KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Response 15 (to C37 by John Mikes)

KEEP THE MIND IN AS-IF
by Herbert FJ Müller
18 June 2001, posted 17 July 2001

My new responses are in [brackets].

[1]
Re. {8} « … Our language, our thoughts are space-time based conceptual ideas, unless paradoxical. The atemporality of a change or a causal connection disturbs a wording, even thinking. Even the time-reversal in QM is mostly unnatural and one has to 'force' the mind to accept its use. We simply CANNOT think in reversing cause and effect. I am sorry to state that this is my problem as well. 'Metaphysical' may be anything outside one's 'physical' system belief, which will be put as uncertain below. »

[2]
[ The question for me is here : what do such difficulties mean ? We make up concepts like time. "Time" grasps (describes, and can be used to quantify) the flow of experience, which is more or less straightforward. Causes cause effects among other things because they are earlier, one state of affairs causes another which ensues from it, or into which it develops. A notion of time-reversal-in-itself is "unnatural" because it contradicts the function of a self-made mental tool as we have made it. It is like claiming that a sewing machine is an airplane, or that 2+2=5 : it does not work because we have defined the numbers so that 2+2=4 (ie, if you count on your fingers that is how it agreed that is named). ]

[3]
[ Some events can be described by the same formalism backward in time as forward, e.g., in Feynman diagrams. This does not mean that experience flows backward, but that such events can be served by the same conceptual tool, ie., handling them as though they happened in either direction, which may sometimes facilitate things - but evidently it can also cause conceptual problems. (One of the web-sites dealing with this question is called "halfbakery", which may be more correct than to say that our thinking is "obsolete" {8}, another site says time reversal is an oxymoron. Perhaps we might aspire to advance from half-baked to three-quarters-baked.) ]

[ Some other notions are on the other hand perhaps over-cooked and used with too little reflection, such as "solipsism" and "physical world" {14,19}, where the question of MIR versus as-if-MIR (construction) does not even come up; instead of denying a physical world, the mentioned discussants {19} might instead say that "there is no proof of static-MIR - of course not, since we made it up".) The "physical thinking" {21} would then be "static-MIR-thinking". Concerning solipsism, cf TA8 C3. ]

[4]
[ A definition of time reversal I found is "The operation of replacing time t by time -t. The symmetry of time reversal is known as T invariance. As with CP violation T violation occurs in weak interactions of kaon decays." (Harris) ]

[5]
[ In my understanding this refers to a human operation, not to something happening in or by itself. It means being able to describe an event the same way backward as forward along a created time axis. This is clearly not possible for most events, such as a glass falling from a table and spilling its contents on the floor while breaking. You can film this and then play the film backward, but you know that this is a trick, and in addition, the second event is the opposite of the first one, not the same. The surprising thing, if anything, is not that there is 'time-symmetry-breaking', but that some sub-atomic events can actually be described with the same formalism in both directions, in a T invariant manner. ]

[6]
[ I also spent a part of a hot afternoon looking for a definition of "acausality", but the internet disgorged only nebulous ones. Then I came across the statement that "The existence and uniqueness of the function f is elementary and follows from the fact that Sa is an acausal hypersurface". Learning that an acausal hypersurface is a fact from which something else can follow made me stop and pour myself a drink. I am afraid I cannot help here, but others may do better. Until such help arrives, I will assume that the idea of acausality is related to Aristotle's notion of the unmoved mover (but I have too little material to try this out), and that both of these are related to our building mental mind-nature forms within unstructured experience. ]

[7]
[ Concerning {22-23} I am still not certain whether or not JM assumes a basic (i.e., ontological) subject-object split (à la Descartes for instance). In my estimation this question is fundamental and needs to be clarified, if one wants a useful discussion : because MIR-belief is an immediate consequence of such primary s/o split assumption. So far as I can determine, he does. For instance {23}, "the jury is out : a choice between a supernatural creating force and a category mismatch" (he refers to the creation of something from nothing). The mentioned choice seems to be between two explanations for a mind-independent (and thus mind-less) world origin, though other interpretations may be possible for creationism. This seems to imply an (MIR-ontological) is-ness status for that world, excluding subjective experience (which one would then presumably secondarily try to explain in objective terms, like everything else.) ]

