(I hope I got this right.) — SophistiCat

Damn straight!

some relativistic formulations of the wavefunction equation have two solutions: w and its complex conjugate w* — SophistiCat

All, I believe.

But complex conjugation is equivalent to time reversal (although it also implies negative frequency, energy and charge) — SophistiCat

Time, frequency and energy are all inextricably linked. Essentially energy is frequency with decorative physical constants, and is reciprocal to time (time interval and frequency are Fourier transforms of one another). So the odd one out here is charge.

To me it seems like TI goes further out on a limb than MWI. I am uncomfortable about the pseudo-causal narrative of the "transaction." But perhaps the more profound aspects of the interpretation escape me. — SophistiCat

I think it's more economical than parallel universes. But it doesn't resolve the measurement problem by itself. Since the transaction goes both ways, the final state is "known" at the start, so it is still probabilistic, however nothing real collapses probabilistically.

Whether it's the non-relativistic Schrodinger equation (which has only a retarded solution) or a suitable relativistic equation (which has both), the equation alone does not determine where and how the absorption/measurement will happen - hence the "measurement problem." I am not sure what point is being made here specifically about the relativistic equation. — SophistiCat

So this is where the theoretical background ends and my argument begins. Taking the Dirac equation and TQM as gives, we understand that in order for an electron described by a particular time-dependent wavefunction to be emitted by the cathode and absorbed by a point on the screen, the cathode must itself be in a state that would emit an electron with that wavefunction, i.e. it must have an available electron to emit.

The advanced wave must be similarly causal but in reverse. For an advanced wave to be emitted from a particular point on the screen (describing an electron hole in reverse), that point must be capable of doing so. Otherwise the retarded wavefunction depiction of the electron leaving the cathode is unjustified in the first place.

That state also has its own history in our future (recalling that QM is backwards-deterministic) and we can repeat this process by considering events in that future history that are consistent with the future of the electron. This can only eliminate possible locations on the screen.

Andrew M has pointed out that other factors that equally depend on the precise state of the set-up should also eliminate possible paths, namely those where the eventually phase randomisations due to scattering in the screen cause destructive interference.

These are factors of the true time-dependent many-body wavefunction that describes the entire experimental setup that a) we couldn't possibly solve and b) we couldn't possibly know the accuracy of (we can't know the precise state of a macroscopic object even if we could store it's wavefunction in principle).

This aspect of the argument is not dependent on relativistic TQM, rather the latter provides us with an obvious way to consider how these incalculable states will inevitably lead to certain trajectories becoming disallowed when we consider not just the past but also the future of the experiment.

(The Schrodinger equation can be produced as a non-relativistic limit of a more general relativistic formulation. How then do two solutions reduce to one? Turns out that two versions of the Schrodinger equation are equally valid reductions: the other one has only an advanced solution.) — SophistiCat

Correct, the conjugate of a solution is not itself a solution. However you can still time-evolve that conjugate and it will behave as expected, traveling in the reverse direction to the solution.

I still don't see how this can be. Boundary conditions are, by definition, local. — SophistiCat

No, not necessarily. We treat them as local because we treat experiments ideally: we have to.

And yet when we do experiments like quantum interference, we find that the measurements depend mainly on the incident wave. Why aren't results confounded by such strong dependence on the boundary conditions? — SophistiCat

In the case of both microstate exploration and decoherence, the precise state changes constantly. An electron on the screen which might forbid an incident electron at time t might not be present at time t'. A particular configuration of scatterers that would destroy the wavefunction at time t might permit it at time t'.

The signature pattern of the double slit experiment is not one event but many thousands. What we see then is not just the value of the probability density of the electron, but also the statistical behaviour of the macroscopic screen. Over a statistical number of events, the pattern must be independent of changes in the precise microstate of the screen.

Allow me to ask you a question. — EnPassant

Shoot!

Are the mathematics of quantum change sufficiently different from relativity to justify the idea that quantum particles live in a different spacetime? — EnPassant

The time of relativistic quantum mechanics is the same time as normal special relativity for a single object. But that does leave a lot of room for difference. For instance, we don't have a general relativistic quantum theory, so curved time is not understood quantum mechanically. There is also the concept of Planck time in quantum mechanics, which is the shortest interval of time that meaningful measurements can be made. This discretisation of time is counter to the continuous nature of time, position, and any other observable in classical field theories like relativity. Finally, in many-body classical physics, all objects have the same time axis in a given frame of reference, while in many-body quantum mechanics, every particle described by the wavefunction has its own time axis. This is one of the reasons why the ontological status of the wavefunction is doubted.

I can’t comment on the science, but the idea of a cyclical cosmology has an ancient provenance; it’s reminiscent of Hindu cosmology which has always said the Universe expands and contracts over ‘aeons of kalpas’. — Wayfarer

I wonder if we're doomed to impose our own mythologies on everything we encounter...

what’s your view of Sabine Hossenfelder? She has some pretty savage criticisms of current particle physics. — Wayfarer

I'll get back to you. She wasn't on my radar, thanks.

