From hpstapp@lbl.gov Tue Nov 1 15:47:04 2005 Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 15:47:03 -0800 (PST) From: Henry P. Stapp To: John Searle Cc: Philosopher List -- Chris Wilson , David Chalmers , David Hodgson , Philip Clayton Subject: RE: My forthcoming UNESCO talk On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, John Searle wrote: > Dear Henry, > Many thanks for all the stuff you have been sending. > There is a question you may already have answered, but I want to ask > it again anyway. In common with most philosophers and neurobiologists, I > take consciousness as a derived (or emergent or higher-level) feature of > the brain, caused by neuronal processes. For me it is definitely not a > basic building block of the universe, but only came into existence in later > stages of evolution. Sometimes it seems to me you write as if consciousness > was a basic building block. Is this really what you think? > Thanks again, > John Dear John, Your question is a crucial one, so allow me to give an answer that is more detailed than what I have given before. First, let me mention my original answer. Werner Heisenberg, commenting on my 1972 paper "The Copenhagen Interpretation", which was published, along with my correspondence about it with Heisenberg, in Amer. J. Phys., (and was republished in my 1993 book "Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics") said" "There is one problem that I would like to mention, not in order to criticize the wording of your paper, but for inducing you to more investigation of this special point, which however is a very deep and old philosophical problem. When you speak of ideas (especially in [section 3.4]), you always speak about human ideas, and the question arises, do these ideas "exist" outside the human mind, or only in the human mind? In other words: Have these ideas existed at the time when no human mind existed in the world?" My answer to Heisenberg was: "Regarding non-human ideas it seems unlikely to me that human ideas could emerge from a universe devoid of idealike qualities. Thus I am inclined to the view that consciousness in some form must be a fundamental quality of the universe." I went on to justify, on the basis of the writings of Bohr and himself, leaving an examination of this point out of my article, which emphasized the pragmatic as opposed to ontological orientation of the Copenhagen interpretation. Heisenberg concurred. Heisenberg himself had probably been pondering this issue for more than thirty-five years, and I have now been wrestling with it for more than thirty years. I have not moved far from my 1972 position on this point, but will give here a more detailed and nuanced answer. My basic commitment is to science, which means a commitment to theories linked to empirical evidence. The theory of basic physics that is directly supported by evidence is the Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics, which is fundamentally about the structure of human knowledge: it is essentially epistemological and pragmatic, rather than ontological. An essential part of that theory is the process called by von Neumann "Process 1": it is an intervention that injects into the physically described aspects of nature the conscious intent of a probing agent. However, many scientists, while admitting that human knowledge is the foundation of science, want more than a pragmatic theory. They want an underlying non-anthropocentric ontology. Because Process 1 is, within the Copenhagen formulation, an expression of the entry of a conscious intent, and it can be regarded in the same way in the von Neumann extension of that theory, these scientist generally assume that the natural way to evade anthropocentrism is to eliminate Process 1. Thus, motivated by the desire for a non-anthropocentric ontology some physicists have tried---intensively---to introduce some sort of "purely physical" process that will predate biology, and produce a world roughly in accord, at the macroscopic scale, with a classically conceived world but satisfing the statistical predictions of quantum theory. They have not yet succeeded. But if they did succeed, on some purely physical level, the questions would arise: How and why is that ontologically different, causally redundant, kind of stuff, our conscious experiences, produced. It seems logically impossible to pass, rationally, within a strictly mechanistic framework of the kind conceived of in physics, from the neural correlates of consciousness (the NCC's) to the conscious realities that the neural correlates are correlates of! The question is, therefore: can one really *deduce* from such a purely physical theory the detailed predictions of orthodox QM about human experiences. The sought-after non-anthropocentric theory that will cover the pre-life universe ought not to depend essentially on "human ideas". But the basic question, essentially raised already by Heisenberg, is whether the basically non-mechanistic "idea-driven" Process 1, whose introduction is so crucial to the logical structure and empirical success of the orthodox quantum theory, can really be successfully eliminated without weakening the empirical connection so essential to science. Instead of eliminating Process 1, another option is to retain the basic structure of orthodox quantum mechanics, but expand the concept of Process 1, in order to allow this process, in its expanded form, to be present from the beginning. That option could allow the hard-won, amazingly coherent, and empirically supported detailed structure of contemporary quantum mechanics to be retained, essentially intact, as part of a broader more encompassing theory. The empirically supported Copenhagen interpretation, extended by von Neumann to include human brains, leads to a very satisfactory theory of the mind-brains of human beings. It naturally accommodates physically efficacious free-will, which is philosophically helpful, and it entails the existence of both our known-to-exist conscious thoughts, and an important role for them to play. Human beings are of prime interest to us human beings. We need a rationally coherent theory of ourselves that is compatible with the empirically supported principles of physics, more than we need a conception of the universe that, rationally, is in danger of leaving us out, and, being devoid of us, can never be tested by us. Nature has not yet revealed to us her every secret. But that does not mean that we must await a complete unveiling before making use, in an extremly important way, of the part that we have uncovered. In brief, mechanistic classical mechanics is known to be wrong; and the only extant logically and empirically satisfactory alternative is orthodox QM. It impacts in prescribed ways upon the structure of human experience, and it solves the critical basis problem by introducing causally efficacious conscious choices. These choices come in from outside the mechanistically described part of the theory, and no fully satisfacory way has yet been found---by anyone--to banish these interventions. So, in answer to your question, I think it is too soon to say how the successful predictions of orthodox contemporary---which pertain to the structure of human experiences---will emerge from a not yet achieved future theory that will place our streams of consciousness in a cosmological context. Perhaps scientists will be able to deduce these results from a purely physical starting point. But it is far from obvious that this will be possible, or is the only rational possibility. Another possibility is that the dualistic stucture of orthodox contemporary quantum theory will be retained and expanded. In either case, the future theory must somehow justify, in the present day context of human life, the effective validity of contemporary orthodox quantum mechanics, so it is reasonable to use this theory as a foundation for a theory of ourselves. That is what I am doing. I hope this rather longish statement clarifies my position. Best regards, Henry > > -----Original Message----- > From: Henry P. Stapp [mailto:hpstapp@lbl.gov] > Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 9:52 AM > To: Philosopher List -- Chris Wilson; David Chalmers; John R. Searle; Philip > Clayton > Subject: My forthcoming UNESCO talk > > Dear Philophers, > > Thought you might be interested in my talk: > > "Science's conception of human beings as > a basis for moral theory". > > Sincerely, > > Henry > >