From: "Edwards, Jonathan" <jo.ed...@ucl.ac.uk>
Date: 17 June 2017 at 19:29:42 GMT-5
To: "Edwards, Jonathan" <jo.ed...@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Choice
Dear Whit,
I am travelling on iPad so this may come out with glitches.
Our intuitive conception of causality is clearly problematic, and a theory of indivisibles like the Monadology or quantum theory brings that to light. Leibniz denies that anything causes anything, although people may overinterpret that - he says that everything just progresses in harmony. I suspect qm is the same. However, Leibniz also has a concept of monadic souls having choice - on this you are closer to him than l.
In 1676 Spinoza and Leibniz met. For Spinoza there were no individuals, just one Nature, and 'freedom of choice' was an illusion. Leibniz was sure there must be individuals, to explain points of view. They had to free because the Bible said so. However, as Russell complained, in Leibniz's schema each soul can only ever have one choice, to be that soul at creation; if Socrates, to have decided from the outset to take the hemlock. Multiple choices would mean multiple souls. In a sense my schema is to bite that bullet.
This problem is the subject of a paper I presented at the International Leibniz Conference last year. It is on my website (google UCL and Jonathan Edwards ). What Leibniz correctly identifies is that indivisible units must be end-entailing or show telicity . They might be regarded as having a 'purpose', although this raises questions. However, there does not seem to be any way that souls could choose in the intuitive sense of 'consciously choosing ' because the choice must occur when the soul is created. This might sound like getting into abstruse theology, but it is actually hard logic and, if that ends up theology, so be it.
The only way I can make sense of individual telicity is to say that each soul, or quantised action is god's choice. The purpose is the god's purpose, which we are working out. I use god with a small g to mean the totality of sufficient reasons, something that physics cannot do without. The really interesting thing is that Leibniz shows that this totality must have 'an end in mind' for entirely logical reasons.
What I think this means for qm is that the 'choice of measurement' is not separate from the choice of an actual action occurring. It is one indivisible event. Yet it seems to involve something extraneous in the form of an observer. I think this was an error by Bohr. I think what we see is the totality of reasons choosing to arrange within the universe a whole action, complete with 'catcher' as well as 'pitcher'. That is where things get close to retrocausality. In the vast majority of qm experiments the observer never chose the mode of measurement anyway - it was probably written in the grant application by her boss.
Best wishes
Jo
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I would dare predict that such a model is most likely to fall beyond the ken of Science as we know and practice it, and give us grounds to redefine Science and make it expansive enough to include distributions of individual consciousness and qualia.
The four Mahaavaakyas of the Upanishads actually allude to the "big G" and "little g".
1. Prajñānam brahma - "Prajñāna[note 1] is Brahman"[note 2], or "Brahman is Prajñāna"[web 3] (Aitareya Upanishad 3.3 of the Rig Veda)
2. Ayam ātmā brahma - "This Self (Atman) is Brahman" (Mandukya Upanishad 1.2 of the Atharva Veda)
3. Thath thvam asi - "Thou art That" (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 of the Sama Veda)
4. Aham brahmāsmi - "I am Brahman", or "I am Divine"[7] (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10 of the Yajur Veda)
Best wishes,
LSG.
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From: online_sa...@googlegroups.com <online_sa...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Whit Blauvelt <wh...@csmind.com>
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2017 9:36 PM
To: Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Sadhu Sanga] Re: Choice
Joseph,
Best,
Whit
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Marchal,"...we don't do all possible choice except for negligible set of worlds. If I decide todrink coffee, I will drink coffee in (almost) all worlds/histories."A good example of you choosing, your act of free will. I don't think the consequences of free will is built into QM is it?
" that is why free-will need (enough) determinacy, and canonly be diminished by adding indeterminacy. Free-will is a sort ofself-determinacy in partial information contexts."Some structure (for ex., you choose the time and place of your birth), free will, and basic unpredictability (I like that, "partial information context"), as I see it."The problem of abstract modal realism is that there are as many multi-worlds structures than modal logics, and there is at least 2^aleph_0modal logics."I am not sure why you see that as a problem. I guess I do not understand what you said : )
Modal realism is an artificial construct, and like all of those, they have bugs, due to the inherent nature of scientific and mathematical rationality.
Joseph
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