And finally - I’ve noticed a few times your remark on the ‘creation and destruction’ of sub-atomic particles. This generally takes place also over cosmic time-scales doesn’t it? Like, many of the elements are created in stellar explosions, but then they last for cosmic periods of time after they’re created. Do I understand it right? — Wayfarer

It can occur at any time scales. Pairs of virtual particles (pairs that don't have enough energy to escape one another) can be created and annihilated in the smallest conceivable timescales; particles are created and destroyed very rapidly in particle colliders; a particle created soon after the big bang might go the lifetime of the universe without annihilating or might have done so almost immediately.

A memory is also a qual? — Banno

Yes. Qualia are elements of subjective experience. When we subjectively experience a memory, we just experience a different kind of qual. I admit when I said it before, I was just expressing my own discomfort, but since then I've gathered that the idea that memories are qualia isn't that controversial, even taught at colleges :o https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/what-is-cognitive-science/icalrepeat.detail/2007/11/01/179/-/memory-qualia

You seem to be agreeing with me...? — Banno

Yeah, I'm pretty much on board with Dennett, and so with you by extension. It's interesting to wonder what, if qualia explain absolutely nothing, the point of them is. To me, what differentiates qualia from the colder subject-object interaction is simply that our brain is dumping information (that is not necessarily relevant) into our consciousness for consideration. The redundancy is an aspect of the fact that it's not computed in advance what is relevant and what is not. The conscious part of the brain is an algorithmic problem-solver that apparently understands data in a certain, pre-processed way that makes it amenable to that sort of processing. The sorts of intuition pumps Dennett presents are not statements about the conscious brain's API but about the absence of new information in qualia themselves. And that's fine. We know the brain does an awesome job without qualia, far more than it does with. The question then remains as to why qualia exist at all, which seems to me a question of what form that same information happens to be required to be in for our conscious brains to do what they do.

I just finished reading Carlo Rovelli's book The Order of Time which is an attempt to argue that time is a function of entropy. His arguments are very weak and confused. — EnPassant

I might agree.

No more so than traditional JTB. Really the whole “truth” component of both traditional and my modified JTB is a historical vestige that’s rather redundant. Knowledge is merely justified belief, where justification itself implies a reason to think it is true; we only bother saying “justified TRUE belief” because before the justification criterion was added, the standard was simply “true belief”. It would have been better if the “true” had simply been replaced by “justified”. — Pfhorrest

It was more that a justified belief is knowledge if the belief is determined to be true e.g. by observation, deduction, etc. The part I quoted made knowledge of truth a prerequisite of a justified belief instead. It seems circular to define knowledge in terms of a belief in something because it is true. If I already know it is true, belief is irrelevant.

Just because both arrows point in the same direction does not mean they are the same. — EnPassant

Penrose believes they are the same arrow, not aligned arrows, which is perhaps one of his least controversial views. However, if the two arrows are aligned in all circumstances, there's no criteria by which to differentiate them.

Yes, you start off with the implication that you're going to discuss determinism, and by the end all I got were several different theories of big bang cosmology. =D — Philosophim

It's sort of a sequel thread. The previous thread established (or attempted to) the relationship between time-reversibility and determinism. I hadn't planned on reiterating the whole thing here, hence the link and the summary up top.

The idea that black holes sucked up the universe, then exploded into a big bang again has been around for decades at least. I suppose what is exciting is the actual science to back up the theories? What is the major cosmology shift you see in all of this? — Philosophim

Yes, and I cite several papers from those decades in the OP. I don't predict a particular shift. Paradigm shifts in cosmology are very observation-driven. The next field-shattering observation may or may not invalidate any of the broad arguments cited here.

However the six white hotspots are interesting, if the maths in the Penrose paper are good. Already Penrose is getting dung for interpreting them as old big bangs, and rightly so in my opinion, but they might turn out to be less momentous examples of white holes.

I think generally the observations of low-frequency CMB features sound interesting. I drafted the OP quite a while ago and have since read more discussion that suggests these anisotropies are more prevalent than the OP suggests, which might be evidence of tidal forces in the very early universe.

That aside, quite a lot of the ideas mentioned in the OP are probably untestable. We'll never know what's outside the observable universe, or whether a neighbouring galactic supercluster is predominantly matter or antimatter. So the only take-home is: the most obvious assumptions may be equally unjustifiable, and the ramifications of those assumptions shouldn't go by unquestioned.

This is basically where the first thread started, with a discussion of how the idealised screen in the double-slit experiments, in lieu of actually being able to calculate the many-body wavefunction of the set-up, leads to the unquestioned acceptance of consequences for determinism that really ought to be scrutinised. The same goes here. The cosmological arrow of time relies on fundamentally or circumstantially irreversible processes taking place in the universe when the underlying theories have no privileged direction for time. The assumption of irreversible processes is largely a feature of our models, not our observations. The rest is an illustration of this principle.

This is the most sophisticated OP I've seen in the eleven months I've been here. — jgill

Thanks! :) Although this is admittedly much more loosey-goosey than I'd like. I'm extremely worried that it might be read as a theory in itself, whereas it's meant more as an illustration that on-going, high-profile research in a field that is itself a tad loosey-goosey shows that there is a lot of obvious potential for massive paradigm shifts in some pretty fundamental areas. Some big names in cosmology have very different ideas about what kind of universe we live in, and those differences have a huge impact on the philosophical ramifications of cosmology. That's all I'm really trying to illustrate here.

