Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that hybrid of MWI and Waveform Collapse. While I love MWI for fictional purposes (see how the characters made different decisions and had different outcomes on a different timeline), I prefer the pilot wave theory, because it appears to be the natural extension of how classical electromagnetic fields guide the flow of energy, as extrapolated to the limit in which energy is quantized.
More in my recent paper which should be mostly accessible even to the non-mathematically inclined.
Pilot wave theory is indeed very compelling. I've never liked MWI, as it seems to me to violate Ockham's razor by multiplying entities - in its case entire universes - without limit. It's also essentially untestable.
The traveling minds interpretation is an interesting one, novel to me as well. The multiverse becomes a sort of unrealized probability/potential space, with consciousness serving to navigate it - crystallizing the potential into the actual. This also matches the behavior of time, and our experience of it: the multiverse is the future, the selected path is the past, and our minds exist only at the momentary intersection of the two, where they have the ability to select which of the branching timelines of the future will be crystalized.
I wonder if there's a way to combine the pilot wave with traveling minds? Something like, the pilot wave is the propagation of choice through reality, which then guides the point particle that in turn corresponds to the focus of consciousness.
But how do you reconcile individual Free Will with Universal Consciousness?
If true Free Will requires the ability to choose between entire four dimensional hyperspaces, what limits our spirits to just nudging some chemical reactions in the brain? Why not magic, for those with sufficient Will? I wrote a science fiction based on this premise for a class back in college entitled "Choice." The protagonist reveals his insanity towards the end; solipsism is not a happy place.
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Personally, I don't believe in the contradictory picture presented by relativity and quantum mechanics. We have some mathematical tools which produce some interesting results, given lots of massaging, but the tools aren't all that rigorous. (The basic model of a hydrogen atom starts with Coulomb attraction between point charges. A point charge would have infinite field mass. Oops! And then you have Feynmann's renormalization hacks where he DID set the masses of electrons to infinity to make the math work.) I think what we have is a Ptolemaic mess, a mess that is next to impossible to fix because doing so means spending decades at the drawing board. With Publish or Perish, this cannot be done in a university setting.
I did not go into it, but Squires actually concludes that free will would not necessarily be limited to just nudging some chemical reactions in the brain, and that parapsychological phenomenon (magic) would be explainable through his interpretation.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the state of physics or academia, but I go to war with the army I have. Or, rather I go to blog with the papers I have!
Oct 27, 2022·edited Oct 27, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe
The problem of probability collapse assumes that there is an issue with improbable results. But I prefer to see this as a fractal nature of consciousness. Even the recent movie Everything Everywhere All at Once touched on it: the more improbable, the more distant the reality.. the fractal nature of consciousness yields patterns and beautiful fluffy edges filled with wonder... Yes, experience tends to follow in familiar but unique moments, as it unfolds, but that's because consciousness is exploring every possible moment, and yet, we don't often tread down the rarer options... We can and do but it takes conscious effort.
MWI as a pure logic tree (ie every choice is a binary split) seems unlikely but what if the split is fractal in nature? What if the universe explores it all, but we tend toward the larger universal "shape of things". The largely improbable branches tend to be unreachable to us but they aren't impossible just unlikely, and consciousness spends fractally less energy exploring those branches of the MWI.
Lately I've come to a Borgeian Infinite Library model: it _all_ happens someplace in the library, include self referential fractalism.... My conscious experience is my unique library trip into the world, opening up books and reading pages, and while it's possible for the book to turn into gibberish at any moment, on an page turn, my conscious page turn every moment yields a coherent next page.
The recent Stable Diffusion explosion of development is a nice parallel: SD works, in a nutshell by training a ML model to first turn order (photos, ordered coherent information) into chaos (random looking noise) in a concrete set of steps of applying reversible math guided by the input (concepts tokenized into math values). You can then reverse the process: give the ML actual random noise and ask it to reverse the process and it attempts to turns that noise into coherent visible information guided by the requested input... It FINDS the best answer it can given, entirely by the math of the query, and gives us a image result. Tweak the math of the query (add a new value to it, adjust an existing value, etc) and it finds a different coherent result closer to your desire (hopefully).
The same algo engine, the same random seed (meaning the same starting noise pattern), the same math token input (the prompt query) yields the same result...
But in Reality, our seed is always changing (the quantum sea), and our consciousness is evolving (the engine) and our query in the moment isn't constant... But the experienced result is a coherent one that yields information that "makes sense". The Universe doesn't randomly shift from our perspective, because we're generating the perspective in a constant manner.
