must
be faced in constructing a realistic interpretation of QT. The other
is the question of where to place the cut between the "atomic" level 
absorber events, which not collapse the state vector, and the 
experienced events, which are collapsed to states corresponding to
definite experiences. I see no indication in Cramer's RPM article
of how either of these two key questions are to be answered. They 
are the questions that are answered by the vN/W interpretation.
So it seems to me that TI fails to address the essential questions
that were seen to be such by the founders and by von Neumann and Wigner.
.....
> >
> >Of course, there is then the question of which states the collapse
> >is into.
> >
> >For a device that was built to measure some property, which is
> >display it by a motion of a pointer we have no qualms about saying
> >what the possible states are: the builders designed the device to measure
> >some specified property. But what if some big lump of matter is just
> >there, and a photon gets absorbed by it? Is this a collapser?
> 
> Yes. And photons tend to get absorbed by small pieces of big lumps in 
> rather precise ways, which have nothing to do with the intentions of 
> the people who constructed the apparatus. (How could it possibly 
> depend on that? Why did anyone take this idea seriously?)
> 

In order to make the probability formulas work one must specify
the "basis" that one is using to define the "possible
final states". And infinite number of basis sets is possible,
a priori. So some extra principle must be put in to complete
the theory. This is precisely the key problem in formulation
a realistic interpretation of QT. Cramer does not seem to have addressed
it. His examples are such that the basis is specified by the human
observers who have set up an experiment such that the basis is defined
by what they can see (e.g., Geiger counters firing or not firing.)

But what about firing photons into lumps of matter that have no 
detectable reaction?
 

> >What are the preferred states? What is the Yes-No question?
> 
> There are no Yes-No questions, which is to me a huge relief, since 
> this entire business of 'questions' being 'put' to Nature doesnt seem 
> to make any sense.

But it is essential to the probability interpretation!
It is the `choice of basis' problem!


Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 11:38:06 2000
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 20:34:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: Stan Klein <klein@spectacle.berkeley.edu>

Subject: Re: QZE and speed of light



On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Stan Klein wrote:
...
> [Henry]
> >This reduction is not a "real" reduction, because if one acquires, in some
> >way, information about the enviromment then one can single out a subset
> >of cases where some observation on the environment yields one outcome
> >rather than some other outcome, and in this *subset* of cases there can be
> >interference effects between the two parts of the `statistical
> >mixture'. This means that there was no real reduction, but only an
> >effective reduction caused by a lack of information about the environment.
> 
> [Stan]
> This is sounding like what I suspected. Somehow 'mind' must be able 
> to make use of information about the environment. 

I said just the opposite, that the empirical confirmations of QZE
pertain to the merely effective, hence nonreal, `collapses' associated
with interaction with an enviroment, and hence NOT associated with *mind*,
whereas I use the *real* vN/W collapse associated with the mind-matter
interaction. This does not involve any interaction with the environment,
and is effectively orthogonal to and disconnected from the environmental
decoherence, which is connected to the environment.

>  How does mind do 
> it? For me to do my calculation on how easy mind can do it I need to 
> see a simple example of the apparatus that can do the QZE. 

No apparatus except a brain that interact with mind via the vN/W rules
is involved.

> I guess 
> you are having the questions coming at 1 msec speed (I had previously 
> thought it was at 100 msec intervals). So let's consider a physical 
> apparatus that asks questions of a system every 1 msec. And let's 
> further suppose that the system gets entangled with the environment 
> every 0.1 msec. Henry, I need to know how the apparatus makes the 
> proper projection operator P to do the QZE. I suspect that the 
> entanglements will make it a difficult enterprise. Or is it still 
> pretty simple?
> 

There is no apparatus apart from a brain that has sluggish macro-scopic
variables (formed by averaging over ~10^23 particle positions) that
are the variables associated with the conscious experience: take
the electric field formed from the sum of the contributions of all the
neurons that are creating the slowly changing macro fields associated
with the conscious experience, and treat those neurons quasiclassically:
treat them as classical neurons, because they are fully reduced to
such by the rapid decoherence effects, then form a classical mixture
of these fully reduced classical neurons, and let S(t) be the
representation is this mixture, but actually a real state, since the
decoherence effect does not produce a real mixture, but merely an
effective one.

This state S(t) already has the full effect of the environmental
decoherence built in, and P is a projection based on slowly
evolving variables with, in particular, only slow leakage from
the P subspace to the (1-P) subspace. Then my derivation in
"A Quantum Theory of Mind" proves that H-->PHP + (1-P)H(1-P)
if the rate if asking questions is fast on the scale of the 
transition rate from P to (1-P).


So, Yes, it is pretty simple.

Henry


From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 11:41:49 2000
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 21:47:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: augustyn@erim-int.com
Subject: Re: Other Ontologies (fwd)



On Fri, 2 Jun 2000 augustyn@erim-int.com wrote:

> Dear Henry,
> 
.......
> 
> Back to your theory:  I'm still puzzled about your 
enthusiasm for the concept of
> the conscious self assenting or not assenting to put to 
nature a yes-or-no
> question served up by the computational brain.  I'm 
perfectly comfortable with
> the idea of mechanical brain processes "having their way" 
with the conscious
> self.   I'm completely stumped (and have been for some 
months since you first
> came up with the idea) by the concept of assenting or 
not assenting to a
> yes-or-no question coming from "below".  I get "commands" 
from below,  which
> could be translated into "Find something to eat" or  
"Stop trying to write this
> and go watch TV".  I never seem to get questions.  
I can't even imagine my
> non-conscious self coming up with questions.  Your examples 
such as "am I
> lifting my arm? - yes I am" are very far from any 
reality that I experience.
> 
> Ken
> 

The element of freedom within vN/W QT that I am trying to 
exploit
is the freedom to choose which question is put to nature, 
and when 
it will be put. Putting the question can be represented by 
the vN process I, namely, 

S(t) = P S(t-) P + (1-P) S(t-)  (1-P).

Which question is put corresponds to which P is used, 
and when it is put corresponds to the time t in this equation.

The mind-matter connection is based on the postulate that each
experience E is accompanied by a reduction 
S(t+) = P(E) S(t-) P(E) 
to a form "compatible" with E.


