One needs Bohm's pilot-wave plus this new back-action. A good reference is Bohm and Hiley's, The Undivided Universe. Pages 345-6 discusses the back-action idea that I have taken much further.

The brain is the hidden-variable, or what the late John Bell called the "beable". The Bohm pilot-wave is the mind. The nonlocal contextual Bohm quantum force is how mind acts on brain in a decision. The back-action from brain beable to the pilot-wave is how the brain literally changes its mind. This last thing can't happen in ordinary quantum mechanics which has no back-action.

Back-action is a fundamental part of the universe. This was shown by Dimitri Nanopoulos using superstring theory. Coupling of matter to the thermal environment masks the back-action. DNA/RNA/proteins have learned how to build a thermal shield around key control electron switches in microtubules. This enables back-action enough time, free from thermal disruption, to self-organize the brain.

All of this is visualizable in terms of quantum chaos theory in Bohm's sense in which the beables move on a fitness landscape in classical configuration space propelled both by the Bohm quantum force and external gauge field stimuli from outer world. This Santa Fe Institute picture is explained in Chapter 5 of Ron Kauffman's book, The Origins of Order. Because of back-action the fitness landscape changes due to the actual path of the brain-beable. This does not happen in ordinary quantum mechanics because of the thermal decoherence.

Qualia (i.e., perceptions, feelings, ideas, experiences of all kinds) are attractors on the fitness landscape. You experience a quale when your brain-beable system point is captured (temporarily) by the attractor corresponding to that quale. Each quale is essentially an eigenfunction of the observable that defines "fitness" or "perspective" or a "frame of mind" which is something like a "paradigm" or a "mind-set", maybe, even a "character structure". The Darwinian natural selection pressure is like a random stochastic driving force on the brain-beable which is also feeling the self-organization from the quantum force. Every movement of the beable forces a change over the entire fitness landscape which in turn changes the path of the beable in configuration space. This is learning or adaptation. Both the mental fitness landscape from quantum Hilbert space and the material brain beable in classical configuration space co-evolve. This co-evolution does not happen in ordinary quantum mechanics. The co-evolution from back-action in thermally-protected beables is the essential signature of all life (i.e. of all quantum self-organizing adaptive systems). Back-action is the missing piece in the puzzle of the role of mind in the universe.

This fundamental theory of sentience immediately suggests how to make a new kind of naturally conscious computing chip from quantum dots, wires and wells using nanotechnology by emulating the carbon-based microtubule switching network in the silicon-based solid-state. The thermally protected macroscopic quantum pilot wave attached to suitable tiny switching devices is the "Soul of The Machine".

LBC: Then the only element of locality that that exists in quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of collapse, or partial collapse.

I think most people think of collapse as a nonlocal superluminal process. Einstein certainly did. It was his motivation for the EPR paper. One of his thought experiments was the collapsing spherical wave in the detection of a single photon or electron. He definitely thought of this collapse as a faster-than-light process. This has nothing to do with communication faster than light which is not possible in orthodox quantum theory because of the zero back-action. With non-zero back-action the formerly "uncontrollable" randomness of quantum sequences become controllable because of the feedback loop between pilot-wave and its attached beable.

See The Cosmic Code by the late Heinz Pagels for a good discussion of uncontrollable quantum randomness. Ironically, Pages spends part of that book debunking quantum theories of consciousness and my claims that precognition is possible as a physical phenomenon. He ends his book with a dream in which he falls to his death off a mountain and understands the meaning of the universe as he falls. In fact, he died shortly thereafter falling off a mountain in Aspen, Colorado.

In traditional Copenhagen explanation of EPR, one observer collapses the pair wave function over a spacelike separation to explain the perfect correlation (or anti-correlation depending on parity) for parallel polarizers (or more generally the cos^ theta or sin^2 theta for photons, theta/2 for electrons, joint probabilities).

LBC: Then the capacity to convert a conscious thought, within a quantum consciousness model, is for some element of state reduction to occur.

No, only in the Hameroff-Penrose "orch OR" and the Stapp "R" models is this the case. There is NO COLLAPSE in the Bohm hidden-variable theory.

LBC: For a quantum system in a strange attractor the process of state reduction and de-reduction by the driving term is continual.

