Reviewer: Mind is “elephant in the room” as far as evolution is concerned
| February 22, 2014 | Posted by News under Evolution, Mind, News |
David Snoke
Just up at the Christian Scientific Society’s site, physicist David Snoke reviews Mind & Cosmos by Thomas Nagel (2012). Nagel, you will recall, is the atheist philosopher who has been vehemently attacked for doubting Darwin. Snoke writes,
For Nagel, the elephant in the room which has not been adequately explained by the theory of evolution, by a long shot, is the existence of Mind. We all live every day with our whole experience governed by our experience with Mind. Nagel asks how we can consider any explanation of life adequate which fails to explain this predominating fact. Even if we had a complete theory of evolution with all the physical mechanisms (A) which explained the existence of brains (B), it would fail to explain Mind (C) unless it could be shown that the physical mechanisms are intrinsically connected to the existence of Mind.
On reflection, it is surprising that the existence of Mind has not been considered a major problem to address in evolutionary thought. This stems from the early commitment of Western science to a sharp distinction between observer and observed. That distinction was fruitful, because early science too easily settled on conclusions that the scientists wanted to be true or felt to be true because of their personal experience. But it evolved into a complete removal of the observer from consideration.
The standard narrative of evolution is that having minds makes people better able to find resources and avoid threats, and this favored their survival in competition with other species. But this explains only those abilities: resource-finding and threat-avoidance. It does not explain some pervasive, fundamental aspects of Mind which seem unrelated to those goals. Nagel lists these under the categories of Consciousness, Cognition, and Value. More.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
17 Responses to Reviewer: Mind is “elephant in the room” as far as evolution is concerned
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
to that I would add the Mind is “elephant in the room” as far as Quantum Mechanics is concerned. And the ‘observer’, far from ‘complete removal of the observer from consideration’, is found to be central to Quantum Mechanics.,,,
I first, much like everybody else, was immediately shocked to find out that the observer would have any effect whatsoever in the double slit experiment:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video:
Of course, atheists/materialists were/are in complete denial as to the obvious implications of mind in the double slit (invoking infinite parallel universes and such to try to get around it). But my curiosity was aroused and I’ve been sort of poking around finding out a little more about quantum mechanics and how the observer is central to it. One of the first interesting experiments in quantum mechanics I found after the double slit, that highlighted the centrality of the observer to the experiment, was Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries. Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
Wigner went on to make these rather dramatic comments in regards to his work:
Also of note:
Then after Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, I stumbled across Wheeler’s Delayed choice experiments in which this finding blew my socks off as to the central importance of the observer to quantum experiments:
Then I found out that the delayed choice experiment had been extended:
And then the delayed choice experiment was refined yet again:
i.e. The preceding experiment clearly shows, and removes any doubt whatsoever, that the ‘material’ detector recording information in the double slit is secondary to the experiment and that a conscious observer being able to consciously know the ‘which path’ information of a photon with local certainty, is of primary importance in the experiment. You can see a more complete explanation of the startling results of the experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
And then, as if all that was not more than enough to prove that a conscious observer is central to the experiments of quantum mechanics, I stumbled across something called Leggett’s Inequality. Leggett’s Inequality was, as far as I can tell, a mathematical proof developed by Nobelist Anthony Leggett to prove ‘realism’. Realism is the notion that an objective reality exists independently of a conscious observer. And, as is usual with challenging the predictions of Quantum Mechanics, his proof was violated by 80 orders of magnitude, thus once again, in over the top fashion, highlighting the central importance of the conscious observer to Quantum Experiments:
The following video and paper get the general point across of what ‘giving up realism’ actually means:
But, as if that was not enough, I then stumbled across something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’,,
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang:
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for actions within the space-time of the universe:
In fact, entropy is also the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,
And yet, to repeat,,,
This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^120 entropy is?
Putting all the lines of evidence together the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Verse and Music:
my two cents:(sorry for my english)
Atheist is the Belief, which the Origin (or the first Cause) of everything is something dead or none living entity.
For God is living.
The question is what definition of life can we have, to include God, i try this way (please correct me, if i’m wrong): entities, who has freedom to produce and maintain Order,
freedom means those orders are not results from natural laws.
maintain Order means to reverse the effect of the second law of thermodynamics.
As always its a rejection of historic Christiandom’s conclusion that man is a soul only. The body is just a vessel.
These deniers of christian conclusions must say we are brains in skulls. then they must explain the mind as opposed to the parts. it doesn’t work or they are not brainy enough to figure it out.
I figuerd that out.
Bornagain77:
In another comment thread, I just asked if you thought conscious observation was the trigger for wavefunction collapse; from what you say here, it appears the answer is “yes.”
