Is There A Place For The Mind In Physics? Part I

[rug]

Where does the mind fit within the cosmos? Are they separate, intertwined or one in the same?
(F. Comeron/ESO)

by Adam Frank
January 29, 2013 7:51 AM

So I want you to do something for me. I want you to think of a blue monkey. Are you ready? OK, go! Visualize it in your head. Any kind of monkey will do (as long as it's blue). Take a moment. Really, see the little blue dude! Got it? Great. Now, here is the question: Where did that thought fit into reality? How was it real? Where was it real?

Another way to ask this question is: Was the "blue monkey thought" just the electrical activity of your neurons? Was that all there was to it? If not, might your private internal screening of the blue monkey be something altogether different? Was it, perhaps, part of something just as fundamental as quarks and Higgs bosons?

This is the fundamental question behind philosopher Thomas Nagel's controversial book: "Mind & Cosmos: Why The Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False". I've been slowly making my way through Nagel's short (though, at points, dense) volume for a few months now. Back in October our own most excellent philosopher of Mind, Alva Noe, presented his own take on Nagel's work. Yesterday, Tania Lombrozo extracted some real-world questions out of Nagel's philosophy. Today I want to begin thinking a bit about what and where the Mind might be in relation to my own science of physics.

Before we go any further, though, we have to deal with Nagel's subtitle, which seems like the bad advice of a publisher intent on pushing sales. Nagel is a self-proclaimed atheist and is not using this work to push a vision of a Deity into the debate about the nature of reality at a fundamental level. His arguments are, for the most part, those of a philosopher steeped in philosophical tradition, laying out an argument that the Mind has its own unique place in the structure of the Universe.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/29/169896128/is-there-a-place-for-the-mind-in-physics-part-i



Mind and Cosmos

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

by Thomas Nagel

Hardcover, 130 pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

[Fumesucker]

1. But what if the test is *not* to think of the blue monkey or white bear or whatever?

Is that perhaps something as fundamental as quarks and bosons?

It takes greater mental effort not to think of something than it does to think of that thing.

[reteachinwi]

2. It seems that Heisenberg placed the centrality of the mind

or observer into physical reality 80 some years ago. I may not be understanding the thesis rightly. If this guy's mind is real then we may all be on the way out.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022277486

[rug]

3. That's assuming that guy had a mind.

[tama]

5. LOL, great musical

and educational video. One can only appreciate the artistic talent of combining that video with music into musical.

Werner Heisenberg reported on Pauli's position, and his own, as follows:[44]
...Pauli once spoke of two limiting conceptions, both of which have been extraordinarily fruitful in the history of human thought, although no genuine reality corresponds to them. At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject; this has been the guiding image of modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world; this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these two opposites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind%E2%80%93body_problem

Eye which looks at the world, has a blind spot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision), but in more general sense eye looking at world is it's own blind spot, it cannot see the eye that is looking. And when we close our eyes, we can keep on looking with "mind's eye" as such and such mental images keep appearing and disappearing. We can and do attach various emotions to those mental images, and those emotions affect what happens in our body, including our magnetic fields that extend beyond our skin, and what happens in our body affects the world we can see when we open our eyes, e.g. as these fingers type and text appears on the screen.

We can't see the mind's eye directly anymore than the blind spot in the eye, but we can study it from many angles and also ask, what kind of experience would be mind's eye without looking at anything, awareness as such without content. And we can have confidence that just as we see intrasubjective reality again when we open our eyes again, it comes back also after mind's eye start's looking again and awareness has content of mental images.

As far as I understand, the potential both to measure and to be measured exists already in Schrödinger equation describing a quantum state, measuring another quantum state described by Schrödinger equation, but we can't tell which one is the observer and which one is the observed, just that there are no two identical quantum states, according to the no-cloning theorem. We don't have a full theory explaining how classical world decoheres from quantum states, or full theory of how conscious experience arises, in that sense quantum theory is not complete. But as in the Heisenberg&Pauli quote above, we have some idea of the goalposts and how to move them.

[Jim__]

4. Interesting review and interesting links from the review.

Nagel's book sounds like a worthwhile read. It's good to see that it is getting some attention.