No, this is confounding the Bohm with the Bohr-based models. The Q-based "mindscape" or "fitness landscape" is a hypersuface in the classical configuration space of the material beable (system point) attached to the pilot-wave psi that makes the quantum potential Q = -(hbar^2/2m)(Laplacian|psi|)/|psi| for nonrelativistic particle mechanics. For simplicity, think of only one dimer, so m is the mass of the electron that controls the conformation of the dimer, as is explained very clearly in the Hameroff-Penrose papers now on-line. The beable (electron in this over-simplified toy model) rolls around the fitness landscape propelled by the force -gradQ + Fext. Where Fext is the net external environmental force from electromagnetic fields and chemical potential gradients. -gradQ is the intrinsic self-organization force while Fext is the effect of Darwinian natural selection pressures in the picture given by Stuart Kauffman in The Origins of Order. The "observable" in this case is the position of the electron in physical space. For more than one electron, we are in configuration space of 3N dimensions for N electrons. Therefore, the "mindscape" can be pictured as a 2-dimensional hypersurface with two dimples in it corresponding to the two basins of attraction of this electronic biocomputing switch that obeys a non-Boolean "quantum logic" because of the superposition principle. This single-electron of my toy-model is a baby-Frohlich mode. It grows up into an adult when N gets much larger than 1. If Hawking can get away with "baby universes", I can get away with "baby Frohlich modes"! :-)

Now in ordinary quantum mechanics, Q is fixed by the boundary conditions on psi. Now it may well be that changes in these boundary conditions are important in the actual biology. Also cyclic changes in boundary conditions should give rise to topological Berry phases. These topology effects may be crucial to the biology. But that is all ordinary quantum mechanics that I want to ignore temporarily for now in order to get the really new idea that I am proposing across. You will all see that what I am doing here and now, in some detail, is not fairly characterized as a "cheap imitation" as Hameroff in an angry mood has intemperately charged. But I forgive him! :-)

The back-action idea means that psi, and therefore Q, are DIRECTLY dependent on the actual position of the beable in configuration space. This is explained clearly in Bohm and Hiley's The Undivided Universe, 14.6, p. 345 "Extension of our approach beyond the domain of current quantum theory". They show how this idea of back-action connects to the dissipation terms of both Nanopoulos (from bottom-up superstring theory) and Prigogine (from top-down irreversible far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics with the "super-Liouville operator"). Prigogine got the Nobel Prize in chemistry for that top-down model. Therefore, the Q-mindscape changes with the actual path of the beable in configuration space. In turn, this modifies the actual path of the beable because of -gradQ. So we have an exquisite self-organizing adaptive system in which the Q changes or "learns" depending on the "experience" of the beable provided by Fext. Now, any physicist in his right mind looking this will see it is a thought-experiment for a proto-type or "baby" version of an intelligent quantum nano-machine in which Q is a "mind" and the electron is a "body". Now, there is an assumption that I made which is that Q is stabilized against thermal disruptions. This feature is also in the Hameroff-Penrose model. "For I am a Pirate-King", therefore, I brutally, and without any sting of remorse, or qualm of conscience, "co-opt" whatever is good about their theory and reject what is bad. :-) What is bad, is their reliance on "collapse" or "reduction" whether it be "R", "OR" or "OOR". None of it is needed. Again there is no collapse in Bohm's theory. What is good is their thermal screening (maybe). But I have one of my own - the quantum Carnot effect. In a more realistic model with a high dimensional configuration space, the different qualia are simply basins of attraction in the Q + V mindscape. I also now explicitly include any classical potentials V though they are not mind-stuff because they are both local and context-independent. Note Fext = -gradV + Fnon-conservative. Q is both nonlocal and context-dependent. That is, Q changes as psi changes. So the Q-force depends on psi as well as the separations between the particles. This is qualitatively unlike any classical force field. Furthermore, the Q-forces need not diminish with separations between the particles which is the basic explanation for "the binding problem" of consciousness theory.

What replaces "orch OR" in my above back-action modified extension of Bohm's theory beyond ordinary quantum mechanics? It is simply the momentary capture of the beable by an attractor on the mindscape. Each attractor is a possible "quale" lying there dormant or waiting as "inactive information" to use the language of Bohm and Hiley. The empty eigenfunctions of the observable are ontological not epistemological in Bohm's theory in contrast to Bohr's. The observable (position of the electron in the toy-model above) is the criterion of "fitness" in Stuart Kaufmann's sense. Each quale attractor on the mindscape is an eigenfunction of the "fitness" observable. Q is clearly an "internal representation" of the history of the material beable buffeted about by Fext. Q is changing as the history of the beable unfolds. But it is doing so in a very complex self-referential way, because each change in Q changes the mental force of Q on the beable. So it would be changing itself entirely, were it not for the mutational Fext!