I'm curious about the images; where did they come from? — jgill

I should cite. The first comes from an older paper on Penrose's CCC model here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-018-0162-3 although I believe the image is older. The second is from Penrose's latest preprint on the same subject which identifies six hit spots in the CMB as earlier WHL big bangs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.01740.pdf

I made the third. Just seemed easier than tracking down a particular figure. The fourth was just a Google search that looked roughly right, i.e. had all worldlines converging to a point in finite time and had the right shape event horizon. I could maybe get a better one.

The fifth image is from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe iirc, though I took it from PhysicsWorld:
https://physicsworld.com/a/the-enduring-enigma-of-the-cosmic-cold-spot/

The sixth and seventh images I drew myself for illustrative purposes. The insights are in the papers I link to, none of which had suitable images.

I see analogous phenomena in dynamical systems in CC: attracting fixed points and repelling fixed points, then there are indifferent fixed points that may combine the features of the two. I wonder if there are cosmological similarities of the latter? — jgill

Interesting, especially given the aforementioned complex nature of less sophisticated spacetime representations. Mathematics is wondrously self-similar.

I'm happy nothing I've been a part of publishing is to be found here, as it would have been re-printed without any consent. — Mayor of Simpleton

It would only be there if you gave consent for it to be there.

As I was not aware of these databases, I can't say if any of the journals we publish in have restrictions or not. — Mayor of Simpleton

So... the obvious follow-up question... how can you justify your claim that journals are attempting to hide content from lay readers and not know if they're okay with authors making that content open access? It seems to me that any policy of hiding content behind a paywall would demand overt and strict exclusivity.

My response to this problem is similar to that of Robert Nozick: I say that knowledge is believing something because it is true, such that not only does one believe it, and it is true, but if it weren't true one wouldn't believe it. — Pfhorrest

This requires knowledge of whether or not the thing is true, the knowledge that is under question. If one already knows it is true, belief is irrelevant. In JTBs, the truth is verified after the belief. I believe the ball is red. I look at the ball. It is red. The above has knowledge of the truth as a prerequisite for the belief which is in turn a prerequisite for the knowledge.

Edmund Gettier has since proposed that even justified true belief is not enough to constitute knowledge, to the extent that reasons to believe something can sometimes be imperfect, can suggest beliefs that nevertheless turn out to be false, yet we nevertheless want to say that someone can still be justified in believing something for such reasons. — Pfhorrest

I've seen this, but never seen a sensible example wherein the belief is both false and justified, or true and not justified either. Examples include 'X told Y that Z was true', as if believing X is a given, which bypasses the justification aspect.

Of course to get TECHNICAL, we could say that the mind is merely one part of the brain. After all, there's a lot going on there that we don't really have any say or control over. So far I haven't been able to control my digestion or fat storage production. That's all regulated by the brain, but not the mind part of my brain. — Philosophim

:up:

Seems to me that there is nothing that talk of qualia is about. In so far as talk of qualia is usable and useful, it is no different to talk of colours or tastes or what have you. In so far as something is added to the conversation by the addition of qualia, seems to me that Dennett is correct in showing that there is nothing here to see. — Banno

Sure, if f(x,y) is unique for x and y, you can talk just in terms of x and y, and ignore f. f doesn't add any new information. Likewise what Dennett's intuition pumps demonstrate is that, when considering a particular individual interacting with a particular object, there's nothing added by considering the objects of subjective experience of that individual of that object. The subject and the object suffice.

intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank. Back to Wittgenstein: how could you tell that your qualia had been inverted, so that what was once blue is now red, as opposed to say, your memory had changed, so what you always saw as red you now recall, erroneously, previously seeing as blue? — Banno

This one never sat well with me. If my memory of grass looks like what I think of as green, and the grass before me looks like what I think of as red, both the memory of green grass and the present experience of red grass ought to be on equal footing. All Dennett can really say is that we don't know *which* qualia changed, not whether qualia changed.

Again as far as conscious experience goes, it's just experience as far as we are concerned. — Mr Bee

And this is the Strawson argument. That because we have experience, somehow we can't study it and understand it more scientifically, as if not having experience of being a computer program is somehow an advantage to understanding computer programs. It's a pitiful argument, a great example of human preciousness.

Meanwhile, science ploughs on, understanding more and more about consciousness, how it works, what constitutes it, and all that the likes of Strawson can do is insist that, while they cannot describe consciousness beyond 'if you got it, you know it', whatever it is that scientists are studying definitely can't be it (begging the question). If this impresses you, okay.

(I know, I've made a mess of the physics!) :gasp: — jgill

Nope.

Start with a very simple version of Schrödinger's equation:

ih∂ψ∂t=Hψ, ψ=ψ(x,t)ih∂ψ∂t=Hψ, ψ=ψ(x,t). — jgill

is exactly the Schrödinger equation, which is a differential equation. You're right, these crop up everywhere.

Thanks, that's pretty well the only point I was getting at. — Wayfarer

Oh okay. Ha ha!

