[time 69] Spacetime & consciousness


Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Mon, 29 Mar 1999 19:16:32 -0500


At 12:29 PM 3/29/99 -0500, Stephen P. King wrote:
>Hi Ben,
>
> I recommend you read Hitoshi's papers. :) This is the "philosophical"
>one.
>
>http://www.kitada.com/time_III.html

yes, I read this before, but it does not explain why R^6 instead of R^4

This is explained in another of his papers which I have not gotten through yet

Returning to

>> >1) How the quantity of time (past, future, "history") as it is
>> >considered "classically" by observers is derived from the interactions
>> >of LSs, which give us local clocks.

this is indeed tricky, but seems to me to NOT be equivalent, as you suggest, to
the problem of projecting R^6 to R^4, which is a quantum-mechanics-internal
problem, standard Kaluza-klein type stuff, and much less difficult IMO.

There seems to me to be a freaky ontological problem with the idea that
centers of
mass live in finite-dimensional Riemannian space whereas the particles that
are averaged to yield these
centers of mass live in Hilbert space.

Hitoshi, your "philosophical" paper does not really address this
philosophical issue.
I'm not interested in philosophical verbiage so much as in the logic of
this relationship.
Quantum logic encapsulates the structure of quantum theory in an abstract
way; is there
a similar abstract conceptual formalism that captures this reduction?
Logicians have formulated
numerous "temporal logics." I would like to see a consistent "temporal
logic" involving these
two time scales....

How do we decide when we have a system with a center of mass. to be treated
general-relativistically and not
just a multiparticle quantum system? Is the center of mass of 2 particles
a GR particle?
3 particles? 9372? Obviously there is no magic number. But what then?
do we have to view
the GR perspective as fuzzy, as having more and more plausibility as there
are more and more
particles in the system, and as their mean becomes more and more stable (in
a highly dynamic,
high-variance quantum system there may be no reliably detectable center of
mass over finite time
scales).

In psychological terms, a center of mass is the "exemplar" of a category,
so what Hitoshi is
proposing is that a different logic applies to categories than to
individual elements. In the mind
this corresponds roughly to the distinction between cognition to
perception. QM is being posited
as the "perceptual level" of the Universal Mind, and GR is being posited as
the cognitive level.

Consciousness I have argued serves to group perceptual features into wholes
(wholes=
categories, very roughly speaking). This has an interesting resonance with
Hitoshi's theory,
when one considers that consciousness in quantum physics is related to
making phenomena into macroscopic events. The synthetic idea here would be
that, once consciousness has grouped
some percepts (particles) into a whole, this whole is then susceptible to
the laws of wholes,
i.e. GR, rather than the laws of raw percepts, i.e. QM.

ben



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