Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 14:29:51 +0000 From: Saul-Paul Sirag Subject: [q-mind] Replies to Awret and Sarfatti on collapse etc. -- Henry Stapp MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Henry Stapp Subject: Reply to question from Uzi Awret and Jack Sarfatti (q-mind: 25, 26 Sep & 1 Oct 1998) [Awret] I have three questions for Henry Stapp: 1) Suppose that we think of planet earth 4 billion years ago. You have rocks, water and some simple molecules which will later prove to be essential to life. How do you define an event in that context? What is the status of experience in such a context? Is one forced to embrace a form of pan-experientalism? [Stapp] As I have stressed in earlier postings, there is at present no empirical evidence for the existence of any reduction events other than those associated with human brian/minds. So I believe the most promising research strategy is to focus now on the mind-brain connection, which is the subject of a great deal of high quality and well funded research. Once we have a better understanding of how it appears to work in this case, we shall have some foundation for making proposals for how it works elsewhere. I have purposely been pretty non-informative about my speculation concerning reductions pertaining to reductions not associated with human mind-brains in order to separate my main purpose in all this, which pertains to studies of the mind-brain connection, from "wild speculations" that are at present very far from any confrontation with empirical evidence. On the other hand, although I am pursuing, in this way, the pragmatic course that is the basis of the Copenhagen interpretation, I do believe that moving in the direction of a cohesive ontology is a good strategy, because it push theoretical thinking in the direction of more inclusive structures. So with these caveats in mind let me move toward answering the question. First, I must identify what I believe to be the key features of how it works in human mind/brains. The details can be found in my book, and the many articles I have written [cf. www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html] Each reduction event in the human mind/brain comes to us as a single unit. But it can be examined and analyzed in later experiences and be found to have a structure that involves both a sequence of `temporally ordered' components (See MM&QM Ch 6.6) and a slowly changing fringe that constitutes the aspect "I" of the stream of conscious events that are bound together by a human brain. The experiences are built on the body-world scheme, which is the brain's representation of the surrounding body and its environment, and the projected body-world scheme, which is brains representation of an intention. [The body-world schema is enlarged in normal human beings to a body-world-mind scheme that expands what can represented to include idea-like objects]. Our evolutionary history has honed the mind-brain connection e--> P_e so that there is a strong positive correlation between the projected body-world-mind schema in one experience and the body-world-mind schema of a slightly later experience. The two schemas will be present in diferent temporal components of single experiences, and hence can be compared within experience. The connection will be produced by the causal chain that begins with the brain state S-b actualized by the earlier experience `e' and causes the actualized pattern of neuralogical activity in S_b to produce, e.g., muscle contractions that cause e.g., hand motions that cause e.g., letters to appear on the black board that cause e.g., photons to move from these letters to the retina where they cause neurons to fire .... which cause patterns of neuralogical activity to arise, whose actualized by an e~-->P_e~ S_b P_e~ will be the representation in the brain of an experience e~ in which the projected body-world schema of the earlier experience `e' has now become the body-world scheme in (a newly appearing temporal component in) the new experience e~. I have emphasized that the causal chain generated by the Schroedinger-equation, and the Dirac choice, is fundamentally incomplete, and have suggested that the Heisenberg choice of which (experientially represented) question is posed in connection with the event e~ is determined by the intentional attentional aspect of experience e. This causal link directly within the experiential realm is in principle strong enough to account for Yoda's feat if lifting the space ship out of the muck. I am NOT suggesting that Star Wars sort of stuff, but AM suggesting that this mental force does play a role in directing the course of quantum reduction events in human brains. So what is a reasonable way extending this sort reduction process to proto-experiences associated with systems that do not have the complex structure of human brains? I see the basic process here is one of self-replication in an environment. In the earth of four billion years ago there were lots of rock-like things. But there were also more fluid systems where quantum possibilities were perhaps richer. Serious scientific studies have concluded that life could not be expected to have evolved in the short time since the creation of the earth. But we do not yet know how ubiquitous life is on earth-like planets, or whether the models were sufficiently realistic. So I am not certain that there is a real problem. Still, it would