Quantum thought?

[Edward Grefenstette <pha04eg@sheffield.ac.uk>]

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At the BUPS conference, Jonathan Cameron had jokingly described how  
guest-presentations hosted by the University of Edinburgh's  
philosophy society with buzzwords like 'quantum' or 'sex' in the  
title seemed to attract the largest audiences. Thus I hope this will  
stir up a little action here, as I haven't received anything from the  
BUPS mailing list in months (which, I hope, isn't because I've been  
accidentally bumped off the mailing list or something like that).

I recently sent the following rambling to the lecturer teaching  
Philosophy of Mind at my university, as part of a larger letter  
asking for suggestions in terms of reading an methodology, and though  
I might as well post it here as well (after editing it a bit to allow  
for contextual understanding) as it might be of interest to some of  
you, and that, given the number of people that are considerably more  
well-read than I, perhaps someone might even have read something  
similar and have some pointers or articles in mind for me to read.  
Anyway, I do hope you don't find this too boring...

Recently, in a 'rare' state of procrastination I was ignoring my  
quantum mechanics reading by thinking over some of the things I had  
read in the books suggested by my lecturer, the following  
consideration came to me:

	Kant and Hume both suggest we form a "web of beliefs" based on  
experiences, and when we acquire new beliefs we link them to prior  
beliefs in such a web, namely those which justify it in a more or  
less direct fashion. This is not unlike the idea that in act of  
reasoning, prior beliefs are often (or even always) 'sub-conciously',  
or implicitly used as underlying premises, something I don't believe  
many would deny.
	According to this line of thought, when one comes to a conclusion  
during the act of thought, one generally will have a set of premises,  
a set of intermediary conclusions, and a final conclusion. From  
personal experience, thought can be and tends to be rather chaotic so  
that one can sometimes lose track of how he arrived to a final  
conclusion, and is forced to trace his thought back to certain  
premisses by filling the gaps in order to obtain a clear, organized  
form of thought that is recordable and communicable. The interesting  
bit here is how we fill the gaps based on short term memory. It seems  
entirely plausible that we forget certain premises or intermediary  
conclusions and take them to be implicit, or that we "fill in the  
gaps" with something other than what had originally filled that 'gap'  
in our original line of thought.
	Come to think of it, when you intend to produce organized thought  
during the act of communication (writing down, talking), you tend to  
focus more than when you just think silently, as your audience needs  
to know how you get from premisses to conclusions. However as this is  
mentally taxing, I believe it is understandable why we cannot think  
like this constantly, and spend a consequent proportion of our  
thought time thinking 'freely', with fewer restrictions and less  
order, and this also form a consequent proportion of our beliefs in  
such a way: 'chaotically' (so to say), and occasionally order them by  
tracing them back to their origins by 'filling the gaps'.

	Assuming that nothing I have just stated is utterly wrong and/or  
shocking, let me get to the crux of the matter. In philosophy of  
mind, psychology, machine learning, etc... a lot is inferred from the  
analysis of people's thought, which itself is inferred from the  
analysis of their expression of this thought. However, a famous  
experiment in physics has left me doubting that this is a correct  
approach. In case you are not familiar with electron diffraction and  
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the long story short is that  
particles such as electrons exhibit bizarre wave-like properties when  
diffracted by two micro slits: they act as if single particles pass  
through both slits at once and interfere with themselves. Physicists  
have tried to understand this effect by determining which slit each  
particle goes through and have failed because when they observed the  
particles actually going through the slit, the bizarre behaviour did  
not occur: in short, the actual act of observation interfered with,  
altered the particles' behaviour.
	This is now accepted as an impossibility in quantum mechanics and  
is, it turns out, quite a fundamental principle holds quantum theory  
up. What this has to do with philosophy is that I suggest the  
following proposition: "The mind, like particles, does not exhibit  
the same behaviour when observed as it does when it is left  
undisturbed". I am not implying that the mind is like a particle or  
that quantum mechanics should be used to describe mental processes.  
It's just that when we express ourselves or write down our thoughts,  
or just try and 'focus' (on our own thoughts) in order to think  
clearly, we are not thinking the way we do when we're thinking  
naturally. In short, the organization of thoughts interferes with the  
thought process itself, as the implicit and 'sub-concious' nature of  
premisses and intermediate conclusions is lost, and their quantity  
may be inferior to the quantity called upon during natural thought.


And thus I turn to the BUPS community. Any thoughts, comments or  
suggestions concerning what to read for this sort of topic?

-- Edward Grefenstette.


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