Directed Attention

[Simon Adams]

I don’t follow the way in which the experiment is undecidable. Are you saying that by deciding to put the detectors there in the first place, that awareness of the fact that information is being collected is responsible for collapsing the wave function ? That seems very improbable to me, when you have a simple explanation that it’s just something about an information-collecting-interaction?

But you don't. We would not be having this discussion, if the academic authorities had such a simple solution to the measurement problem. The answer to the problem may be simple, just hidden under way too much complexity, and learning away from too much complexity tends also to be complex process.

Sorry I think you misunderstood what I was claiming to be simple - I’m certainly not claiming the measurement problem is simple. What I was suggesting is that if we compare our two positions, namely what I take to be your von Neumann ‘human conscious observation of results’ versus what I’m speculating as an intuitive idealist interpretation where it’s one form collecting property information from another form. Your version seems to add huge complexity on top of what is already difficult to understand, doesn’t make sense to me in terms of some of the experiments (including the “no go”/Wigner’s friend experiment), or even in terms of what happens to the tree that falls in a forest when no one is there?

The big picture is very simple: Potential measured/decohered into some actuality. Potential, in Aristotle's terminology dynamis, corresponds with "superposition/quantum state", and actuality, in Aristotle's terminology energeia, with "classical state. Measurement and decoherence are two different words, or viewpoints, for the same process.

Yes I’m sure it fits into an Aristotelean framework, what I don’t understand is why you don’t think the idea of matter as a representation of a form when it interacts in a meaningful way with another form is enough, why you’re suggesting that a human observation needs to be involved?

Forget Einstein. He got it wrong. Brilliantly wrong, but wrong anyhow.

You can’t just ignore relativity, unless you can replace it with something better that still enables us to have GPS, to predict cosmological events, clocks going slower at different altitudes etc etc. I’m assuming you don’t have some secret theory somewhere that’s going to overturn modern science the minute you publish it?

PS: if you are planning to do so, I’m obviously not going to be able to evaluate it myself, and you’d also need to wait for it to be able to replicate experimental results with the amazing accuracy that GR and SR get. Yes it’s surely not a final theory, but you can’t dismiss it without some bloody good evidence.

A very interesting question is, does the "non-local" (ie. superluminal) interaction happen really instantly, and what "instantly" could really mean, instant in relation to what absolute? Bohm's notion of decoherence is temporal process, but what does temporal mean exactly in that context?

We know for sure now that measurement of an entangled pair is an instant effect. I think Bohm like Many Worlds gives us useful insights, but I wouldn’t say either are viable as they are stated. Instead, if the entangled particles have become a single form, the whole problem goes away. Of course when you measure the left hand of the form, the other becomes the right hand instantly? I don’t see any value in making this aspect more complicated than it needs to be?

[SanteriSatama]

I’m speculating as an intuitive idealist interpretation where it’s one form collecting property information from another form. Your version seems to add huge complexity on top of what is already difficult to understand, doesn’t make sense to me in terms of some of the experiments (including the “no go”/Wigner’s friend experiment), or even in terms of what happens to the tree that falls in a forest when no one is there?

OK. In the big picture interpretation, "form collecting property information from another form" seems too limiting to allow for the no-form aspect of Potential. Also, can it be a one-way process?

Yes I’m sure it fits into an Aristotelean framework, what I don’t understand is why you don’t think the idea of matter as a representation of a form when it interacts in a meaningful way with another form is enough, why you’re suggesting that a human observation needs to be involved?

I'm not suggesting humanism. Any sort of intention/attention/observation could be involved, including incorporeal/spiritual.

Matter as a representation of a form is already a mathematical representation... of what? Turtles all the way down? If so, what is the math form that the Turtle has eaten and self-created with?

A testable theory should consist of/generate constructible elements. I don't believe that e.g. Hilbert space is a valid mathematical construction, in that sense. As a theory, QM is purely mathematical theory made of highly questionable mathematics. In it's standard mathematical forms, it's a house of cards build on invisible cards.

You can’t just ignore relativity, unless you can replace it with something better that still enables us to have GPS, to predict cosmological events, clocks going slower at different altitudes etc etc. I’m assuming you don’t have some secret theory somewhere that’s going to overturn modern science the minute you publish it?

A fair comment, but a single blind guy can't feel and narrate the whole elephant, and developing an alternative theory with similar predictions is not in my competence area. My own interest is in the foundations of mathematics. There are alternative ether type theories available, but don't ask me about their scope and validity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

amazing accuracy that GR and SR get

From my point of view, I consider a long decimal extension of a real number amazing inaccuracy.

Uncertainty principle and statistical modelling are mathematical artifacts of the mathematical theory used for measuring, not reducible elements of "objective" nature.

