From:	THEORM::STAPP        21-OCT-1996 20:07:29.38
To:	SMTP%"phayes@picayune.coginst.uwf.edu"
CC:	STAPP
Subj:	reply to yours of oct15

Dear Pat,                                              Oct 21, 1996

Your letter of Oct 15 began with a quote from my previous
note:

>I have answered this argument by pointing out the principled difference in
>kind between, on the one hand, the abstractions from our experiences of
>the world about us that comes chiefly through our visual sense, and that
>are therefore readily compared by us to experiences of the kind from which
>they were abstracted, and, on the other hand, the brain activity that *is*
>our conscious experience, but that is represented within CM
>as something altogether different from the experience that it actually
>is: this brain activity is represented within CM by neuron pulses
>etc, that are not abstractions from "the patch of blue" that the experience
>actually is.

You replied:

"Ah, I see the problem that is bothering you. It is nothing whatever to do
with CM or QM. It is the difference between the neural event, as seen from
outside, and the quality of the experience. This is an old philosophical
straw. The computational perspective gives an immediate reply to this old
puzzle: the subjective experience is the *meaning* of the representation
encoded by the neural event. My experience of blue isnt blue for much the
same reason that the word "blue" isnt blue: the map is not the territory.

If you want to respond that the notion of "meaning" isnt in CM, there are
two replies. It isnt in QM either; but, more to the point, we can make
machines which can be understood within CM but for which an adequate
account requires talk of the meanings of the symbols encoded within them,
ie computers." (End of quote from PH)

You appear to recognize and reaffirm, here, a difference in kind 
between the neural event as seen from the outside (the objective 
event) and the quality of the experience (the subjective event 
associated with it). You say that: 

"the subjective experience is the *meaning* of the representation
encoded in the neural event."

Later on you say:

"... we can make machines which can be understood within CM but
for which an adequate account requires talk of the meanings of
the symbols encoded within them."

Thus you are in effect trying to substitute "meaning" for
"experience".

The "meanings" of these symbols derives from the fact that they
are imbedded in, or can be imagined to be imbedded in, a decoding
machine, i.e., in an environment that transforms the symbols, 
singly or collectively, into corresponding activities of the
decoding or environmental system.

This objective "source of the meaning" resides in the system 
that we computer/physical scientists and philosophers observe.
*We* see meaning. This meaning is something that *we* experience.
*We* are the human observers who are looking at the computer 
from the outside. What we are observing is the "behaviour" of 
some physical system describable in terms of the concepts of CM. 
Alternatively, we may be not observing any actual physical 
system that lies outside our bodies, but rather contemplating an 
abstraction from experiences of this sort: we may be 
contemplating a certain "model" based on abstractions from our 
experiences of the world about us, including relationships such 
as inclusion, disjunction, conjunction, etc. 

We can distinguish "objective meanings" that we can ascribe
to the observed or contemplated system based purely upon its 
internal properties, from "subjective meanings" related to one's own 
personal interests in the system. 

The interesting question arises when we try to include a
human observer, or contemplator, Sam Smith, in the system that 
is being observed by the rest of us. If we treat Sam just as we
treated the computer, then we shall be able to identify certain
behavioural features and ascribe "objective meaning" to these 
features purely on the basis of behavioural connections: we shall
be able to ascribe meaning to neural events in terms of their
behavioural consequences in the neural dynamics. Thus suppose 
Sam is contemplating Pythagoras's Theorem, and is visualizing a 
right triangle. We who are observing Sam's brain (say, with very
sensitive but non disturbing probes) can "see" the neural event
but not the triangle that he experiences. Yet it may be
eventually true that someone's comprehension of brain dynamics 
will great enough so that that he can "see" the following 
"objective meaning" of the neural event: Sam will presently 
utter the words "I am visualizing a right triangle".  
This fact may also have some "subjective meaning" to some outside,
viewer in terms of his own situation or interest.