If I’m interpreting your claim correctly, I think you haven’t thought the implications all the way through. Specifically, the implications for the idea of an omniscient (all-observing) God. In all of the various QM tests you describe, we can show that the wavefunctions don’t collapse before measurement. (Showing that collapse does happen turns out to be very difficult/maybe impossible, because it’s indistinguishable from decoherence — but don’t worry about that right now.)
In the two-slit experiment, the interference pattern only appears if nobody looks at which slit the particle/wave goes through. In the entanglement tests (Bell, Legett, etc), the limit-violating correlations only appear if nobody looks at the photons prematurely. The quantum zeno effect implies that unstable particles only decay when nobody’s watching them sufficiently closely.
I see a limited set of possibilities here:
1) God doesn’t exist,
2) God exists, but is not all-seeing,
3) God exists and is all-seeing, but not conscious, or
4) Conscious observation does not always trigger wavefunction collapse.
It looks to me like the view that conscious observation triggers collapse is incompatible with any reasonable variant of Christian theology.
BTW, I should clarify that I don’t see any particular conflict between standard QM and theology; the only conflict is with the idea that conscious observation triggers collapse. For example, I don’t see any problem with the idea that God could observe the raw (uncollapsed) wavefunction.
Actually, quantum mechanics and General relativity are both far more compatible with Christianity than you, as an many worlds atheist, would prefer to believe: (whichever version of your many worlds infinite self ‘you’ may be upon your last observation of a photon. A infinite many worlds self who you also happen to believe randomly evolved from some hypothetical primordial slime to possess a brain with for more complexity than all the computers in the world combined). Yes, please do tell me how me beliefs are incompatible with reality. I’m sure you got a firm grip on that whole reality bit! LOL 🙂
But anyways, apart from the sheer absurdity of being lectured by a many worlds Darwinist on the true nature of reality, let’s see if reality conforms to Christianity:
Since ‘truth’ cannot be grounded in Naturalism, save by the hidden presupposition of Theistic claims in Naturalism in the first place, what does it REALLY mean to ‘seek truth’ for a naturalist? Well, a lot of atheists would claim, such as Hawking, that ‘seeking truth’ would involve seeking the hypothetical mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’. But, as Godel proved, and as Hawking himself admitted and subsequently forgot, truth cannot be grounded within a mathematical ‘Theory Of Everything’ since any mathematics that is specific enough to have counting numbers within it cannot contain ‘the Truth’ within itself but is dependent on a outside cause in order to derive its truthfulness:
Thus Naturalists/Atheists cannot appeal to a platonic realm of abstract mathematical ideas in their ‘seeking of truth’ since ‘truth’ cannot be grounded in any mathematics that is specific enough to account for the universe. This would seem to be rather obvious point to make since agency cannot be grounded in a mathematical description:
Of related note: In the following video, at the 22:27 to the 29:50 minute mark, is a pretty neat little presentation of the Schrodinger Equation in answer to the question, ‘Why does mathematics describe the universe?’ i.e. The short answer? God!
Indeed, assuming naturalism as the source for the truthfulness inherent within mathematics leads to the frightful proposition, because of the ‘randomness’ postulate at the base of naturalism, that at any moment our mathematical models may fail to give us an accurate account of reality. i.e. ‘Random’ Naturalism simply does not guarantee us that our mathematical models will remain consistent tomorrow with the reality they purport to describe to us today. Even a minor variance would spell catastrophy for the scientific enterprise:
And yet Naturalists/Atheists, apparently completely oblivious to the chaos in science that would ensue if random variance were actually found to be in the fundamental constants of the universe, continue to be surprised every time they find that the constants have not ‘randomly’ varied as they presuppose they should according to their base naturalistic (i.e. random) worldview:
Indeed Einstein and Wigner both expressed awe that mathematics should describe reality so accurately when, according to naturalism, this should not be a-priorily expected:
Yet, to go back to square one
,,, Can what we have reviewed so far support such a radical claim that Christ made about Himself? Yes! I believe Christ’s claim of being ‘The Truth’ is substantiated by the following. If we allow that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (for who could deny Him that possibility “IF” He exists), as even the author of the incompleteness theorem himself allowed that God could do,,
,, ‘if’ we allow that possibility that ‘God can play the role of a person’, (and how could a person who believes in the absurdity of infinite multiverses deny at least that possibility?) ‘if’ we allow that possibility then we find a very credible reconciliation between the finite/materialistic world of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity and the infinite/Theistic world of Quantum Mechanics. A very credible reconciliation that does not wind up in the ‘anything goes’ epistemological pit of logical absurdities as string theory, m-theory and the multiverse in general does,,,
,,,in fact, unlike all these outlandish multiverse scenarios which have no solid empirical support (and which undermine our ability to rationally practice science in the first place anyway), we find a reconciliation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that has a surprising amount of empirical support. For instance, it is now shown that the process in which the image was formed on the Shroud of Turin had to be a ‘quantum process’, not a classical process:
Also of important note is the fact that physics reveals two very different eternities to us:
i.e. Black Holes are found to be ‘eternal’ singularities of destruction and disorder rather than singularities of creation and order such as the extreme order we see at the creation event of the Big Bang. Needless to say, the implications of this ‘eternity of destruction’ should be fairly disturbing for those of us who are of the ‘spiritually minded’ persuasion!