"Lately I've come to a Borgeian Infinite Library model: it _all_ happens someplace in the library, include self referential fractalism.... My conscious experience is my unique library trip into the world, opening up books and reading pages, and while it's possible for the book to turn into gibberish at any moment, on an page turn, my conscious page turn every moment yields a coherent next page."
I think that's actually quite compatible with the traveling minds theory, in fact, it's an analogy I wish I'd thought of!
Here's a more basic example of finding patterns in noise being like QM:
feed random noise into a narrow bandpass filter, get out a sine wave. Change the frequency of the filter, ~instantly get out a different frequency wave. Increase the bandwidth of the filter, and the sine looks more and more noisy. on the oscilloscope, until it looks to the eye like pure noise.
But do the same thing while watching the frequency plot instead of the oscilloscope, and you see a single frequency line, which ~instantly shifts as you change the frequency (odd, since ordinarily getting the frequency plot updated takes quite some time for the input to sweep though all the frequencies - but a noise input presents all frequencies at once). Turning up the filter's bandwidth makes the line on the frequency plot first wider, then ripples start to show to either side which grow higher and extend further out until the frequency plot looks like a cosine wave (more like cosine^2, actually, can't have negative amplitudes). A comb filter, in other words. Switching back to the 'scope, it looks like pure noise, but there is a structure to the frequency spectrum you can't see in the time domain.
So there is a duality between the sine wave in the time domain at low bandwidth and the cosine^2 on the frequency-domain plot at infinite bandwidth. This may show the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in time-frequency form. (It may be somewhat an artifact of the particular filter I used, too, but it made a nice demo. BTW, anybody need a lightly broken HP3562A signal analyzer?)
The traveling-minds interpretation is appealing, but I think your expression of it presupposing past and future as being as they seem needs fixing. According to the math of advanced and retarded waves in QM (psi-star and psi, respectively), Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Mead's Collective Electrodynamics, when any photon is emitted by an electron, its absorber in the future is fixed, even if the photon will not be absorbed for billions of years. The photon experiences no time delay between emission and absorption at all, according to the theory of relativity. Nearly everything in physics, at least all electromagnetic effects, is due to the mediation of these intrinsically atemporal photon interactions which falsify our idea of time, particularly the idea that the future is undetermined and the past is fixed.
Further, quantum entanglement, particularly the intractably complicated entanglements of thermal vibration and radiation, makes photon interactions even at widely separated places and times have a generally unknowable pattern of dependence on each other, a pattern which encodes the whole history of even the smallest molecular motions and spreads it across the universe. Does this give more potential freedom of will (whatever that means) or less? It would seem likely to be less, having more constraints, but with a much richer, and more potentially meaningful pattern, as well as giving good reason to believe our patterns will last eternally, ever more knitted into the overall pattern of the universe and everything in it, which may be only a part of God.
I haven't studied Cramer's Transactional Interpretation or Mead's Collective Electrodynamics to be able to offer an intelligent reply to this! If I am reading you correctly, however, you are stating that under TI, the future is fixed, which leads to something more akin to a timeless pattern of classical theism?
Well, the future might not be fixed, exactly, though that's one way to interpret it - another way to interpret it is that causality goes both ways, the emission and absorption aren't separated at all in space-time though they are separated in space and time ( ct^2 + x^2 = 0). Seeing the future as fixed comes from thinking of an emission now and absorption in the future, but instead considering the case of a absorption now of a photon emitted in the past, the absorption in the present could just as well be seen as determining the past emission. So either the future is fixed and/or the past isn't.
Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics is a pretty short and comprehensible book which explains things better than I can,, using the example of the quantum behavior of macroscopic superconducting loops rather than subatomic particles. As I understand his explanation, an electron can't emit a photon unless it is in perfect resonance with the absorbing electron, which is a very rare and sensitive thing. This resonance occurs through the universal wave function, which propagates forward (psi) and backward in time (psi-star). The resonance between the two, though, has an asymmetry in time, starting off relatively slow until there is a phase-lock between emitter and absorber which then rapidly increases the resonance until there is a transfer of energy from the emitter to the absorber, the latter being distinguished only by its being later in time. This burst of resonance is seen as "the collapse of the wave function". (Carver Mead, I should say for those who have never heard of him, is an extremely respected professor at Caltech, the godfather of the modern electronics industry, Moore's Law would better have been named Mead's Law (Moore went to him to find out if the trend he had noticed could continue). He also taught courses with Feynman, co-wrote the seminal textbook in chip design, and founded several successful companies.)
Oct 27, 2022·edited Oct 27, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe
Methodological Naturalism is not the "trend" in even the more (traditionally) Anglo-Saxon circles; be it the Academy or even amongst freelance philosophers and thinkers in Analytic Philosophy today. In Continental circles (Philosophy, Literary theory, etc) it is already dead meanwhile.
