From: THEORM::STAPP 18-SEP-1997 14:43:51.71 To: @KLEINDIS.DIS CC: STAPP Subj: Reply to Aaron's Queries Reply to Aaron's Queries of Sept 18. This is a reply to Aaron's two communications. One of them asked for a precis of my new paper; the other asked for comments on his abstract for Tucson3. I thought the abstract very good, and look forward to seeing the detailed working out of the ideas mentioned. I did take notice of the claim: " Other reasons for bringing in quantum mechanics are usually not based on proper design considerations. (Often more on confused, wishful thinking about "freedom", "self", etc.) ... A baby zombie designed with the right architecture could eventually develop the ability to wonder about the link between its qualia and its body. Just like baby humans." In a recent referee's report I said: " Penrose's noncomputability, even if it were bona fide, would not help with free will. Rather it would stand in the way. For a choice is not made by me {\it unless it is determined} by all that I am. So a breakdown of determinism in the fixing of my actions would preclude my acting on the basis of {\it my own} free will." That I had to make this comment supports Aaron's "(Often more on confused, wishful thinking about "freedom", "self", etc.)". But one of the points of my recent paper was precisely to stress that in a rational ontological formulation there should be in principle a causal structure, even if is not yet totally understood, and even if it is not "mechanistic" in the classical physics sense of being governed by microscopically expressible laws of motion. So this charge about "confused wishful thinking about `freedom' " does not, I think, apply to me, or to my theory. Indeed, another key point in my recent paper was to show how, in the deterministic framework that I was proposing, our thoughts themselves could be causally efficacious without upsetting the statistical predictions of quantum theory. Aaron's second claim mentioned above was: "A baby zombie designed with the right architecture could eventually develop the ability to wonder about the link between its qualia and its body. Just like baby humans." The word "could" makes this claim ambiguous: maybe it is no claim at all, in which case I have no objection to it. But the words "wonder" and "qualia" would seem to suggest that the adult zombie could have "experiences": i.e., that experiences could occur in association with the processing that the adult zombie's "body" is performing. The tie in of this sentence to the earlier one about the inadequacy of the "other reasons for bringing in quantum theory" suggests that these experiences could be present in association with the objectively describable processing being carried out by the adult zombie's body even if that body were completely describable in terms of the idea of classical physics that the physical world is made up of physical substances of the kinds specified in classical physics. Of course, we cannot know for sure whether or not experiential elements would be present in such a world, for that world is not the sort of world in which we actually live. But I think it is clear that one cannot actually deduce from the principles of classical mechanics, and any boundary conditions at all, that experiences must necessarily occur in conjunction with the processing activities of the adult zombie: we cannot deduce that there must be experiences of "wonderings" and "qualia" in the way that we can deduce the presence, under appropriate boundary conditions, of physical structures that would qualify as being "tornadoes", or "digital computers". Since the classical principles are known to be fundamentally false, it is reasonable to look at the question of the presence of experience from the standpoint of the principles of quantum mechanics, which, as far as we now know, are correct. This is an altogether feasible and reasonable thing to do. That is because orthodox quantum theory is built specifically upon experiential realities. So one can examine within the framework of that physical theory that does seem to be in accord with the world in which we live, the conditions for the occurrence of experiences. And what one finds is that experience would be absent from a world that conformed to principles of classical mechanics: classical mechanics is obtain from an approximation to quantum mechanics in which the nonunitary/nonlocal parts of the quantum processing is suppressed, and this is specifically the part of the quantum processing that is associated with our conscious experiences. This is another key point that is explained in my new paper. So, as regards Aaron's claim that: " Other reasons for bringing in quantum mechanics are usually not based on proper design considerations. (Often more on confused, wishful thinking about "freedom", "self", etc.)", I would agree that these "other reasons for bring in quantum mechanics" do not rest on design considerations of the kind Aaron is talking about. But there are other good reasons. Insofar as his design considerations can be implemented in physical structures that conform to the ideas about the nature of `the physical' promulgated by classical physics it appears from an analysis of the relationship