In light of this dilemma that these two very different eternities present to us spiritually minded people, and the fact that Gravity is, in so far as we can tell, completely incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, it is interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
Personally, considering the extreme difficulty that many brilliant minds have had in trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and special relativity, i.e. QED, with Gravity, I consider the preceding nuance on the Shroud of Turin to be a subtle, but very powerful, evidence substantiating Christ’s primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell:
Verse and Music:
footnote:
The Mental Universe – Richard Conn Henry – Professor of Physics John Hopkins University
Excerpt: The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.,,, Physicists shy away from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics. A common way to evade the mental universe is to invoke “decoherence” – the notion that “the physical environment” is sufficient to create reality, independent of the human mind. Yet the idea that any irreversible act of amplification is necessary to collapse the wave function is known to be wrong: in “Renninger-type” experiments, the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. The universe is entirely mental,,,, The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf
The Renninger Negative Result Experiment – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3uzSlh_CV0
Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester
Excerpt: In 1994, Anton Zeilinger, Paul Kwiat, Harald Weinfurter, and Thomas Herzog actually performed an equivalent of the above experiment, proving interaction-free measurements are indeed possible.[2] In 1996, Kwiat et al. devised a method, using a sequence of polarising devices, that efficiently increases the yield rate to a level arbitrarily close to one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.....xperiments
Experimental Realization of Interaction-Free Measurement – Paul G. Kwiat; H. Weinfurter, T. Herzog, A. Zeilinger, and M. Kasevich – 1994
http://www.univie.ac.at/qfp/pu.....994-08.pdf
Interaction-Free Measurement – 1995
http://archive.is/AjexE
Realization of an interaction-free measurement – 1996
http://bg.bilkent.edu.tr/jc/to.....rement.pdf
In related note to ‘interaction-free measurement’, it is proposed that non-local (spooky action at a distance) quantum entanglement is possible without the physical interaction of the particles first:
Qubits that never interact could exhibit past-future entanglement – July 30, 2012
Excerpt: Typically, for two particles to become entangled, they must first physically interact. Then when the particles are physically separated and still share the same quantum state, they are considered to be entangled. But in a new study, physicists have investigated a new twist on entanglement in which two qubits become entangled with each other even though they never physically interact.,,
In the current study, the physicists have proposed an experiment based on circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) that is fully within reach of current technologies. They describe a set-up that involves a pair of superconducting qubits, P and F, with qubit P connected to a quantum field vacuum by a transmission line. During the first time interval, which the scientists call the past, P interacts with the field. Then P is quickly decoupled from the field for the second time interval. Finally, F is coupled to the field for a time interval called the future. Even though P and F never interact with the field at the same time or with each other at all, F’s interactions with the field cause it to become entangled with P. The physicists call this correlation “past-future entanglement.”
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-q.....ement.html
Insulting me, ranting about garbled versions of what you think my views are, and throwing out random “look how weird QM is!” snippets… none of this really addresses the problem:
1) God doesn’t exist,
2) God exists, but is not all-seeing,
3) God exists and is all-seeing, but not conscious, or
4) Conscious observation does not always trigger wavefunction collapse.
Or, to put it more simply: in a standard two-slit experiment, does God know which slit the particle went through? If so, why does the interference pattern still appear?
Gordon,
I tend to accept #4.
Thanks for your participation. I think conscious “choice” is not the same as “obvservation”. Thus we can still have consciousness as an fundamental component of QM system evolution. I think that is Richard Conn Henry’s view.
I studied QM at graduate level like you, but well, ha…doesn’t mean I can make much sense of what I learned.
Thanks for your insights. I always enjoy reading what you have to say.
Sal
Hi, Sal. Good to hear from you as well. I just reread the old article you linked; do you still favor the transactional interpretation? Since that doesn’t require a special role for consciousness, the conflict doesn’t really arise there. I presume the equivalent of #4 under TI would be that God can “see” the raw Offer and Confirmation waves that form transactions (essentially, He has access to reality at a deeper level than we do)?