For those in the former group who tend toward Scientific Realism; the move towards the "middle" is what (so far) seems to be the consensus and the larger trend. And so, Structural Realism (and not flat out Scientific Realism) is what tends to get pursued.
Granted, not every contemporary Realist is a Structural realist; but the trend has been closer to the Structural realist "middle" than towards the Scientific realist Pole.
This opens up room for several maneuvers. In particular, we can zoom out from the Philosophy of Science and look at the Macro-structure it embeds itself in (namely, Epistemology). Here, we can now "freely" pursue Dialetheism. Relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
If so, the schema of Classical Logic (especially considerations such as the Law of the Excluded Middle) can now be eschewed *if* we are talking about higher-order, Supra-rational structures and relations. At this point, QM (and other interpretive lenses for the world of Physics) can be nested into a larger macro-lens which can better account for it than 'regular' reconciliation.
Specifically, we can do what Imam al Ghazali (Hujjat-ul-Islam) finalized and David Hume (independently) "rediscovered": That Cause-Effect relationships are "accidents"; we are using here the Mediaeval usage of the term, namely: "non-essential characteristics".
QM then, insofar as it speaks about the world (and let's use the Structural Realist lens here) identifies real patterns, structures, etc *within* a schema (for argument's sake let's call it the "everyday view that causes and effects are tangible"), but cannot get at the essence of the world.
This is because said 'world' is ultimately real in a weak sense; i.e. utterly dependant on the One Will (to whom everyone else submits and subjugates to ultimately).
So it is entirely possible to Reject Free Will (well, to be more exact- There is Only One Free Will), affirm God Almighty *and* affirm monism of any sort a failure.
This is because said Monism-models cannot account for the Dialethic tendencies and notions we come across when we examine higher order and supra-rational relationships.
For said models either have to reject said Intuitive Dialetheias (which all thinking men have in their Fearful + Despair filled nights come across) or they have to posit some reductive or supervenient relationship to account for them that don't properly explain their various intricacies.
I think ToW's description of God as the "universal awareness of the wave-function of all possible outcomes" in some sense would give God no free will, aside from perhaps determining the initial constitution of matter in the universe and the physical laws by which it operates, but it's not clear that the latter is implied by the former.
My intent was that God also possessed the option of being universal selector of what it is experienced, as well, although that is my own elaboration of the theory and not per se found in Squires.
The PIE-root is *per which notionally means "try/risk". The Latin "ex" (i.e. out of) is latched on and we get a notion of "to try/risk out of"
Even in our modern use, those notions have actually 'transferred' pretty well.
Namely, the usage of it as a Noun when we talk about "an event which has affected one", notionally the 'trying/risk' lingers there.
The same is not quite true when (and this is the impression I got here) you are using the word "experience" here. It looks more like a stronger use; which does not quite tap into the 'try/risk out of' that the everyday use claims descent from.
Interesting article. I'm afraid I'm not really sufficiently adept at physics to argue the finer points of quantum theory, but if it's not a stupid question: Why would 'consciousness' in this framework be a particular property of intelligent organisms and not a property of every material object, down to quarks and protons? Is there something special about the way a nervous system interacts with the waveform that makes it privileged as a 'selector' for experience?
- We know that in the absence of a particular *type* observer, the wave function does not collapse, and we know this because we can set up experiments in which e.g. the (unobserved) wave, and not the (observed) particle manifests. So what is that "type"?
- Von Neumann showed, mathematically, that no matter what physical object you chose, you could always find a quantum wave function that described both the object and the system it was observing. E.g. if you say "the device observes the system", you can model it as "device+system" -- what's observing that? If you say "the eye observes the device+system" you can model it as "device+system+eye" -- what's observing that? Eventually Von Neumann concluded that only a non-material consciousness, outside of the physical, could be the cause.
It's in his book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. I personally learned about his views from Dr Henry Stapp's books, which are much easier reading. I later bought MFQM just to confirm that Stapp's quotes of Neumann's views were accurate.
Short answer: no, there is nothing special about nervous systems that allows them to "collapse the wave-function", select out a single possibility. Nor is there even anything special about macroscopic objects than makes them classical rather than quantum (as ToW/von Neumann noted). Attributing consciousness to subatomic particles shouldn't be considered any crazier than the other interpretations, I think.
If consciousness precipitates the collapse of possibilities into actualities, I argue one must attribute a basic form of consciousness to the particles themselves. (The following is mostly pasted in from notes on my blog (mindsbasis.blogspot.com), so apologies for being a bit telegraphic.)
