As I mentioned on Pharyngula, I was invited by a philosopher friend to attend the Darwin Day talk by Daniel Dennett, at Framingham State College. The talk, “Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons”, was interesting, and meta-interesting; it not only was a good presentation of memetic evolution, it was a good demonstration of it as well, with successful elements of his earlier talks replicating themselves in this one. (Also, in a vivid display of horizontal meme transfer, I invite any who saw Dennett’s talk to also watch Sue Blackmore’s TED talk, to count the number of similar memes. For those who did not see Dennett, the Blackmore talk will give you the gist of it. No, they are not identical; variety exists among members of this species.)
After the talk (and the exodus of rude students who must have been there only for class credit), Dennett invited questions from the audience. Two (or maybe three; my notes are not clear) questions stood out for me, questions which explored Dennett’s claim that, despite our robots-made-of-robots-made-of-robots bodies, and the unthinking replicant memes infecting our brains, we humans have free will–a free will of the sort worth having. The last questioner asked whether we were actually free moral agents, or whether we were the hosts to parasitic moral memes; Dennett’s reply did not really satisfy me (nor my philosopher friend). Dennett made the analogy (a big part of his talk, too) of eukaryotic cells enjoying the benefits of the combined prokaryotic cells which compose them, and of humans enjoying the benefits of our symbiotic memes. All well and good, as far as that goes, but it seemed a strain to speak of memes as evolving separately, substrate-free, not caring about their human hosts other than as a means to reproduction, and then to turn around and claim that as a portion of our free will!
Perhaps I am misunderstanding him, but I have certainly read enough of his writing to doubt that, and I have read enough to know that Dennett misunderstands some aspects of some areas of my own expertise (which I would go into detail about, but it would rather get in the way of trying to remain an anonymous cuttlefish), so I have no illusion that he is infallible.
In another example of memetic transfer, I offer a replicated song. The structure (and tune, if you are inclined to sing it) are replicated from the original by Joni Mitchell; the first replication by Judy Collins shows that structure, descended with modifications in the chords, can successfully sell. Both versions are beautiful. Mine, less so.
Memes, it seems, are parasites
Inside our minds, so Dennett writes;
Poetic turns, and verbal flights
Evolving in our brains
But then he claims that we are free
To choose among the things we see
It doesn’t fit, it seems to me,
His explanation strains
I’ve looked at memes and at free will
From every way I can, but still
In spite of Dennett’s siren call
I don’t believe we’re free… at all
Memes are things that replicate
At really an astounding rate
From blind selection, they create
A culture that evolves
But now the concept gives me pause
I’ve got to stop and look for flaws
This explanation—might it cause
More problems than it solves?
I’ve looked at memes and at free will
From every way I can, but still
In spite of Dennett’s siren call
I don’t believe we’re free… at all
Love and hate and peace and war
Are memes that were selected for
Dreams and themes you can’t ignore—
Memetic, every one.
It seems the memes are in control
They take the place, they play the role
We used to say required a soul
Now souls are all undone
I’ve looked at memes and at free will
From every way I can, but still
In spite of Dennett’s siren call
I don’t believe we’re free… at all
Isn’t it queer?
Are we but hosts?
Robots of robot machines
Rid of our ghosts?
Send in the memes.
What is it like
Knowing at all?
Zombily Bayesing our nerves —
Store, then recall.
Are they just memes?
Send in the memes.
Easy to claim,
“Freedom evolves!”
Making the term we’re defining the thing that it solves,
Nailing that feeling of agency down to its seat
Inside a blind
Theatre of meat.
Learning is fun.
Shall I explore?
Using the memeplex of science
I can learn more.
But would these be memes
Not shared with my teams?
Perhaps there’s a flaw.
Memes can be rich:
Memes everywhere
Driving the dualist dreams
Into despair.
But we’re more than memes
Though sometimes it seems
Non-memebots are rare.
(with apologies to Stephen Sondheim, Daniel Dennett and Sue Blackmore)
*standing ovation for Phunicular*Bravo!
I like your song!
I find Dawkin’s introduction of memes a bit tiresome. Memes used to be called “culture” and was passed down from parents to children. The only advantage of the term “meme” is that it medicalises the process.
Dennett believes that he is a computer. What a weird meme he is creating. See The symbol grounding problem and Chinese Room and The nature of the soul for some counter arguments.
The Chinese Room won’t save your “soul”
Old Searle has dug himself a hole.
You see, a man within his room
Need not be produce of a womb
Since OCR and lines of code
Could lift that secretarial load.
The “understanding” must have been
Performed by Searle’s adept machine.
Once you see Searle’s dopey drone
Can lack a brain and flesh and bone
You’ll see the Chinese Room’s a joke
That shouldn’t baffle clever folk.
Alas, the ruse has gained esteem
And thrives – a most persistent meme –
In those who can’t complete their weaning
From outmoded views of meaning.
My symbol grounding doesn’t mess
With idle infinite regress –
No turtles, turtles, all the way,
No eyes that other eyes survey.
But every part of how I think –
Every symbol, every link –
Finds routes to run to states all real:
The correlates of how I feel.
Your belief is that the world we sees the world we get
But I am quite prepared to bet
That the world itself is nothing like the coloured lusciousness,
The beauty thats portrayed within the web of time an space
That gives your soul its place.
You propose that correlations are consciousness
When the noumenal correlates are unknown except to instruments.
Oh, where to start? My dearest Thoughts.
You’ve missed my views completely.
But many thanks that you replied
In rhyming verse so sweetly.
Please read again where I say “real”;
It’s brain states – networked nerves
And not some naive notion that
A mind itself observes.
For this next chunk I’ve made the choice
To sluice my views in Seussian voice:
When the photons from my futon
Find the focus of my eyes
They will kick my cones and rods,
Thus causing signals to arise.
I cannot span the spectrum
But my special cells respond
To their windows on the wavelengths
From the wondrous world beyond.
My cortex then combines the cues
And cottons on to patterns;
With fancy feature filtering
The futon form unflattens.
My nervous networks notice
Both the novel and mundane,
Matching models, melding motifs,
For my memories to retain.
In my Hebbian web of me-ness
Not one neuron stands alone:
Every concept gains its context
From connections that it’s grown.
Yet my net of wet connections
Are not abstract facts that lack
Any impact, since they’re cinched
To visceral states from bliss to wrack.
(Thoughts,
Lest my verse grow catatonic
I’ll abandon third paeonic.)