We know for sure now that measurement of an entangled pair is an instant effect. I think Bohm like Many Worlds gives us useful insights, but I wouldn’t say either are viable as they are stated. Instead, if the entangled particles have become a single form, the whole problem goes away. Of course when you measure the left hand of the form, the other becomes the right hand instantly? I don’t see any value in making this aspect more complicated than it needs to be?

We can't know "instant effect" for sure, as "instant" is not a well defined concept. The sum of number and antinumber - form and anti-form; chirality of left and right hand - can be defined well, but even in that case, we can't insist that the computation is instant, without any temporal duration. Coherent physics can't exclude empirical time from mathematical modelling.

[Simon Adams]

OK. In the big picture interpretation, "form collecting property information from another form" seems too limiting to allow for the no-form aspect of Potential. Also, can it be a one-way process?

Surely potential without form isn’t going to represent as matter? You need the forms or else there is nothing to represent. To put it in a more explicitly idealist way, without ideas or mental processes, all you have is mind.

In terms of whether it can be a one way process, the interaction is clearly a unity of subject and object, but there does seem to be a sense in which it has an information direction. One form is representing TO another form. The photon passes through the air and bounces off the mirror without collapsing, because they aren’t observing it.

I'm not suggesting humanism. Any sort of intention/attention/observation could be involved, including incorporeal/spiritual.

I’m not quite sure I follow in terms of what you’ve previously said. In the sealed box experiment I described, the experimenter puts detectors on each slit that destroy themselves before the box is opened. I was saying that it’s impossible for any human to know which slit the photons went through, but there is still no interference pattern. You seemed to think that something about the way the experiment was setup must be what collapses the wave (which I still don’t understand), but are you maybe suggesting that there is some spiritual entity (other than the forms of the detectors) which are keeping an ‘eye’ on what the detectors are ‘seeing’?

Matter as a representation of a form is already a mathematical representation... of what? Turtles all the way down? If so, what is the math form that the Turtle has eaten and self-created with?

In my simplistic way I see the forms as the ‘unfolding’ of ideas. The way nature unfolds ideas is clearly very different from how we do it when we, say, make a table, but in principle it’s not a million miles away. Of course in the lab experiments we’re talking about, the form is one particle, or two if they’re entangled, so it’s an extremely simple form.

A testable theory should consist of/generate constructible elements. I don't believe that e.g. Hilbert space is a valid mathematical construction, in that sense. As a theory, QM is purely mathematical theory made of highly questionable mathematics. In it's standard mathematical forms, it's a house of cards build on invisible cards.

The formalism seems to be fairly rock solid so far. The weirdest things it has predicted all seem to bear out. So just like SR and GR, even though it’s not a final theory, I can’t see how you can dispute that the maths is telling us something valid about nature. The interpretation of what it’s telling us is where the debate is, and where physicalist descriptions break down without going to the extreme lengths of many worlds or superdeterminism.


We can't know "instant effect" for sure, as "instant" is not a well defined concept. The sum of number and antinumber - form and anti-form; chirality of left and right hand - can be defined well, but even in that case, we can't insist that the computation is instant, without any temporal duration. Coherent physics can't exclude empirical time from mathematical modelling.
[/quote]

We know that it’s massively faster than the speed of light. It’s as close to instant as we are able to tell, which is ridiculously close. If it’s much faster than light then some minuscule duration almost doesn’t matter. If the entangled pair is a single form in mind, then instant makes sense because they have become part of the same ‘thing’.

[Dave casarino]

In accordance with this https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/02 ... ss-in.html and having red the Idea of the world, this reads like a sort of straw man, it goes back and fourth in describing what Kastrups theory is claiming that his argument is at one time everything being created by different minds and at another time virtually indifferent to concrete realism, and it seems to be written by someone rather young who in truth does not seem to understand the points Kastrup is making, this coming from a person who has some problems with idealism.

[Simon Adams]

In accordance with this https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/02 ... ss-in.html and having red the Idea of the world, this reads like a sort of straw man, it goes back and fourth in describing what Kastrups theory is claiming that his argument is at one time everything being created by different minds and at another time virtually indifferent to concrete realism, and it seems to be written by someone rather young who in truth does not seem to understand the points Kastrup is making, this coming from a person who has some problems with idealism.

Assuming your comments are directed at me, I’ll ignore the ad hominem comments and thank you for the link to the article, which I had not seen. However this seems to me to be even closer to my view than I had expected from the articles and interviews I have seen. Bernardo makes it very clear that he does not see collapse as being explicit to personal consciousness, rather that it’s due to interactions in phenomenal consciousness (which is all there is in Bernardo’s view).