* Distinguishable states must differ by at least 1 bit (here I'm thinking of a Y- shaped Feynman diagram where there is a split between two possible paths - the center of the "Y" being the point which distinguishes between the base - representing the initial state where there are not 2 distinguishable states - and the arms, which represent the 2 distinguishable states.)
* No outside agency besides the 2 minimally differing states can do the distinguishing between themselves.
* Otherwise the theory would have to explain how the 3rd thing distinguishes not only the 2 original entities from each other but also how it distinguishes itself from the other two as well. (Leading to an infinite regress, which is actually how physicists decided to handle it - infinite sums of Feynman diagrams, but this led to getting ridiculous results such as empty space having practically infinite energy, requiring "renomalization".)
* This requisite ability to distinguish is logically part of every distinguishable entity.
* This logical nature, this ability to distinguish information, is not just the basis for consciousness but a basic form of consciousness itself.
* This suggests panpsychism or hylozocism
* However, this basic form of consciousness is attributable only to the junctions or vertices in the Feynman diagrams (= interactions = particle behavior) which exist as a scattered, discontinuous set of points, not to the web of lines ( = wave propagation). Higher forms of consciousness would seem to have to somehow be built up from these discontinuous events rather than waves.
"Wave function collapse" is the belief that the map is more real than the territory. It is the belief that our knowledge of a thing is the thing itself. It is arrogance made scientific policy. It is not science, but faith. This religious dogma has held back science for 90 years.
Bell's Inequality, purported to disprove Bohmian pilot wave theory, is deeply flawed. There are at least two logical fallacies at the heart of Bell's Theorem. Go read the paper and see for yourself. All Bell's paper proves is that not-waves do not act like waves. I give full credit to the winners of the 2022 Nobel prize in physics, but all they proved was that waves do, in fact, act like waves.
> Of course, to the hardnosed materialist-monist, all of the above will be seen as disastrous to the scientific merits of the traveling minds interpretation, flaws that render the interpretation a form of “quantum woo”
Well, to me your explanations of these interpretations sound too materialist. Like your conception of minds and even God is as material beings with strange properties. Notably you seem to avoid trying to consider the concept of God existing outside time.
Except that as our host presented the theory, the Being knows everything that *could* happen, but doesn't know which possibility *will* happen until it happens.
Oct 29, 2022·edited Oct 29, 2022Liked by Tree of Woe
Maybe ToW can correct me, but I think the loose analogy would be God being the author of a choose-your-own-adventure book, and any given intelligent organism is a reader who chooses what 'will' happen by flipping between instructions on page to page. In some sense it would reconcile free will with God's omniscience.
Well, that's not *quite* what I'm saying or Squires is saying. The position you've enunciated would be Henry Stapp's position, where only one possibility actually happens because the wave function collapses. In TMI, the wave function never collapses; everything happens. God (or whatever term you want to use) therefore knows everything that has, is, or will happen in the world -- because the universal wave function IS definitionally that. But we choose what we experience in God's world.
Let me give an example. Imagine that God appears in the room with me and reveals a vision of His radiant glory to me. It is up to me whether that vision makes me feel awed and loved, or if it burns and hurts. The event is the same either way, all that varies is how my soul reacts to it. That's the predominant Eastern Orthodox view of Heaven and Hell: "God’s loving and fiery presence either causes us to withdraw within ourselves or to reach out and be consumed and healed." https://www.orthodoxroad.com/heaven-hell/
So what I believe the TMI suggests is that ALL of reality is analogous to that. I judge that to resolves the paradox of free will. I do not claim that TMI meets all the requirements for God as defined by certain strands of classical theology (timeless, simple, etc); and many theologians disagree on what those requirements are.
It's worth noting that in Henry Stapp's last book, he concluded that the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation also meant that some sort of universal consciousness existed. In email correspondence with Dr Stapp, we discussed the similarity to the Hellenistic concept of Logos.
If I gave the impression that I am a materialist, or that Squires or Stapp end up as materialists, then it was poor writing on my part. At this point I consider myself an interactional dualist.
I can well understand that I'd come off as just another materialist, though. Studying science is what made me believe in God again, so that's the path by which I approach. For those who have gotten to faith by a direct experience of God or the Holy Spirit in their lives (my wife is one) I imagine I look like a clumsy oaf climbing a mountain when a helicopter is available.
Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that hybrid of MWI and Waveform Collapse. While I love MWI for fictional purposes (see how the characters made different decisions and had different outcomes on a different timeline), I prefer the pilot wave theory, because it appears to be the natural extension of how classical electromagnetic fields guide the flow of energy, as extrapolated to the limit in which energy is quantized.
