Mind/matter duality

[whatever76]

As an aside, my intuitive answer to the mind/body split is that there is no mind or consciousness. There is nothing hiding behind the physical. And I say "intuitive" because the notion that there is no mind is an experience of existential relief for me.

This is the extreme position of physical monism-- there is no mind at all, and therefore no apparent duality to solve.

The other extreme position is to say there's no physical universe at all-- that it's all idealism. If you want to choose a complete monism, this one is better, because it's much less difficult philsophically. If you say that all the physical universe is in the Matrix or the Mind of God or whatever, then there's little contradiction in saying that everything we take as objective reality can be a subset of an idealistic universe, which also allows for the existence of mind. It also makes sense of some of the issues with QM and the effect of observers (monkey is going to disagree with that for sure though).

However, if you want to go with a physical monism absent consciousness, then you come up pretty fast against the idea of consciousness as a brute fact. I'm conscious because I am conscious-- no further conjecture or understanding is really required, and until you can get people to ascribe to a Buddhist or hindu meditation of "not self," very few people are going to say, "Hmmmm. . . I think there's no mind. Wait. . . where did that idea come from?"

Well, fortunately, I don't really care if people subscribe to whatever it is I'm thinking. I'm also not suggesting any Eastern metaphysics. The existence of consciousness or mind or soul is a microcosmic version of the question of God's existence. We think there must be a cause that transcends the organism or the universe as it is. Just as the more we understand about the universe the less we need a creator, similarly the more we understand about the human organism the less we need consciousness as a filler.

Any thought or behavior that you have can be attributed to your own genetics and conditioning. The more you come to recognize that fact and let go of some transcendent cause, the more control you have over your own experience. That is my answer to your question as to why you are self-aware in the first place. If you don't apply that understanding, someone else will in order to control you for their interests.

I disagree that an idealistic monism is easier to uphold because you will quickly run into physical reality (literally) and have to provide some extensive explanation as to why it appears that we are physical organisms in a material universe or that all of our experience has a natural (physical) cause.

We intellectuals are quick to draw from heady theories like QM to defend a position, when the reasoning is much more local, such as physiology. In answer to the question, "Where did that idea come from?" I would say, "Your organism. Where else would it come from?"

[little_monkey]

Quantum logic is slightly different than classical logic, but the difference amounts to a whole lot. Just as an illustration, the probability of rolling a 2 or a 5 from a die, would be P =1/6 + 1/6 = 1/3. Here I've just added the probabilities. But in QM, you would need to add amplitude and then square to get the probability. P = [ψ(2) +ψ(5)]^2 = ψ(2)ψ(2) + ψ(2)ψ(5) + ψ(5)ψ(2) + ψ(5)ψ(5). You get a whole bunch of terms that describe interference, which you don't get in classical physics. The real mystery of QM is why this works, and not some other scheme.

Hello Lil Monkey.

I'm a bit curious about you posing Quantum Mechanics "working" with a diferent set of logic slightly diferent to the classical one ( I once read a paper where they suggested it could work with paraconsistent logic, in order to allow for contradictions ).

¿Are you sure Quantum Mechanics really requires a new set of logical rules? I've heard there are at least 13 Interpretations to the Quantum Mechanical behaviour ( and for the moment all are valid in a sense ) and some work with "hidden variables" like De-Broglie Interpretation, that somehow can fool Bells Inequalities by accepting non-locality while conserving a form of determinism.
Maybe Quantum Mechanics is not that strange after all.

The probability is equal to the square of the amplitude is a fundamental postulate of QM. Its interpretation may be several, but its calculation isn't. There has been a debate about "hidden variables", also called "non-locality" or the one I prefer, "spooky action at a distance". None of that ever panned out. Unfortunately, once in a while you'll get a title from some magazine or website, someone testing Bell's theorem, and indeed QM is weird, spooky action has reared its ugly head. But once you read the article, it's nothing but a quantum system violating Bell's theorem, which a QM system will do on theoretical grounds due to... guess what? Well, to the fact that probability is calculated differently in QM than in classical physics.

