13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

The well known philosopher of mind, Jerry Foder, famously quipped that, "Not only have we no idea what conscious 'is,' we have no idea what it would be like to have an idea what consciousness 'is.'"

To my considerable surprise, I do have an idea what consciousness may be, and how to begin to test for it.

In the last blog, following Alfred North Whitehead, who thought in terms of Actuals giving rise to Possibles giving rise to Actual, and W. Heisenberg, among the giant founders of Quantum Mechanics, with a similar view, I proposed a testable hypothesis of a new dualism, the realm of the Possible, Res Potentia, and the realm of the Actual, Res Extensa. Res Potentia and Res Extensa really are linked by quantum measurement. In von Neumann's axiomatization of Quantum Mechanics, this is his R process, the "collapse of the wave function".

I quote Shimon Malin, a quantum field theorist, from "Physics and Whitehead" (Ed. T.E. Eastman and H. Keaton). "According to Heisenberg, the interplay between the two modes of quantum systems, being isolated and being measured, is an interplay between potentialities and actualities." [...]

Full article at npr.org

Thanks, Don! :)

Posted via email from Peace Jaway