More in my recent paper which should be mostly accessible even to the non-mathematically inclined.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328593361_Energy_velocity_and_reactive_fields
Pilot wave theory is indeed very compelling. I've never liked MWI, as it seems to me to violate Ockham's razor by multiplying entities - in its case entire universes - without limit. It's also essentially untestable.
The traveling minds interpretation is an interesting one, novel to me as well. The multiverse becomes a sort of unrealized probability/potential space, with consciousness serving to navigate it - crystallizing the potential into the actual. This also matches the behavior of time, and our experience of it: the multiverse is the future, the selected path is the past, and our minds exist only at the momentary intersection of the two, where they have the ability to select which of the branching timelines of the future will be crystalized.
I wonder if there's a way to combine the pilot wave with traveling minds? Something like, the pilot wave is the propagation of choice through reality, which then guides the point particle that in turn corresponds to the focus of consciousness.
In his book, Squires suggests (though he doesn't deeply explore) that there is an affinity between the two interpretations.
But how do you reconcile individual Free Will with Universal Consciousness?
If true Free Will requires the ability to choose between entire four dimensional hyperspaces, what limits our spirits to just nudging some chemical reactions in the brain? Why not magic, for those with sufficient Will? I wrote a science fiction based on this premise for a class back in college entitled "Choice." The protagonist reveals his insanity towards the end; solipsism is not a happy place.
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Personally, I don't believe in the contradictory picture presented by relativity and quantum mechanics. We have some mathematical tools which produce some interesting results, given lots of massaging, but the tools aren't all that rigorous. (The basic model of a hydrogen atom starts with Coulomb attraction between point charges. A point charge would have infinite field mass. Oops! And then you have Feynmann's renormalization hacks where he DID set the masses of electrons to infinity to make the math work.) I think what we have is a Ptolemaic mess, a mess that is next to impossible to fix because doing so means spending decades at the drawing board. With Publish or Perish, this cannot be done in a university setting.
I did not go into it, but Squires actually concludes that free will would not necessarily be limited to just nudging some chemical reactions in the brain, and that parapsychological phenomenon (magic) would be explainable through his interpretation.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the state of physics or academia, but I go to war with the army I have. Or, rather I go to blog with the papers I have!
The problem of probability collapse assumes that there is an issue with improbable results. But I prefer to see this as a fractal nature of consciousness. Even the recent movie Everything Everywhere All at Once touched on it: the more improbable, the more distant the reality.. the fractal nature of consciousness yields patterns and beautiful fluffy edges filled with wonder... Yes, experience tends to follow in familiar but unique moments, as it unfolds, but that's because consciousness is exploring every possible moment, and yet, we don't often tread down the rarer options... We can and do but it takes conscious effort.
MWI as a pure logic tree (ie every choice is a binary split) seems unlikely but what if the split is fractal in nature? What if the universe explores it all, but we tend toward the larger universal "shape of things". The largely improbable branches tend to be unreachable to us but they aren't impossible just unlikely, and consciousness spends fractally less energy exploring those branches of the MWI.
Lately I've come to a Borgeian Infinite Library model: it _all_ happens someplace in the library, include self referential fractalism.... My conscious experience is my unique library trip into the world, opening up books and reading pages, and while it's possible for the book to turn into gibberish at any moment, on an page turn, my conscious page turn every moment yields a coherent next page.
The recent Stable Diffusion explosion of development is a nice parallel: SD works, in a nutshell by training a ML model to first turn order (photos, ordered coherent information) into chaos (random looking noise) in a concrete set of steps of applying reversible math guided by the input (concepts tokenized into math values). You can then reverse the process: give the ML actual random noise and ask it to reverse the process and it attempts to turns that noise into coherent visible information guided by the requested input... It FINDS the best answer it can given, entirely by the math of the query, and gives us a image result. Tweak the math of the query (add a new value to it, adjust an existing value, etc) and it finds a different coherent result closer to your desire (hopefully).
The same algo engine, the same random seed (meaning the same starting noise pattern), the same math token input (the prompt query) yields the same result...
But in Reality, our seed is always changing (the quantum sea), and our consciousness is evolving (the engine) and our query in the moment isn't constant... But the experienced result is a coherent one that yields information that "makes sense". The Universe doesn't randomly shift from our perspective, because we're generating the perspective in a constant manner.
"Lately I've come to a Borgeian Infinite Library model: it _all_ happens someplace in the library, include self referential fractalism.... My conscious experience is my unique library trip into the world, opening up books and reading pages, and while it's possible for the book to turn into gibberish at any moment, on an page turn, my conscious page turn every moment yields a coherent next page."
I think that's actually quite compatible with the traveling minds theory, in fact, it's an analogy I wish I'd thought of!
