How to think like a quantum monadologist

This site is full of people interested in implementing intelligence (and even themselves) on a new substrate .... but they're not going to be interested in the relationship between physics and thought ?

Conscious experiences have "parts", but not in the sense of spatial parts. Therefore consciousness cannot be directly identified with any complex entity built up out of aggregation of parts in space. So if we don't want to be dualists, positing a law of correspondence between a spatial material complex and the nonspatial complex that is consciousness, we need a nonspatial material complex. Quantum entanglement is the only example we have of nonspatial complexity in physics.

This is not in opposition to neuroscience. It implicitly calls for attention to quantum effects in the brain, and not just electrical and chemical signaling; and then there's the step where you explain the formal ontology of physics (used to describe the state of the monad) in terms of the ontology revealed by phenomenology, rather than vice versa. But that is all in addition.

The root of it all is that you take phenomenology seriously, and you don't think it can be reduced to the physics we have, and you take that seriously enough to look for ways to revise the physics, both ontologically and mathematically. The majority of commenters here appear to be content with the theory of consciousness they have, or at least with the prospects for reduction of consciousness to existing physics. I am not, and we are therefore going over some of the familiar disputations in comments, but I really didn't write this to present the case against ordinary physicalism one more time. Chalmers does that, many others have done that. Some people get it and some people don't. This article is a sketch (and only a sketch) of a new alternative - a new starting point, rather than an argument against the old one. If you don't feel the need for a new starting point, you may not be interested.

Is the self-monad like a soul? Yes and no, just as the brain is like and unlike a soul according to classic mind-brain identity theory. A monad is a "single substance", but here it is not a different sort of substance. A simple monad should be able to evolve into a complex one, or vice versa, given the right boundary conditions. There is also no radical independence of it from the body; it's a condensate of entangled electrons (or whatever) that forms as the brain develops, nothing more. As a quantum state, you might be able to transfer it into a new environment by a process resembling quantum teleportation; that's about as close to the traditional detachability of the soul as I can get in this theory.

The one inescapable empirical conclusion is that quantum effects are functionally relevant for consciousness and cognition, somewhere, somehow. But if that's a fact, plain old empirical neuroscience, biophysics, and psychology should turn it up eventually anyway, whether or not a theory of monads is a recognized intellectual option.

This article seems to be aimed almost entirely at those who already agree that physics is going to have to change to account for qualia.

Not quite. It is an experiment in seeing whether the people who insist that there is no problem may be moved by seeing a concrete alternative, rather than being told that their existing account of color, etc, is inadequate. (See first paragraph, last sentences.) No success so far.

What do I think of Dennett? It is a while since I read him. But while of course I disagree with him, I think he is a superior exponent of the true consequences of standard physicalism. I have accused most physicalists of being stealth dualists, who posit an association between, say, color and some computational or other physical property, but call it an identity. Dennett simply says, there is no subjective color (which he calls "figment") and no unity of consciousness ("the Cartesian theater"). These are just intersubjective figures of speech, etc. And he's quite right: subjective color and the unity of consciousness do not exist in standard physics. But they do actually exist, which is why I've posited a monadic physics. A conscious monad is a Cartesian theater, a place where the components of conscious experience are genuinely simultaneously present, and among those components are color sensations.

Responding to your other question - heterophenomenology is where you agree that other people's phenomenological reports must be explained, but you feel no commitment to the ontologies implied by taking the reports literally. In principle, I have no problem with that. People can be wrong. But I disagree with Dennett's specific eliminations, and especially want to show that they are not necessitated by physical ontology, because physical ontology can be different.

You are saying that there is some monad in my head and that monad is me?

Yes.

I think a concrete example of a quantum-monadological hypothesis is in order. The best-known quantum-mind theories revolve around microtubules, so let's start there.

Orthodox cognitive neuroscience revolves around synapses and action potentials. But let's suppose Stuart Hameroff is right and microtubules are relevant as well, and are not just structural molecules. Maybe there are quantum-entangled mobile electrons in the shell of the microtubule, they feel the action potential, and they affect the binding of microtubule-associated proteins, i.e. let's suppose they are causally relevant to neuronal information processing, as they had better be if they are going to be the locus of consciousness. So, some subpopulation of microtubules, in some subpopulation of neurons, contains a big set of entangled electrons - and that is the monad that is you.

Although I have described it as a "set of entangled electrons", it is to be regarded as elementary because entangled objects no longer have independent individual states - they are more like aspects of a bigger thing (at least under the interpretation of quantum theory I'm using). Mathematically, it has a large number of degrees of freedom, and I suppose that in reality, those degrees of freedom are busy being your conscious thoughts, perceptions, and so forth.

Does that make things clearer?

I certainly know about David Chalmers's work and I generally agree with it. I just think we need to go even further and say, not just that "raw sensory qualities" aren't present in physics as normally conceived, but that they are bound together in consciousness in a way which suggests an underlying ontological unity beyond that possessed by a collection of spatial parts.

