Dear Stan, 

I'll be delighted to join you at BKVI next Friday, before your talk.
Olivia cannot make it, due to another commitment.

About the two issues, I see theory and experiment as two inseparable
parts of science. I have little doubt that, just as quantum theory
says, the empirical data is describable in classical terms, and that
certain empirical one-to-one correspondences between brain activity
and aspects of conscious experience will come to be known with increasing
precision, and even that classical modelling of brain activity down to 
some level of size will seem to give a reasonably coherent account of 
what is going on, even though the underlying process is fundamentally 
quantum mechanical. Indeed, one must look very hard to identify aspects 
of the empirically measurable relationships where the phenomena is not 
equally explainable by *all* of the proposed interpretations of QM, and 
also by some quasi-classical account that represents the chemical processes 
by some classical statistical microprocess, or perhaps represents whole 
neurons themselves by some such classical model. But there are differences in 
principle! So I think it becomes of interest to identify phenomena
that will allow the very profound basic dynamical differences to
be detected. On the basis of what you might call metaphysical
considerations, but what I would prefer to call considerations 
of theoretical coherence, I suspect that when these sensitive measurements 
are carried out then they will favor the sort of model of mind/brain
dynamics that I see as the `most natural' possibility.

This is a typical interplay between the empirical and theoretical sides
of science, where the rough empirical facts are first established, and then
theorists, on the basis of theoretical coherence or naturalness or simpicity 
of one kind or another, propose theories that allow the all the empirically 
known facts to be `explained' in terms of theoretical models based on a few 
basic principles, and propose possible new experiments that are sensitive to the
differences between competing theories. At the present time we are, in brain
science, at the empirical stage that is analogous to time before the
discoveries by Kepler of the very detailed regularities that bear his name, 
and that allowed Newton's laws to be distinguished from a infinitude of 
alternative conjectures. We will have to identify precise measurement that 
will distinguish competing models, so I think that the effort to spell out 
the competing theories, in order to determine what the distinguishing 
experiments are, is a key part of the theoretical side of the scientific 
effort to understand consciousness.

Best, Henry