Here's a more basic example of finding patterns in noise being like QM:
feed random noise into a narrow bandpass filter, get out a sine wave. Change the frequency of the filter, ~instantly get out a different frequency wave. Increase the bandwidth of the filter, and the sine looks more and more noisy. on the oscilloscope, until it looks to the eye like pure noise.
But do the same thing while watching the frequency plot instead of the oscilloscope, and you see a single frequency line, which ~instantly shifts as you change the frequency (odd, since ordinarily getting the frequency plot updated takes quite some time for the input to sweep though all the frequencies - but a noise input presents all frequencies at once). Turning up the filter's bandwidth makes the line on the frequency plot first wider, then ripples start to show to either side which grow higher and extend further out until the frequency plot looks like a cosine wave (more like cosine^2, actually, can't have negative amplitudes). A comb filter, in other words. Switching back to the 'scope, it looks like pure noise, but there is a structure to the frequency spectrum you can't see in the time domain.
So there is a duality between the sine wave in the time domain at low bandwidth and the cosine^2 on the frequency-domain plot at infinite bandwidth. This may show the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in time-frequency form. (It may be somewhat an artifact of the particular filter I used, too, but it made a nice demo. BTW, anybody need a lightly broken HP3562A signal analyzer?)
The traveling-minds interpretation is appealing, but I think your expression of it presupposing past and future as being as they seem needs fixing. According to the math of advanced and retarded waves in QM (psi-star and psi, respectively), Cramer's Transactional Interpretation and Mead's Collective Electrodynamics, when any photon is emitted by an electron, its absorber in the future is fixed, even if the photon will not be absorbed for billions of years. The photon experiences no time delay between emission and absorption at all, according to the theory of relativity. Nearly everything in physics, at least all electromagnetic effects, is due to the mediation of these intrinsically atemporal photon interactions which falsify our idea of time, particularly the idea that the future is undetermined and the past is fixed.
Further, quantum entanglement, particularly the intractably complicated entanglements of thermal vibration and radiation, makes photon interactions even at widely separated places and times have a generally unknowable pattern of dependence on each other, a pattern which encodes the whole history of even the smallest molecular motions and spreads it across the universe. Does this give more potential freedom of will (whatever that means) or less? It would seem likely to be less, having more constraints, but with a much richer, and more potentially meaningful pattern, as well as giving good reason to believe our patterns will last eternally, ever more knitted into the overall pattern of the universe and everything in it, which may be only a part of God.
I haven't studied Cramer's Transactional Interpretation or Mead's Collective Electrodynamics to be able to offer an intelligent reply to this! If I am reading you correctly, however, you are stating that under TI, the future is fixed, which leads to something more akin to a timeless pattern of classical theism?
Well, the future might not be fixed, exactly, though that's one way to interpret it - another way to interpret it is that causality goes both ways, the emission and absorption aren't separated at all in space-time though they are separated in space and time ( ct^2 + x^2 = 0). Seeing the future as fixed comes from thinking of an emission now and absorption in the future, but instead considering the case of a absorption now of a photon emitted in the past, the absorption in the present could just as well be seen as determining the past emission. So either the future is fixed and/or the past isn't.
Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics is a pretty short and comprehensible book which explains things better than I can,, using the example of the quantum behavior of macroscopic superconducting loops rather than subatomic particles. As I understand his explanation, an electron can't emit a photon unless it is in perfect resonance with the absorbing electron, which is a very rare and sensitive thing. This resonance occurs through the universal wave function, which propagates forward (psi) and backward in time (psi-star). The resonance between the two, though, has an asymmetry in time, starting off relatively slow until there is a phase-lock between emitter and absorber which then rapidly increases the resonance until there is a transfer of energy from the emitter to the absorber, the latter being distinguished only by its being later in time. This burst of resonance is seen as "the collapse of the wave function". (Carver Mead, I should say for those who have never heard of him, is an extremely respected professor at Caltech, the godfather of the modern electronics industry, Moore's Law would better have been named Mead's Law (Moore went to him to find out if the trend he had noticed could continue). He also taught courses with Feynman, co-wrote the seminal textbook in chip design, and founded several successful companies.)
Methodological Naturalism is not the "trend" in even the more (traditionally) Anglo-Saxon circles; be it the Academy or even amongst freelance philosophers and thinkers in Analytic Philosophy today. In Continental circles (Philosophy, Literary theory, etc) it is already dead meanwhile.
For those in the former group who tend toward Scientific Realism; the move towards the "middle" is what (so far) seems to be the consensus and the larger trend. And so, Structural Realism (and not flat out Scientific Realism) is what tends to get pursued.
