From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Sep 01 2004 - 17:11:36 BST
Mel,
[Scott said previously:]> > What about the mystery of consciousness? Unless
someone can show me how
> one
> > set of electrons and quarks can be aware of another set -- not just
flip a
> > switch to indicate a yes or no answer to the existence of some pattern
or
> > other, but to experience the conscious phenomenon of seeing that pattern
> in
> > all its four-dimensional glory -- then there is a mystery, as long, that
> > is, as one assumes that consciousness is derived from the nonconscious.
> >
>
> mel:
> The work on quantum entanglement seems to indicate
> that matter at some level IS conscious of other matter,
> at least to the point of state awareness of certain
> qualities.
[Scott:] I don't think one can infer consciousness from quantum
entanglement, but you are right to point out that there may be clues to
consciousness in quantum physics, in that one does find non-locality, as
one does in conscious perception. At least that is how I see it (sense
perception unites what is apparently spatio-temporally separated, which
implies that sense perception is not a strictly spatio-temporal process.)
My own possibly crackpot view is indicated by the "apparently" in the last
sentence. I think that the unobserved quantum world is non-spatio-temporal,
and sense perception is the act of putting it into spatio-temporal form.
The error that causes the mystery is to try to understand consciousness in
terms of the products of consciousness, that it, spatio-temporal things and
processes. This would explain various so-called paradoxes of QM, like
wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle, and of course
non-locality. Roughly, the unobserved, non-spatio-temporal reality just
won't fit into spacetime, and so we get this weirdness when we try to
understand it in spacetime terms, like 'particle' and 'wave'.
- Scott
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries -
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 01 2004 - 17:15:21 BST