QM not (yet, at least) needed to explain why we can't experience other minds

From: Tim May <tcmay.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 07:48:32 -0800

On Monday, December 23, 2002, at 08:06 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote:
>
> Yes. I strongly suspect that "minds" are quantum mechanical. My
> arguement is at this point very hand waving, but it seems to me that if
> minds are purely classical when it would not be difficult for us to
> imagine,
> i.e. compute, what it is like to "be a bat" or any other classical
> mind. I
> see this as implied by the ideas involved in Turing Machines and other
> "Universal" classical computational systems.
> The no cloning theoren of QM seems to have the "right flavor" to
> explain
> how it is that we can not have first person experience of each other's
> minds, whereas the UTM model seems to strongly imply that I should be
> able
> to know exactly what you are thinking. In the words of Sherlock
> Holmes, this
> is a "the dog did not bark" scenario.

I just can't see any basis for invoking quantum mechanics and "no
cloning" for why I am not you, or why I cannot plausibly experience
being you, and vice versa, and so on.

Even if intelligence is purely classical (in terms of the physics),
there are excellent reasons why there is no way today (given today's
technology, today's interfaces, today's bandwidth) for me to "compute
what it is to be a bat."

Inasmuch as we cannot even build a machine which even remotely
resembles a bat, or even an ant, the inability to
simulate/understand/"be" a bat is not surprising. There is no mapping
currently feasable between my internal states and a bat's. Even if we
are made of relays or transistors.

Saying that our inability to know what it is to be another person
implies that some principle of QM is likely to be involved is, in my
view, unsupported and unrealistic.

It may well be that there are deep, QM-related reasons why Alice cannot
emulate Bob, but we are probably a long way in _engineering_ terms from
knowing that Alice can or cannot emulate Bob, or have a first person
understanding of what a bat is, etc.

Occam's Razor--don't multiply hypotheses needlessly.

In other news, I am enjoying Barrett's book on quantum mechanics and
minds. (Interesting to compare his views with Bub, Peres, Isham, and
Wheeler.) Got a copy of Joyce's "Causal Decision Theory," to go along
with the QM papers Bruno and Wei have been citing. Also read an
interesting science fiction novel with some new twists on the Many
Worlds Interpretation (esp. the DeWitt variant): "Finity," by John
Barnes. A New Zealand astronomer/mathematician with some interesting
ideas about "abductive reasoning" finds himself slipping between
different realities.

--Tim May
Received on Tue Dec 24 2002 - 10:50:57 PST