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Reality seems to be Quantum Probabilistic

#11
Ostronomos Offline
(May 23, 2019 06:37 PM)C C Wrote:
(May 23, 2019 04:09 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: CC, What do you mean no proto-consciousness is attributed to mainstream physics? The latest idea, if I am not mistaken, is that there is a universal consciousness.


Physics certainly doesn't endorse cosmopsychism (top-down), and (the bottom-up of) Christoff Koch's micro-panpsychism is just another fringe ripple that gets both press exposure and abundant criticism.

No, it is not mainstream: Electrons don't think.

As you can see, many physicists suffer the same cognitive impairment as much of the general population when it comes to distinguishing between intellect and experience, or language-based activity and manifestation slash feeling. Efforts to help individuals make the distinction can often fail because they're simply unable to stop conflating the two, or it's caused by another more fundamental understanding roadblock (more on that in the last paragraph).

In Sabine's particular case, she may not be familiar with the Hard Problem of Consciousness (HPC) or is literally taking the "panpsychism" approach to remedying it as what the term etymologically implies -- concerning the complete faculties of mind (both rational/conceptual and phenomenal properties). She wouldn't realize it's the latter which is largely emphasized by those often using the term, which in an ideal or less sloppy world would be properly narrowed down to labels like panexperientialism, pan-proto-psychism, proto-consciousness, etc.

Or she might be familiar with HPC, but again like much of the general population simply cannot grok it. Most people are naive or commonsense realists, so they don't know that secondary qualities don't exist in a scientific depiction of an objective external world.

Since they reflexively believe that the cosmos or matter is "showing itself" outside their head like it it does inside, they thereby can't understand why there would be a problem with manifestation in a physical (physics) account. The latter actually historically eliminated it and provides nothing for experience to incrementally emerge in complexity from. Ironically, the "can't apprehend HPC" folks are actually like a subspecies of panpsychists who are unaware they are such. That is, there's no impetus for associating their "common sense of experiences universally occurring" to an "-ism", or a stimulus to recognize how bizarre it is in a scientific realism and brain-science context (which usually favors indirect perception or manifested "simulation in the head" built from the processing of sensory information).


Could these panpsychist physicists be operating from the opinion that materialism is false and thus the antithesis of truth? Could your own bias be coming into play here? I recognize that a more open-minded approach is necessary. Do you think that your disagreement arises from psychological issues and a refusal to accept the idea of universal consciousness? The reason I ask is because I happen to know that a mind can appear out of nothing and that consciousness can exist apart from the human brain.
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#12
Secular Sanity Offline
Although, it’s noted that there are no sources, and written like a personal essay, I must say, it sounds pretty good to me. I like it.

Quote:All uranium found on earth is thought to have been synthesized during a supernova explosion that occurred roughly 5 billion years ago. Even before the laws of quantum mechanics were developed to their present level, the radioactivity of such elements has posed a challenge to determinism due to its unpredictability. One gram of uranium-238, a commonly occurring radioactive substance, contains some 2.5 x 1021 atoms. Each of these atoms are identical and indistinguishable according to all tests known to modern science. Yet about 12600 times a second, one of the atoms in that gram will decay, giving off an alpha particle. The challenge for determinism is to explain why and when decay occurs, since it does not seem to depend on external stimulus. Indeed, no extant theory of physics makes testable predictions of exactly when any given atom will decay. At best scientists can discover determined probabilities in the form of the element's half life.

The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time.

So if the wave function itself is reality (rather than probability of classical coordinates), then the unitary evolution of the wave function in quantum mechanics, can be said to be deterministic. But the unitary evolution of the wave function is not the entirety of quantum mechanics.

Asserting that quantum mechanics is deterministic by treating the wave function itself as reality might be thought to imply a single wave function for the entire universe, starting at the origin of the universe. Such a "wave function of everything" would carry the probabilities of not just the world we know, but every other possible world that could have evolved. For example, large voids in the distributions of galaxies are believed by many cosmologists to have originated in quantum fluctuations during the big bang. (See cosmic inflation, primordial fluctuations and large-scale structure of the cosmos.)

However, neither the posited reality nor the proven and extraordinary accuracy of the wave function and quantum mechanics at small scales can imply or reasonably suggest the existence of a single wave function for the entire universe. Quantum mechanics breaks down wherever gravity becomes significant, because nothing in the wave function, or in quantum mechanics, predicts anything at all about gravity. And this is obviously of great importance on larger scales.

Gravity is thought of as a large-scale force, with a longer reach than any other. But gravity becomes significant even at masses that are tiny compared to the mass of the universe.