Each experience is a certain specific feeling.
In the mental growth of the person the various feelings become
connected by a web of linkages that arise from the combinations 
of the reduction events S-->P(E) S P(E), and the Schroedinger 
evolution of S(t) between these reduction events. These 
dynamical connections clothe these feeling with meanings: 
Each experience E comes to represent the anticipated, 
expected, or intended form of the experiences that tend,
under suitable conditions, to flow causally from the 
associated reduction S--> P(E) SP(E). Thus the experience of 
seeing a red rose in the garden becomes associated with 
expectations of what will be experience if one looks at a 
certain place in the garden. And the feeling of effort
to raise one's arm becomes associated with the expectation 
that, under certain conditions of noncontraint, the 
arm will rise.

According to this theory a person's stream of consciousness 
consists of the clothed experiences of the affirmative 
answers represented physically by the reductions to P(E)S P(E),
together with a feeling of effort to influence this ongoing 
stream of consciousness (which is driven by
questions that are created by unconscious processes).
The experience of examining a rose in the garden is regarded 
as the stream of affirmative answers to a rapid sequence of 
questions of the form  "Does feature F hold or not? These 
features F themselves get refined by inquiries as to what 
feature of the feature is to be examined. The process
that underlies the conscious process is, then, a stream of 
particular questions. But consciousness does not formulate 
these questions: it merely OK's the possibilities that meet 
high-level criteria pertaining to objectives.

This idea of mental process is, I believe, in general 
agreement with the writings of Wm. James (Briefer Course: 
Ch. Attention). He defines preperception to be "imagining 
of an experience before it occurs" and says "the only things
that we commonly see  are those that we preperceive."
And a digital computer that `perceives' its environment must,
I believe, basically put internally well posed questions to its
environment.

The effort to raise one's arm is the effort to keep attention 
focussed on the intention to raise the arm. 

According to this theory the QZE effect can keep attention 
focussed on the intention to raise the arm by rapidly 
repeating the putting of the question "Am I attending to my 
intention to raise my arm?" This is process of using the QZE 
to keep attention focussed on that intention is experienced 
as effort to keep attention focussed on that intention to 
raise the arm.



The theory itself, in its present stage of development,
makes no claim as to the nature of the process behind
the occurrence of this phenomena of efficacious effort:
it could be reducible to a macrolocal process built upon
the informational structure already present in the Hilbert
space structure, or upon something even more abstract. The 
first possibility would be a quantum version of the identity
theory of consciousness.

Indeed, the vN/W theory distinguishes the aspects of nature 
that are described in "experiential" and "physical" terms, and
specifies dynamical connections between them, but not specify
that these two informational structures are not just aspects
of a single coherently conceivable informational structure.
Indeed, they already appear to be that.

Henry




From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 11:43:12 2000
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 11:25:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: e-forum list
To: Stanley Klein 
Subject: Re: QZE and quantum collapses.


On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Stanley Klein wrote:

> [Henry]
> >There is 

in the case of the conscious human subject under consideration

> >no apparatus apart from a brain that has sluggish macro-scopic
> >variables (formed by averaging over ~10^23 particle positions) that
> >are the variables associated with the conscious experience: take
> >the electric field formed from the sum of the contributions of all the
> >neurons that are creating the slowly changing macro fields associated
> 
> 
> [Stan]
> This didn't help much for being an example showing me how to do the 
> QZE calculation after the system had repeatedly undergone 
> environmental contact. I need to see how to do it with a much simpler 
> system, like maybe with 4 particles rather than 10^23. That would put 
> me on the path to seeing what the mind is needing to do. Are you 
> saying that the brain is special in being able to have an organized 
> collapse or are you saying the mind is special in being able to 
> produce a very special P?
> 
> To further my understanding of the QZE let me ask about the converse 
> situation (QZE without collapses). Let's start with the presently 
> done QZE with excited atoms being looked at continuously. I presume 
> there wasn't a human doing the rapid viewings. Does that mean that 
> the QZE doesn't need collapses?
> 

In the QZE effect with excited atoms (PRA  41, 2295-2300) there was no
*real* collapse, in my terminology, and no need for interaction with a
human brain, except for the observations that reveal the slowing down of
a transition that would be occurring in the absence of the probing
measurements. This slowing down (of a transition that would otherwise be
induced by an applied rf) is caused by a rapid set of effective
measurement operations, which produce photons that "could" be detected, to
reveal which state the atom is in, but which are not actually observed by
anyone. In spite of this somewhat `virtual' quality of the measurement
(no one actually sees the photons that would reveal which state
the particle is in) the very fact that this information is present in the
universe ensures that it is "as if" a measurement is performed, and a
collapse to one atomic  state or the other had really occurred: the state
of the atom is *effectively* reduced to a statistical mixture of the
two possible states: the `vN process I' occurs *effectively*. One could
determine which of the two possible states is *the one actually present*
by actually observing in an appropriate way the photons that carry the
measurement information.

But then why do I say *effectively*: it seems the one could say that the
collapse really does occur in this case!

No, one cannot say that! One could in principle (and there are similar
experiments where this is actually done) collect the photons that reveal
the state of the atom, and perform a measurement that combines them with
the photons (or lack thereof) associated with the alternative possibility,
so that the information carried be those photons is actually destroyed.
Then one can look at the *subset* of cases corresponding to one of the
possible outcomes of that second measurement, which  destroys the
information pertaining to the outcome of the first measurement, which 
measured which state the atom is in,  and find effects that are due to an
interference between the two states of the atom. Thus the first
measurement did not achieve a real collapse at all: it was merely an
*effective* collapse, which is effective insofar as no information is
available to us about the photons that convey the information about the
state of the atom. 

The whole quantum formalism is amazingly consistent when viewed from this
information theoretic point of view: it gives well defined predictions
about what we human observers will observe, and these predictions seem
always to be borne out. 