These mental states I share with mice,
But does a mouse need “soul”
To smell the cat and run in fear
To safety in its hole?
The cow that you perceive through eyes
And nose and sense of touch –
She knows and values her young calf.
Does she have “soul” as such?
Or are non-humans all robotic
Just like John Searle’s room?
Then what of babes anencephalic?
“Soul”-less you’d presume?
I won’t assign the unexplained
To concepts unexplainable.
A cogent theory of our minds
seems now to be attainable.
Me Labrador and Me
As we sit, my best friend and I
He, panting, knowing cats are chased
Me, wondering without a thought
I know we have a common view
A view that’s true for you
My mind like your mind
Rests on a turmoil
But rested it is space
Light, simultaneous
Is this the self same space that hosts my brain?
Without it I would be less than a dot, pointless
Cosmology
The successions of neural states
Like frames in a film show
Have nothing within their fates
To suggest where their pulses go
As Hermann Weyl, the Nobel Prize winning physicist put it, reality is a: “four-dimensional continuum which is neither “time” nor “space”. Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space” (Weyl 1918)
Observation is the placing of events in a changing time and space.
Perhaps the plenum of my brain navigates at a quantum pace?
Perhaps it is a becoming place?
Who knows? But what is sure
Is that we need to know much more.
See
Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscienceand medicine. Bjorn Merker. 2006http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Merker-03062006/Referees/Merker-03062006_preprint.pdf
I am very impressed by both the content and the form of these responses, not to mention their level of passion.
My response will take a slightly different fashion—
Somewhat Ogden Nashian.
Why is it that when people search for mind, or spirit, or soul
They look to the parts, and never to the whole?
They argue, wheedle, cajole, and strain
To reduce consciousness to some function of the brain.
Why should I be convinced that there is something in the neural net that creates me
When I use the terms of consciousness to say my computer hates me?
We do not learn to label our hunger, our love, or our perception of the color red
By comparing our neural state to the state of neurons in somebody else’s head.
It is our vocabulary, not our neurology, that serves as evidence for reified thoughts, memories, images, and qualia,
et alia.
But memories do not exist apart from remembering, nor images apart from seeing, nor thoughts apart from thinking
In the same way that drinks do exist separate from drinking.
And we learn that this is hunger, this is love, and this is red, through shared vocabulary
In the language of our parents, teachers, friends, or perhaps the local constabulary.
This language refers to acts performed in public by people, animals, or even cars or computers
which serve as our tutors,
Showing us that “red” is not defined subjectively at all
But rather as a common feature of this strawberry, that sweater, this stop sign, that fire truck, this apple, and that ball.
So if you wish to find consciousness, don’t look inside your brain, or worse, inside your mind—
the answer is not there to find.
Rather, look to our language, our behavior, and how we learn to put names to what we feel—
We are conscious because we are social—and unlike the mind, your social environment is real.
@Thoughts: That paper by Bjorn Merker was fine fodder for mind munchers. The section on selection (4.2’s my recollection) framed a physical explanation for your cow-perception questions.
@Cuttlefish: I agree that social linking is the source of all our thinking and that pressure to cooperate has helped to make our brains inflate. But consciousness still manifests in creatures cut off from the nest. It’s worth the effort sloggin’ to find functions in the noggin.
Phunicular, I hadn’t known
of children reared up all alone!
I do agree it’s worth a look, to see what way our neurons cook–but mechanism tells us how we think, and while this earns a “wow”, it does not, can not, show the whole–it’s not what we’d confuse with soul–the “how” an engine burns its gas does not tell how the miles pass–the engine gets us to the store, or to the mountains or the shore, but if we focus on the piston, think of all the stuff we’ve missed on.
Consciousness is not in our brains, but in behavior, which explains why “correlates of consciousness” is such a scientific mess.
Cuttlefish: Phunicular, I hadn’t known/of children reared up all alone!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyronhttp://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.phpetc.
There are numerous cases recorded
But it’s hard to sort facts from the mess
Of sensational press and the researchers’ guesses.
(Deliberate contact-free child-raising’s sordid
But people have tried it, nevertheless.)
But before we get tangled with ferals
And the children brought up locked away,
We must look at the differences in what we say
With regard definitions, or else risk the perils
Of arguing nothing all day.
Cuttlefish: Consciousness is not in our brains, but in behavior, which explains why “correlates of consciousness” is such a scientific mess.
By your implicit definition a cobber in the sad condition
of tetrodotoxin paralysis (by our little blue-ringed mate)
who’s been CPR’d by another (since behavior-less, he’s smothered)
must not have that thing that you would call a “conscious” state.
However,there’s reports from such survivors (kept alive by stoic strivers)
that describe their fully “conscious” state –
yes, they relate that through the wait while fearing fate they still kept thinking straight.
Deprived of all behavior, breath reliant on a savior,
a “consciousness” still manifest when isolated from the nest
is what mind science works to wrest from studies in its current quest.
Even if this “consciousness” relies on what culture supplies in order for it to arise,
it is plain it remains when the brain must abstain from all contact.
I’m not hunting some ghost-in-machine,
Nor some destiny locked in a gene,
Nor behaviour when humans convene,
But the science of knowing I’ve been.
So I have to conclude
that the “consciousness” you’d
be describing is not what I mean.
Tetrodotoxin and botulism
Affect the voluntary system
But! There is a chemical schism
The “thinking” channels? This stuff missed ’em!
You (as most) define “behavior”
Mostly in what muscles do-
I’d say signals your brain gave yer
Muscles, still are part of you.
Thinking is behavior, surely,
Not suppressed by drugs like these;
Thus, your volunteers not purely
Sans behavior, if you please!
Just as one may run in place,
But use one’s running muscles still
While paralyzed, one’s brain may race
As one who functions fully will.
(And yet, a quadriplegic knows
He feels emotions differently–
The truth is, such a difference shows
How global things like love may be.)
By my explicit definition
Thinking is behavior, too;
To follow B. F. Skinner’s tradition,
Behavior, simply, is what you do.
If you should try to quash behavior
With botox, curare, or crystal meth
You may indeed require a savior–
“No behavior” equals “death”!
Cuttlefish: By my explicit definition / Thinking is behavior, too; / To follow B. F. Skinner’s tradition, / Behavior, simply, is what you do.
I wondered if you’d go that way –
Behavior not put on display.
Our language strongly parts the two:
The “what we think” and “what we do”.
Communications could be clearer
Finding our positions nearer
If we flag alternate use
Of words we choose to state our views.
