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

From: Colin Hales <colin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 19:34:48 +1100

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim May [mailto:tcmay.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Wednesday, 25 December 2002 2:49 AM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: QM not (yet, at least) needed to explain why we can't
> experience other minds
>
>
>
> 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
>
>


Hi Folks,

There is no and never will be any way of describing 'being' save by 'being'.
Science can point a big cartoon arrow and say in a cartoon bubble "Good
folk...The experience of redness is happening right there > Aye! There be
REDness in there!!", and be absolutely 100% verifyably right, but the
experience of REDness is not at the tip of the arrow. You have to be the
thing pointed at, experiencing red.

This is the great divide between the the type and the token, Pinocchio the
puppet and Pinnochio the little boy, the definition and the declaration ,
the recipe and the cake. Philosophy of mind grapples endlessly with 1st and
3rd person ontology and makes a very good living not sorting it out.

Philosophy of science gets a poke in the eye, too - there's no room there
for a describer _within_ the described. What is it like to be a bat? What is
it like to be a 100% unrefuted Popperesque 3rd person descriptive model of a
bat kept in a dusty library? We need Popper back for a bit of rework. Just a
few clauses....speaking of clauses...

Merry christmas to you all and may 2003 bring you all closer to the elusive
'everything'.

:-)

Colin Hales
Received on Wed Dec 25 2002 - 03:41:13 PST