Re: Quantum thought?

[nj8 <nj8@ntlworld.com>]

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A couple of quick points.

1) I take it that Sartre (in Nausea and elsewhere), is doing 
phenomenology, which is indeed an attempt to identify the actual 
conditions of experience rather than our conceptual description so of it.

2) "The mind, like particles, does not exhibit  the same behaviour when 
observed as it does when it is left  undisturbed"

Well, I don't know whether the association with sub-atomic particles is 
apt, but I take your point. It's impossible, seems to me, to know 
exactly what goes on in most of our trains of thought. The best we can 
do is to reconstruct these, and in doing so we tend to fit them into a 
framework of rationality which may be an abstract description of the 
sort of processes we undergo (one of the problems is whether 
rationality, so described, can be prescriptive ..  or whether it is just 
descriptive).

Reading? Umm, I don't know, though there's a lot of material on 
rationality, and Quine, rather than Hume or Kant, is the name I 
associate with the idea of a web of belief. But then I think that Hume's 
philosophy of mind is naturalistic, aiming to downplay the explanatory 
value idea of rationality.

best
nick jones



Edward Grefenstette wrote:

> To reply to this message or start a new topic please email: 
> BUPS-DIS@bups.org
>
>
> 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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