LBC: The process of state reduction is then a self-driven mechanism that "objectifies' some or all of the quantum states of the "mindscape" to the outside world. In some sense both the beable and the pilot wave are hidden variables. The beable becomes the particle of a measurement outcome and the pilot wave is absorbed or collapsed as the beable settles in to an attractor.

Forget all this "state reduction". It's a poison of the mind that I have the antidote for. Yes, I have,above, clearly explained the "self-driven mechanism" you seek correctly being true to Bohm's theory. As far as "reduction" is concerned "There ain't no there, there." :-)

LBC:What I meant by absorbed is that the continuity equation is violated, or at least violated on some course grained level.

That's true, but the back-action effect has a long decay time unless N the number of particles is very large. It goes as t/N. That is not the same as reduction. In my model the electrons in the dimers form the Q-mindscape and N electrons have a t that is 10^20 longer than the t for N protons according to Nanopoulos's formula. So even taking N = 10^27 this t/N is still 100 years! Nothing to do with a momentary experience. It ain't collapse. Decay of Q by back-action dissipation is not collapse in Bohr's epistemological sense. It is an ontological decline an objective smoothing of the hills and valleys of the mindscape.

LBC: If the pilot wave under the action of Q is caused to split into a vast number of vortices or whorls then the fined grained details of the behavior of these small branches of the pilot wave "fall through the cracks."

Fine, but this is also not to be confused with Bohr's collapse. There is no incoherent uncontrollable randomization. The degree of fractalness if you like may ebb and flow in different regions of the mindscape. That's what I said about the mindscape bifurcating with new qualia etc.

LBC: Either that, or the pilot wave literally vanishes and its continuity is strictly violated. For a Hamiltonian chaotic system the first case is obviously true. For a strange attractor case it is a subtle issue as to whether the pilot wave is literally eaten, or if fine grained details of it are lost to the environment.

Don't forget, the idea here is that living systems are protected against environmental decoherence. Once that happens the cat is a dead duck! :-) What I mean is that the time scale for environmental decay is the lifespan of the organism for the protected beables whose pilot-wave forms the stable mindscape. We do have this sense of a permanent self - that is the Q-mindscape I am thinking of in the toy model.

LBC: This is why I am going through the agony of setting up some of this machinery. Much of this is to me an open question.

OK at least now I see where you were coming from. Yes, you are right, It IS "subtle".

LBC: The dichotomy between the beable and the pilot wave is becoming to me increasingly similar, but not identical, to the duality between the position and momentum representations in standard quantum mechanics.

The position and momentum duality is purely in the pilot-wave itself. As you well know is simply the Fourier transform that you can associate with noncommuting operators and the symplectic structure of phase space.

LBC: I have performed a transformation on the variables that makes the modified Hamiltonian-Jacobi equation and the continuity equation for the pilot wave more symmetrical.

Now that's cool! You may be on to something there. I eagerly await the mathematics.

LBC: I'll try to finish the calcuations this weekend and finish writing that paper. The two equations have a Q_{+-}, where the quantum potential is split into two parts that the two equations share. The advantage of doing this is that the Poisson brackets of classical mechanics are more easily seen to have an hbar^2 correction to them that reflect the quantum corrections to classical mechanics.

Cool! :-)

LBH: Further, these corrections as symplectic transforms on the classical variables are seen to be mapped into the generators of the unitary transformations of the total wave function. I am trying to find a long exact sequence for this fibration. This part will take a litle bit of time.

Double Cool! :-)

LBC: The longer term hope is that an imaginary time, or equivalently imaginary transform elements, will push this into the regeme of strange attractor physics.

JS: Triple Cool! :-)

LBC: I think that there is a similarity between what goes on with quantum gravity or quantum fields in curved spacetime and the self-collapse, or collapse without collapse of back-action, or quantum strange attractor physics.

JS: Yes, that smells right to my precognitive intuition or remote-viewing. :-)

LBC: The business I did about the pilot wave as it approaches the event horizon of a black hole as seen be a distant observer shares some peculiarities. The pilot wave becomes spread into an arbitrarily thin membrane over the event horizon and Q ---> 0. It shares some features similar to collapse. What is questionable is whether the process, while similar in our putative quantum consciousness, is identical or directly due to the action of quantum gravity or superstring theories.