But in the vN/W interpretation, and also the Copenhagen interpretation,
`the buck stops at the human observers': when a human observer observes
a definite outcome there is a real collapse. It is of course true that
in an ontological approach human beings cannot be singled out as special.
But orthodox QT deals only with real collapses associated with human
observers. So I cannot give you a simpler example: this is the only place
that orthodox theory unequivocally specifies that real collapses occur.
These are the orthodox real collapses that I am talking about. 

Further discussion is speculative. But I believe the minimal
requirements for a  `collapsing system' is that the system be
complex enough so that certain collapses create in that
system the tendencies for a later collapse of the  same kind: i.e., that
the system has the capacity, via a sequence of suffiently closely space
(in time) collapses, to sustain, via QZE, its identity. The efficacy of
QZE in self maintainence, would thereby become the defining characteristic
of systems that can effect real collapses.


Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 11:44:08 2000
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 07:58:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: e-forum list
To: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: QZE and quantum collapses.



On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote:

> Henry,
> 
> >But then why do I say *effectively*: it seems the one 
> >could say that the
> >collapse really does occur in this case!
> >
> >No, one cannot say that!
> 
> Why not?
> 

I explained why not. In that case, where the QZE effect
had been empirically observed (which was the case that
Stan asked about) the "measuring device" consisted of
just a few photons, and in such cases, where one can
feasibly do experiments that combine the states corresponding
to the alternative possible final states of the measuring 
device, quantum theory can make definite predictions that
involve interference between the alternative states
of the atom. Thus the atom cannot have actually done a real
collapse to one state or the other.

Experiments (quantum eraser experiments) of this kind,
which reconstitute interference effects that seem to have
been wiped out by a "measurement" whose outcomes was never
observed by a human observer, or recorded by a big macroscopic
recording device, have been successfully performed, and the 
predictions of orthodox QT have been confirmed. 

These successes have inclined most quantum physicists to
believe, tentatively, that the unambiguous predictions
of QT in cases that are practically feasible will probably
be validated whenever experiments are performed, though there 
is a healthy desire to check out this expectation where 
possible, since a breakdown in the predictions of QT would 
be a major discovery (of Nobel quality).


> OK, that's a rhetorical question.  One cannot if one is 
> to keep the 
> orthodox interpretation.
> 
> But what is really wrong (as distinct from non-orthodox) 
> with 
> assuming that the cat either lives or dies at the time 
> the atom 
> either does or does not radiate and is or is not detected by the 
> detector, whether or not anyone ever opens the box and 
> looks?  What 
> is wrong with assuming "as if" collapses ARE real collapses?
> 

That is another matter. The case that I was commenting on
(in answer to Stan's query) was a case where the QZE had been
emirically observed, and in that case the "measuring device"
consisted of just a few photons, and the was no recording
of the result in a macroscopic recording device, such as 
a cat that is dead or alive. The central problem in going
beyond  Copenhagen QT is to give a principled answer
to the question of when a system switches over from being
a quantum system that obeys the Schroedinger equation to being
a real recorder/collapser. Most physicists would agree that a
cat is a real recorder but that three photons are not.


> >The whole quantum formalism is amazingly consistent when viewed from this
> >information theoretic point of view: it gives well defined predictions
> >about what we human observers will observe, and these predictions seem
> >always to be borne out.
> >
> >But in the vN/W interpretation, and also the Copenhagen interpretation,
> >`the buck stops at the human observers': when a human observer observes
> >a definite outcome there is a real collapse. It is of course true that
> >in an ontological approach human beings cannot be singled out as special.
> >But orthodox QT deals only with real collapses associated with human
> >observers. So I cannot give you a simpler example: this is the only place
> >that orthodox theory unequivocally specifies that real collapses occur.
> >These are the orthodox real collapses that I am talking about.
> 
> The orthodox interpretation is way too anthropocentric for 
> my taste.
> 

Yes, one must eventually go beyond that, but the question
at issue, in my discussion with Stan,  was whether QZE could be effective
in a human brain.


> It can't be falsified, can it?  Clearly no human has observed what 
> goes on when there are no human observers looking.
> 

As I said, there are (quantum eraser) experiments in which the collapses
that seem to have occurred, due to a "measurement" by a simple "device"
consisting of a few photons, are reversed by doing a suitable measurement
on the "device". [This measurement destroys the information that is
contained in this device about the state of the measured system, and
produces an observable outcome that can be used to define a subset of
cases in which an interference between the alternative possible states of
the original measured system is observed.] So these experiments falsify
the idea that a real collapse has occurred in these measurements by
these simple systems: a real collapse, by definition, cannot be undone
by a procedure that one might do later.

> >Further discussion is speculative. But I believe the minimal
> >requirements for a  `collapsing system' is that the system be
> >complex enough so that certain collapses create in that
> >system the tendencies for a later collapse of the  same kind: i.e., that
> >the system has the capacity, via a sequence of suffiently closely space
> >(in time) collapses, to sustain, via QZE, its identity. The efficacy of
> >QZE in self maintainence, would thereby become the defining characteristic
> >of systems that can effect real collapses.
> 
> So any far from equilibrium autopoietic dissipative 
> structure would do, right?
> 
> Kathy
> 
> 
> 
 
It is speculative, and would need to be made precise
for a true ontology, but this may be a good tack.
We are just at the beginning of trying to understand
how to go beyond the orthodox theories.


Henry




From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 12:38:37 2000
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 09:25:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: e-forum list
To: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>
Cc: kleinlist
Subject: Quantum process and Mind



On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote:


>[Stan, says] 
> >Classical neurons can quite easily do all the behavior that Henry 
> >and Jeff desire. We need to remember the strength of the quantum 
> >effects.
> 
> I don't know enough physics to have really solid intuitions here, but 
> the words Henry and Jeff use seem to imply that mind operates through 
> some field unknown to current physics, that corresponds to the 
> Jamesian concepts of "will" or "attention."
> 
> If it's a field, it must have observable effects.  I don't know 
> whether QZE is the place to look for the observable effects, but it's 
> worth a try.
> 
> >I think Henry wants the Zeno decision to come from an outside mental 
> >realm, not from the QED equations themselves.
> 
> The QED equations don't specify which operator to apply when. 
> Already that has to come from outside the equations themselves.
> 
> If there is some "information field" an organism can make use of in 
> making its choice, there would be no violation of the QED equations 
> and the macroscopic effects might be subtle and much harder to detect 
> than "physical" fields.
> 

The relevant "information field" is mathematically represented by S(t):
it is therefore not outside physics at all, but is precisely the 
mathematical structure that represents, according to QT, the physical
universe. But the issue is the nature of the "process" that acts upon
this physical state. Part of this process is the Schroedinger equation.
A second part is the part that gives the collapses.