Now, now, I'd like to tear into the methodological flaws in monadology as much as anyone here, but Mitchell_Porter clearly said:

This is obviously more of a research program than a theory. ..., the point of this article is not to carry out the research program, but just to suggest what I'm actually on about.

It would be unreasonable not to think about any idea until it's at the theory stage, else you'd never get there.

The major prediction is that mesoscopic quantum effects are functionally relevant in conscious cognition. Beyond that, there's also the prediction that the neural correlate of consciousness is one large quantum-entangled subsystem of the brain. But the crucial threshold, yet to be crossed, is simply for there to be such a thing as "quantum-computational neuroscience". If no-one ever sees an empirical need for that, then theories like this will go nowhere.

Well, yes, based on his previous writings, that's what he meant. While it's not completely solved, it's not as mysterious as Mitchell_Porter makes it out to be:

We know why light departs from objects with the EM wave frequency that it does. We know what EM waves are well enough to generate them in other contexts consistent with our observations of light on objects. We know that detection of EM radiation at certain frequencies creates a physical response in the retina. Information about that response is passed to the brain through the optic nerve.

Based on this previous comment, Mitchell_Porter would consider even these last steps mysterious:

We can quantify certain things about subjective color; and we can describe certain physical realities which are somehow correlated with color. Thus 450-nm wavelength light "is" a type of blue light. But I submit that it makes no sense to say that when you see a particular shade of blue, you are "seeing a length"; or that blue itself "is a length". That might do as a poetic description of the physics behind the perception, but as an ontological statement, it simply substitutes the correlated geometric property for the sensory property we are trying to explain.

Which makes his level of dissatisfaction with current physics unjustified.

Furthermore, Gary Drescher made some headway in Good and Real about the phenomenological issues. Once you can explain the correspondence between different EM frequencies and different retina states (and thus the nerve signal), you're just left with the qualia issue of "is my red the same as your red?" and "Does this brain state mean a different red for me than if it appeared in your brain?" But, Drescher says, this is no different from the gensym "problem" in programming, where the names used in referencing data are different between program instances. If that doesn't confuse you, neither should color qualia.

This will probably be my last reply to Mitchell on consciousness or ontology.

It is now very highly probable that my differences with Mitchell in this thread stem from differences over epistemology. Specifically, Mitchell considers it epistemologically satisfactory to adhere to his current position until provided with strong evidence or strong argument against it. The best summary of that position in a few sentences is probably the following passage written by Mitchell less than 36 hours ago to be found in the parent of this comment:

A priori, I regard it as outlandish that color is an arrangement of things in space, or any other such composite property from the physical theory in question. They appear to be radically dissimilar things, as if one were to say that yesterday was the number 2. So when someone says that color is such a property, if they wish to convince me, they must overcome this skepticism and somehow explain how this can be so.

My position is that what Mitchell considers outlandish is a perfectly normal and perfectly satisfactory hypothesis. None of Mitchell's indictments of the hypothesis strike me as actual handicaps in a proper contest among hypotheses (i.e., in a proper epistemological process). If you want a summary in a few sentences of my position (which is the standard position round here) on how hypotheses should be judged, see the first paragraph of something I wrote less than 48 hours ago. I would gladly elaborate on it and how it applies to Mitchell's concerns if anyone is interested. Alternatively, the interested reader could just wait for the top-level submission promised by jimrandomh in a sister to this comment.

Silas says that the experience of color is how it feels for this to happen. But I still do not see where the color is. Either I am to look for it in the motions of the ions themselves, in which case I do not see it; or I am to look for it in the "feel" of those motions, but I do not know what that means, in terms of the physical theory with which we began.

I don't think you understand the nature of the exercise. Let me return to the example of temperature.

Temperature exists. I say this without qualm - I am an engineer working on thermal issues in electronic packaging, dealing with temperature is my profession. However, temperature is nowhere described in the most current theories of particle physics. Instead, we find that in certain special cases, we can relate certain properties of the distribution of particles to a summarizing parameter in different locations in space, and that if we analyze the behavior of the particles in time this implies certain patterns in the development of the field corresponding to our parameter. These patterns are identical to those observed regarding temperature distributions, and indeed predict in great detail the physics of temperature - even explaining when these physics 'break down'. We therefore conclude that we have discovered a reductive explanation of temperature.

The exact same story may be told about semiconductors, about conductors, about electricity and magnetism, about weather, about chemistry, about sound, and about light. We find a phenomenon associated with certain conditions, and we can relate the nature of that phenomenon to the underlying physics. We further prove this relation constitutes the innate nature of the phenomenon by examining edge cases - very thin conductors, chemistry in extreme conditions, light passing through a fine grating - and observing that the higher-level physics (of electrical conduction, of chemistry, of optics) break down just in the way which the lower level physics predicts.

