Appendix II. Survival AdvantageSarfatti Note. Not so fast. It is arguable whether all experiences are classical. Henry is a very straight fellow and has probably not experienced the effects of powerful psychedelic drugs. It is certainly possible to experience directly the coherent superposition of mutually exclusive classical branches. If these branches correspond to different attractors as in Bohm's model, the attractor landscape in phase space, is all relative to a particular complete set of commuting top-level brain observable operators. But the action of the drug alters the landscape increasing the Schrodinger Cat like tunnelling rate between the attractors as in the mesoscopic SQUID experiments by Leggett et-al. The result is that the altered state of consciousness has new attractors that correspond to eigenfunctions of a new complete set of brain observables that do not commute with the first set. A new attractor is a coherent superposition of all of the old ones. Hence we experience alternate realities and "photographs of other worlds". In addition to all this conventional quantum stuff, the very structure of the brain observables are self-modified by the quantum jumps. This is an emergent collective effect not found at the lower levels.Contemporary quantum theory does not have any definite rule that specifies where the collapses occur. The proposal adopted here is designed to produce a simultaneous resolution of the quantum measurement problem and the mind-matter problem. Thus the proposal is justified by the fact that it produces a coherent model of reality that accords with our actual experience. Yet the deeper question arises: Why should the world be this way, and not some other way? Why should the collapses be to single high-level classical branches, rather than to either lower-level states, such as firings of individual neurons, or to higher-level states that might include, for example, many classical branches.
If we suppose that the determination of where the collapses occur is fixed not by some a priori principle but by habits that become ingrained into nature, or by some yet-to-be discovered characteristic of matter that does not single-out the classical branches ab initio, then the question arises: Is the placement of the collapses at high-level classical branches, as specified in our model, favorable to survival of the organism? If so, then there would be an evolutionary pressure for the collapse location to migrate, in our species, to this high-level placement. The fact that the collapses, and hence the accompanying experiences, are classical and high-level would then be consequences of underlying causes, rather than being simply an unexplained fact of nature: it would he advantageous to the survival of the organism to tie whatever fundamental property controls collapses to the high-level classical states of our model.
In fact, it is evident that placement of the collapses at a lower level would introduce a disruptive stochastic element into the dynamical development of the system. Any sort of dynamical process designed to allow the organism to respond in an optimal way to its environmental situation would have a tendency to be disrupted by the introduction of stochastically instituted low-level collapses, which will not always be to states that are strictly orthogonal. Thus there would be an evolutionary pressure that would tend to push the collapses to higher levels. On the other hand, this pressure would cease once the highest possible level of classically specified branches is reached. The reason is that in order for the organism to learn there must be records of what it has done, and these records must be able to control future actions. But these properties are essentially the properties by which we have defined "classical".Sarfatti Note. Henry is assuming retarded causality and not taking the teleological actions from the future inherent in the multiple time generalization of quantum mechanics of Aharanov and students.
Superpositions of such classical states have, because of the local character of the interaction terms in the quantum mechanical laws, no ability to reproduce themselves, or to control future actions of the organism. Thus there should be no migration of the location of the collapse to levels higher than those specified in our model.Sarfatti Note. Here Henry appears to thoroughly demolish Murray Gell-Mann's "Flapdoodle" argument in the book The Quark and the Jaguar. There is a real battle between Cal Tech and U.C. Berkeley here. Berkeley lost the quark-S matrix battle. Stapp was a champion of Chew's defeated S-Matrix "bootstrap" in the 60's and 70's. For readers of sci.physics on the usenet, Henry, in the next installment, pulls the rug out from under quantum cosmology in general, and Michael Clive Prices's relentless advocacy for a traditional many-worlds interpretation of quantum reality, in particular.
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