Let us consider first the "ordinary" Schroedinger part. This seems
at first unproblematic: we have become comfortable with the idea that
nature should be governed by local partial differential equations.

But, really, this is a profound mystery. As Feynman himself remarked,
how can nature possible exactly solve by local processing a set of
partial differential equations? To work out by local processing even
the tinyest part of this process would involve a continuously infinite
set of numbers and operations. It would seem beyond the power of all
creation to able to handle such huge numbers of numbers and processes.
Many thinkers believe that such processing is beyond the majesty of even
the most powerful deity, and that nature must, at bottom, operate via
discrete processing, with the local continuous description just an
approximation.

If this is so, then the two parts of the processing, the "normal"
Schroedinger evolution and the discrete jumps, may not be, in the end,
so hugely different: this separation is probably just a product of or
present incomplete state of understanding. We must use it at present to
help us reach an understanding of the deeper discrete process that it
approximates.

So I do not see the process that leads to the collapse as in any way
fundamentally different from the process that leads to the Schroedinger
equation: it is no more "outside" than any other process of nature.
But the distances from which it gathers information is greater:
the question-selection process can access information from all over
the brain, whereas the process the generates the Schroedinger evolution
accesses information over a much smaller region. The process that
"answers" the question operates on a global scale. The three parts of the
tripartite process thus act nonlocally over different scales. But the key
point is that at our present level of understanding three processes must
act on the state to generate its time evolution. We currently understand
more about the "local" and "global" ones than  we do about the
"macrolocal" question-asking one.

Eventually, one would like to understand the state S(t) in such a way that
it represents both the processor and that which is processed.

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Thu Jun  8 12:39:40 2000
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 11:05:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: e-forum list
To: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Quantum process and Mind



On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote:

> Henry,
> 
> >The relevant "information field" is mathematically represented by S(t):
> >it is therefore not outside physics at all,
> 
> Yes, you're right.  I misspoke.  It's the "mental effort" field I was 
> hypothesizing might be an as yet unknown field.
> 

There is a basic issue buried here. Any feeling is an experience,
and experiences are supposed to be part of the  reality that is described
in QT: experience is the coming into being of the new information
represented by a quantum event S-->PSP, and conversely this mathematical
event is the representation of the experience. If the present experience
involves a feeling of effort then the rules that determine from the
present and past what will come next, and when it will come, must tend to
make the next event come sooner. But one must, I think, draw at first a
distinction between the feeling of effort that influences, via rules,
the coming events and the "manner" in which this felt effort affects the
coming events. This "manner" may be via simple rules: the  effort itself
may not be a "field" that  extends through time and "causes" something.

Of course, the effect may not be via merely some logical
formulas that convert the experience of effort into an effect on later
events: it may be rather a direct causal effect of some "field"
that extends out from the region of the experiential event. 
But it may not be possible to distinguish such a "field" from 
the logical rule that specifies its effects on future events. 

From one point of view it may be better to speak in terms of just
the logical rules and not  get too enmeshed in ideas  about
entities that effect these rules. For if one speaks of these entities
then one must speak of the rules that  tie *them* to the events
that are represented by the evolving S(t). My own preference is to speak
basically about these experiential events and the logical/mathematical
rules that connect them to each other, recognizing that one must
eventually include also proto-experiences that are not yet clearly
specified.

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Mon Jun 12 13:11:41 2000
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 13:11:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Cc: hpstapp@lbl.gov
Subject: Re: QZE and quantum collapses.



On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, pat hayes wrote:

> >On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, pat hayes wrote:
> >
> > > >Experiments (quantum eraser experiments) of this kind,
> > > >which reconstitute interference effects that seem to have
> > > >been wiped out by a "measurement" whose outcomes was never
> > > >observed by a human observer, or recorded by a big macroscopic
> > > >recording device, have been successfully performed, and the
> > > >predictions of orthodox QT have been confirmed.
> > >
> > > Er...I can't help asking... does a cat in a box count as a big
> > > macroscopic recording device?
> > >
> > > Pat
> > >
> >
> >Absolutely!  No interference has been observed between states
> >that correspond the a "macroscopic" pointer: it is totally unfeasible
> >to bring  all the 10^28 particles from the  dead and alive cats back
> >to some common state. So, FAPP, a collapse can be said to have occurred:
> >no one would suggest that  it is feasible the make the dead and alive cat
> >interfer.
> 
> OK, I'm learning. Now let me ask a further question. Suppose that by 
> some miracle/accident/fluke (or maybe if the universe is 
> longer-lasting than Stan thinks it is) , the 10^28 particles involved 
> were to somehow get themselves back into a sufficiently correlated 
> state.  Would you (or 'standard QT') predict that in this case, one 
> would then find interference? I take it that the conventional QT 
> expectation would be that one would, right? Which implies, if I 
> understand this correctly, that in a sense there are no *real* 
> collapsings, only what might be called thermodynamic burials, where 
> the interferable correspondences are just too scattered to keep track 
> of; but if something were able to keep track of them, the 
> interferences would always be there.
> 
> I gather that Heisenberg proposed this idea but that it has been 
> subsequently criticised, but I don't know the details of the critique.
> 
> Pat
> 
> PS. The significance of this thermodynamic idea for brains would be, 
> in part, that the only way to put the particles in a brain back into 
> the coherent state would involve killing the organism. Life depends 
> on macroscopic energy use, and such flows of energy (I'm thinking of 
> things like oxidation of blood sugars) inevitably bury quantum 
> coherence quite rapidly, right?
> 


Dear Pat,

Copenhagen QT is presented as a practical tool for making computations
about observations made by human beings on the basis of information
available to them. It is not an ontology, and hence need not answer
hypothetical questions that never do actually arise. So FAPP the cat
*can be considered* either definitelty dead or definitely alive.
The unfeasibility of this experiment is built into the idea of the
Copenhagen interpretation, as it is most conservatively construed.