I'm not sure I follow your last sentence (and I read the SEP section). If, on measurement, the superposition state information is lost to the environment (apart from the measured value) then what else could be required for apparent collapse to have occurred? — Andrew M

Decoherence leads to random phases between different trajectories. You can't guarantee a singular value upon measurement without invoking e.g. MWI. But nor do e.g. excluded or otherwise saturated points so thank you for bringing it up. It is yet another physical consideration ignored in the idealised screen that will eliminate possibilities in a way dependent upon the exact state of the lab equipment.

This is just unitary QM. For example, MWI and RQM both agree with this prediction and are both referenced in the paper you linked — Andrew M

Yes, I was thinking about this afterwards. I was thinking that in MWI the second observer would just branch. I'm not sure what the consensus is on branching during non-destructive measurement, but thinking about it you're probably right. Essentially a branch in MWI is just an additional term in the MB wavefunction. Whether the maths tells us branching has occurred will be time-dependent.

Zurek is a decoherence guy and he agrees with the Wigner's friend predictions. You seem to be treating decoherence as objective. — Andrew M

Decoherence usually is. Reading the full paper, Zurek is saying that, in light of the recent Wigner's friend type experiments, it's not. I'm not so sure about that. He's solving a problem that probably doesn't need to be solved from either end. Generally decoherence is treated objectively and is insufficient to yield collapse

Thanks for the link, btw. I hadn't read that paper. I kind of wish I had before submitting a follow up thread to this.

Not really cause even if I didn't know how a car work, I can conceive of it being broken down into elements that I don't know about right now. — Mr Bee

Exactly. Same goes for anything.

The thing about consciousness is I don't see how that can be the case. It's not like consciousness is a thing that we can measure and cut with a knife or anything. — Mr Bee

Neither can a computer program.

Strawson's point is that the only way to grasp experience as a concept is to have it. None of that has anything to do with whether you can question it's nature. The way you seem to represent him he sounds like a closed minded bigot which I don't see at all. — Mr Bee

I think that's the way he represents himself. I hadn't thought of it in terms of intellectual bigotry, but yes that does seem accurate to me. He has no interest in describing a thing, but builds straw men to misrepresent others who do if it doesn't give the kind of answer he wants.

Not human consciousness. Just consciousness. Animals can be conscious, aliens can be conscious, and robots can be too. At least I don't think Strawson would disagree with that. — Mr Bee

But the reason why people like Strawson need consciousness to be something other than a bunch of more elementary things is precisely that human consciousness is fundamental to subjective experience. They are not in the tizz they are in because of guinea pigs or ravens.

Whether or not consciousness is irreducible on the other hand is debatable so I agree with you there. Strawson believes that it is, but people like Dennett would disagree. — Mr Bee

Right. The question asked in the OP was: what does Dennett mean by his response to Strawson? Strawson argues that Dennett is a consciousness Denier in the grounds that the latter does not believe in an irreducible consciousness. Dennett's response is merely the obvious: that one can believe in consciousness without subscribing to Strawson's conception of it.

Hrmmmm. That doesn't seem like a particularly good analogy here. I mean, almost everyone seems to think they have something like a direct experience of, ahem, what they're experiencing. — Srap Tasmaner

Consciousness isn't in doubt though; irreducible consciousness is. We don't experience the mediators of our experience, but we don't experience the irreducibility of consciousness either, it's just an inference. We can study conscious beings to learn how consciousness works, what it's moving parts are, etc. Irreducible consciousness requires a termination of enquiry and a leap of faith.

It seems to me that ought to be explained right up front, that the almost universal misconstrual of consciousness, if that's what it is, ought to come from the theory itself.

Does that make sense? — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. But the likes of Strawson just respond that whatever studies elucidate, it isn't the thing being studied. And that's the conversation the OP is about.

The main point that Dennett is making is that consciousness can be fully understood in the third person. — Wayfarer

No, the point he is making in the quote in the OP is that disagreeing with Strawson's conception of what consciousness is is not the same as disagreeing that consciousness exists.

What you've touched on instead is the reason Strawson names him as a Denier: Dennett believes in a scientific, reductionist explanation for consciousness that, to Strawson, is equivalent to saying consciousness doesn't exist.

You're still clinging to the myth of the atom. The 'standard model' itself is a fantastically complex intellectual and mathematical construct. — Wayfarer

How we arrived at it is not a measure of its intrinsic complexity.

Elementary particles, the fundamental forces of nature, space, time, etc. Anything that we take to be basic in our models is by definition irreducible. None of these things are "magical", it's just that they are what they are as far as we know. — Mr Bee

Right. Or close enough. Basic, simple, not homocentric elements.

Well cars are reducible to smaller elements since we can break them down to their subatomic composition. As for conscious experience, that is a whole other question. — Mr Bee

Are you saying that if you didn't know how a car was put together, you might suspect that it was irreducible? Or, put it this way, if you knew vaguely but not exactly how a car worked, and someone told you that actually carness is irreducible, that it is not the sum of its parts but actually a manifestation of a ubiquitous, elementary carness, would you accept that this was valid on grounds of your own ignorance or would it still sound absolutely absurd?

Consciousness is a whole other question solely because certain people don't like applying that sort of answer to subjective human experience.