Relevant: https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.bc8a60906e437afa2216153c666dd4ac?rik=hxR%2b8avTpPEbNw&riu=http%3a%2f%2frreece.github.io%2foutline-of-philosophy%2fimg%2fphil-of-science-v02.png&ehk=Dl%2fKiyuGQqkXHTCdoKWHrX6f7IG2h2zJEOCpPeQbGj4%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0
Granted, not every contemporary Realist is a Structural realist; but the trend has been closer to the Structural realist "middle" than towards the Scientific realist Pole.
This opens up room for several maneuvers. In particular, we can zoom out from the Philosophy of Science and look at the Macro-structure it embeds itself in (namely, Epistemology). Here, we can now "freely" pursue Dialetheism. Relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
If so, the schema of Classical Logic (especially considerations such as the Law of the Excluded Middle) can now be eschewed *if* we are talking about higher-order, Supra-rational structures and relations. At this point, QM (and other interpretive lenses for the world of Physics) can be nested into a larger macro-lens which can better account for it than 'regular' reconciliation.
Specifically, we can do what Imam al Ghazali (Hujjat-ul-Islam) finalized and David Hume (independently) "rediscovered": That Cause-Effect relationships are "accidents"; we are using here the Mediaeval usage of the term, namely: "non-essential characteristics".
QM then, insofar as it speaks about the world (and let's use the Structural Realist lens here) identifies real patterns, structures, etc *within* a schema (for argument's sake let's call it the "everyday view that causes and effects are tangible"), but cannot get at the essence of the world.
This is because said 'world' is ultimately real in a weak sense; i.e. utterly dependant on the One Will (to whom everyone else submits and subjugates to ultimately).
So it is entirely possible to Reject Free Will (well, to be more exact- There is Only One Free Will), affirm God Almighty *and* affirm monism of any sort a failure.
This is because said Monism-models cannot account for the Dialethic tendencies and notions we come across when we examine higher order and supra-rational relationships.
For said models either have to reject said Intuitive Dialetheias (which all thinking men have in their Fearful + Despair filled nights come across) or they have to posit some reductive or supervenient relationship to account for them that don't properly explain their various intricacies.
I think ToW's description of God as the "universal awareness of the wave-function of all possible outcomes" in some sense would give God no free will, aside from perhaps determining the initial constitution of matter in the universe and the physical laws by which it operates, but it's not clear that the latter is implied by the former.
My intent was that God also possessed the option of being universal selector of what it is experienced, as well, although that is my own elaboration of the theory and not per se found in Squires.
We use words like "experience" more or less the way older usages have used it. Relevant: https://www.etymonline.com/word/experience
The PIE-root is *per which notionally means "try/risk". The Latin "ex" (i.e. out of) is latched on and we get a notion of "to try/risk out of"
Even in our modern use, those notions have actually 'transferred' pretty well.
Namely, the usage of it as a Noun when we talk about "an event which has affected one", notionally the 'trying/risk' lingers there.
The same is not quite true when (and this is the impression I got here) you are using the word "experience" here. It looks more like a stronger use; which does not quite tap into the 'try/risk out of' that the everyday use claims descent from.
Interesting article. I'm afraid I'm not really sufficiently adept at physics to argue the finer points of quantum theory, but if it's not a stupid question: Why would 'consciousness' in this framework be a particular property of intelligent organisms and not a property of every material object, down to quarks and protons? Is there something special about the way a nervous system interacts with the waveform that makes it privileged as a 'selector' for experience?
That goes to the measurement problem.
- We know that in the absence of a particular *type* observer, the wave function does not collapse, and we know this because we can set up experiments in which e.g. the (unobserved) wave, and not the (observed) particle manifests. So what is that "type"?
- Von Neumann showed, mathematically, that no matter what physical object you chose, you could always find a quantum wave function that described both the object and the system it was observing. E.g. if you say "the device observes the system", you can model it as "device+system" -- what's observing that? If you say "the eye observes the device+system" you can model it as "device+system+eye" -- what's observing that? Eventually Von Neumann concluded that only a non-material consciousness, outside of the physical, could be the cause.
Do you have a link to some resource where Von Neumann's conclusions/discussion on the topic are recorded?
It's in his book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. I personally learned about his views from Dr Henry Stapp's books, which are much easier reading. I later bought MFQM just to confirm that Stapp's quotes of Neumann's views were accurate.
Short answer: no, there is nothing special about nervous systems that allows them to "collapse the wave-function", select out a single possibility. Nor is there even anything special about macroscopic objects than makes them classical rather than quantum (as ToW/von Neumann noted). Attributing consciousness to subatomic particles shouldn't be considered any crazier than the other interpretations, I think.