of the fundamentally false ideas of classical physics to the apparently valid quantum conception of nature in which it is embedded that there should be no experiences associated with the classically implemented process, no matter how `circular' its causality is. Experience becomes possible only to the extent that classical concepts fail. A principle focus of my new paper is precisely on that point. I have, in this comment on Aaron's proposed abstract, already given some elements of the precis of my new paper that Aaron requested. Aaron asked specifically for the new things in this paper. The chief new thing is a new perspective: the objective of to build a rational, minimalistic, naturalistic ontology that will undergrid the orthodox quantum theory, which is pragmatic/epistemological rather than ontological. This already puts me on a certain track: I must create an ontology that contains the experiences that the orthodox quantum theory is built upon. So experiences are built in from the outset, rather than having to `emerge' from a structure that does not seem to contain or entail them. So I am creating an idealistic ontology. The usual difficulty with idealistic ontologies is the looseness of their connection to our scientific knowledge. But here I am building squarely, and minimalistically, upon our basic scientific theory. Because our basic theory is explicitly built upon experiences rather than matter I do not have any problem in principle with tying the idealistic ontology to physical science. This physical science, quantum theorm, already itself ties mind to matter because it explains quantitatively all of the properties of the structure of our experiences that we usually ascribe to the material aspects of nature, and it does this without giving to nature any substantive qualities of the kind that classical mechanics ascribes to nature. The stuff of nature is not matter, but experiences and the accumulated knowledge they build. But this knowledge has mathematical properties that suffice to ensure the mathematical regularities that were ascribed in classical mechanics to matter. In section 2 I answer Pat's challenge that quantum theory is not built on experiences and knowledge by documenting that the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation certainly was. Then in response to his retort that many physicists do not accept that orthodox view I say (beginning of section 4) "There have been many attempt by physicists to `get mind back out of physics': i.e., to reverse the contamination of physics brought in by Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli and company in 1927. I believe those decontamination efforts have failed, even though I myself have worked hard to achieve it. So I am taking here the other tack, and trying to build a coherent ontology around the orthodox ideas." I do not detail in this paper my reasons for believing that they have failed. I have spelled out reasons elsewhere. It is a fact that the alternative proposals have not received general approval. In section 3 I spell out my answer to Pat's suggestion that "causality" has been discredited by Hume, and provide the reader with a more-detailed- than-usual description of the failure of certain classical relativistic ideas of the local character of causal connections. A principle objective of the paper is to focus attention on the two very different types of process that enter into the full quantum dynamics: the (trivial) unitary/local evolution that is associated with the Schroedinger-equation-directed unitary evolution, which is not associated with experience, and the (nontrivial) nonunitary/nonlocal changes that are associated with experiences. I emphasize that the latter changes, though abrupt and unanalyzed in the orthodox theory, should be generated by some process in an ontological description, and show how quantum theory naturally generates two different times (mathematical time and process time) for the two different kinds of evolution, and explain why the unitary/local evolution in mathematical time can be regarded as merely a change generated by changing one's mode of description of the state, rather than any actual change in the reality itself. This meshes with the fact that there is no experience associated with that sort of change: nothing is actually changing or happening. These things just fall out of the mathematics: they are not forced or contrived. I emphasize the need for a `process of nature' to generate the nonunitary/nonlocal/nontrivial part of the evolution by assigning a continuous interval (i< T < (i+1)) in process time to each component of this process. So in summary, I am proposing, and providing the foundations of, an experience-based ontology that is based squarely on our basic physical theory, and am detailing the contrasts and connections to classical mechanics, and am explaining why, from the encompassing quantum perspective, experiences should not occur in processes describable in terms of processes implemented in classically describable physical systems. So my new paper is, essentially, a detailed reply to Aaron's seeming claim that there are no " Other reasons for bringing in quantum mechanics" other than bad reasons. Henry