Your suggestion is evidently to identify Sam's "subjective 
experience" with  "Sam's meaning" of the objectively 
described neural event. 

This would, of course, make Sam's sort of "subjective" meaning very
different from the "subjective meanings" spoken of before. For
there the meaning to some person was the meaning of something 
that he either observed through his senses, or contemplated
in the form of abstractions from such observations. They were 
meanings of thoughts about things viewed, perhaps in
imagination, from afar; not the meanings of the activities of 
his own brain as felt from within. 

It would seem more straightforward to call this new kind of 
"subjective meaning from within" by its usual name, "experience".

One problem with the new language is that each event in a 
human brain has many consequences, not all of which are 
experienced. Thus "meaning"is too broad a category: what is 
"experienced" does not include everything that has some 
significance for the dynamical development of the system. 

Also, significance or meaning is often in terms of what is
"initiated", but lies still in the future: I seem to 
experience the triangle *before* I utter the words "I am 
experiencing a triangle". And many consequences lying still
further in future are not experienced "now". Experiences seem 
to be connected to some finite-duration process of laying down 
certain special types of "memory structures" that normally can 
 be re-accessed at a later time.  So, again, "meaning" is too
broad a category to be equated to what we mean by
the word "experience". The latter is something that has 
certain properties independently of some definition that can 
be arbitrarily set down: it is not a free category that can 
simply be defined so as to create a convenient logical framework.

You say that the issue here has nothing whatever to do with 
CM and QM. But CM is a theoretical framework based on objective
concepts abstracted, basically, from our visual experiences 
of the world outside of us, and it is unitary in this sense. 
But QM naturally has two (inimately entangled) kinds of things: 
1) the local operators, which are like the material things of 
CM in that their evolution throughout all of spacetime is fixed 
by deterministic equations of motion; and 2) the chnges in
the state vector, which are  like the experiential things of CM in 
that they pick the single *real situation* out from among the 
many merely possible ones.  

So how is this all tied to the issue, which is my claim that:
"The same orthodox principles of CM that *do* entail the 
motion of Foucault's Pendulum *do not* entail the existence of
consciousness".  

Our previous discussions have brought us to the
point where I identified the principles of CM as including
the identification of features of a CM theoretical model
such as `the location of the center of mass of something 
such as the pointer of some measuring device as positioned on a 
backdrop of numbers enscribed on some dial' with `an observation
of such a coincidence of pointer and location a dial': the
correspondence between CM theory and experience is in terms
pointer readings, which can be  interpreted either as 
properties of a theoretical model of the objective physical 
system, or as subjective experiences. It is this
principle of psycho-physical parallelism of `readings on
devices' that allows CM to be relevant to our experiences.

The motion of the pendulum can be described in terms of readings
on devices, namely the readings on clocks and sightings of 
the  pendulum passing over certain marks on the floor.

These ideas are the basis of Einstein's analysis 
leading to the special theory of relativity. They are also the 
basis of Bohr's theory of QM, through its crucial dependence 
on "classical description". 

So this *is* orthodox CM: it is the psycho-physical
principle that both Einstein and Bohr took as basic. 

You said: " If you allow CM to include such descriptions
[which link the vocabulary of springs, gases, etc., to that of
classical mechanics] then I still fail to see why there might
not be similar descriptions of subjective things  like thoughts
and experiences."

But CM already has its principle of psycho-physical 
correspondence, and this principle keeps the concepts in the 
domain of `abstractions from visual experiences of things viewed 
from afar'.  

Of course, this does not mean that one could not *add* something
else onto orthodox present-day classical mechanics.

But I stressed from the beginning of this series of exchanges 
that I was not denying, in this discussion, the possibility 
that some new principle could be added onto the present CM, in
order to bring in consciousness; my arguments for this stronger
conclusion are of a very different kind.  

Here I was only defending the much more conservative claim that
the (orthodox) principles of CM do not entail consciousness.
But this weaker claim is important in its own right, as I have stressed and 
explained in earlier letters.

Best regards,        Henry