X-Message-Number: 7985
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Qualia, Lao & QM
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 1997 01:29:45 +1000 (EST)

Robert Ettinger writes,

>the quale (a modulation of the self circuit) is the interpretation 
>of the message, or a part thereof; it extracts or derives meaning from the 
>stimulus.  

Okay, this helps - a quale is the instrument of meaning that we attach
to sense data (perhaps the context in which they are construed?). I'm
happy with this as a definition, but I have more questions, then, about
the self circuit:

 + by its name I infer that there should be other circuits that
   deal with other mental phenomena - if so, how do you characterize these?

 + I wonder if there could be a method by which such circuits might be
   mapped. I'm wonder specifically about a relationship between your
   theory and the methods of Personal Construct Psychology, which can be
   played with online at http://tiger.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/WebGrid/WebGrid.html

 + I wonder about the context of "self" here; do you feel that the various
   eastern traditions that seek to free the mind of the self are,
   for want of a better word, self-defeating? Or do you mean self to
   be a more abstract term - simply something like awareness?

>Peter also asks what reason we have to recognize qualia as qualitatively 
>distinctive from other phenomena, and in particular from sensory data. The 
>fact that feeling is a special and mysterious kind of phenomenon needs no 
>argument [...]

It's also been asserted that God is a special and mysterious kinds of
phenomena that need no argument, but I think such assertions lack
predictive power. I wonder about the predictive power of your theory -
what would a self-circuit do that might make it a better explanation for
someone's cranial porridge than any of the other "two and seventy
jarring sects"? What are the implications? How can we test it?

--

John Clark writes,

>You already know about Searle's room, now I want to tell you about Clark's 
>Chinese Room. You are a professor of Chinese Literature and are in a room 
>with me and the great Chinese Philosopher and Poet Laotse. Laotse writes  
>something in his native language on a paper and hands it to me. I walk 
>10 feet and give it to you. You read the paper and are impressed with the 
>wisdom of the message and the beauty of its language. Now I tell you that I 
>don't know a word of Chinese, can you find any deep implications from that 
>fact?  I believe Clark's Chinese  Room is just as profound as Searl's  
>Chinese Room.

This is a pretty scenario, especially as it is just the way that the Lao
Tse, literally "the old philosophy", has been transmitted. Lao Tse, the
person, is almost certainly a myth, but the incredible permutation of
Lao Tse, the poem, by the many and various Chinese cults demonstrates
that its specific meaning may only be received, not transmitted.  This
observation is the core of yet another interpretation of Lao, commonly
known as Tao Chia, "philosophical taoism".  

If consciousness is something that constructs meaning, then all these
"Chinese Whispers" suggest that we may never agree on a common, concrete
criterion for consciousness.

--

Mike Perry writes,

>A person is an FSM 
>over finite stretches of time, but could also be a "growing 
>automaton"--not limited to any fixed size if you take eter-
>nity into account.

A growing automaton is an FSM? I take "finite state" to mean, at the
very least, recursively enumerable; how are "growing automatons" 
recursively enumerable? 

>With that I disagree. "Apparently non-local correlatons" 
>are still local, despite some appearances to the contrary. It's 
>certainly true, that what happens in one bounded region 
>will depend (ultimately) on what happens in other places 
>far removed, and it may look as if it happened faster than it 
>really did, but that doesn't require that "FSM's lose their 
>applicability." 

Okay, let me wave my hands a little less; if the state of a bounded
region is interdependent with the process of a boundless space, then
it's hard to see how to recursively enumerate its states. If the region
is instead interdependent with a boundless collection of similar regions
in other universes, then it's still hard to see how to recursively
enumerate its states. So help me out: what's the trick?

>As for the quantum 
>computer, it seems to provide a way of getting results that 
>are hard to explain unless you assume many, many compu-
>tations are being done in parallel--a suggestion that many-
>worlds is true, i.e. the extra "worlds" really exist. (I'm not 
>saying that all other interpretations are ruled out, however, 
>but clearly the others have some explaining to do.) 

Weeelll, for Cramer, just as the cat is not truly in a superposition,
neither are the qbits; instead, you've got the standard atemporal TI
mechanisms linking the measurement of the result with the initialization
of the computer. Since the TI doesn't suggest any different result than
the maths of QM, there's no great mystery in this.

>here is what Michael C. Price had to say (17 Feb. 1995, 
>"Many-worlds FAQ," 
>http://www.airtime.co.uk/users/station/m-worlds.faq):

>[TI] requires that the input and output states, as defined by an 
>observer, act as emitters and absorbers respectively, but not 
>any internal states (inside the "black box"), and, conse-
>quently, suffers from the familiar measurement problem of 
>the Copenhagen interpretation.

I'm afraid this doesn't seem to follow Cramer too closely; the whole
point of the TI is to explain the measurement problem by an atemporal
process that forges the transaction between the measurement and the
initialization; this process involves the generation of the Born
probability distribution, so then there seems to be no issue.

Cramer's paper goes into this in painstaking detail, and given its vocal
supporters, Gribbin most notably, I don't feel the matter can be
thought of as settled.  So far as I can see, the point of all the
various interpretations that have survived Bell is that they all provide
predictions that meet the maths - it's just that no one yet has come up
with an experiment to weed out the chaff. For a look at all of the
surviving interpretations, you might try



http://ring.aist.go.jp/archives/misc/NetNews/FAQandDOCS/alt.sci.physics.new-theories/Measurement_in_quantum_mechanics_FAQ

Peter Merel.

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