Um, I don't think that that was how the quote was meant to be understood. I think the point of what Strawson was saying there was that the very idea of conscious experience itself is, like I said elsewhere, basic and fundamental. — Mr Bee

That's saying the same thing. Strawson's view is that the only way to grasp it is to accept it en tout without question. If you try to look at its moving parts, you lose visibility of the thing itself.

Also if you're implying that panpsychism is homocentric, I'd say it's quite the opposite. Panpsychist views aren't claiming that humanity is somehow special, or even that consciousness is. It's a pretty naturalistic view, which is why some have found it appealing. — Mr Bee

It has to yield human consciousness without being reducible to simpler parts, e.g. the response of an electric charge to an electric field. That makes the whole universe homocentric from the bottom up. After all, no one becomes a panpsychist after really looking hard at rocks.

What is to be taken at face value here? Experience itself? If that is the case, I don't think that that's really a controversial view. — Mr Bee

It's a pro-ignorance view. So yeah not controversial per se. :D

In addition, I would take issue with calling that "faith" as well since it seems like one of the few things we can know with certainty, which is the opposite of faith. — Mr Bee

Irreducible consciousness is not something we "know with certainty". It is something we believe through faith, and protect with anti-scientific argumentation.

I don't think that Strawson is saying that consciousness is not something that can be questioned, or explained. That's the New Mysterianist view. He's merely saying that it is not a thing that can be reduced into anything more fundamental but that doesn't prevent one from looking into it's origins or anything like that. — Mr Bee

Can you give an example of something that is irreducible but can have a natural origin?

But, to quote Strawson:

Some people not only deny the existence of consciousness; they also claim not to know what is being presumed to exist. Block responds to these deniers by quoting the reply Louis Armstrong is said to have given to those who asked him what jazz was (some people credit Fats Waller): “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.” Another response is almost as good, although it’s condemned by some who follow Wittgenstein. If someone asks what conscious experience is, you say, “You know what is from your own case.” (You can add, “Here’s an example,” and give them a sharp kick.) When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing. — Strawson

Like I said, you're not supposed to ask about it, you just have to accept it.

Personally I don't see anything "magical" about irreducibility in itself because inevitably one has to arrive at something basic in their ontology. — Mr Bee

Yes, but it doesn't follow that, because there are elementary things, and because there are cars, there can be elementary cars. Our actual studies on elements of reality show they are basic, simple, dumb, and not in the least homocentric.

What is Strawson's idea of consciousness, in your mind? I'm not sure I'm clear on what that is. — Mr Bee

Essentially the above, that it's something irreducible that has to be taken at face value and accepted on faith. His idea is manifest in his reaction and straw-man--building in the face of people who do question what it is, how it's made, how it works. He's a stop sign on the road to knowledge.

And yet, to reduce consciousness to behavior and dispositions to behavior is to eliminate it. To say that consciousness is really nothing more than (dispositions to) behavior is to say that it doesn’t exist. Reductionists may continue to deny this, or claim that it begs the question—that it assumes the truth of the conclusion for which it’s arguing. Formally speaking, it does beg the question, and begging the question is a well-known theoretical sin. Sometimes, however, it is the correct response. — Strawson

Not great, is it.

I think you're misrepresenting Strawson's position a number of ways here. For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist... — Mr Bee

I didn't say Strawson was a dualist, just that he has a dualist's idea of consciousness. That said, any physicalist panpsychist is also a dualist, since panpsychism is not a description of physical nature, i.e. it is unfussed about observation. Or sense, for that matter.

For one, Strawson is a self-described monist and a physicalist, just of a panpsychist bent. He also doesn't hold that consciousness is a magical thing, though he may consider it to be fundamental and irreducible. — Mr Bee

Two bits of magic in a supposedly unmagical thing ;)

So much as Strawson does use the term "magic" it's used to describe strong emergence, which is something he explicitly rejects (and also part of the reason why he believes in panpsychism in the first place). — Mr Bee

Strong emergence is magic, agreed. But so is irreducible consciousness. It is something one cannot question, derive the origins of, or study: one simply has to take it on faith that exists, like God or UFOs.

You also seem to be suggesting that the dispute between Dennett and Strawson is over naive realism vs. something like indirect realism, but I don't think that was what Dennett was referring to. Instead, his disagreements come over the existence of qualia or the subjective aspects of what we call experience. — Mr Bee

I don't think that's how I characterised it. Rather I said that Strawson's argument is that if you don't believe in his magical consciousness, you don't believe in consciousness full stop. Dennett's counter is that this is wrong. One can believe consciousness exists without having to adopt Strawson's idea of it.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett. — Strawson

Of course, even this straw man is obvious. Dennett himself does not reject the notion of qualia.

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. — Dennett

So nor does Dennett deny qualia, rather he disagrees with Strawson about what they are, what their status is.

You have a quote that proves that, or is it just something you made up? — Olivier5

Your quote of Dennett's suffices.

And I agree with him wholeheartedly. Just because we can't explain our own consciousness is no good reason to call it magic. — Olivier5

You, as always, misunderstand what you are being told. Dennett does not think consciousness is magic. Consciousness as described by Strawson is magic. There is nothing to understand because it isn't real.

Funny... I could not find a single article published by any one my colleagues on arXiv, medRxiv or bioRxiv.