I agree about choice being a separate question from observation, but I also think that conscious free will is irrelevant to the sorts of free will that show up in QM. In QM, free will shows up mainly as an assumption about free choice of measurements, which could correspond to conscious free will, or simple randomness, or deterministic results of independent causes… or it could be a wrong assumption (as in superdeterminism), in which case the experiments aren’t telling us what we think they are.
(Well, there’s also quantum randomness, but I don’t think that has anything to conscious free will either.)
I’m not really sure how to fit consciousness into QM, but I think this is mostly a result of not understanding consciousness very well. I know, I am conscious, but that doesn’t mean I understand what it is any more than a fish understands what water really is. Or perhaps a better analogy would be the human body: I live in one, but that doesn’t make me an expert on anatomy, physiology, biochemistry,…
BTW, remember that “Origins and Destiny” book you linked a while back, and I said I’d take a look and see what I thought? I, um, got distracted. But it’s still on my list…
When studying physics and science is that it seems that the equations don’t predict which conditions will force consciousness to exist. When a human develops from any zygote, at what point will the assemblage of molecules create consciousness? So I think it is non-material and separate from anything we can access through ordinary physics.
Regarding interpretations of QM, I have my biases, but I don’t think there is much hope for resolution. Curiously, ID proponents like Frank Tipler and John Barrow accept consciousness collapse AND Many World’s simultaneously where the all the MWIs eventually collapse with a final observation by the ultimate observer — the Final Anthropic Principle.
I like the elegance of the transactional interpretation and at least the fact that they tried to make experimental “confirmation”. I think the TI just compartmentalizes some of the issues to proximal causes which themselves may regress to an ultimate cause. The TI’s domain is localized and is thus agnostic to the ultimate question of whether consciousness is fundamental.
I thought your discussion of MWI was extremely interesting, and some of it was over my head. One thing however is that we must be mindful of whether our mathematical representation create fictitious artifacts that we should regard not as reality but byproducts of our convenience representations.
For example, I could represent the number 1 in the following way:
1 = 8 + (-7)
or I could state it with various finite or infinite series representations.
When I say there is 1 person in the room, mathematically we could say there are
8 + (-7)
people in the room. Even though, in terms of reality, such a description is nonsensical. In Electrical Engineering we often invoke imaginary currents and voltages, but are they really there or just an artifact of our representation.
So too MWI or any other interpretation of QM could be loaded with fictitious artifacts of our representation. Even when I was finding solutions to the Schrodinger equation, we threw out lots of solutions as non physical, but well, they were still solutions!
Even in some mechanics problems where I had to find square roots, I might choose to throw out negative solutions (i.e, the square root of 4 is +2 or -2).
We can come up with infinite series representations of finite physical phenomenon (like a wave) but does that really mean the wave is physically made up of an infinite number of components, or is it just a convenience representation of the wave. I sometimes suspect MWI is possibly a convenience representation. That said, I found your MWI argument compelling even though it is a view I don’t share. I think MWI is a valid virtual conceptual tool just like virtual particles in physics and imaginary currents and voltages in electrical engineering.
Maybe we end up with artifacts as we try to find solutions to our physical laws that really are only mathematically valid solutions, but not real in the ultimate sense.
From my vantage point, rather than proof, I’m content to accept possibility (rather than absolute proof) of a non-material consciousness as fundamental to reality. I also think, akin to the problems of Gödel’s theorem, truly fundamental questions can have no proof, thus if consciousness is fundamental to reality, we won’t be able to absolutely prove it because the most fundamental truths are axiomatic and not capable of proof.
PS
I think the “Origins and Destiny” book is probably wrong in its use of a generalized 2nd law, or at best the formulation is intractable, so I personally wouldn’t want you to be troubled to work through it. I felt it had some valuable insights, and I certainly learned things from reading it and discussing it.
Funny that the number one ‘reasonable’ option on Gordon’s list (as if reason could be had in the naturalist’s worldview) of quote/unquote ‘rational’ objections is that ‘1. God doesn’t exist’. Perhaps, Gordon, you can tell that to God when you stand before him when you die and he holds the fate of your eternal soul/mind in his hands! Believe what you want Gordon, it is obvious no amount of reason (since you have no mind to reason with) will prevent you from trying to find whatever imaginary ‘loophole’ you can so as to deny the reality of God.
Gordon you said ‘Insulting me’,,,
Gordon I did not insult you so much as I insulted your insane *worldview. But I guess to the extent that you are married to your insane worldview then I guess that would be an personal insult! 🙂
*(i.e. a quasi-infinite number of mindless Gordons, in a quasi infinite number of parallel universes, who all ‘randomly’ evolved from some primordial slime to have a brain that is far more complex than all the computers on the earth put together. A deterministic brain which has no choice but to believe it is a quasi-infinite number of mindless Gordons, in a quasi infinite number of parallel universes, who all believe they ‘randomly’ evolved from some primordial slime)