If consciousness precipitates the collapse of possibilities into actualities, I argue one must attribute a basic form of consciousness to the particles themselves. (The following is mostly pasted in from notes on my blog (mindsbasis.blogspot.com), so apologies for being a bit telegraphic.)
* Distinguishable states must differ by at least 1 bit (here I'm thinking of a Y- shaped Feynman diagram where there is a split between two possible paths - the center of the "Y" being the point which distinguishes between the base - representing the initial state where there are not 2 distinguishable states - and the arms, which represent the 2 distinguishable states.)
* No outside agency besides the 2 minimally differing states can do the distinguishing between themselves.
* Otherwise the theory would have to explain how the 3rd thing distinguishes not only the 2 original entities from each other but also how it distinguishes itself from the other two as well. (Leading to an infinite regress, which is actually how physicists decided to handle it - infinite sums of Feynman diagrams, but this led to getting ridiculous results such as empty space having practically infinite energy, requiring "renomalization".)
* This requisite ability to distinguish is logically part of every distinguishable entity.
* This logical nature, this ability to distinguish information, is not just the basis for consciousness but a basic form of consciousness itself.
* This suggests panpsychism or hylozocism
* However, this basic form of consciousness is attributable only to the junctions or vertices in the Feynman diagrams (= interactions = particle behavior) which exist as a scattered, discontinuous set of points, not to the web of lines ( = wave propagation). Higher forms of consciousness would seem to have to somehow be built up from these discontinuous events rather than waves.
"Wave function collapse" is the belief that the map is more real than the territory. It is the belief that our knowledge of a thing is the thing itself. It is arrogance made scientific policy. It is not science, but faith. This religious dogma has held back science for 90 years.
Bell's Inequality, purported to disprove Bohmian pilot wave theory, is deeply flawed. There are at least two logical fallacies at the heart of Bell's Theorem. Go read the paper and see for yourself. All Bell's paper proves is that not-waves do not act like waves. I give full credit to the winners of the 2022 Nobel prize in physics, but all they proved was that waves do, in fact, act like waves.
> Of course, to the hardnosed materialist-monist, all of the above will be seen as disastrous to the scientific merits of the traveling minds interpretation, flaws that render the interpretation a form of “quantum woo”
Well, to me your explanations of these interpretations sound too materialist. Like your conception of minds and even God is as material beings with strange properties. Notably you seem to avoid trying to consider the concept of God existing outside time.
If the wave-function includes everything that ever has or could exist, then in some sense a being that 'knows' it would be eternal.
Except that as our host presented the theory, the Being knows everything that *could* happen, but doesn't know which possibility *will* happen until it happens.
Maybe ToW can correct me, but I think the loose analogy would be God being the author of a choose-your-own-adventure book, and any given intelligent organism is a reader who chooses what 'will' happen by flipping between instructions on page to page. In some sense it would reconcile free will with God's omniscience.
I like that as an analogy, yes.
Well, that's not *quite* what I'm saying or Squires is saying. The position you've enunciated would be Henry Stapp's position, where only one possibility actually happens because the wave function collapses. In TMI, the wave function never collapses; everything happens. God (or whatever term you want to use) therefore knows everything that has, is, or will happen in the world -- because the universal wave function IS definitionally that. But we choose what we experience in God's world.
Let me give an example. Imagine that God appears in the room with me and reveals a vision of His radiant glory to me. It is up to me whether that vision makes me feel awed and loved, or if it burns and hurts. The event is the same either way, all that varies is how my soul reacts to it. That's the predominant Eastern Orthodox view of Heaven and Hell: "God’s loving and fiery presence either causes us to withdraw within ourselves or to reach out and be consumed and healed." https://www.orthodoxroad.com/heaven-hell/
So what I believe the TMI suggests is that ALL of reality is analogous to that. I judge that to resolves the paradox of free will. I do not claim that TMI meets all the requirements for God as defined by certain strands of classical theology (timeless, simple, etc); and many theologians disagree on what those requirements are.
It's worth noting that in Henry Stapp's last book, he concluded that the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation also meant that some sort of universal consciousness existed. In email correspondence with Dr Stapp, we discussed the similarity to the Hellenistic concept of Logos.
If I gave the impression that I am a materialist, or that Squires or Stapp end up as materialists, then it was poor writing on my part. At this point I consider myself an interactional dualist.
I can well understand that I'd come off as just another materialist, though. Studying science is what made me believe in God again, so that's the path by which I approach. For those who have gotten to faith by a direct experience of God or the Holy Spirit in their lives (my wife is one) I imagine I look like a clumsy oaf climbing a mountain when a helicopter is available.
> Studying science is what made me believe in God again, so that's the path by which I approach.
Well my background is mathematics, so I'm at least used to dealing with things that are eternal and noncontingent.