[8]
[ Religious explanations can (but do probably not always) have the advantage of not primarily excluding the mind, since they do not demand an objective view, but the disadvantage that for reasons of stability and completeness (wholiness) they tend to prohibit doubt in their pronouncements. Objective approaches have the advantage of allowing, even encouraging, doubt, but the disadvantage of MIR-mindlessness, which is their basis. The jury might eventually come out in favor of a 0-D view, because its basis of thinking includes unity (completeness) of experience, which can still be combined with as-if-MIR procedures. One can then ask two types of question : (i) how do we qualify and structure the universe (i.e., the originally undivided mind-and-world experience) including a pragmatic subject-object-split-structure where useful, and (ii) in case we treat the development of the world pragmatically as-if it were mind-independent, what are helpful views of its origins in time ? ]

[9]
[ For the latter it is of interest that there are competitors for the big-bang view, such as an "ekpyrotic model", which "takes place in 11 dimensions, six of which are rolled up and can be safely ignored. In that effectively five-dimensional space float two perfectly flat four-dimensional membranes, like sheets drying on parallel clotheslines. One of the sheets is our universe; the other, a "hidden" parallel universe … [which] spontaneously sheds a membrane that slowly floats toward our universe … and splats into our universe, whereupon some of the energy of the collision becomes the energy that make up our cosmos … " (Science 292 p.189, 13 April 2001). This sounds poetic, and more such might be expected. Considering that "we" (i.e., Archimedes, Fermat, Descartes, et al.) invented coordinates and dimensions in order to handle the extension aspect of experience, it is intriguing to contemplate how six dimensions can roll up. ]

[10]
[ I am not against poetry at all, but perhaps some theoretical physicists are offended in case they are told that this is what they are doing. Really this is all anyone can do. We build (poiein, construct, compose) the universe, namely self-and-world, with our qualities and forms within experience, which is given to us. Fiction and fact differ in the purposes, viability, and usefulness of what is created. ]

[11]
[ {37} mentions a 'recent change in the meaning of 'brain' '; I am not sure what JM refers to here. In my opinion any kind of material brain notion (and any 'brain' notion is material) arises in experience, as does any other kind of object or matter. For instance, to equate brain with mind, as one can at times read, is a 'category mistake' as JM calls it, because mind is not, and cannot become, matter, nor vice versa. 'Consciousness' has too many meanings to be very useful, and so does actually also 'mind'; for this reason I prefer 'subjective experience' (SE). This includes 'the unconscious' in the psychological sense, because when we deal with the unconscious we do so in SE after it becomes conscious. SE is the center from which to start, and within which we and our world remain caught. In unconsciousness due to general anaesthesia (and deep sleep, etc.) we are out of it, we plus our world are gone, although we can come back. This is a tough one, I know, because it contradicts the opinion of static MIR nature, but static MIR also arises within SE. ]

[12]
[ {38} is therefore not clear to me. In my opinion Chalmers asked the wrong question. Instead of asking 'how does experience arise from matter', which leads into a dead end because it doesn't, we can usefully study, for instance, how self- and object-structures arise within SE. ]

[13]
[ {40} Quantity and quality : quantity depends on human counting, quality does not. It is an MIR-type error to think that quantity is earlier, because it depends on availability of a number system, which animals do not have, but they do experience quality without having numbers. An askable question here is : how do numbers arise within a qualitative SE? The answer would refer to the iterative quality of (counting) activity; this is where quality can transit to quantity, but not vice versa. Once you are in an as-if-MIR objective state, on the other hand, this changes; then you can say that numbers are (as-if-)first, and qualities may follow, for instance a picture from many pixels, a herd from many cows, or also in physiology, where Gestalt vision is understood to result from many retinal, cortical, etc. events. But by then you may have lost the mind, unless you have your as-if firmly in cheek. ]

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REFERENCE

Harris D, Physics. Available at

<http://physics.about.com/science/physics/library/dict/bldeftimereversal.htm>

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Herbert FJ Muller