But if one could, by some miracle do this experiment, then the Copenhagen 
prediction  would. I think, be that the interference would occur: that is
one reason why I said that the Copenhagen prediction was a FAPP
prediction: the other reason is that the most conservative position
would be to just reject the question as unphysical nonsense.

Even if a human observer HO were inserted in place of the cat there would
still be no actual contradiction with CI: after the two distinct states of
the human being were brought together, and some measurement was made that
allows us to observe a coherent superposition of these two
states---which would  mean that HO was killed , or at least that his
memory of his intermediate state was obliterated (along with all
records of that state)---then computations by the surviving human beings
could, according to the Copenhagen principles, measure the interference 
effects. The point is that in the strict CI there is no ontological 
commitment to what "really" happens, but just an identification of a
consistent set of rules for computing probabilities for would we would
observe under specified observational conditions.

That is all pretty neat: one just talks about what human beings
can observe and compute, and never makes a commitment as to what
really exists or happens.

In the vN/W interpretation there is, I believe, a commitment to
to an actual collapse when a human being experiences the outcome.
So in this case the prediction would be that NO interference
would  occur in the case that the interfence between the two 
relevant states of the human brain were observed. Thus there would be a
difference "in principle", but none "in practice", between the
CI and the vNH/W interpretation. 

If one wanted to attach to CI an idea of what is actually happening then I
believe that one is forced to an Everett-type theory. But the founders
effectively evaded that no-collapse conclusion by simply renouncing
any ontological content beyond the existence of our thoughts. That
leaves the door open to either a "no-collapse" or a 
"collapse-at-human-observer" ontology, or to a "collapse-at-
living-organism" interpretation: all are FAPP equivalent, and no sharp
definition of the terms is needed. For in the CI the only testable
predictions concern experiments that are actually carried out: if
one can actually carry out an experiment involving interfence of two
states of an "observer" then the CI would, I would say, be that 
the interference should occur. If the observer was a human observer
then one would have experimental support for an Everett-type universe,
as contrasted to a vN/W-type universe.

Any empirical evidence of a "real" collapse, as opposed to an effective
one, would be a major discovery, because it would set off an experimental 
pursuit of the question: under what conditions does such a "real" collapse
occur?

Henry


From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Wed Jun 21 21:01:37 2000
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 10:51:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Cc: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>, kleinlist <A.sloman@bham.ac.uk>,
     bdj10@cam.ac.uk, brings@rpi.edu, brucero@cats.ucsc.edu,
     ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu, hameroff@u.arizona.edu, hpstapp@lbl.gov,
     Jeffrey M. Schwartz <jmschwar@ucla.edu>, keith@imprint.co.uk,
     klein@adage.berkeley.edu, patrickw@monash.edu.au
Subject: Re: Other Ontologies



On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, pat hayes wrote:

> >I'm copying Henry on this because we're having discussions on what 
> >he does or doesn't think, and it seems appropriate to let him have 
> >his say if he wishes.
> 
> OK, I'll do the same. Henry, please don't feel under any pressure to 
> respond, though if my account of your views (towards the end of the 
> message) is misleading then I'd appreciate your letting me know.
> .....
> 
....
> >>>>Henry has always insisted that modern QT *requires* one to accept 
> >>>>a role for consciousness in physics,
> >
> >I don't agree with that, if that's what Henry really is saying.
> 

What I said is that the founders seemed to find it necessary to bring mind
into the theory in order to get a coherent, workable, and satisfactory
theory, and that von Neumann and Wigner followed them in this respect.
Thus in these two "orthodox" theories, the human mind is brought in.

Later workers tried to get mind back out. Whether they succeeded or
not is open to question. 

The many-worlds approach does not evade bringing in mind. It brings
in mind in an even more central role: 
the theory must somehow explain how all of the many real minds can 
get sorted out in a way that makes the probabilities come out right
in each individual stream of consciousness. 

I believe that it is not possible to achieve this. But in  any case, 
many worlds/minds does not get mind out. 

Bohm's interpretation was an effort to get mind out. But he later tried to
get mind back into this interpretation. He tried to evade the problem
of an epiphenomenal mind, which classical physical theory is saddled with,
by introducing an infinite digression of states of states, but confounding    
us with infinities is not a happy solution.

His model, and all other "realistic" models require an explicit
"physical" instantaneous action-at-a-distance. The founders evaded this
"instantaneous physical action" by rejecting realism in favor of
pragmatism, so that the occurring instantaneous changes far away were mere
changes in our knowledge of the far-away "system".

> Unless I badly misunderstand him, that is built into the version of 
> QT within which he is operating: consciousness is where the collapses 
> really happen.

Yes, I follow vN/W!

[Kathy]
> >
> >>>Consciousness is a phenomenon I know exists, at least to the 
> >>>degree I know anything. In fact, I'm more sure that consciousness 
> >>>exists than I am that the computer screen in front of me exists. 
> >>>(I may be a brain in a vat hooked up to the Matrix computer, but 
> >>>even if so, I AM conscious.)  As something whose existence I'm 
> >>>surer of than I am of the existence of "real physical" things, I'd 
> >>>like to have a scientific theory for consciousness.
>
[Pat] 
> A few years ago I realized that I, personally, disagree with 
> Descartes. I'm more certain that the computer screen (or tree, or 
> whatever I'm looking at) exists than I am that I exist.  I think that 
> what needs explaining is why things like our brains believe in the 
> things that we call our consciousness.
> 
> >>>Constructing my scientific theory for consciousness to be 
> >>>consistent with what science tells me about the world would seem 
> >>>to be a useful thing to do, if the history of science is any 
> >>>guide.  Therefore, it seems reasonable to construct a theory in 
> >>>which there is a role for consciousness in physics,
> >>
> >>I agree entirely until your last sentence. Of course I agree 
> >>consciousness is real and we need a science of it. But why would 
> >>you expect to find it in *physics*?
> >
> >Actually, it would be more accurate to say I'm looking for a unified 
> >theory of reality that has an integral place for consciousness, and 
> >that unified theory of reality had better be consistent with physics.
> 
> Oh sure. Sociology and Marxism are both *consistent* with physics. 
> But why would you think that consciousness is likely to play a very 
> big role in a unified theory of reality? 

