Re: Why physicists should pay attention to the mind

Hendrik van Hees wrote:
On my opinion "solutions" of this dilemma like the de Broglie-Bohm
interpretation do not really solve the problem [...] because then one
introduces nonlocal interactions which never have been observed at all,
and the formulation of these interpretations for relativistic quantum
field theory is not settled yet.

Flanagan
JS Bell wrote that his chief motivation in pursuing hidden variables
flowed from an interest in providing a homogenous account of the world
-- and I think that is just right. Thus, one often reads that
Schrodinger's equation contains, in principle, all that can be known
about a physical system. Yet the author of that equation disagreed:

"If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell
you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the
neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow
come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of
vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person
whose eye it is the sensation of yellow."

Schrödinger, 'Mind & Matter' (Cambridge)

As I may have mentioned once or twice, this little difficulty was
initially gotten around by Galileo and Newton, who, following the Greek
atomists, declared that colors and such do not belong to the physical
realm:

"Hence I think that these tastes, odours, colours, etc., on the side of
the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere
names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body..."

Galileo


"For the Rays (of light) to speak properly are not coloured. In them
there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a
Sensation of this or that Colour. ... in the Rays they are nothing but
their Dispositions to propogate this or that Motion into the
Sensorium, and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions
under the form of Colours."

Newton


Galileo and Newton never got around to explaining how colors arise in
the brain, which is presumably part of the physical world, and so the
mind was made to do this work... somehow. Austen Clark, in his
admirable text on 'Sensory Qualities,' brings us up to date:

"The world as described by natural science has no obvious place for
colours, tastes, or smells. Problems with sensory qualities have been
philosophically and scientifically troublesome since ancient times, and
in modern form at least since Galileo in 1623 identified some sensory
qualities as characterizing nothing real in the objects themselves...

The qualities of size, figure (or shape), number, and motion are for
Galileo the only real properties of objects. All other qualities
revealed in sense perception--colours, tastes, odours, sounds, and so
on--exist only in the sensitive body, and do not qualify anything in
the objects themselves. They are the effects of the primary qualities
of things on the senses. Without the living animal sensing such things,
these 'secondary' qualities (to use the term introduced by Locke) would
not exist.

Much of modern philosophy has devolved from this fateful distinction.
While it was undoubtedly helpful to the physical sciences to make the
mind into a sort of dustbin into which one could sweep the troublesome
sensory qualities, this stratagem created difficulties for later
attempt to arrive at some scientific understanding of the mind. In
particular, the strategy cannot be reapplied when one goes on to
explain sensation and perception. If physics cannot explain secondary
qualities, then it seems that any science that can explain secondary
qualities must appeal to explanatory principles distinct from those of
physics. Thus are born various dualisms."


The trouble is, colors behave as though they are physical:

"A color is a physical object a soon as we consider its dependence, for
instance, upon its luminous source, upon temperatures, and so forth."

Mach, 'Analysis of Sensations'


If we accept Mach's reasoning, it is incumbent upon us to find some
place in physical theory where colors can be inserted without doing
harm to the whole imposing edifice.

____________________________________________________


It would seem increasingly difficult to maintain that nonlocal
interactions have never have been observed.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9902020

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v69/i9/p1293_1

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v64/i7/p788_1

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v50/i2/pR895_1

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v57/i5/p3229_1

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v45/i11/p7729_1

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v60/i2/p1530_1


.

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