Your claims seem fairly bizarre to be honest. Can you explain where I have “straw manned” anyone? My views are fairly close to Bernardo’s on nature, it’s when he equates MAL to the same as god and reduces our individuality to nothing more than our isolation from the conscious universe that I start to diverge very sharply.

I’m guessing you have a materialist mindset, and when anyone says “mind”, you seem to be thinking of your personal mind, and other personal minds. In fact you probably also think that your mind is generated by the matter in your brain, so to be honest I’m surprised Bernardo makes sense to you, let alone my speculation.

If you do have any specific areas where you disagree with what I say, it would be helpful to explain where and why.

[SanteriSatama]

Surely potential without form isn’t going to represent as matter? You need the forms or else there is nothing to represent. To put it in a more explicitly idealist way, without ideas or mental processes, all you have is mind.

The relation of generalized superposition to the form of the measurement is analogous to the polarity of no-form and form. That polarity is an idea, a mental process. What a form of measurement "represents" is reflection of itself.

In the sealed box experiment I described, the experimenter puts detectors on each slit that destroy themselves before the box is opened. I was saying that it’s impossible for any human to know which slit the photons went through, but there is still no interference pattern. You seemed to think that something about the way the experiment was setup must be what collapses the wave (which I still don’t understand), but are you maybe suggesting that there is some spiritual entity (other than the forms of the detectors) which are keeping an ‘eye’ on what the detectors are ‘seeing’?

Maybe this will help. Freedom of choice includes freedom not to choose, yes? In the box experiment, a choice is made not to know the result of the experiment, in other words not to choose whether the result shows interference or not. Such a choice is not necessarily a global, some form of sentience may choose to peak in the box and see a result. This leads naturally to the parallel worlds of Relational Quantum Mechanics. In some world some observer may choose to know something that some other observer in some other world chooses not to know.

In the world where we choose not to know, what sense is there trying to guess and speculate what the result might have been? That result is not a fact of our world, by our choice.

Hmm. Maybe we could speculate, that the observer who chooses not to know, invents later in life a time machine and a miniature self/avatar, that can travel back in time and take a peak in the box, while it is closed and the detectors have not yet self-destroyed...? Wouldn't that be very close to the delayed choice experiment?

In my simplistic way I see the forms as the ‘unfolding’ of ideas. The way nature unfolds ideas is clearly very different from how we do it when we, say, make a table, but in principle it’s not a million miles away. Of course in the lab experiments we’re talking about, the form is one particle, or two if they’re entangled, so it’s an extremely simple form.

Wave pattern is mathematically far from simple. Transcendental forms such as pi get involved.

The formalism seems to be fairly rock solid so far. The weirdest things it has predicted all seem to bear out. So just like SR and GR, even though it’s not a final theory, I can’t see how you can dispute that the maths is telling us something valid about nature. The interpretation of what it’s telling us is where the debate is, and where physicalist descriptions break down without going to the extreme lengths of many worlds or superdeterminism.

First result to search 'general relativity anomalies' gave this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Relativity

The math is telling something valid about nature, of which the nature is part. Main message is that the math itself is not valid.

In idealist ontology, a mathematical theory - a mental form - is ontologially primary to the phenomenal measurements which it decoheres. This is the main message of quantum theory and measurement problem, which materialists keep on trying to deny. Axiomatic set theories are not coherent, consistent or intuitively and constructively empirical. They can't be trusted as valid forms.

We know that it’s massively faster than the speed of light. It’s as close to instant as we are able to tell, which is ridiculously close. If it’s much faster than light then some minuscule duration almost doesn’t matter. If the entangled pair is a single form in mind, then instant makes sense because they have become part of the same ‘thing’.

Yes, as I said we know that entanglement actions are superluminal. Conceptually, to keep on thinking as clearly we can, actually instant vs any duration makes all the difference in the world. Physicists have a very bad habit of "agreeing" that "small" doesn't matter and can be forgotten, so their models become boxes of jesus tape with layers of patches on, held together with wire and bubble gum, a mess that nobody can anymore make any sense of. Born rule, second quantization, etc., are very arbitrary patchwork. If science is self-correcting methodology, time to time it's necessary to make a radical revision of the presuppositions a theory and a paradigm started from.

Here's an article that at least exposes some of the problems, whether or not the hype is justified:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-born ... -20190213/

A quote, which cuts to the essence of the universal precondition of any phenomenology:

The work can’t answer the troublesome question of why measurement outcomes are unique; rather, it makes that uniqueness axiomatic, turning it into part of the very definition of a measurement. After all, Galley said, uniqueness “is required for us to be able to even begin to do science.”

Uniqueness is where the spiritual Truth and physics meet.