[bennyboy]

Well, fortunately, I don't really care if people subscribe to whatever it is I'm thinking. I'm also not suggesting any Eastern metaphysics. The existence of consciousness or mind or soul is a microcosmic version of the question of God's existence. We think there must be a cause that transcends the organism or the universe as it is. Just as the more we understand about the universe the less we need a creator, similarly the more we understand about the human organism the less we need consciousness as a filler.

Any thought or behavior that you have can be attributed to your own genetics and conditioning. The more you come to recognize that fact and let go of some transcendent cause, the more control you have over your own experience. That is my answer to your question as to why you are self-aware in the first place. If you don't apply that understanding, someone else will in order to control you for their interests.

I disagree that an idealistic monism is easier to uphold because you will quickly run into physical reality (literally) and have to provide some extensive explanation as to why it appears that we are physical organisms in a material universe or that all of our experience has a natural (physical) cause.

We intellectuals are quick to draw from heady theories like QM to defend a position, when the reasoning is much more local, such as physiology. In answer to the question, "Where did that idea come from?" I would say, "Your organism. Where else would it come from?"

Here's the thing with monism. Mind is not normally considered an objective thing, and yet it exists. To have a physical monism, you have to have to explain why ideas, which cannot be touched, or have force exerted on them, or be measured with any objective means. exist. You can say they are just brain function, but that's not the question-- the question is why brain function creates an experienceable subjective perspective.

An idealistic monism is more flexible, because all the physical traits that we attribute to objects are processed by us as ideas anyway. Solidity, force, predictability, etc. are concepts. So are uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability. All of this is easily brought under the umbrella of idealism, but each of these requires a new re-write of what "physical" is supposed to mean. To take a model which is always changing, and assert that as the single candidate for the representation of reality, is really to say that there's no reality. After all, we're not just talking about Grammy's bouncing billiard balls anymore.

As for the mind/God syllogism, I disagree. Mind is a brute fact. Whether it's a byproduct of a specific collection of organs, or an emergent property of high-level self-referential information processing, or a little spark of God, doesn't matter that much: it is what it is, and I have it. It is true on a definitional level: "mind" is just a label, not a theory or an assertion.

God is not true on a definitional level, because while each of us MUST experience mind, the same does not follow for God. Even God would have to be perceived by the mind-- and clearly, there are many minds who do not believe they've perceived any such thing.

[whatever76]

Here's the thing with monism. Mind is not normally considered an objective thing, and yet it exists. To have a physical monism, you have to have to explain why ideas, which cannot be touched, or have force exerted on them, or be measured with any objective means. exist. You can say they are just brain function, but that's not the question-- the question is why brain function creates an experienceable subjective perspective.

You can't have an idea or a mind without a physical organism. This tells me that a mind or concept must have a relational existence with my body and behavior and that it is my body/behavior that is the determining entity of mind/idea, not the other way around. I still end up with a duality, but it increasingly becomes unnecessary to say mind exists. Because if mind/idea is not the determining factor than it also isn't an explanation for anything, including itself.

I'm not trying to play dumb here. I understand the problem of universals. But I think you are mixing an ontological question with an epistemological one.

An idealistic monism is more flexible, because all the physical traits that we attribute to objects are processed by us as ideas anyway. Solidity, force, predictability, etc. are concepts. So are uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability. All of this is easily brought under the umbrella of idealism, but each of these requires a new re-write of what "physical" is supposed to mean. To take a model which is always changing, and assert that as the single candidate for the representation of reality, is really to say that there's no reality. After all, we're not just talking about Grammy's bouncing billiard balls anymore.

It's also more easily abused. What I'm suggesting is that whatever speculation or revision of reality we might come up with can be reduced to our physical existence which gives primacy to that model of existence. With that particular understanding, I can actually do something to modify how I am experiencing, which in turn revises my modeling of reality. That also describes why I experience the way I do.