We haven't finished the job of reducing subjective phenomena to their fundamental physics, but what we've accomplished so far looks like what we observed in all the previous cases: the normal patterns break down in edge cases (e.g. brain damage) and the science of the underlying phenomenon predicts certain aspects of the phenomenon in very, very special cases (e.g. autonomic nervous reflexes? I'm not a neuroscientist).

This is strong evidence that the entire thing is reducible, and therefore that the phenomenon of color perception can be found in a physics with no explicit color.

A small note (no need to respond): my account as constructed so far is consistent with what Silas has proposed, a proposal I am inclined to accept.

A second small note (again, no need to respond): the analogy to the videogame was not an analogy to the visual output of the console as seen on the television, but to the internal representation within the program. So far as I can ascertain, the distinction is probably moot with regards to your reply.

The confusion in this debate has nothing to do with color or experience; it's about how ontologies and definitions are (or should be) structured. Rather than try to give an incomplete explanation here, I'll write a top-level post to cover the topic properly (probably in about a week)

Representing isn't explaining.

The formal revisions to physics that I propose do not in themselves reintroduce color (or any other aspect of consciousness) into the real. But they are meant to make it possible, and the key move is to identify the thing that is conscious with a sharply defined entity in the physics, the monad. At present, computational neuroscience revolves around coarse-grained computational states of physical aggregates whose boundaries are vague from a fundamental perspective. (Under exactly what conditions does a wandering electron count as part of a neuron that it's passing through? Etc. And yet conscious states are supposed to be identified with computational states of neurons.) Once you have sharp boundaries, you still have to deal with the formal mismatch between physical properties and phenomenal properties, but I think that's doable. But if you can't even be precise about whether there's a conscious entity there, and how many of them there are, then you cannot even get started.

In a monadology such as I propose you cannot have zombies in the classical sense, but you should be able to have unconscious simulations of consciousness.

The zombie as described by Chalmers is implicitly proposed within the framework of property dualism: you have a causally closed physical world, and an epiphenomenal world of consciousness linked to the first by a psychophysical bridging law, and a zombie world results by subtracting consciousness from the picture. In his book The Conscious Mind he has a chapter on "the paradox of phenomenal judgment", which is that zombies - being behaviorally identical to their conscious counterparts - talk about consciousness and even philosophize about it, without having it. In my monadology, the conscious state is identical with the state of the monadic self, so it is causally efficacious and you cannot simply subtract it from the world while preserving the causal structure. There is also no paradox of phenomenal judgment, because phenomenal judgments - judgments about the experience you are having - are in fact caused by consciousness. However, there is no obvious barrier within monadology to the creation of a black-box simulation of consciousness whose interior mechanism is made up of many simple monads rather than a single complex conscious monad, and which is therefore not conscious itself.

Done. Thanks (and thanks to Alicorn for assisting).

It might be best to just be agnostic about the simpler monads, until the nature of the state space region between simple and complex states is much clearer. Given the monadic hypothesis, it is natural enough to wonder if the states of even the simplest monads have a psychological interpretation - maybe they are thinking some minimal thought or having some minimal perception. But I'm not going to assume that.

I'm an artist, and believe that any two given individuals will not share an identical color perception.

Being an artist has nothing to do with the accuracy of this belief.

I've always had issues with infinity and transcendental numbers. For instance, pi is said to be transcendental as it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers; yet, in a sense, is the ratio of two numbers - the circumference over the diameter.

There are two problems here. First, irrational numbers are the ones that cannot be expressed as a fraction of integers. Transendentals are defined as numbers that are not algebraic. All transcendental numbers are irrational, but the converse does not hold.

Second, pi is defined as the ratio of circumference to diameter, true. This would only be a contradiction if both the circumference and diameter could be integers at the same time, which is impossible.

This got me to thinking about numbers as mere concepts. Numbers that we count on our fingers and toes have a greater "reality" than such oddballs as radical two and i, yet those oddballs seem to me much more useful.

You are confused about what numbers actually are. Some classes of numbers are useful for certain tasks, but there is no sense in which one class is more 'real' than another. I recommend Mathematics, Queen & Servant of Science by Eric Temple Bell for a wonderful overview of mathematics. Chapter 2, "Mathematical Truth", is relevent to this discussion. Also, see Godel, Escher, Bach, Chapter 11: "Meaning and Form in Mathematics".

We are using monad in the functional programming sense? I thought Leibniz at first glance. I've never quite apprehended Leibniz's monads, so I put off trying to grok the post fully. An introduction to them would be useful.

FP monads are interesting, but I was taking my lead from Leibniz, not Haskell. That is, a monad here is an elementary entity (or at least, one without spatial parts, it may have some other form of internal structure) which can be the bearer of a state of consciousness. Though my monads differ from Leibniz's in that they can interact with each other (Leibniz didn't think relations are real and so disbelieved in causal interaction, which led him in peculiar directions).