It seems to me that the core issue is being touched upon here, but is
not being resolved, and that the basic disagreement in theory of mind 
arises essentially from this one unresolved issue.

If by "physics" we mean, for the moment, "classical physical theory" (CPT)
then we can consider all the physical structures that could in principle
be built out of the microscopic building blocks of CPT, and all of the
structural, relational, and functional properties that these composite 
physical systems could have as a consequence of the possible dispositions
in space and time of these systems, and their  interactions with other
such systems. These could rightly be called "physical properties". From
the viewpoint of CPT we could imagine an outside intelligence that was
able to comprehend these structural, relational, and functional
properties, which could be said to inhere, in some sense, in these
physical structures simply by virtue of their physical properties, which
are defined by possibilities for dispositions in space and time and the
associated causal connections that are mathematical consequences of
the micro-physical elements and laws..

Now we come to the critical question: In what sense do these structural,
relational, and functional properties add anything to the ontology.

If we take away the outside intelligence that is able to recognize and
appreciate these structural, relational, and functional properties, 
then in what sense do these properties themselves have any real existence?

I believe that the point of view most in line with CPT is that these
structural, relational, and functional properties that could be
known or appreciated or recognized by an all-knowing outside
intelligence are not added realities: within CPT they can be regarded
as merely features of particular physical arrangements, rather than
added ontological realities.

The other point of view is that when a complex physical
systems that supports novel structural, relational, or
functional properties come into being "some new genuine reality"
comes into being: something real exists that did not exist before.

How does one resolve such a difference in viewpoint?

The physicist would say that any addition of realities is completely
superfluous: that the micro-realities and micro-laws completely fix
all the motions of all the parts, and hence any additions should be
stripped away by Occam's razor.

But even if one were to go along with the more extended conception
of what exists, is would seem that this extra element of reality
would be EXACTLY that structural, relational, or functional property
itself. But it is just as hard to pass from such a property, carefully
specified as EXACTLY a structural, relational, or functional property of a
classically described physical system, to an experiential-type reality as
it is to pass from the elemental atoms themselves to such an experience.
Any addition to the list of realities would seem to be some  mystical
or supernatural superfluity, insofar as one accepts CPT.

In orthodox QT some things beyond the micro-realities are present already
from the outset, namely the knowledge of the human beings, and the
thoughts and ideas from which the theory is formed. These are primary 
`givens', whose connections to the objective "physical" aspects are 
spelled out in principle by the theory.

[Pat] 
> >>But I think you havnt seen how strong Henry's claim is. It goes 
> >>much deeper than just being a neat application of QT to brain 
> >>science. He thinks that the basic ontology of physics itself is 
> >>phenomenal rather than physical in the traditional sense: the 
> >>universe is actually in a very real sense *made up of information*, 
> >>rather than the solid little pieces and spatially extended fields 
> >>that we see when we perform experiments. This entire way we have of 
> >>thinking about the universe, its apparent solidity and size, is all 
> >>an illusion: none of this stuff we see is *real*, in the sense that 
> >>Newton would have thought. This really is a big metaphysical 
> >>suitcase.
> >
The classical conception is THE big metaphysical suitcase.
In the first place, we know for sure that the world definitely
is not made out of local bits of matter obeying local laws.
So to bring them into one's basic conception of nature is simply
a disasterously false move with no metaphysical foundation at all.
In such a situation it is certainly a rational move to begin with
our "knowings": with the increments in knowledge that are the basis
of all science. And it is metaphysically more agreeable to build
the objective reality out of elements of the same general kind as these
knowings, than out of some totally different kind of stuff. For that
latter course brings one to the desparate state that philosophy
has been in since Newton, of having no rational way to make nature
whole.


[Kathy]
> >Are you sure your characterization of Henry's view is more than a straw man?
> >
> >I don't think the universe is made up of information RATHER THAN fields.

[Pat]> 
> I took the terminology from Henry directly.
> ...
>

The information is represented by quantum fields.
 
> >>To this extent the TI is just as strange as all the others, I 
> >>agree, but this is a strangeness that we apparently have to learn 
> >>to live with. What I liked about the TI (and maybe vonN also has 
> >>this feature, after reading Henry's reply to my message) is that it 
> >>deftly avoids the apparently intractable problems which come up 
> >>when one tries to say *when* a quantum collapse occurs.
> >
> >Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that all TI does 
> >is refuse to precisely localize a measurement event at a specific 
> >point in space-time.  It doesn't remove all issues of "when."  We 
> >still have to localize the relativistic set of "whens" that 
> >corresponds to the particular lightlike interval on which the 
> >transaction takes place.  TI doesn't answer THAT "when" question. 
> >If it did, it would be saying something new, because QT has no 
> >answer to that question.
> 

I use the von Neumann formulation, in which each collapse occurs
at a global "now", which is a `spacelike' surface (every point on it
is separated from every other one by a spacelike interval). The choice
of exactly when a collapse occurs is not specified by either CI or vN.
I assume that the time of the collapse is tied up to the "experiential"
aspect of collapsing, and that it is indeed via this control of the timing
of the collapse events that a person's conscious efforts are able
to influence his behavior.

[Pat]
> I may indeed be misunderstanding the situation, but my impression was 
> that a transaction corresponded to the existence of a photon (or more 
> generally the transmission of energy across spacetime by a particle.) 

In Cramer's Transactional Interpretation (TI) the "event" is typically
the absorption at a detecting devise of a photon that was emitted 
at an earlier time.

I do not absolutely rule out the possibility that a particle
detector/counter/memory device could be a quantum collapser:
I must extend the theory beyond human collapsers to specify whether
or not a non human system is or is not a collapser/player.

But in a human experiencer/collapser/player the quantum event
is a not at all like the absorption of a photon: it is the collapse
of the quantum macro-state of the brain to a subspace of the brain
state space that is compatible with a human experience.

