Dear Pat, 

You say:
"By insisting that the brain phenomena 'correspond to' his experiences, you
assume precisely the substance duality which I reject. Why can we not
simply say that these events in his head *are* his experiences? His
perspective on them is of course different from ours, since his, not ours,
is the head in which they occur. But the location of these events in his
head is not a private matter."

I do not at all insist that brain activities merely `correspond' to experiences.
Just the opposite: I *do* allow that the conscious events might *be* brain 
events. In fact, that is pretty close to what QM is already saying, and I 
think that further advances in physics  will make the identity of experiential 
events and physical events ever more understandable, and more likely to be 
the fact of the matter. 

My claim has to do only with the logical structure of classical mechanics, 
in the broad sense that includes the way that it conceives the connection 
between its mathematical portions and our experiences. Classical mechanics 
is, I claim, a rational scheme that includes in a coherent and rational way 
an account of how its mathematical content is connected with our experience. 
It is this second part that allows the theory to have the great relevance 
to our lives that it in fact does.

Einstein in his analysis leading to the special theory of relativity identified
the events of the theory as the points of intersection of trajectories of 
particles placed against a backdrop of various clock and ruler readings, which 
allowed the spacetime locations of these events to be described in quantitative
terms. These concepts of intersections of trajectories and readings on clocks 
and rulers are clearly abstractions from what we human beings are able to 
observe about the world around us through the auspices of our senses. Bohr's
readings on other devices are things of the same kind. The close similarity,
and natural correspondence, between these *abstractions* from our experiences
of the world about us that come to us through our senses and these very 
sorts of experiences from which they are abstracted is the hook upon which 
the whole close connection of classical mechanics to experience is based.
This is the sort of experience that I briefly described as "views from afar".
The essential point is that they are abstractions from the sort of experiences
about the world that comes to us chiefly through our sense of vision, though
the information is generally confirmable or supported by the testimony of
our other senses. And the importance of this sort of abstraction lies in
its immediate identifiability with the kinds of experiences from which it 
was abstracted, the quantitative information these experiences can supply 
in terms of readings on the devices that we construct in order to increase the 
quantitative precision of our science, and the fact that it is part of the
social fabric of our lives that trained scientists and technicians can
communicate about and agree about, and use to construct our social reality. 

This is how classical mechanics *is in fact* linked into our lives. The scheme 
is rational because it coordinates aspects of the theory that are abstractions 
from our experiences of world about us that come to us through our senses to 
these very kinds of experiences themselves. That is why we are able to make the
required judgements about the validity of the correspondences.

But the correspondence between these experiences (of the world about us that
are brought to us through our senses) and certain abstractions from these very
experiences is not the same sort of thing as a connection of a  brain activity
to an experience that could indeed be the very same thing as that brain 
activity  itself. There is no possibility of saying that the blue flower out in 
the world as represented by the classical mechanical model *is* the very 
same thing as someone's experience of it because, for one thing,  the blue 
flower out in the world, as represented by the classical mechanical model, 
obeys an equation that causes it to persist even when no one is looking at 
it or thinking about it.  But if this second type of connection/identity 
is a different sorts of thing from the connections that are found in 
contemporary CM, then one cannot say that the second kind of connection is 
a *logically necessary part* of classical mechanics. Classical mechanics as 
we know it is a rational scheme that already has a coherent and rational 
connection to experienced reality: to add something to it of a completely 
different kind would make it into something else. 

In particular to claim that classical mechanics interpreted---as it now is
by the scientists that use it---so as to be correlatable to our experiences 
of hurricanes, and springs, and meter readings, and other experiences of the 
world about us, brought to us through our senses, must *logically* include 
also an account of the brain activity that "constitutes" the experience 
itself seems totally unsupportable by any logic. Since classical mechanics 
seems to be completely rationally coherent as it stands, it is not enough to 
simply suggest that perhaps for some unaccountable reason something that 
thus seems perfectly rationally coherent and self-contained might be in 
need of drastic revision---not on empirical grounds, which we know in fact 
to be the case, but for some logical reason---is really too flimsy an argument
to be taken seriously. Maybe Euclidian geometry is in need of serious revision
for purely logical as opposed to empirical reasons. Maybe. But more than an
unsupported "maybe" is needed here. Anything is conceivable. But scientific
programs should not be based on just shear unsupported total skepticism:
one should look *carefully* at the existing theory, not simply say that in
spite of its apparent logical coherence it "just might be" logically
incomplete, and that something totally alien to it must be added to it to 
make logically coherent. If there is some purely logical reason why CM 
*must* include this other kind of structure then this logical reason 
should be set forth. If there is no such logical reason, then classical 
mechanics, construed as is today by physicists, is logically coherent and
does entail hurricanes and reading on meters, under appropriate conditions,  
but does not entail Cs. Hence, *within the framework of CM* zombies are 
a logical possibility: *within that framework* hurricanes are causally 
efficacious but consciousness is not. But then *within that coherent
framework* such questions as to why Cs is present, and why does it have the
form that it has are left in a scientific limbo, as contrasted to a theory
in which consciousness is causally efficacious. 

[I note here that consciousness can be causally efficacious within QM
without violating any of the quantum rules, and without being merely an
expression of the play of whimsical chance. ]

You say:
"Surely. The constructions of the conglomerates which you mention are my
'linking sentences' which connect the vocabulary of springs, gases, etc. to
that of classical mechanics. If you allow CM to include such descriptions,
then I still fail to see why there might not be similar descriptions of
subjective things like thoughts and experiences. I have no idea what they
would be, let me hasten to add, and indeed cannot even imagine what they
would be like; but I see no principled reason why the limitations of my
imagination should be considered a proof of impossibility."

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. The issue is not the matter of lack of imagination about what
is possible; about how physical theory might evolve in the future to 
accommodate the identity of brain activity and conscious experience.
Indeed, I think that this is exactly what will eventually happen, and what
the shift to QM has in large measure already achieved. But in speaking
of the limitation of your imagination to conceive such a development you
must carefully distinguish the limitations that arise from the nature
of the logically coherent CM as it exists and is in use today, and as it 
existed in the early part of this century, from limitations on future 
theories, which are surely free to depart from the basic structure of CM.

The identity of complex functional patterns of neural pulses with
conscious experiences is not something that can be *deduced* from a set 
of principles that are sufficient to allow us to deduce certain things 
about what our experiences pertaining to the motion of a Foucault Pendulum 
will be.

Best wishes and regards, 

Henry