[Simon Adams]

The relation of generalized superposition to the form of the measurement is analogous to the polarity of no-form and form. That polarity is an idea, a mental process. What a form of measurement "represents" is reflection of itself.

I would say that the measurement/observation is just what causes the representation of the form at a particular time. The form is the mental process, matter is the representation of that form when observed.

Maybe this will help. Freedom of choice includes freedom not to choose, yes? In the box experiment, a choice is made not to know the result of the experiment, in other words not to choose whether the result shows interference or not. Such a choice is not necessarily a global, some form of sentience may choose to peak in the box and see a result. This leads naturally to the parallel worlds of Relational Quantum Mechanics. In some world some observer may choose to know something that some other observer in some other world chooses not to know.

In the world where we choose not to know, what sense is there trying to guess and speculate what the result might have been? That result is not a fact of our world, by our choice.

Hmm. Maybe we could speculate, that the observer who chooses not to know, invents later in life a time machine and a miniature self/avatar, that can travel back in time and take a peak in the box, while it is closed and the detectors have not yet self-destroyed...? Wouldn't that be very close to the delayed choice experiment?

This seems to be confusing something for no reason. QM experiments are replicated all over the place consistently. The only bit that gets complicated is the “random” element. There seems to be a way in which the forms are ‘rotating’ which gets captured when measured/observed. This is not what we would call rotating in 3D space, but is what results in the artefact of the wavefunction.

Wave pattern is mathematically far from simple. Transcendental forms such as pi get involved.

Yes as I mentioned above, this is the area where I would need to improve my maths to explain the dimensional translation of what the forms ‘do’ that is described by the wave function. I agree this part is not simple, but we don’t need to have a complete description of this movement of the forms to describe the measurement part.

First result to search 'general relativity anomalies' gave this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Relativity

The math is telling something valid about nature, of which the nature is part. Main message is that the math itself is not valid.

I don’t have the competence to come up with a better version of GR. I suspect MOND will be part of the story of dark matter, in which case GR would also have to be tweaked. But I don’t think you or I are going to be the ones who do that

All that said, GR is an abstraction. It’s the best abstraction we have at present, and so it’s valid to use it to inform metaphysical speculation. However it would be wrong to say that GR describe what space and time are, or even gravity for that matter.

In idealist ontology, a mathematical theory - a mental form - is ontologially primary to the phenomenal measurements which it decoheres. This is the main message of quantum theory and measurement problem, which materialists keep on trying to deny. Axiomatic set theories are not coherent, consistent or intuitively and constructively empirical. They can't be trusted as valid forms.

I do think idealism provides the only opportunity to understand what the QM maths is telling us.

Yes, as I said we know that entanglement actions are superluminal. Conceptually, to keep on thinking as clearly we can, actually instant vs any duration makes all the difference in the world. Physicists have a very bad habit of "agreeing" that "small" doesn't matter and can be forgotten, so their models become boxes of jesus tape with layers of patches on, held together with wire and bubble gum, a mess that nobody can anymore make any sense of. Born rule, second quantization, etc., are very arbitrary patchwork. If science is self-correcting methodology, time to time it's necessary to make a radical revision of the presuppositions a theory and a paradigm started from.

Here's an article that at least exposes some of the problems, whether or not the hype is justified:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-born ... -20190213/

Yes I’m sure when we understand it better, we’d be able to explain QM at some level to a waitress (in Einstein’s inappropriate example). Most physicists claim otherwise, understandably.

A quote, which cuts to the essence of the universal precondition of any phenomenology:

The work can’t answer the troublesome question of why measurement outcomes are unique; rather, it makes that uniqueness axiomatic, turning it into part of the very definition of a measurement. After all, Galley said, uniqueness “is required for us to be able to even begin to do science.”

Yes you need will and telos to do science, but apparently neither exist in nature

[Dave casarino]

"Your claims seem fairly bizarre to be honest. Can you explain where I have “straw manned” anyone? My views are fairly close to Bernardo’s on nature, it’s when he equates MAL to the same as god and reduces our individuality to nothing more than our isolation from the conscious universe that I start to diverge very sharply."

AAAAHHH you got the wrong message, I was saying the writer of the paper attacking Kastrup was straw manning to an extent.

[Simon Adams]

"Your claims seem fairly bizarre to be honest. Can you explain where I have “straw manned” anyone? My views are fairly close to Bernardo’s on nature, it’s when he equates MAL to the same as god and reduces our individuality to nothing more than our isolation from the conscious universe that I start to diverge very sharply."

AAAAHHH you got the wrong message, I was saying the writer of the paper attacking Kastrup was straw manning to an extent.

Sorry, I feel embarrassed now . I suspect Jung would say that deep down I know I’m a bit out of my depth, and it was that part of me which reacted there...