As these platforms are not journals in themselves, are there standards for peer review?

Is there any standard in place to prevent the dissemination of articles from predatory journals? — Mayor of Simpleton

They are not journals, just preprint databases. Point being that even journals that charge for access allow the contents of their publications to be freely available on such a database. The fact that your colleagues don't use it isn't especially relevant afaics: it is up to the author whether they do it or not. On the other hand, the fact that these databases exist and contain preprints of manuscripts published in journals with paywalls tells us that said journals are not trying to limit access to their contents.

I'm not aware of any journal that won't publish an article on these databases, but there might be some. Which journals did you think had this policy of deterring lay persons?

By open access I mean 'open source', as in open to the public. — Mayor of Simpleton

Yes, so do I. And the movement is toward open source.

Indeed the economics involved with the publishing process play a role, but no journal I know of is there as a profit making enterprise. — Mayor of Simpleton

There are lots (Elsevier, for instance) but that isn't the point. Publishing a journal costs money, which requires income, even for non-profit publishers like the APS. They are not putting up a paywall to deter lay people: they do it to cover their costs. The fact that pretty much any journal will publish a manuscript that is available freely on arxiv demonstrates that they're not trying deter people from reading science.

One of the main reasons as to this not being open source is the tendency for patients to self-medicate or misunderstand a potential treatment or medication and subsequently petitioning the medical professionals without end to treat them with this misunderstood option. — Mayor of Simpleton

That may be the case for specific journals, but it isn't general, even to pharmaceuticals. In fact, the journal Pharmaceuticals is open access. Do you have an example of a journal that has this policy? e.g. do any journals with paywalls forbid preprints on arxiv?

[EDIT: Pharmaceuticals, Perspectives on Medicinal Chemistry, Drug Delivery, International Journal of Nanomedicine, Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis, and Pharmaceutical Biology are all open access. It seems harder to find pharmaceutical journals that aren't.)

Either way, it is not generally true that this is the reason for paywalls, as evidenced by the fact that the major non-profit publishers are moving toward open access and have allowed open access preprints for decades. All of my papers, for instance, are available in preprint form on arxiv for free, and now are available as finished articles from the APS for free.

I get the impression I have not well conveyed what is meant by a reversible process or how it relates to independence of time direction or real physical processes. Below is two sets of four Feynman diagrams to illustrate the point.



Time is the vertical axis, a given dimension in space the horizontal. The solid lines denote massive particles, in this case an electron/positron; the squiggly lines represent photons. The solid lines have arrows because the particle in question is not its own antiparticle, e.g. the antiparticle of an electron is a positron, not an electron. The squiqqly lines have no arrow because the photon is its own antiparticle.

The first diagram A1 depicts a known physical process called pair annihilation, in this case the annihilation of an electron with a positron or anti-electron. The two particles move together, resonate, and decay into a pair of photons.

The frame invariance of relativity suggests that the temporal and spatial aspects of this process should be interchangeable, i.e. if we rotate the diagram 90 degrees such that time becomes space and space becomes time, the diagram should still represent a physical process, and indeed it does. A2 represents a scattering event, in this case one which a positron absorbs a photon and later re-emits it. A further rotation by 90 degrees leads to A3: a complete time- and space-reversal of the first diagram, and this too is a physical process called pair creation, the reverse of pair annihilation. A final rotation gives us the fourth diagram wherein we see that absorption followed by emission time-reversed is still absorption followed by emission.

The next set B1-B4 show the same processes but with the absorption and emission events reversed. As we see, we still have the pair creation and annihilation rotations, merely with photon momenta exchanged. One can complete this set by incorporating spin.

This is a broader depiction of what is meant by reversibility in the OP: that rotating a physical process about space and time yields another physical process. The vast majority of physical processes are included in QED which has the above characteristics, i.e. is independent of whether a dimension is temporal or spatial, directed one way or the other. Within this majority of elementary processes covered by QED, nature does not have a preferred reference frame, including directionality.

Okay so if Dennet doesn't understand something, it cannot exist. Therefore Dennet's ignorance is magical: if he ignores a phenomenon, the phenomenon disappears by magic. — Olivier5

That's basically Strawson's argument, yes.

‘Magic, Illusions, and Zombies’: An Exchange
By Daniel C. Dennett, reply by Galen Strawson — Olivier5

Dennett is saying that the dualist conception of consciousness is an illusion. Basically Strawson holds that consciousness is this magical thing that directly reveals reality to us, contrary to all knowledge about how we become conscious of things (e.g. how the human eye works). Dennett says that this direct awareness is an illusion, and he is right. We are unconscious of the mediators between reality and perception, therefore we perceive that we perceive things directly.

The main point Dennett is making is that rejecting the dualist consciousness is not the same as saying consciousness itself is an illusion. Consciousness is very real, it just isn't what Strawson thinks it is. Strawson's fallacy is that disagreeing with him about what consciousness is means that it doesn't exist. It's basically the same argument that Christians often use about morality.

