On Mar 6, 2011, at 12:31 PM, David Sarfatti wrote:
Jack,
This is wonderful. Your discussions with Basil Hiley are important for the historical record in physics. Sort of like the Born-Einstein letters.
Yes, I am including it in the new edition of Destiny Matrix. I think I have the closest model to a real understanding of consciousness as a physical process not inconsistent with Vitiello's, but including signal nonlocality not in his model.
I am claiming to have essentially solved the mind-matter-consciousness problem as well as the cosmological constant problem using only battle-tested mainstream physics.
re: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/pilot_waves.html
Thanks Basil, so if I understand you correctly, Bohm and you never used it in the way I did with the notion specifically that "feedback control loops" between "mental" Q and the "material" particles (in simplest model) would make Q not "fragile," but robust ("phase rigidity" in P.W. Anderson's sense) allowing specifically "signal nonlocality" violating orthodox quantum theory. Nor did Bohm contemplate the living mind field as a Q for a macro-quantum coherent order parameter from a spontaneous broken symmetry (nonlinear quasi-local Landau-Ginzburg equation in 3D space replacing linear nonlocal Schrodinger equation in 3ND configuration space), nor did he and you specifically define qualia as the excitations of this coherent ground state that is intrinsically "mental" in Chalmers and Stapp's sense?
Of course I only learned about back-action from Undivided Universe I think in 1994 or so - but immediately connected it to signal nonlocality the way Valentini means it today - but independently of him for sure and probably before he did? I only became aware of Valentini's work in maybe 2003 as I recall.
On Mar 6, 2011, at 1:51 AM, Basil Hiley wrote:
On 5 Mar 2011, at 22:02, JACK SARFATTI wrote:
corrected statement
...As far as I know David Bohm never used the term "back-action" or “feedback control loops” to explain qualia in consciousness, although he did have the back-action idea - I got it from him - he did not connect those two dots in that way. That is my original contribution. Perhaps Basil Hiley can clarify that for the record?
"My discussions with Bohm on "back-action" go back to the 70s and 80s. I am not even sure if it was "our" idea. It was a very obvious question that arises if one assumes that the quantum potential gives rise to a Newtonian mechanical force. Then action and reaction was a necessary consequence of this mechanical picture. But Bohm had already made strong arguments against a mechanical explanation of quantum mechanics. In his book "Quantum Theory" in a footnote on page 167, he writes "This means the term "quantum mechanics" is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called "quantum nonmechanics". The philosophy behind this remark is spelt out in detail in chapter five of his book "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics".
I don't think any of our discussions on "back action" were put into print, essentially because we did not believe that was the way forward for us. In our book "The Undivided Universe" we did refer to the possibility of including "back action" on page 346, in a chapter entitled "Extensions of ontological theories". We added the idea in the context of the GRW approach, which was proposed to "collapse" the wave function. That is certainly a way to go if you believe the "wave" has ontological significance. Bohm and I did not take up the idea, certainly not to discuss consciousness, because we were exploring a more radical approach using the notion of "active information". Paavo Pylkkanen and I have several papers on this subject including "Can mind affect matter via active information", Mind and Matter, 3, (2005) 7-27."
Yes, that's for volition, but the problem I considered was the very opposite of that, can matter affect mind to generate internal qualia (conscious experiences) via direct back-action to the quantum potential Q of some coherent state of bosons (elementary excitations of some kind in the brain) - with signal nonlocality inherent so that entanglement is a stand-alone-command-control-communication system explaining the binding problem - unity of conscious experience.
"The way Bohm looked at this was to assume every process had two sides, a manifest side and a subtle side and these were connected by active information. When applied to mind, drawing on the word "psycho-somatic", this becomes a somatic side and a subtle (psyche) side. Bohm introduced a two way process which he described as "soma-significance" and "signa-somatic". The material (soma) has a significance (thought) and the significance (thought), in turn, has an effect on the material (soma). Jack, this is a much more general notion of "back action" without actually using this specific phrase. What would be a very interesting thing to do would be to try to build a detailed mechanical analogue of this process. It would be somewhat limited but it may provide some new insights. The paper that contains a very clear discussion of these ideas is Bohm, "Meaning and Information" which appeared in "The search for meaning: the new spirit in science and philosophy", ed. Pylkkanen, Crucible, Wellingborough, 1989. This may be difficult to get hold of but if anyone is interested I could get scanned.
Basil."