be interesting to construct scenarios based on this general idea that a fore-runner of experience, which tends to favor the creation and/or preservation of self-replicating systems is operative in nature. But I have not seriously looked at this problem. [Awret] 2) Suppose that 60,000 people in a football game are looking at the quarterback throw a touchdown pass, why do they all have the same experience? When the wave function that describes the entangled "brain-portion of the environment" collapses, does it partake in a collective process? If I look at another person which is part of my experience should not the collapse of "my environment +person-brain" cause the collapse of the wave function associated with that person's brain? It seems like one needs to clarify the relationship of Stapp's theory and intersubjectivity. Husserl who also felt that experience is fundamental, struggled with the issue of intersubjectivity for many years. [Stapp] Quantum theory automatically makes the collapse in any one person's mind/brain reduce the entire universe of potentialities for future experiences [of everyone] into possibilities that are compatible with one person's increment in knowledge. That is why the quantum theorists speak of "our knowledge": although the primary event is associated with ONE brain, the increment in knowledge affects the state of the entire universe. That is the totally mind-boggling thing about quantum theory, and one reason that the founder's of quantum theory said that their theory was about "our knowledge", rather than about some more substantive sort of reality. It is understandable that Husserl should have been troubled by this incredible nonlocal aspect of nature, as it is represented in quantum theory. Indeed, although this nonlocal aspect is automatic in the vN/W formalism, and deeply imbedded in the predictions of quantum theory itself, it is too mind-boggling even for most quantum theorist to swallow, with any ease. But I am resolutely following the mathematical theory, which is well defined, and compatible with all data. I have explained how this works in my recent replies to Stan Klein, and have given a detailed account in my article in: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics Vol 52; Amer. Math. Soc. [Awret] 3) When the entangled wave function which describes `brain-portion of the universe' collapses to produce an experience e or a fundamental event, what kind of portion are we talking about? and is not that portion entangled with other parts of the universe? I have explained this in my replies to Stan Klein. One must first separate the degrees of freedom associated with the system under consideration from the degrees of freedom associated with the rest of the universe. The brain system might be all the degrees of freedom associated with the brain, though I suspect that in the end one will want to take the degrees of freedom associated with our conscious experiences to be the degrees of freedom associated the EM field in our brain. Having thus identified these degrees of freedom #b associated with the brain b, and the rest of the degrees of freedom, #b~, of the entire universe, it is essential to use the *density operator* representation S of the state of the universe, and to then define the state of brain b by S_b := Trace(#b~) S. This operator depend only on the degrees of freedom associated with the brain b: it is represented as a matrix in the variable associated with b. [It is an operator in the Hilbert space built on the degrees of freedom #b.] But all quantum entanglement, quantum superposition, and quantum decoherence effects in the entire universe are exactly represented in the simple formulas involving S_b that I gave in my replies to Stan Klein. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Reply to Jack Sarfatti's] Reply to Henry Stapp about attention, free will and all that. (q-mind: 24 Sep 1998) [Sarfatti] The list needs a clear definition of "body-world schema". [Stapp-prev] .. patterns of neural activity that are the brains representation of the body and world in its present and intended state; [Sarfatti] I call this Level 1 material Bohm worldline in configuration space. [Stapp] No! I assume that the brain has, as a very special aspect of its structure, the possibility of forming its own representation of the body that it is controlling, much as a servo-mechamism has got to have some representation of some aspects of the system it is controlling. This representation will generally be only a small part of the whole mechanism. [Sarfatti] That is, the quantum mind-brain system outputs signals to the environment which feedbacks to it in the form of changing interaction Hamiltonian and changing boundary conditions on the quantum wave function for the brain configuration. I say this will not generate experiential qualities. You say it will. [Stapp] No! I do not usually talk about a "changing interaction Hamiltonian": there is the one unchanging Hamiltonian for the entire universe. But it may be useful to invoke approximations in which those terms are used. If one does introduce this way of speaking then one may be able to speak of an evolving wave function that represents the part of the state of the universe (or brain) that is most closely connected to consciousness, and how it evolves in an evolving potential that has lots of mountains and valleys. But this evolving wave function does NOT