At that point, information is generally lost to the environment due to wavefunction collapse. — Andrew M

Just a clarification, it is not lost to the environment in the Copenhagen interpretation: it is simply deleted. Decoherence is the process of information loss to the environment, in which superpositions cannot be sustained by macroscopic objects because of the large number of degrees of freedom. When an electron is found at y, the contribution at y' is dissipated. Last time I checked, consensus was this is real but insufficient to account for apparent wavefunction collapse, although Penrose advocated this view at some point.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/#ConApp

They cannot determine from that state what the original state was. But an isolated observer can (in principle). — Andrew M

This is specifically the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation. In Copenhagen, the wavefunction collapses objectively.

I didn't cover Von Neumann-Wigner in the OP because it's kind of a magic version of MWI: in both cases, the first observer is in a state of having made a measurement (entangled), but for the second observer everything is still in superposition (unentangled). What I like about Von Neumann-Wigner is the relativism, but I dislike the magic. However, various findings in the last few years have provided experimental evidence for that relativism. It seems to me consistent with an MWI with stricter branching criteria, which is less magic. These experiments generally rely on something called *non-destructive measurements* whose status is questioned.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832.full

Anyway, point being that these various interpretations are not interchangeable. The docoherence picture of wavefunction collapse is at odds with Copenhagen, MWI, transactional QM, and Wigner's friend. Likewise Wigner's friend is at odds with Copenhagen, decoherence and transactional.

I think this is a good question. We're currently at the point where knowledge as to how to effectively exploit our environment has led to unforeseen (or often foreseen but obfuscated) negative impacts on that environment.

This puts us in the position of using technology to now fix the problems that our use of technology caused in the first place, which introduces a feedback loop.

Whether this ends up being good or bad depends on other unforeseen or obfuscated environmental impacts of these second-generation technological applications.

It might be that our increasing knowledge allows the intended reduction of environmental impacts to outweigh any unforeseen or obfuscated negative impacts, in which case we should listen to the science and ensure that bad actors do not mislead us.

Alternatively the unforeseen impacts might outweigh our intended efforts, in which case, yes, we should focus on reducing the use of our harmful technologies rather than making new ones to fix the problems.

On the unforeseen/obfuscated distinction, sometimes the knowledge is there that we should *not* use certain technologies, an example being diesel. The UK government sold diesel to the public as a cleaner, safer alternative to petroleum. The science at the time said the opposite, but energy companies had already invested in this technology and governments tend to represent the interests of corporations and hang the consequences.

[EDIT: Just today, research was announced that diesel fumes are a cause of increasing mental health problems, particularly depression.]

So it's not just a matter of unforeseen consequences. We also have to account for the casual evil of people, especially the sorts of people that for whatever reason we tend to elect to office.

In short, many of these journals realize that if people who do not understand the particular science involved this information (if misunderstood and misapplied) could prove to be dangerous; thus is it not open access. — Mayor of Simpleton

This is absolutely untrue. Scientific journals cost money to produce. While referees give up their time for free, the editors are highly skilled people and there are huge production costs.

The typical approach to funding has been to put the costs on the reader because otherwise finances become a barrier to scientific progress. We need good science to be published whether the scientist can afford it or not. Most publications are affiliated to universities which also pay subscriptions to the journals. As such, while authors are asked to make a contribution to the publication of their material, it is almost always waived.

Because this model puts the burden of the cost onto the reader, it has been standard procedure to put preprints on arxiv for many years now, which means that, while you have to pay to see the final article, the content is usually accessible for free. This is not objected to by the journals who are more than aware that universities will continue their subscriptions whether the material is available unofficially or not.

There is movement atm toward a completely open access model. I think all of the Physical Review journals are now freely available, with funding from various sources, including university subscribers still covering the bulk of the bill.

In brief, the effort has always been for ethical journals to allow scientific progress to be as freely available to all as possible.

One can equally argue that you cannot with reason or logic as a principle, be atheist towards all gods. — Benj96

It's true that people can and do make God so ill-defined that one cannot say that it exists or doesn't. But if the thing someone claims exists has no discerning properties, one can dismiss the claim without dismissing the thing itself. If your God is so ill-defined that it might be a teapot or the entire universe, the claim is meaningless and can be rejected on those grounds.

As Banno said, the discussion isn't particularly useful. One can replace god with a stuvletumpfeckle and we can all have a good ol' debate about whether it exists without ever defining it. Really, the burden lies with the stuvletumpfecklist to define what the hell they're talking about, not for the astuvletumpfecklist to justify their skepticism.

Also, if each person believes their God exists but no one else's, this isn't a theist versus atheist issue. As Dawkins said, we all agree that most gods don't exist. Atheists just go one god further. You can reconsider your question in terms of two people who do not believe in each other's god. How do you justify their positions? Either all beliefs are equally justified, no beliefs are justified, or else the criteria for a belief being justified lies outside the argumentation put forth here. (It's the third one.)

Certain mathematical formulae or processes in physics show a symmetry in the time variable. How this relates to "going back in time" is a reasonable question. — jgill

Most fundamental processes do. Mass, charge, position, acceleration, energy, density, electric field, potential and polarization are the same under time-reversal. Pretty much everything else transforms into another physical process or property, such as velocity, momentum, angular momentum, current, magnetic field, and of course time coordinate. That is, for any processes describing these, the time-reversal is itself a physical process.