But will you stick to Skinner’s scope?
Intentional acts? Or slippery slope
To how a thorough scientist
Defines behavior of a syst-
em. Heartbeats are a thing we do
But are these called behavior too?
Heading back to previous claims,
With somewhat modified definitional frames.
Cuttlefish: Consciousness is not in our brains, but in behavior, which explains why “correlates of consciousness” is such a scientific mess.
And so I’m guessing you have no beef
With Dennett’s heterophenomenological brief
For using all the evidence –
The measurements,
And subjective word,
Not only third person reports –
Lest we distort
Or miss the mental behavior of the brain
We wish to explain.
Looking further back in our conversation,
I see we can further relieve Thoughts’ symbol grounding consternation.
Cuttlefish: They argue, wheedle, cajole, and strain / To reduce consciousness to some function of the brain. / Why should I be convinced that there is something in the neural net that creates me / When I use the terms of consciousness to say my computer hates me?
It seems to me we both agree
On computational models of the mind.
I’m open too, to try the view
That culture wrote the software of mankind.
I must confess Aristotle’s regress
I broke by tying symbols back to feelings,
But Cuttlefish, you’ve made me wish
I’d seen a ground of culture as appealing.
I note it seems free-floating memes
Can terminate the meaning of a meaning
In thoughts of old that gained a hold
And stuck around through evolution’s screening.
So some thoughts root in culture’s fruit
And some thoughts ground their meanings in sensations.
A Cartesian soul need not fill this role
For a person with Mysterian temptations.
(Philosophical aside:
If a man speaks in a forest clearing
And there’s no wife within hearing
Is he still wrong?)
We gaze at stars in a dark sky
Likes lights on a firmament
Nothing moving in the warm air
Nothing moving..
Is Darkness
Surrounding us
Nothingness?
What behaviour did this blackness indulge
That it might itself divulge?
Did it walk out of the sky
And strike you in your naked eye?
—————
(All experience is physical
But need not be dynamical
It could be geometrical
Or even quantum physical).
—————
Gilbert Ryle knew that every conscious thinker ought
To preface each and every thought
With the thought that sought that thought
He realised this was such a mess
He called it Ryle’s Regress
But Descartes knew that thoughts arise
Unbidden, as the brain’s surprise
So Ryle and his pupil Dennett say regress denies the mind
But Berkeley points out that mind is of a passive kind
Certainly our inner speech
Is no conscious creation
Its origins are out of reach
Of conscious contemplation
Each word appears made by machine
By neural automation
So inner speech is not your being
———–
Perhaps behaviour ends in feelings
But what feels a feeling?
How much would you feel in no time at all?
Why is time revealing
If someone is kind or cruel?
How do you hear a whole word?
Do you extend in time like space,
Are feelings in a space-time place,
Or is experience absurd?
Thoughts: But Descartes knew that thoughts arise / Unbidden, as the brain’s surprise
Please, just walk away, René.
Your quotes are obsolete today.
For what you knew about our brains
(Like maggots sourced from food-remains
In Aristotle’s “History”)
Was just your guess at mystery.
And Berkeley too, a clever guy,
Lived in a time when armchair-phi
Was all the rage. Put that to bed.
He had no tools to scan a head.
Thoughts: So Ryle and his pupil Dennett say regress denies the mind
Dear Thoughts, read closer. Then you’ll find
That Ryle did not deny the mind.
He merely noted that the split
Of mind and body didn’t fit.
(To say, by using modern tools,
That blood is made of molecules
Would not in any way deny
That humans have a blood supply!)
But one denial he can boast:
He kicked out an unhelpful ghost.
Empiricism’s great to claim
(And “New” just forms a different name)
But for your title to make sense
You must address the evidence
Accrued in bulk these last ten years
From science opening new frontiers.
I see you resort
To the pejorative retort,
Attacking Descartes for being old
And even Ryle is left in the cold
Yes, fMRI shows that imagining is like vision
And inner speech like speech and audition
So the brain maketh mind
But what has it made?
What matter, what space
And where is it laid?
How do you hear a whole word or see the space of darkness?
Consider this:
We have experience
That experience is simultaneous things
Simultaneous things are a space
Physicalism means all things are physical
Therefore experience is a real physical space-time
Where is it?
Or are you a mystical materialist?
Thoughts: Attacking Descartes for being old.
If I asked you to write of a photon in flight
And Newtonian ways you extolled,
Were I then to invite you to get your sums right,
Am I wrong to regard Newton “old”?
I’ve respect for Descartes. Yes I know he was smart
But there’s things that he couldn’t have known.
Will you tie your self back to René’s knowledge lack
By denying our knowledge has grown?
Thoughts: That experience is simultaneous things
I’m the first to concede that at very high speed
Our concept of simultaneity
Within different frames leads to different claims.
It’s a mind-screwing jolt for the laity.
My vision proceeds at mere chemical speeds
And my neurons all share the one frame.
If they were to part (in a big bang-like fart)
My “experience” would not be the same.
Thoughts: Physicalism means all things are physical / Therefore experience is a real physical space-time / Where is it? / Or are you a mystical materialist?
You seem discontented at sense represented
By interconnections of cells.
I don’t find it tragic when facts replace magic
It’s all about breaking the spells.
I think you’d do well to try Eric Kandel,
Ramachandran, Dan Dennett, and Pinker,
E.T.Jaynes, then some rubies in Cosmides and Tooby
Before you unravel the thinker.
Tendon reflex
Righting reflex
Reaction times
Driving cars without thinking
Walking home after drinking
Hating limes
All these can be done
By my digital brain
But true observation
Smooth sight without grain
Without superposition
In dreams and sensation
Is another thing again
Brain maketh mind
But according to Zeh
The QM point of mind might make brain
As a collapse of wave again and again
Who’s to say?
Dennett and the rest
Rouse the rabble
But surely they jest
When they dabble
In problems that afflict all philosophy
Dennett (1999) says:
“A curious anachronism found in many but not all of these reactionaries is that to the extent that they hold out any hope at all of solution to the problem (or problems) of consciousness, they speculate that it will come not from biology or cognitive science, but from–of all things!–physics”
And so displays
A total failure to realise that the problem of conscious observation is a global problem that affects the entire corpus of philosophy and natural science and will not be answered by his Newtonian prejudices. The philosophy of change, space, time, matter and causality are all affected by the final resolution of the problem of the nature of the conscious observer.