generate experiential qualities, according to the theory I am describing: your idea of what I am saying is fundamentally incorrect. This evolving state of the (key part if the) brain is, according to my idea, a representation of certain potentialities for a real experiential event to occur. It is real, in that it represents an aspect of the causal linkage between experiential events. But that evolving state is not suffient to determine which experience will occur next. NOR IS IT SUFFICIENT TO DETERMINE EVEN THE PROBABILITIES FOR THE VARIOUS ALTERNATIVE POSSIBILITIES! That is my essential point! So it is upside down, with respect to an understanding of my theory, to say that what is specified by this this physical description will "generate expeperiential qualities". It is rather the experiential qualities that generate certain key features of this physical desciption. The causal connections do not go exclusively from the physical to the experiential. It is the specific detail of how the experiences act upon the evolution of the wave function that I have been describing and discussing on this forum. The mechanism is, in fact, easy to describe. [Sarfatti] 3. Self Level 2 <-> Level 1 feedback i.e. direct Wigner reaction of Level 1 Bohm worldline on its guiding Level 2 quantum information field. I say this is what generates experiential qualities. This is consistent with what you did in Phys Rev A but then rejected. [Stapp] You keep saying that I have rejected what I did there. I keep saying [probably 4 or 5 times at least, on this forum, specifically contradicting your allegations] that I have steadfastly embraced it, although I remain strongly focussed on orthodox data. However, the Schmidt results would follow directly from the intervention of consciousness in the way I have spelled out, without introducing any violation of the quantum principles, provided there are no pertinent reductions associated with inanimate "proto-observers". [Reply to Sarfatti's] Reply to Henry Stapp re: Fred Alan Wolf's theory (q-mind: 29 Sep 1998) [Sarfatti] "Causal process"? What is that? Does that mean that causes are always before their effects? [Stapp] The process is highly nonlocal, but in one frame causation does act forword. Yet the Schmidt retroK data could be accounted for if there were no reductions associated with inanimate proto observers, such an magnetic core memory storage units. [Stapp-prev] I have described in the target article (Whiteheadian approach...) and subsequent postings how the attentional aspect of experiences can influence, via the Heisenberg choices and the quantum Zeno effect, the course of brain events. [Sarfatti] I will look and see if I have missed some your relevant postings on this. I understand that the Zeno effect inhibits collapse if the measurement is repeated often enough. But what is it in terms of the theory that is making the measurement? That is, what is it that making the Heisenberg choice? I think this is also Stan Klein's question? [Stapp] The intentional attentional aspect of `e' controls the Heisenberg choice that is needed to allow the quantum rules to be applied to the later event e~. It is worthwhile to recall the course of scientific progress as regards the basic elements of physical theory. In Newton's theory these elements were basically particles: tiny persisting objects with some fixed unchanging properties. Then Maxwell brought in local fields. Ihe idea of "particle" as a persisting "entity" that carries fixed properties such as mass and charge carries over to quantum theory, but in orthodox theory it loses the property of having a single unique location. Moreover, it plays the role of being essentially a carrier of connections between larger objects, rather than independent realities in their own right. But then there was the problem of understanding what the larger objects were, if they consisted of particles that were not fully real. Orthodox quantum theory solved that problem by noting that they need not be anything at all beyond our description of them, and the potentialities for our experiences that they mathematically represented within the theory. But it is interesting to trace the flow also from particles inward, not outward. Heisenberg's S-matrix and nonlinear field theory ideas, made it clear that the "particles" were not fundamental: they were just the "stable" configurations of energy; the particular configurations of fields that happened to be long-lived. Quarks and leptons became the new building blocks. Then came strings that encompassed qravity, and then more complex membranes in high dimensional spaces. Now we begin to build the theory around particular kinds of structural configurations in these complex membranes. What does this reveal? It shows, I believe, that reality is a complex though highly constrained structure, and that we seize opportunistically upon salient features of this complex structure to be the fundamental elements of our theories. Quantum theory has shown the utility of building a theory of physical reality upon the realities that are the experiences that we can describe to ourselves and to our colleagues. Given that these elements were, and remain, despite seventy years of dedicated effort to replace them by purely physical concepts, the foundation upon which physics rests today, they certainly ought to be the appropriate basic elements of the optimal theory of the mind-brain connection.