> I don't think that the TI refers to 'measurement events' so much as 
> to 'events', and it assumes that these events (and the waves which 
> interfere to produce them) are physically real. The idea that QT 
> deals only with measurement events seems to be a hallmark of the CI 
> rather than the equations of QT themselves.
> 

One could indeed apply the equations of QT to collapsers that are not
used by human beings as probes (measuring devices), INSOFAR as one
has a way of specifying the pertinent projection operators P, and when
do the events occur.

But THOSE are the core problems: how are the P's chosen, and when do
the events occur?

> However, I confess that my confidence in this aspect of my 
> understanding has been shaken by Henry's replies concerning the TI, 
> so I shouldn't push this point until Ive understood it better.
> 
> >>>Sure, if it's a radium atom, I'm not going to ascribe it the same 
> >>>kind of consciousness I have, as I am "emitting" these words 
> >>>across the Internet.
> >>
> >>Well, I think that Henry DOES have to make some such ascription in 
> >>order to keep his story internally consistent.
> >

Atoms are not players. We are players. And certain things like us are
players. But I am not suggesting that atoms qualify.

> >Did he ever say the radium atom has the SAME KIND of consciousness 
> >he has?  He is careful to say he's talking about human conscious 
> >events. Then he goes on to say his theory may also apply to other 
> >kinds of collapsings, and may well be consistent with a "rocks are 
> >conscious" metaphysic, but he is making no claims that this IS the 
> >case.
> 
> He tends at this point to use terminology like "proto-consciousness" 
> which is just word-salad to me, since we have no way to know what a 
> protoconsciousness would be like (or what it would be like to be one) 
> even if we had any reason to suppose there were any, which of course 
> we don't.
> 

It would completely unreasonable to suppose that consciousness would
remain completely like human consciousness as one moves down to species
with very much simpler brains. Since you are admitting that conscious
(as we experience it?) exist I think that you are in basically the same 
boat as I: consciousness will degenerate into something that can be called
proto-consciousness as one moves to creatures with simpler brains.

[Kathy] 
> >Henry is suggesting, and it makes a great deal of sense to me, that 
> >the feedback control behaviors involve a player controlling the rate 
> >of application of sensing operations and the choice of what it 
> >senses, from among a set of choices intrinsic to the type of player. 
> >The nice thing about this formulation is that it puts sensing and 
> >feedback control  (something that exists in nature for which current 
> >physics has no place) at a very natural place given current 
> >formulations of QT.
> 
> Well, it might do that if QT said anything about 'players', but 
> regrettably it doesn't, so there seems to be rather a large ghost in 
> your and Henry's machine.
> 

Copenhagen quantum theory is formulated in terms of players.
When you read papers in The Physical Review about subtle quantum effects
where one really must be careful to say it just right the
description is in terms  of how the experimenters set experimental
conditions to elicit information about some system, and how other
information is then denied to themselves and to all other 
experimenters/players. There are no "ghosts" in these proceedings:
groups of human scientists making controlled and recorded experiments
are not ghosts by any stretch of either the imagination or of the normal
meanings of words. Scientists who knowingly perform experiments and
communicate what they have learned to their colleagues no more ghostly
than you are.

> 
> So for example when I decide to attend to my email and reply to that 
> old message from Kathy, what I am really doing is choosing a QT 
> operator, which is to say, choosing an infinite-dimensional matrix of 
> positions and momenta of fundamental particles in my brain, and 
> applying it at some chosen rate? Do you seriously want to put that 
> idea forward as an account of what goes on when someone makes a 
> decision? As you say, it is vastly more complex: so much more 
> complex, in fact, that my puny consciousness is quite incapable of 
> grasping it. How then am I able to do this inconceivably complex 
> thing consciously? It would be like trying to operate a puppet with 
> infinitely many strings.

Yes, that is exactly why I postulated that the brain does almost
all of it automatically at an unconscious level. We are not in the least
bit aware of all of the tremendous amount of computation that the brain
must be making to produce the right/best course of action. James already
emphasized that. Consciousness seems to provide nothing but a top-level
consent, or possibly veto, to plans already worked out, and merely
presented for conscious approval. This is how a scientist and philosopher
as acute as Wm. James understood it, and it appears to me (subject to
further study) that this is what modern experiments seem to be supporting
(See my discussion of Pashler's "The psychology of attention" in my recent
"A quantum theory of mind".)

> 
> >God plays dice in determining the ANSWER to the question. ..... 
> >Henry is NOT saying the guy who makes the apparatus determines what 
> >happens on the die toss!!!  He is saying that the guy who makes the 
> >apparatus determines the set of possible outcomes of the toss. Then 
> >nature determines which number turns up, ...
> 
> Yes, I understand. But does it really make sense to say that the guy 
> who makes the apparatus determines the set of outcomes? Surely it is 
> the apparatus, not the guy who builds it, which determines that set. 
> If the apparatus had come about by random accident, the same thing 
> would have happened. Indeed, 'apparatus' does occur in nature by 
> accident. Light quanta are emitted and absorbed in stars in distant 
> galaxies, without any guys building anything.

But in the relevent case, in  vN/W QT, the device is the human
brain itself, evolving in the presence of an associated stream of
consciousness. So we are not talking about some piece of purely
physical matter, which according to this vN/W theory would not 
be a collapser/player. We are concerned with the basic question
of how P is selected in a human brain.
 
No quantum collapse can occur until SOME choice of the associated
operator P is made. So SOME rule must be added. I have propose a simple
rule which puts almost all the computation of P into the unconscious 
brain, but allows consciousness to give consent or veto.


> 
> >>Look, surely you can see how extraordinary this idea is, and how 
> >>far-reaching in its implications? How can you be so blase about 
> >>taking it or leaving it? It means, for example, that there is no 
> >>fact of the matter about the existence of your left toe. Not as an 
> >>epistemic matter, but *really*: your body, like the rest of the 
> >>physical universe, is not really there at all, but is only an 
> >>illusion conjured up from the universal mind-stuff in response to 
> >>a series of nagging questions from your spirit.
> >
> >Excuse me?
> >
> >Henry's ontology requires no such bizarre conclusions.  I am 
> >virtually certain Henry would disagree with the above.  You are 
> >ascribing a mentalist philosophy to Henry, who claims himself to be 
> >a dualist.
> 

vN/W QT is a dualistic theory: it is a dynamical theory of the interaction
between an objective aspect of nature, represented by the evolving quantum
state of the universe, and the many subjective aspects associated with
the various players (physical systems that can collapse the quantum 
state).