There's really only two things that have an intrinsic arrow of time, i.e. where the time-reversal of a process is not another physical process: weak dynamics (such as in radioactive decay) at low temperatures, and statistically improbable initial conditions, e.g. initialising a system into an ordered state, which gives us the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics itself is reducible to QED, i.e. consists entirely of reversible phenomena. The Einstein equations also do not privilege a direction of time, with the cosmological arrow likewise an artefact of boundary conditions not elementary processes.

It's worth clarifying that we're not generally speaking of things changing direction in time. The advanced wavefunctions of the OP are always moving in reverse to our psychological arrow of time. Changing direction in time requires an imaginary component to the Lorentz boost, so can only be considered for *virtual* processes, such as virtual electron-positron pair creation/annihilation.

Incidentally, what does QM have in common with a savings account? :cool: — jgill

One likes to believe it's got every possibility of being positively valued until one measures it?

Obviously, it's a strongly held belief because it is empirical. Empirical means based in observation and experience rather than theory. Clearly, the strength in the belief that time is unidirectional is provided for by experience and observation, and therefore it is empirical. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, that's really not how empiricism works. You can't look at a red car and state that your strongly held belief that all cars are red is empirical. If you want to know whether the elementary process of QED are reversible or not, you can't look at thermodynamics and say, "Well, that's irreversible, therefore everything is!" That's just backward thinking.

I said deductive logic is sufficient. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not deductive, it's inductive.

What is pointless, is for someone like you, to come into a philosophy forum, and argue determinism based on premises derived from science fiction, produced from the fringes of relativity theory, enabled by the deficiencies of the faulty boundaries of that theory. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fine, ignore the thread. I will certainly be ignoring your contributions to it.

But it is important to realize that, while the behavior of the smallest particles cannot be unambiguously described in ordinary language, the language of mathematics is still adequate for a clear-cut account of what is going on.

And this is sufficient. If the mathematical entity -- the wavefunction -- is doing its job in yielding accurate predictions of statistical outcomes, it corresponds to something real. It doesn't need to be the case that the epistemic object we deal with be identical to the ontic thing it represents. That's true generally in mathematical physics.

Heisenberg's Platonism is his own affair... It is not a statement about QM but about his personal philosophy of reality. He is welcome to it, of course, but no one else is obliged to adhere to it.

These are all temporal processes. Time is empirically proven as unidirectional. By simple deduction therefore, these processes are unidirectional. There is no experiment required — Metaphysician Undercover

Then don't describe it as empirical. What it is is a strongly held belief.

That time is unidirectional is the most fundamental and important empirical principle which we have. — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet you just said we don't need empirical evidence because a claim is sufficient.

If your argument for determinism is simply a denial of the obvious difference between future and past, then this thread is ridiculously pointless. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fine. If all you have is an insistence to the contrary, your response is ridiculously pointless.

My sister wanted to move someplace remote, Alaska your question. — The Opposite

Jamaica?

No, it was her idea.

Therefore the theories are deficient with respect to empirical observation, in that sense. — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet no one has devised an experiment to show that photon emission/absorption is unidirectional, or motion is unidirectional, or matter/antimatter pair creation/annihilation is unidirectional, and these constitute almost all of the elementary phenomena studied by the most empirically-tested theory ever: quantum electrodynamics.

Going beyond QED, we do see arrows of time emerging: weak nuclear decay, the Higgs mechanism, cosmology, thermodynamics. I have drafted a follow-up thread to this one touching on the last two which are interesting because fundamentally they are reversible. Thermodynamics, for instance, is just the motions, creation and destruction of particles. General relativity retains the bidirectionality of special relativity. The cosmological and thermodynamic arrows of time appear circumstantial rather than fundamental.

The actual arena of CPT-violating phenomena is very small, but might be vital, e.g. in explaining the absence of antimatter in the universe. However for most experiments, such as the double slit experiment, they are not relevant at all.

Copenhagen and common sense are at odds with this, which might explain why the pioneers of quantum mechanics had the issues they did. Bohr and Heisenberg worked mainly in the non-relativistic approximation where time is unidirectional, and, funnily enough, their preferred interpretation of QM is unidirectional. Meanwhile Dirac was doing it right and seeing reversibility in more accurate equations.

The Lorentz transformations provide mathematical principles for reconciling different frames of reference. They provide no empirical evidence that time and space are interchangeable. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not interchangeable, just mixed. There is no privileged reference frame in which you can say 'this time axis is time, these spatial ones are space', and you can find an infinite other frames in which part of time becomes spatial and part of space becomes temporal. It is the four-vector that is physical, not its space-time components.

In reality, whatever comes to be at t1, as Q, is caused by something in the future of t1, and whatever comes to be at t2, as R is caused by something in the future of t2. The only true causes are always in the future. and being in the future, they have not material, or physical existence. We know them as the immaterial cause of material existence (immaterial Forms, God). — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah. Not so interesting.

Sure, just like a quantity of H2O can be expressed as a combination of ice and liquid, — Metaphysician Undercover

No. No, not at all like that.

Accusations you can easily make but can hardly prove. — NOS4A2

is an example of defending racists, rapists, sex offenders, colluders and tax evaders. Oh, and killers. Let's not forget killers. 300,000 dead through sheer stupidity and counting.