Dennett, D. (1999). “The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Millennial Lecture http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/zombic.htm
Zeh, H. D. (1979). Quantum Theory and Time Assymetry. Foundations of Physics, Vol 9, pp 803-818 (1979).http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0307/0307013.pdf
Zeh has moved to http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0307013
I missed that you had said
How we see the colour red:
Phuncicular:
“My vision proceeds at mere chemical speeds
And my neurons all share the one frame.
If they were to part (in a big bang-like fart)
My “experience” would not be the same.
“I ask for no magic
Just a simple theory
To be blind to the problem is tragic
Perhaps you can see it more clearly
And tell me exactly:
What is the physical transformation from nerve impulses in a mass of neurons to phenomenal experience? (ie: how does a set of membrane depolarisations become the space in experience that is a slab of blackness in a dark night?).
Thoughts: But true observation / Smooth sight without grain / Without superposition / In dreams and sensation / Is another thing again
Experiments agree our peripheral vision
Lacks color – it’s testing that tells.
Yet we think that we see with an even precision –
Delusion computed by cells.
What leads you to think that smooth image deception
Falls out of the reach of a brain?
How the Mind Works, S. Pinker, makes photon reception
To 2.5-D less arcane. *
Having done my fair share of clean image construction
From grainy and noisy reality
I can see no great scare stopping model production
In the links of vast neuron plurality.
* Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works, Chapter 4: The Mind’s Eye.
Thoughts: Dennett and the rest / Rouse the rabble / But surely they jest / When they dabble / In problems that afflict all philosophy
Your philosophy can never grow
Until you work out what to throw.
The symbol grounding problem’s grounded;
How can it be that you’re still hounded?
And “quantum” magic you opine
(Like Penrose back in ’89)B
ut studies show our brain parts work
Without a hint of QM Turk.
Thoughts: And so displays / A total failure to realise that the problem of conscious observation is a global problem that affects the entire corpus of philosophy and natural science…
Dennett shows a total failure to fall for misconceived impasses.Lots of problems still persist from skipping neuroscience classes.
Thoughts (in yet another post that finally strains my ability to versify): And tell me exactly: / What is the physical transformation from nerve impulses in a mass of neurons to phenomenal experience? (ie: how does a set of membrane depolarisations become the space in experience that is a slab of blackness in a dark night?).
Of course you’re aware that the qualia problem’s unsolved (and might remain so), so why do you think that the current lack of an answer could somehow support your anti-Dennett stance? QM provides absolutely no help there. Any proposed hitherto-unobserved physical science will have problems connecting measurable quantities with experience in exactly the same way current science does.
Dennett dissolves part of the qualia issue by showing that nobody can consistently define what they mean by qualia, and points out how most of the perceived problem is illusory*. He does at least propose an experimental methodology for further investigation.
*Dennett, D. (2005) Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness
If you’d like to see a demolition of zombies and property dualism, try Zombies! Zombies?. I can’t look a p-zombie in the face after digesting Yudkowsky’s analysis.
(in yet another post that finally strains my ability to versify)
Lemme give it a shot.
The nature of your question presupposes your position;
The “phenomenal” you’re after is an artifact of word;
Descartes approached the problem in a dualist tradition—
With the progress of neurology, that view is now absurd.
A photon is reflected from a stimulus that’s distal;
Through the pupil, lens, and humors to the retina it goes,
Where a rod or cone transduces it, to fire like a pistol
To bipolar cells and ganglia, as everybody knows.
At the level of the retina, already there are features
Which are processed by the structures that we call the visual fields;
Light is processed very differently by different sorts of creatures
So that information useful to their situation yields.
Now a signal (or “potential”) shoots along the optic neuron
Then through processing in parallel in many different ways
Such as color, edges, faces, on and on and more obscure on—
Read some Sacks or Ramachandran if you can, one of these days.
From occipital to temporal, and on up to the frontal
Back and forth, with constant feedback, now the signal makes its way
With perhaps a verbal output, though the answer that you want’ll
Still elude you, cos you’re looking for a view that’s had its day.
The majority of processing is out of our awareness
(And “the feeling of awareness” has its processing as well!)
We cannot feel the process, just results, and so in fairness
Introspection as a method simply doesn’t work that well.
At no point in the process is “an image” there for viewing,
Nor a “self” to view the image, which is really no surprise;
To demand an explanation for what you think we are doing
Is equivalent to asking how the sun can truly rise!
A perceptual illusion doesn’t mean that something’s missing—
What it means is merely something isn’t what it seemed at first
There’s no need to be Cartesian now, unless we’re reminiscing,
And there’s nothing there but trouble in the bubble we have burst.
Cuttlefish: Lemme give it a shot.
Thanks Cuttlefish. I shouldn’t write
At 1am – the dead of night.
It’s great to see how Cuttle-sense
Can fill the gaps with eloquence.
Zeh: 5. THE PHYSICAL EVENT OF OBSERVATIONA phenomenon is “observed” when an observer becomes aware of it. Thisrequires the observed system to affect the ultimate observer system, which is known to be localized in the brain and probably in the cerebral cortex.
This was no time for sleep;
This was no time to eat;
There were comments to write
Using metrical feet.
All that old, old, old phi –
All that phi had to die.
We shoveled the verses;
Thoughts shoveled them back,
Until out of the blue came a Quantum Attack.
It was Little Cat Zeh, a dualist dealer
And out of his hat he extracted
A Wheeler!
Zeh implied "Let's make space for a god of the gaps:
All things that my Wheeler observes must collapse!"
You see, if we grant this wild Wheeler admission
And let his conceit go, then superposition
Descends on all universe parts unobserved
And keeps all their possible presents preserved.
"Oh no!" I said, "Cuttle, please fetch me a mop.
This anthropocentric conceit has to stop!"
I called up a friend who'd seen all this before
And told him the problem…
Copernicus swore.
Dennett defeated
In nineteen ninety eight
Dennett makes his big mistake
He shifts qualia from what is there
To the ‘judgement of events’
This shift is hardly fair
And out of hand prevents
Discussion of qualia where
Philosophers have their care
A problem is not solved by redefinition
And Dennett descends to base erudition
In nineteen ninety two
In his opus magnus true
He says the brain of man
Has no cutaneous rabbit
Or phi illusions other than
Outside the body and habit
But in twenty oh six
Blankenburg and Larsen proved
The rabbit’s in the brain
And the lights are on again
Dennett is disproved
The mind has played no tricks
The brain models illusion
And mind sees its profusion
And perceptual filling in
Is the new neuroscience scene
So you see Dennett’s thesis lies in tatters on the ground
But still infects young minds from the books that lie around
References
Daniel C Dennett. (1988). Quining Qualia. in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm
In this paper Dennett: "The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infal libility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F.". This is the basis for his subsequent work.