A wave function the size of the universe might successfully model a universe with no gravity. Our universe, with gravity, is vastly different from what quantum mechanics alone predicts. To forget this is a colossal error.

Objective collapse theories, which involve a dynamic (and non-deterministic) collapse of the wave function (e.g. Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber theory, Penrose interpretation, or causal fermion systems) avoid these absurdities. The theory of causal fermion systems for example, is able to unify quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory, via a more fundamental theory that is non-linear, but gives rise to the linear behaviour of the wave function and also gives rise to the non-linear, non-deterministic, wave-function collapse. These theories suggest that a deeper understanding of the theory underlying quantum mechanics shows the universe is indeed non-deterministic at a fundamental level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism
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#13
C C Offline
(May 28, 2019 04:52 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Could these panpsychist physicists be operating from the opinion that materialism is false and thus the antithesis of truth? Could your own bias be coming into play here?


Bias cannot affect the fact that panpsychism is not mainstream in the physics community anymore than it can affect the fact of a sufficient number of UK voters having opted for Brexit.

I'd be a "materialist" only with respect to the way that some pan-phenomenalist scholars and scientists of 19th-century called themselves such (i.e., "bodies" are phenomena first before they are converted to abstract matter by intellectual processes). I'd be a physicalist only with respect to that as an internal (within experience) explanatory approach of using empirical entities and agencies as reasons/causes for each other, and not "physicalism" as a metaphysical stance (or the way existence is beyond appearances).

Note that Reed (in the first of two quotes below) is one of many who fails to get that Hume (or his later groupies) was positing phenomena as prior in rank to their organization or conception as being residents of "mind" (the other residents being properties of intellect). IOW, the "qualia" and manifestations of pan-phenomenalism should not be of mental and psychological classification. Before reason or intellectual activity starts producing its elaborate maze of conceptual distinctions and understandings, there is just the shown, parading presence of "qualitative properties" not being construed as anything beyond their given character.

Thereby Hume also introduced an early kind of "block-universe" constituted of qualitative events rather than the abstract mathematical construct in physics. Leibniz arguably implanted a similar phenomenal continuum in his monads, each of which was synchronized or pre-set with the others. But empiricist Hume would have considered Leibniz's knowable "things in themselves" (monads) to be just another additional theory supplied by speculative reasoning. Getting rid of that left just the bare, phenomenal events themselves in temporal order, minus being conceived of as "mind".

[1] EDWARD S. REED: [Thomas H.] Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group--and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time--was not a [metaphysical] materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones. But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world.

This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890. Yet that type of positivism is inherently unstable when applied to psychology. The externalist (physiological) analysis of behavior and mind attributes all psychological states to antecedent causes. Introspective analysis reveals both intuitions of freedom and the appearance of autonomous psychological states. The two seem irreconcilable.

[...] Matter for Huxley was just what it was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.

The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations.
--From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology (1997)


[2] Panphenomenalism. David Hume (1711-1776) formulated the theory of Panphenomenalism [a later retrospective label, not his own term]. He denied the existence of all ultimate reality (metaphysical reality), accepting as valid data only those things experienced as sense impressions; in other words, he asserted that existence is limited to phenomena, which are objects, not of reason, but of experience. By rejecting the idea of cause and soul as substances, he eliminated the entire problem of interaction. Hume concluded that events depend upon merely repetitious or sequential activities; that nothing in the universe is ever created, or caused to act, by anything else; and that reality consists only of a series of phenomena appearing in a temporal order. --Ideas of the Great Philosophers ... p. 107 - 108; by William S. Sahakian, Mabel Lewis Sahakian (1966)
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#14
Ostronomos Offline
(May 28, 2019 08:26 PM)C C Wrote:
(May 28, 2019 04:52 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Could these panpsychist physicists be operating from the opinion that materialism is false and thus the antithesis of truth? Could your own bias be coming into play here?


Bias cannot affect the fact that panpsychism is not mainstream in the physics community anymore than it can affect the fact of a sufficient number of UK voters having opted for Brexit.

I'd be a "materialist" only with respect to the way that some pan-phenomenalist scholars and scientists of 19th-century called themselves such (i.e., "bodies" are phenomena first before they are converted to abstract matter by intellectual processes). I'd be a physicalist only with respect to that as an internal (within experience) explanatory approach of using empirical entities and agencies as reasons/causes for each other, and not "physicalism" as a metaphysical stance (or the way existence is beyond appearances).
Do you believe that phenomenalistic appearances are prior to mind? Because in the rare instance that the mind is prior to appearances it would presumably affect or influence the material world.
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