So Kathy's left big toe is represented within the state of the universe by
evolving expectation values of various local quantum field operators.
These expectation values would specify quite accurately where Kathy's
left big toes is at each moment, and lots and lots of its properties.
Similar expectation values of local operators would specify features
of the rest of her body, including her brain. The latter, because
of its relative sensitivity to minute variations, would have, when she is
awake, a much stronger tendency to evolve into a state resembling more
a mixture of very distinguishable states than her toe.
And ollapses would be continually pruning away certain of the brain
states: each conscious experience would correspond to such a pruning.

Both the objective and subjective aspects of this dualistic description
are, however, informational in character. Each subjective aspect
represents an increment in "knowledge" of one of the players, or at least
some bit of "information" that is stored in the body of the player,
and is interpretable by that player, in terms of characteristic action.
The objective aspect is a compendium of all the subjective aspects, and
is in that sense also informational. It represents also tendencies
for future events to occur in players. "Objective tendencies"
or "propensities" can be considered "real", but they are not 
like the solid bits of matter of CPT.


> Unless your toe is capable of asking questions by itself, then 
> according to Henry the QZE won't apply to it, and (like a planet or a 
> rock) it will dissolve into a cloud of possibilities, with no 
> particular position.

For the center of mass of a disconnected a toe, initiallized by some
human sighting, to spread out appreciably  would take billions of years.
But the internal structure of a human brain will disperse very quickly.


> I expressed ridicule at the idea and he, quite 
> properly, scolded me for not taking physics seriously. Henry has told 
> me in the past that he considers the universe to be basically made up 
> of information, and that the 'classical' world we seem to inhabit, 
> made up of solid stuff - particles and fields - is an illusion which 
> arises from the act of 'questioning' this cosmic (my word) 
> information-plenum by a consciousness. 

Classical physical theory already made the reality behind our experience
of a hard rock much different from what we seem to feel and experience.
The solid hard rock is certainly an illusion, no matter which physics
we use. But CPT asserts that the apparently solid rock in made up,
really, of tiny little rocks that are like the original false illusion.
And identity theorists claim something even more bizzare, and in fact
downright incredible, namely that, although the idea of the solid
rock was surely an illusion, that illusion itself is made up of
tiny elements that resemble the false illusion. But the notion that
the basic realities should resemble the illusions that permit us to deal
effectively with the gross objects of everyday experiences is hardly a
notion that a rational scientist should cling to, like a security blanket,
in the face if absolute knowledge that the idea is incompatible with
the scientific evidence.

Quantum theory provides a rationally coherent conception of nature that
fits all the empirical evidence. In it our experiences, are real, and
what they seem to be, and are closely connected to an objectively existing
universe that is made up of a similar kind of stuff.

Henry



From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Wed Jun 21 21:03:09 2000
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 08:49:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov
Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov
To: Stan Klein <klein@spectacle.berkeley.edu>
Cc: kleinlist <A.sloman@bham.ac.uk>, bdj10@cam.ac.uk, brings@rpi.edu,
     brucero@cats.ucsc.edu, ghrosenb@ai.uga.edu, hameroff@u.arizona.edu,
     hpstapp@lbl.gov, Jeffrey M. Schwartz <jmschwar@ucla.edu>,
     keith@imprint.co.uk, patrickw@monash.edu.au, phayes@ai.uwf.edu,
     kathy Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>
Subject: Anti-Zeno Effect



On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Stan Klein wrote:

.....> 
> Second, I have been reading the June 1 Nature on Kofman & Kurizki's 
> claim that the quantum Zeno effect is very hard to produce and the 
> quantum anti-Zeno effect should be much more common (a watched pot 
> boils faster). Henry, are they in error? 

I find no error.

> Or is there some reason that 
> you think the brain/mind can avoid their regime. 

Yes, the regimes are quite different. They are considering, basically,
the decay of an unstable particle (or state) into a spectrally dense
band of reservoir states, and the effects of *very* rapid collapses, while
I am considering a projection operator P that evolves in the brain state
on a hundred millisecond time scale being applied at a millisecond rate.

If we  look at Eq, (17) of Kofmam and Kurizki, which defines the 
conditions for QZE to hold (not AZE), then our omega sub e and omega sub M
are of order 10 whereas nu is of order 1000, hence the latter is much
bigger than the former, as required. In the model I have in mind the
Gamma sub R is zero.

Based on the work of Libet I assume that the component of the state
of the brain that corresponds to a conscious experience is a coherent
coulomb state of the EM field generated by the motions of some large set  
of charged particles in the brain, and that this coherent state has
a frequency of the order of 10 per second. The projection operator P
is the projection on a band of energies of this simple harmomic oscillator 
(SHO) component. I assume that in a state S(t) that supports the
occurrence of a conscious experience this SHO component (actually
the relevant state should be a product of several/many such SHO states)
is to first order an eigenstate of H and that both the frequency of
this SHO is in the range 10 per second and the rate of flow of energy in
and out of this band of energy levels defined by P is at the rate where
significant changes occur on the time scale of 10 per second. The 
rapid fire questioning that freezes the state inside the band singled out
by P is assumed to be at a rate of the order of 1000 per second. These
conditions ensure that the system is in the QZE regime: e.g., if one looks
at the condition (17) of Kofman and Kurizki one sees that this condition
that the system be in the QZE regime is indeed satisfied. Since each of
the components under consideration corresponds to a coherent SHO state of
definite frequency, and P restricts that component to a specified band of
energies of that SHO, the transitions of each component  from inside to
outside the energy band defined by P is always between two states
of the same frequency: i.e., Kofman & Kurizki's Gamma sub R is zero.

I have described this model before, and took care to make it such that
the conditions for QZE were satisfied.

Henry