As for the mind/God syllogism, I disagree. Mind is a brute fact. Whether it's a byproduct of a specific collection of organs, or an emergent property of high-level self-referential information processing, or a little spark of God, doesn't matter that much: it is what it is, and I have it. It is true on a definitional level: "mind" is just a label, not a theory or an assertion.

If mind has no objective existence, it is not something you have, nor is it a fact. It is a belief that you hold or, if you prefer, an assumption about how you work. If anything, mind is a label for what we have assumed for centuries to be the free agency within humans: the self-causing cause on a minor scale. But it simply doesn't exist, no matter how it appears or how we may want to believe we are free agents.

Our own awareness of ourselves is a feedback system that is entirely dedicated to our survival and reproduction. If we take that self-awareness and turn it into a separate entity called mind or consciousness or whatever then it appears that mind is what creates the physical organism and wills that organism to behave. However if mind is not a separate entity, but rather a mirror image of the physical organism in real-time then to optimize experience would be to perceive the mind as nothing more than the physical being it represents.

God is not true on a definitional level, because while each of us MUST experience mind, the same does not follow for God. Even God would have to be perceived by the mind-- and clearly, there are many minds who do not believe they've perceived any such thing.

We can agree to disagree. To me, the mind is to us what God is to the universe. Who has ever perceived a mind? Perhaps we perceive through it, but then what is the necessity in even having a mind? Why not just perceive?

[Angrboda]

The probability is equal to the square of the amplitude is a fundamental postulate of QM. Its interpretation may be several, but its calculation isn't. There has been a debate about "hidden variables", also called "non-locality" or the one I prefer, "spooky action at a distance". None of that ever panned out. Unfortunately, once in a while you'll get a title from some magazine or website, someone testing Bell's theorem, and indeed QM is weird, spooky action has reared its ugly head. But once you read the article, it's nothing but a quantum system violating Bell's theorem, which a QM system will do on theoretical grounds due to... guess what? Well, to the fact that probability is calculated differently in QM than in classical physics.

There was something in Nature communications last year where somebody was claiming that they'd demonstrated that conventional QM had as much or more predictive ability than any hidden variable theory. Me not being a physics person, sticking largely to philosophy, never followed up to determine whether that was a trustworthy result or not. (My physics knowledge and research skills, are, to be plain, poor.)

Do you know any more about it?

[bennyboy]

You can't have an idea or a mind without a physical organism.

This is a common assumption. It's a very sensible assumption. But you can't use this particular assumption to make the claim you're making, because it begs the question. How do you go about collecting information about the universe, including the structure of brains, including the experience of doing scientific experiments, etc? You think, you experience, and you interact with your sense perceptions-- and all these are mental experiences by definition.

This is why I've said I think the universe always comes down to ambiguity which is resolved not by proof or rationale, but by selecting a perspective.

I will say mind precedes all. I'll show that all learning, including the experience of doing science in a lab, is exactly that-- experience. It is provable only to be mental in nature. I'll demand that mind must be accepted as brute fact, since I know for sure that I see red, feel love, and enjoy Beethoven's 5th, but I cannot prove that these are not piped in from the Matrix, or created by my brain in a jar, or symbolic representations of the mind of God. I'll argue that whatever (ultimately unknowable) reality may lie behind the mind isn't even that important-- it is the consistency of our experiences, i.e. our mental function, which allows us to build ideas and act meaningfully. So if we're in the Matrix, no matter-- it is what it is, we are what we are, and that is the context in which we live our lives.

You will say that all is physics, that we know that the brain creates the mind, and that all our apparent mental experiences are really just manifestations of complex data processing in a physical system, the brain. You may even argue that the mind is an illusion, and that it doesn't "exist" in any meaningful way, because all ideas and experiences it "has" can theoretically be mapped directly to the brain functions which they represent, making the idea of mind redundant and therefore worth discarding.

To this, I would respond that the universe we know about is not directly manipulable in the way that physical monism is usually thought of. When the building blocks of a "solid" reality come down to statistical functions, which are clearly conceptual in nature, then you have to ask yourself what this physicalism which you are holding to even means anymore.

