I do have a few comments concerning TA1 R3.

<1>
re. [8]. The goal of deriving mind-nature structures from an 'unstructured matrix' puzzles me. Mental structures, at least, seem always to derive from highly ordered biological, environmental and cultural ones. It's the old question of where does information come from? I know of no satisfactory answers, but my own preference is to think that there exists a richer order than we ever experience from which the structures that we see derive. However, I doubt if this order contains space, time, causality or mentality in any form that we could readily recognise. Maybe the concepts of an unstructured origin and an unrecognisably structured origin converge!

<2>
re. [18]. I'm also a QM amateur. However, although QM can be applied in practise only to very simple (not necessarily very small) entities, it in principle applies to anything. As you know its modern development, Quantum field theory, is much used by cosmologists. There are contexts in which it makes sense to talk of the wave function, in the singular, of the universe.

<3>
re. [24]. I tend to think of the Copenhagen interpretation more as a cop-out than a revolutionary stance, adopted to let people get on with the practicalities of QM without getting too distracted by the huge background questions. As developed by von Neumann and others, it seems to lead to a form of idealism which may be just as illusory as the strong objectivist approach. Observers and observed are quantum entangled but are nevertheless usually (not always) treatable as separate with individual autonomy.

<4>
re. [28-31]. Decoherence of the density matrix is a concept which arises naturally from the mathematics of the wave function. It is what John Bell called a FAPP (for all practical purposes) theory. It certainly does dispose of all worries about Schrodinger's cat, as do the other more speculative and forced 'objective reduction' notions (Penrose's, GRW, etc.). What it does not do is dispose of more general questions about the reality of quantum superpositions. There have for instance been claims that both components of a superposed state have been observed (in SQUIDS). The Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing problem shows for sure that unobserved components of a superposition can have consequences for the observed world.

<5>
re. [42]. I don't think it is true to say that QM is a 'specialisation' in relation to preceding physical theories. Rather, it is a generalisation far more revolutionary than relativity theory, but one whose practical applicability is quite limited partly for technical reasons to do with the complexity of the maths and partly because simpler methods often suffice, just as you don't need to take special relativity into account when planning a car journey.

<6>
re. [43] Have made a start on writing about why QM must be expected to have a star part in any complete account of consciousness, though I agree that the precise nature of its role is very unclear at present.

Chris Nunn

[The author is a retired psychiatrist in the UK, with interest in quantum consciousness and related topics.
e-mail <chrisnunn@compuserve.com>]