Dennett, D. and Kinsbourne, M. (1992) Time and the Observer: the Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain. (1992) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual, Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., Cognitive Science, Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/time&obs.htm
Blankenburg, F., Ruff, C.C., Deichmann, R., Rees, G. and Driver, J. (2006) The cutaneous rabbit illusion affects human primary sensory cortex somatotopically, PLoS Biol 2006;4(3):e69.
Larsen, A., Madsen, K.H., Lund, T.E., and Bundesen, C. (2006). Images of Illusory Motion in Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006;18:1174-1180.
———————————–
Cuttlefish says:“A perceptual illusion doesn’t mean that something’s missing—What it means is merely something isn’t what it seemed at firstThere’s no need to be Cartesian now, unless we’re reminiscing,And there’s nothing there but trouble in the bubble we have burst.”
But as you will see above here again
It is Dennett’s bubble that has burst
Illusions are brain activity at first
And your mind is the product of brain
The brain fills in the gaps
With topological maps
A point two to point five second delay
Allows the brain to have its say
But leaves the mind behind the times
As Libet’s passive observer
Which brings us to Tegmark and Zeh
Decoherence sinks
The conscious mind that thinks
As Ryle had already assayed.
But passive observation
Is not contemplation
And Tegmark’s sums dont apply
Perhaps mind’s the preferred basis
As Barrett seems to espy
Epilogue
If observation is a space
And it is made by brains
Then hypotheses must be in place
For how pulses give rise to pains
Scientists observe the world
They measure, describe and look
They wait for data to be unfurled
And do not just read a book
They describe what they see
Then make hypotheses explicit
They do not use school cosmology
To simply dismiss it
They operate empirically
This mind, this simultaneous space, this time is thine
Do not treat it unphysically
references
Barrett (2005) The Preferred-Basis Problem and the Quantum Mechanics of Everything. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access published online on May 16, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, doi:10.1093/bjps/axi114
PS: “Dennett Defeated” should have started “In nineteen eighty eight”!
PPS: On the zombie issue, see Progressive replacement of the brain which deals with the origin of Chalmer’s zombie argument.
Thoughts,
In your haste to leave Dan dead,
To find some fault in what he’s said,
You’ve claimed “The mind has played no tricks”
In sensing where the rabbit kicks.
I don’t think Dennett would agree.
Look carefully. I think you’ll find
You’ve just declared your PSC*
Is not part of your mind!
You’ve sung that Chinese Room refrain
By carving off one slice of brain
To push a subtle “conscious part”
To just beyond our art.
* Primary Somatosensory Cortex
(Life is busy. By and by
I’ll find the time for more reply.)
Yes indeed,
“A subtle conscious part
Is just beyond our art”!
It frustrates me a bit, to find
This parsing out of “what is mind”
Seems always, always to have missed
That I am no reductionist!
I am no fool; I won’t deny
The brain’s importance. Ah, but I
Would argue that is just one part,
But so’s the gut, and so’s the heart.
There is no brain that acts alone—
At least, not any I have known.
The consciousness phenomena
Are everyday and common—a
Description of one’s life, it seems,
Both wide awake and in our dreams.
The consciousness we must explain
Is product of much more than brain!
A wider scope, and not more narrow,
Serves as target for our arrow.
(Explanations claiming “quantum”?
We don’t need, and much less want ‘em;
The level that we need—behavior—
Is not quantum; it can’t save yer
Theory, just because it’s hard
To fathom. We can disregard
The quantum stuff as misconstrued
By several leaps of magnitude.)
The consciousness vocabulary
Isn’t technical or scary;
Rather, it’s the common tongue
We learned while we were very young;
We’re taught our anger, love, and pride
By people with no view inside.
To their thoughts we were likewise blind,
And yet we learned to label “mind”.
But how to learn what makes up “red”
Without a view from head to head?
Or hunger, sadness, even pain
Without a window to the brain?
We learn the things that make us us
Through public, common stimulus;
There is no disembodied “blue”,
But things we learned to call that hue;
When looking at your “mind” today,
Reflect on how it got that way;
The learning that took many years,
Not mere arrangement of the gears.
So much of mental mystery
Reveals itself in history,
Which, if we choose to disregard,
Makes consciousness appear the “Hard
Problem”, as Chalmers so labeled,
A lofty problem, nearly fabled.
It’s “hard” because it asks to find
Physical cause for mental mind.
(The answer I would give—surprise!—
Is one the question plain denies,
As if rotation of the earth
Could not explain the eastern birth
And western death of each day’s sun
As well as Phoebus’s chariot run.)
Our language speaks of mental stuff;
For many, that would seem enough,
And “images” and “memories”
And reified ideas like these
Are what we’re challenged to explain
A task which we’d pursue in vain
Like capturing a unicorn
Or finding where a gryphon’s born.
Reductionist neurologists
By now have plenty on their lists
Explaining this or that or these
In all the detail that you please
Reducing Y to lots of X
Can simplify or make complex,
But if you’re simply changing levels,
Such “explanation” just bedevils.
The problem, if it’s there to find
Is solved in how we learn our mind.
It won’t be found in EEG’s
Or PET scans, CAT scans, none of these—
Oh, yes, we’ll learn some awesome stuff,
But, at that level? Not enough.
“Physical mind” is not just contradiction—
It’s sending us all on a chase for a fiction!
What we are we are
And already we know
What it is to be
Dennett mocks it as “folk psychology”
I cannot reduce what is with my descriptive science
All I make is models
But I can tell you this
You’ll not model me
With any FET or tranny!
Thoughts: I cannot reduce what is with my descriptive science / All I make is models / But I can tell you this / You’ll not model me / With any FET or tranny!
Argumentum ad consequentiam seems unwieldy and hollow
To shield one’s self-image from a pill one can’t swallow.
Thoughts:
What we are we are
And already we know
What it is to be
Dennett mocks it as “folk psychology”
I have no eyes to look behind
And view my brain, much less my mind;
I cannot know your thoughts, and you
Are blind to what I’m thinking, too.
These are the facts; we can’t deny
We have no working “inner eye”
Nor any form of ESP;
Your thoughts cannot be seen by me.