But at any rate, there's a simpler point to be made, in the form of a challenge: prove that anything you think about the universe, or about the mechanism of the brain, is true, without making assumptions that obviously arrive at that conclusion. Hint: you can't start with "Everything is physical. . ." because that is breaking the rules. You have to prove it.

[little_monkey]

The probability is equal to the square of the amplitude is a fundamental postulate of QM. Its interpretation may be several, but its calculation isn't. There has been a debate about "hidden variables", also called "non-locality" or the one I prefer, "spooky action at a distance". None of that ever panned out. Unfortunately, once in a while you'll get a title from some magazine or website, someone testing Bell's theorem, and indeed QM is weird, spooky action has reared its ugly head. But once you read the article, it's nothing but a quantum system violating Bell's theorem, which a QM system will do on theoretical grounds due to... guess what? Well, to the fact that probability is calculated differently in QM than in classical physics.

There was something in Nature communications last year where somebody was claiming that they'd demonstrated that conventional QM had as much or more predictive ability than any hidden variable theory. Me not being a physics person, sticking largely to philosophy, never followed up to determine whether that was a trustworthy result or not. (My physics knowledge and research skills, are, to be plain, poor.)

Do you know any more about it?

Perhaps you are referring to Colbeck and Renner who have published a proof that any extension of quantum mechanical theory, whether using hidden variables or otherwise, cannot provide a more accurate prediction of outcomes. What they have argued is that even if one assumes that the wavefunction in QM represent reality, its future behavior cannot be predicted with certainty. This means that there is an inherent randomness in nature.

[bennyboy]

There was something in Nature communications last year where somebody was claiming that they'd demonstrated that conventional QM had as much or more predictive ability than any hidden variable theory. Me not being a physics person, sticking largely to philosophy, never followed up to determine whether that was a trustworthy result or not. (My physics knowledge and research skills, are, to be plain, poor.)

Do you know any more about it?

Perhaps you are referring to Colbeck and Renner who have published a proof that any extension of quantum mechanical theory, whether using hidden variables or otherwise, cannot provide a more accurate prediction of outcomes. What they have argued is that even if one assumes that the wavefunction in QM represent reality, its future behavior cannot be predicted with certainty. This means that there is an inherent randomness in nature.

What if the hidden variable is really a hidden dimension? How would you be able to tell the difference, IF that dimension was itself part of a multi-dimension system?

Also, what does all this have to do with mind/matter duality?

[little_monkey]

Perhaps you are referring to Colbeck and Renner who have published a proof that any extension of quantum mechanical theory, whether using hidden variables or otherwise, cannot provide a more accurate prediction of outcomes. What they have argued is that even if one assumes that the wavefunction in QM represent reality, its future behavior cannot be predicted with certainty. This means that there is an inherent randomness in nature.

What if the hidden variable is really a hidden dimension? How would you be able to tell the difference, IF that dimension was itself part of a multi-dimension system?

There are a number of physicists who have stake their lives on that. They are not a bunch of happy troopers right now, as none of their predictions of certain classes of particles beyond the Standard Model have materialized in the 2 years the LHC has been in operation. In fact all those who have endeavored in Supersymmetry and String Theory are either in a depressing mood or in a denial mode, which is understandable if you have a few dozens of published articles, and now you begin to realize that your whole life's work might be in jeopardy.

Also, what does all this have to do with mind/matter duality?

I was just answering apophenia who was aking a specific question on QM.

[bennyboy]

I was just answering apophenia who was aking a specific question on QM.

I don't mind at all. The bits of pop physics that I've read about entanglement, indeterminacy, the nature of light, etc. has a lot to do with my views. I suspect that everywhere we look from now on, we're going to end up in a maze of dead ends, ambiguities and apparent dualities that are unresolvable. But I kind of wonder as we collect enough of these if a kind of super-pattern might emerge out of them-- a kind of science of the unknowable.