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(1) I believe we just said the same thing. I agree. The hard part to understand is this "we describe it that way, we live it this way." I should hasten to add
by drostie 15y ago
(1) I believe we just said the same thing. I agree. The hard part to understand is this "we describe it that way, we live it this way."
I should hasten to add that there is a slight problem with what you've said, called the "preferred basis problem," but for reasons which I don't want to get into here, I suspect that the unitary part of QM is also able to handle this to some extent.
(2/3) Even if theories of free will were worn out in the 17th century, the feeling of free will is pretty hard to ignore; it's just this feeling that there are many options open, that you have a meaningful choice between many possible futures. It's the same thing with qualia. Sure, you can get a lot out of red by saying "color is a 3-tuple of integers, the red predicate holds when, after subtracting out a background tuple, the first integer is larger than the other two by a substantial degree." We render all sorts of red images this way, we can build computers which identify red things in photographs, and so forth. But that's nothing like how we experience redness, and it's extraordinarily hard to express what we experience in that vocabulary.
(4) I guess I'm getting at the fact that the rules for composing quantum systems are much more important than the nondeterminism. To the extent that a car has multiple functions, like the ability to play music and the ability to drive somewhere, we generally either split it up into components acting in parallel, or split it up into components which act in sequence. Similarly, our conscious experience has many perceptual functions, but our core consciousness itself does not seem to be divisible in that way.
It's like the old crap about the "inner theater": seeing something ends up "displaying it on your inner screen". The big problem with the inner theater is that I still have to put a unified you inside of it; it isn't sufficient to separate your senses into different theaters. The composition rules for neurons just don't seem to create the unified whole that we experience.
(5) That sounds to me like a cop-out. Sure, we've got two electrons and we can't tell which is which. But you'd need a much more radical application of quantum mechanics to say "therefore, there is only one electron, really." You would still seem to be confronted with the fact that there are two consciousnesses which you can't distinguish -- you would just have the added problem that you can't tell which was the "original" who you are "supposed" to destroy, and which was the "copy" who is permitted to live, because that's an arbitrary distinction. But it would seem pretty radical to say that, even for their first moments of life, there is one consciousness spanning two bodies such that killing one of those bodies does not amount to murder. Even though you can't tell these two apart, it would seem straightforward on most functional theories of mind to say that there are indeed two of them.
I agree with your summary in general -- I especially like one comment by Searle on free will: "Now, I dread saying this because, Searle's Third Law is, whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, what comes out is hot air at best. And by the way, that applies to a lot of the things physicists say about quantum mechanics too."
But I was specifically answering the question, "why are some researchers so quick to blame our failure to understand consciousness on quantum mechanics when we don't yet understand the classical parts of the brain?" I wasn't being satirical. Some of these points come from other people; some of them come from me, but the aggregate point is that it's not just a "latest" flavor of warm and fuzzy: it's a flavor of warm and fuzzy uniquely suited to the problem and disproportionately confirmed by experiment to be a key part of the universe's workings. I agree that it's so hard to reason about and understand quantum mechanics that mechanical models are not just "actually making progress", but are much easier to grapple with and prove or disprove.
It's like if you ask me why us physicists ever accepted string theory, with its difficult mathematics and huge multiplicity of dimensions and arbitrary geometries over those dimensions. We've been interested in it because gravity just falls out. In quantum mechanics, some of the building blocks of warm-and-fuzzy consciousness also just fall out. The problems with both string theory and quantum consciousness are that the rest of the model is considerably more difficult, even though the hard problems of today just seem to have a promising solution in those terms.
- klodolph 14y ago(3) My first problem is that most definitions for qualia I come across are back doors for dualism. The second problem is that I'm not sure there's any point to discussing purely subjective phenomena, since a discussion by its nature requires objective description. (4) I don't have an inner theater, or if I do, I don't call it that. I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't know how this relates to a supposed indivisibility of consciousness (I mean... how are we supposed to know it's indivisible, since we lack the technology to cut a brain up and split it between bodies, not to mention the ethical issues? Am I supposed to trust you that it's indivisible? And what about the evidence from split-brain patients?) If anything, I perceive a very disjointed self. For example, I feel like I have a distinctly single-threaded audio processor which can run independently of other functions. I can play the piano and talk, but not at the same time, and when I'm doing other things quietly I get free background music in my head without using an iPod. (I wouldn't call it inner theater.) One reason we can't understand brains the way we understand cars is because the human brain is more complex by many orders of magnitude. So saying our "consciousness itself does not seem to be divisible in that way" is not very convincing. Microprocessors also don't seem to be divisible that way, but I've been assured that they are. And another important difference is the processes that designed cars, microprocessors, and brains. Part of the design criteria for cars and microprocessors is that they be easy to understand from understanding their parts. The car is designed to be understood. A better comparison might be circuits designed using powerful optimization algorithms. A number of researchers have designed circuits using general purpose algorithms (such as genetic algorithms or swarm algorithms). For all but the most basic end goals, the circuits are practically incomprehensible. One researcher designed an analogue circuit to compute the cube of an input voltage, the resulting circuit defies understanding even though its components are clearly simple transistors. Another researcher made a signal analysis circuit using an FPGA, the resulting mess was a technological marvel but not something you could understand by sitting down and looking at the schematic. Given that the human brain is probably at least ten orders of magnitude more complicated, and created using an equally powerful optimization algorithm, there's no need to bring in quantum mechanics to explain why we don't understand the brain. I think the major problem here is that too many people I meet have a narrow view of what it means to "understand" something. We're used to understanding (a) simple things, like thrown rocks and (b) complicated things for which there exists significant neural machinery to analyze, such as used car salesmen. As the things we try to understand become more and more complicated, the way we understand them becomes more and more like the Chinese room. (5) Never said there was one electron. I said that the two electrons were interchangeable. I'm saying if you actually could clone someone to the extent necessary for Star Trek teleportation but forgot to dematerialize the original, then the label of "clone" and "original" is arbitrary. To me, it seems a cop out to assume that everyone agrees that one is the clone and one is the original. Could you clarify what you mean by "confirmed by experiment" and "key part of the universe's workings"? The problem here is that the subject of the sentence is "it", so I'd like to know exactly what is confirmed by which experiment, please. I'd also like to hear how consciousness just "falls out" of quantum mechanics, since my current understanding of Newtonian mechanics is sufficient to me. My theory is that I am a machine whose output is composed of deterministic parts and thermal noise, and I have yet to encounter experiences not explained by this theory. As for string theory, its acceptance is hardly universal.