Your claim—that we can know ourselves—
Is countered by the miles of shelves
Of self-help books. Our knowledge hides
From where you tell us it resides!
If we could simply take a look
Inside our minds, why need a book?
We’d never ask “How do I feel?
Could this be love? Could it be real?”
If God or Science offered me
Some cranial transparency
So you could see my every thought—
The change of mind; the urge I fought,
The censored comment never spoken,
Secret kept and promise broken—
What fabled treasures! Wondrous finds,
If we could read each other’s minds!
But we cannot. Make no mistake,
Our skulls and minds are both opaque
We do, instead, what we can do;
We read the things in public view
We see the song, the poem, the kiss;
Infer from these that love is this.
In turn, each element we find
We sum, and call the total “mind”.
If I could see inside my head,
(A place where angels fear to tread)
And see how thinking really works,
The jumble of selected quirks
And if (what wonders “if” can do!)
I saw inside your thinking too
I think that I should never see
What now makes up philosophy.
An eloquent testimony
On the impossibility
Of virtual reality
It would be true if it were not the case
That virtual realities are a commonplace
Even the simplest servo has reference states
And detailed maps are used inside
The depths of any system that navigates
The GPS becomes a pale aside
As the mapper computates
Our experience is unlike the world itself
The object is not as it appears
The geometry is not as it seems
The content is encoded
Hallucinations and dreams occur
We imagine, we have inner speech
Yet against all observation
The materialist avers
That the object that he only knows,
Through senses narrow sensitivity,
Is the object in itself
And yet the red object is not red,
Red is reflected
The retina has responded
It is not heavy,
It is the muscles that are stretched
It is not odorous,
It is the nose is stimulated
It is not coarse,
It is the skin that is scratched
It is not consoling
That is remembrance
It does not hurt
That is pain
There is not even reason to reject
The observation of our brain
If from school cosmology we refrain
Over time we will perfect
A theory to explain
The self observation that we detect
Those who believe that only the object of sense exists
Have some strange agenda that persists
Past any reason
But note this clearly
Science is about relations
It never has the essence of a thing
So your fears that explanations
Will reduction bring
Are unfounded remonstrations
The number two
Can be two of anything
It is only when two’s in you
That you understand the thing
It seems to me philosophers have somewhat been seduced
By the metaphor of storage, and conclusions it implies.
The self, itself, it promises, is something that’s produced
Via information transfer in that blob behind our eyes.
All too often this assumption underlies their exploration;
The conclusions that it leads to seem a normal path to follow
But inherent in the metaphor is one sort of explanation;
By removing those assumptions, it’s a tougher bite to swallow.
If the structure of the person helps to form what’s introspected
(And the social and environmental atmosphere as well)
Then feelings, thoughts, or memories just cannot be dissected
From the person as a whole, as information one could tell.
“Ah, but that’s just further information”, I have seen in practice,
When I try this explanation—and I want to pull my hair—
You could stuff it in, of course, but it’s like sitting on a cactus:
Just because it can be sat on, doesn’t mean the thing’s a chair.
A model of time like cards in a deck
Is a recursion lurking
You end up by saying “oh what the heck”
And explanation’s wanting
But time is not parallel planes
Of three dimensional stasis
Time is also time for a change
That new theory chases
If time does exist
Then the world perdures
I do not just persist
Even though my memory endures
But I am no simple Sider stage
Time is not a positive dimension
And to see this 2D page
Needs geometric manipulation
You are not an answer endlessly chasing a question
Both question and answer in time extend
To solve the recursing confusion
And to see the past does not portend
Any more than that space and time depend
On each other in a continuum
And that time is a negative dimension*
It is amazing to the likes of me
That people ignore time extended.
In the twenty first century
Its time we no longer pretended
That only the “now” is “it”
When time like space can divide
The quantum double slit”
Just further information”
Is a transfer from sight to site
But somewhere this motion
May undergo respite
Perhaps a brain can be self aware
And bathed in its own trans-temporal light
Perhaps not
But to brazenly declare
That experience is impossible
Or is simply “what is”
Is an attachment to the cosmological
To nineteenth century material bliss
* Following Weyl’s usage, time is a negative dimension because Pythagoras’ theorem for time is
h^2 = r^2 MINUS T^2
(where T=ct)
See:Attosecond double slit experiment
(Double slit in time)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v95/i4/e040401
Is there an alternative to the block universe view?
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002408/
Wikibook on Special Relativity:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special_Relativity
Quantum computing abhors decoherence;
It’s there with no conscious observer to see.
Still there are mystics with stubborn adherence
To quantum descriptions that need me or thee.
Puzzles abound at the limits of science:
Mysterious cans full of worms to mislead.
Why mix up disparate cans in defiance
Of reason, experiment, logic or need?
Mind in behavior and cells and potentials
Is yielding a torrent of useful results.
Clutching at yet unexplored non-essentials
Works better for book-deals and starting new cults.
You might be amused
If the basics of physics
Could be perused
Some people are trying to bring modern science education up to date, its now over a century behind the times for 18 year olds.
See:
Ogborn, K. and Taylor, E.F. (2005). Quantum Physics explains Newton’s lawsof motion. Physics education. 40(1) 26-34.
Taylor in particular is making a considerable effort in this direction http://www.eftaylor.com/leastaction.html
People don’t realise that even magnetism and kinetic energy (ie: the whole of dynamics) are relativistic effects at ordinary velocities Special Relativity and magnetism.
Thoughts, I’ve no problems with quantum mechanics;
Equations don’t give me cold sweats or mild panics.
It’s mystics like Zeh to whom I object
With their quantumly conscious observer effect.
It is probably time to leave this page
When the founder of modern decoherence theory,
A notable sage,
Is mocked for being culty and dreary
It is no surprise that certainty
Is the currency
Of the computer age
It could still be eighteen ninety nine philosophically
Thoughts,
If you want to criticize
Attempts to philosophize
You’ll then have to agree
Your appeals to authority
Would be more at home BCE.
Philosophers, both old and new,
Find evidence convincing too.
I pointed you to recent finds
That decoherence needs no minds.
I’m sorry that old QM pioneers
Included myths that stood too many years.
It’s time to cease unquestioning reliance
On theories that have now been dropped by science.
Suggested reading: Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious
Your reference:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/projection.html
“The appearance of “probability” in deterministic amplitude evolutions, as we now know, is due to decoherence. Each time a photon was blocked, some other you saw it go through. Each time a photon went through, some other you saw it blocked.”
Saunders points out that:
“Zeh is engaged in a polemic against those who see in the decoherent historiesapproach a one-history solution of the problem of measurement, with no appealto Everett’ ideas. In fact he endorses a radical version of relativism, based onthe dynamical decoherence theory, save in the crucial respect that he appealsto the common-sense notion of change. But now he is not about to say any-thing about probability: given that we have a “dynamically independent wavepacket” let us suppose the packet divides in two, with unequal amplitudes. Thiscorresponds to a bifurcating history with unequal relations in norm. In whatsense is ”…..” more likely to go one way or the other, and what is ”…..”? ”
“Time, Quantum Mechanics, and Decoherence”, Synthese, 102, 235-66 (1995)
Remember that history is multiple
As well as the future
The interesting problem here is what makes “you”.
Suppose you were trying to recall a name
And on the basis of retrieving it again
Some person would be pleased or blue
How many synapses does such a recall require?
If the name is on the tip of your tongue,
how many quanta must expire
Before the offending deed is done?
A few or even one to release a tongue’s tip?
A universe might change on such a slip
And where do you go when such an event occurs?
Time exists so a life thread is divided
When one event your life prefers
To the other thats provided
But what is this temporal thread?
But the basis that hosts decoherence
As through history we tread
But without classical Minkowski time
There is no appearance
Of events that lead to another or that will
Make a difference between the fleeting and the still
And as our minds contain nothing but the past
Is it this thread of mind that makes our local world at last?
Remember that history is multiple
As well as the future and at each instant might be made anew
If the thread of time did not exist in you
Although it’s true, the quirks of quarks
Are what we find when we reduce
The laws of rocks, of tuning forks,
Of cats, of cars, of orange juice,
The truth is, if I know the quirks
Of quarks, and qualms of quantum states
They don’t tell how my pencil works
Or what to do with roller skates.
If (knock on wood) my car should stall
And leave me stranded in a panic
There’s many folks whom I could call,
But none of them a quantum mechanic.
Explosive oxidation of
The hydrocarbon molecules
Is many many leaps above
The quantum tale of fossil fuels;
If, at my car, some stranger spoke
Of many-worlds hypotheses
Instead of just: “your fuel pump’s broke”
He might as well speak Japanese.
Indeed, if one is told a tale
Of how an engine burns its gas,
Of how exhaust comes out the tail,
Of how they make the windshield glass,
Of shock absorbers, front disc brakes,
All sorts of automotive prattle
It would not tell which road one takes
From Albuquerque to Seattle—
Which, if that was what one needs,
Is how the answer should be phrased;
Reductionism here impedes,
And only leaves ones eyeballs glazed.
The actions of a single nerve
Or even of a given piece
Of one, we clearly may observe—
Say, neurotransmitter release—
Where ACH or dopamine
Released in the synaptic cleft
By vesicles, which we have seen,
A process at which cells are deft;
The process may be understood
At many different levels, such
As cell, or body, or a good
Example of a chemist’s touch;
An organ’s function, or perhaps
A function in some social act—
Each level different, each one maps
A different view of one same truth.
The quantum level cannot say
The others now do not exist;
Reducing won’t explain away
A higher explanation’s gist.
Your quantum invocation means
You simply wish our current views
Left something there behind the scenes—
Some agent, with the power to choose.
Alas, there’s nothing there to find;
This entity does not exist
No moral agent, causal mind
That all of science must have missed.
The science shows no secret curse,
No need to travel back in time
To save Cartesian minds—and worse,
We’ve done it, once again, in rhyme.
“Of quarks, and qualms of quantum states
They don’t tell how my pencil works
Or what to do with roller skates.”
Well they do tell exactly this
The graphite’s gentle slip
Is an act of quantum bliss
And without Minkowski no skate may trip
Elegant Windmills were made
Before young Newton raised his spade!
But if you wish to comprehend
When babies become beings
Or a man should meet his end
You must go beyond what seems
Change without observers cannot be explained
But again the materialist complains
That such problems are immaterial
As if change were simply ethereal
The quantum basis state is mighty strange
But the die hard materialist avows
That explanations of how this is arranged
Are philosopher’s holy cows
The Chinese Room and regress
Are widely accepted queries
But materialists digress
“There are no other cosmologies
but those that we were taught in school
So belief in mind is the belief of a fool”
I can make a Turing machine
From ball bearings on a belt
This machine can be seen
To copy computations dealt
By any PC or organic brain
So the poor functionalist must make the claim
that a steel ball is quite the same
As the materialist’s brain
All I say is this:
There is an empirical experience that we call mind
And a cosmology that makes you dismiss anything of the kind
This placing theory above observation is hubris
And the claim that this belief is “scientific”
Is nothing short of plain horrific!
“Well they do tell exactly this
The graphite’s gentle slip
Is an act of quantum bliss
And without Minkowski no skate may trip”
The graphite’s slip is just the same,
With this view thrust upon it,
If I should merely sign my name
Or write a quantum sonnet!
Your answer serves to illustrate
My problem with your view:
I think that answers should relate
To questions—how ‘bout you?
To speak in terms of “gentle slip”
Describes the graphite’s flaking,
But not the path my pencil’s tip
Across the page is making.
Description of the finest kind
Is still not explanation;
Not pencil tips, and not the mind—
That’s misinterpretation!
You act as if reducing mind
To quantum-level laws
Allowed a person thus to find
A true internal cause!
But this, of course, is not the case—
One only finds description!
(A simple fact, which you must face
And not have a conniption.)
Our explanations, grounded in
The world that we can see,
Are where we fruitfully begin
To find what mind must be.
(I also see, parenthetically,
A view that you ascribe to me
That does not sound like mine at all
A strawman, rather, built to fall–
In searching my views for contradiction,
Please have a care not to tilt at a fiction!)
Thoughts: “There is an empirical experience that we call mind /
And a cosmology that makes you dismiss anything of the kind”
Mind exists. It deserves explanation,
Not a stream of obtuse obfuscation.
All the dualist tries
To hide minds in the skies
Have resulted in fact-free frustration.
Thoughts: “Change without observers cannot be explained”
Thoughts: “This placing theory above observation is hubris”
Thoughts, I have already noted
That QM works not how you’ve quoted.
You’re looking for gaps
Such as conscious collapse,
But reality’s already voted.
The guys doing quantum encryptions
Use ego-free QM descriptions.
A snoop with no brain
Still upsets the code train.
Mind-myths leave these guys in conniptions.
Think back thirteen billions of years
Before consciousness ever appears –
Do you think the first pair
To become self-aware
Could collapse all events in arrears?
If so, then encryption is busted,
Using QM that’s not mind-adjusted.
Must we all be retrained
Since theories that reigned
Fifty years ago have to be trusted?
Sorry, QM is not that mysterious.
Your need to update is now serious
To further your aims.
Just restating old claims
Makes comments sound glib and imperious.
Thoughts, do you really still believe that consciousness is a required part of quantum mechanics, despite the recent evidence? Or do you have some other recent evidence to resuscitate the idea? Or are you clinging to a convoluted non-disprovable interpretation that adds as much to QM as the Omphalos hypothesis added to discussions of origins?
Please explain, I both of you entreat
How we see the world simultaneously
Although this is an impossible feat,
forbidden by relativity
If seeing is where particles meet
Explain if you will
How if there is but the present instant
We can know anything at all
When for no time at all nothing is extant
As for the preferred basis of the quantum
There is a problem there
Thinking of this problem is not wanton
And the anthropic existence of observers now
Can be invoked to explain how
The world occurred that we love and share*
But most of all explain
how change occurs
Without assuming change again
What is quite certain
Is that Dennett’s strong AI
Interpretation
Of the nature of you and I
Is reductionist beyond imagination
It reduces explanation
To the science of a century past
Has no predictive power at last
And simply rejects observation
How can “Brights” say that:
Mind is not a problem because it does not exist
Single channel Turing tapes are not a problem, ask any emergentist
Preferred basis is not a problem, ask any pet physicist
Change is not a problem we’ll just not think of this
Time is not a problem – for any closet presentist
Regress is not a problem denying mind dismisses this
Deny, deny, deny dismiss
Is that the route to intellectual bliss?
There is an empirical experience that we call mind
And a cosmology that makes you dismiss anything of the kind
My plea is simply
To avoid cosmological conformity
And study mind scientifically
* I would propose that it is the geometrical form of our universe, a form that allows point observers, that has selected our particular universe.
Thoughts: “Please explain, I both of you entreat / How we see the world simultaneously / Although this is an impossible feat, / forbidden by relativity / If seeing is where particles meet”
You might as well ask me why elephants fly,
And if their ears pop on ascent.
The answer is simple: however they try,
An elephant’s earthbound – 100 percent.
The things that you say are forbidden are not.
You’re making stuff up as you go.
On others’ opinions you’re cloying a clot
In the hope that confusion continues to grow.
It’s clear when I’ve pointed in previous verse
To the reasons your mind-myths don’t wash
That you’ve taken no heed – you restate the obverse.
You have stuff in your head you’re unwilling to quash.
Thoughts: if you’ll either acknowledge that consciousness isn’t required in a quantum description, or explain how you resolve it with current quantum encryption technology, this discussion could continue in a rational form. If you’re planning to merely deny any recent evidence, there’s no point proceeding.
I have never claimed,
Unlike yourself or Dennett
That all can be explained
Thats not my tenet
I hoped my faltering verse
Would open your eyes
And lead to the obverse
That it is no surprise
That Newtonian concepts you will find
Are insufficient to explain mind
On your QM point both many minds and universes
Have the same Predictions
For quantum encryptions
Many universes has a brain
That splits at instants
And can explain
QM decoherence
In fact I am puzzled why you ask
About qm encryption at all
It is an Everettian task
And does not cast a pall
Over any part of our discussion
My point was solely
How Zeh and Zurek's theory
Is not wholly explanatory
Indeed, it opens up a whole new zone
Of preferred basis discussions
That philosophers will hone
And weigh for repercussions
I do not understand how you believe
That decoherence theory has solved
Or even how it might relieve
The view that has evolved
That Everrett's idea
Needs some sort of selection
To reach theoretical perfection
The observer does not create the world
But as Zeh and others after say
It may select the world thats unfurled
Or be part of the mix
That makes the basis matrix
We do not know
We must not deny or just dismiss
To maintain our Newtonian bliss
My point throughout is that mind
Involves many problems in philosophy
It is not simply a problem of the computing kind
Solved by Dennett's simplicity
I do not know the answers I say
You say you do
But the problems dont go away
See
"The preferred basis problem is arguably a more serious problem for a splitting-worlds reading of Everett. In order to explain our determinate measurement records, the theory requires one to choose a preferred basis so that observers have determinate records (or determinate experiences) in each term of the quantum-mechanical state as expressed in this basis. "http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-everett/ (2007)
"..Zurek's argument does not show how Schrodinger dynamics, by itself, picks out a preferred set of projection operators that sum to unity"
Stapp, Henry P. (2002) The basis problem in many-worlds theories. The Canadian Journal of Physics .http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:0bfFzjLoc94J:www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/p%257Fbp.%257F%257F%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%251B%255BD%257F%257F%257F%257F%257F%257F+The+basis+problem+in+many-worlds+theories&cd=7&hl=en
On a physical metatheory of consciousnesshttp://www.arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0010042
“You’re making stuff up as you go.
On others’ opinions you’re cloying a clot”
Well thanks,
But you never answered any question nor referenced any statement.
I must stop this now before I become fully insulted!
Me: “You’re making stuff up as you go. / On others’ opinions you’re cloying a clot”
Thoughts: “Well thanks, / But you never answered any question nor referenced any statement. / I must stop this now before I become fully insulted!”
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was referring to your claim:
“How can “Brights” say that: / Mind is not a problem because it does not exist”
Which is a strawman you’ve erected to help you launch into a chorus of “Deny, deny, deny dismiss / Is that the route to intellectual bliss?”
It’s the same erroneous claim you made earlier when you said:”So Ryle and his pupil Dennett say regress denies the mind”.
To which I replied “Dear Thoughts, read closer. Then you’ll find / That Ryle did not deny the mind. / He merely noted that the split / Of mind and body didn’t fit.”
If you continue to misrepresent opposing arguments, you’ll never understand them.
I was also explicitly referring to “How we see the world simultaneously / Although this is an impossible feat, / forbidden by relativity / If seeing is where particles meet”
That claim of an “impossible feat” is, as I say, “just making stuff up”. There is no contradiction implicit in what we perceive (via our known-to-be-approximate senses) as simultaneous and the concepts of relativity. If you’re not just imagining problems, please provide some support for your incredible claims.
Too… awesome…