Yes, but that is due to significant classical spacetime curvature which does not happen over nanometer distances in the living brain or body. Q does not collapse to zero in the experience of a quale (i.e., a basic mental event that is an attractor on the mindscape). The beable simply passes through the attractor, like Ulysses lingers awhile, and then moves on for new adventures. An obsession is simply a beable trapped in a very deep attractor. The motions of the beable on the Q-fitness landscape in configuration space can be classically chaotic. However, see Dewdney's discussion of the kicked rotator.

LBC: I have heard this man's name I believe, but I need a reference.

JS: http://zaphod.phys.port.ac.uk/quantum/paper1/node4.html

Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:37:31 -0800

Paul Bains wrote:

Jack, you don't like 'philosophy'.

No I don't mean I don't like philosophy. I was partly joking. What I mean't was that the professional linguistic academic philosophers who don't know enough modern physics have dominated the C field up til now and taken it down tortuous largely irrelevant blind alleys.

But isn't philosophy involved in the creation of concepts like matter and mind.

Certainly.

Are there 'scientific concepts' in distinction to 'philosophical' ones?

Yes, but all scientific concepts have a philosophical aspect, but not all philosophical concepts have a scientific aspect.

When you knock Bohm's implicate order stuff are you including the philosophical musings in The Undivided Universe?

I am not really knocking it strategically in the long term. "Implicate order", like "pregeometry", "It from bit." etc are ideas whose time has not yet come. In contrast, Bohm's earlier "pilot wave" is an idea whose time has come, and Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation is an idea whose time has long passed.

What I am objecting to is that the non-physicists have prematurely seized upon "implicate order" as a panacea for the Perennial Philosophy.

Implicate order says that there is a primordial level of reality in which both mind and matter emerge. Well it may be the W2 world of superstrings that Nanopoulos writes about. But my point is that right now the pilot-wave with back-action (which appears as the Nanopoulos "friction" term in his density matrix replacement of the reversible Schrodinger equation) is the proper language to make quick practical advances in C-theory because of its clear mathematical link to the theory of complex adaptive systems being developed at the Santa Fe Institure.

Would you bother to look at Jibu and Yasue's "Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness".

I have a copy of it but have not yet had time to read it. When I do you can be sure I will post a detailed review.

... or have they lost the plot?. Like me.

Don't know yet. :-)

Raymond Ruyer refers to de Broglie's "Continuity and Discontinuity". Was this written after he'd given up his pilot wave approach on Pauli's recommendation.

Don't know. Pauli was an ardent Copenhagenian desciple of Bohr's who eventually became a patient of Jung's and shifted into mystical synchronicity and alchemical studies in his dying process. Bohr's paradigm is inherently mystical and connected with Eastern philosophy as Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (both with my significant help) have made popular. All of us physicists have been deluded by Bohr's charisma, but my pilot-wave/backaction ideas are really based upon Einstein's opposition to Bohr. Einstein was correct on the objectivity or reality but wrong on the necessity for locality. Bohr was wrong on the idea that led to "observer creation of reality", but right on the need for a "nonlocal" or "wholistic" element to reality. Einstein late in life began to doubt his requirement for locality, so I think I am carrying on Einstein's battle against Bohr's Ghost. Bohm wrote his pilot-wave theory directly under Einstein's influence at princeton even though Einstein did not like the end-result because it was highly nonlocal.

... just a few questions...I know you're busy - you've got to be fighting off the heathens

You ask good thought-provoking questions. Keep doing it.

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 18:36:22 +0100 (BST)

From: Jack Sarfatti

To: jcs-online@psyche.zynet.co.uk

Jack Sarfatti wrote:

The ["conscious quantum computing"] chips will write novels, poetry, do scientific research, compose music, play games, have conversations with humans etc. But they will be creative, playful etc, not like the stilted deterministic AI programs of today. Robin Faichney wrote:

You mean they will be creative and playful without having to be so designed, other than having a "quantum pilot-wave" in there somewhere? Sounds like "and here a miracle happens" to me. Why couldn't more complex AI progams and faster hardware than we have today not do all this and more? Exactly what is it about human behaviour that cannot be explained in terms of information processing, within the capacity of any sufficiently powerful and appropriately programmed computer? Hint: this has been discussed, but by philosophers, not physicists. You might start by taking a look at The Mind's I, edited by Dennett and Hofstadter.

If we put the chips in Android bodies they will be "people". No doubt old people who are rich enough will transform into cyborgs to increase their lifespan. All of this is in Bernal's Essay The World, The Flesh and The Devil.

Robin Faichney wrote:

I sometimes enjoy science fiction, but I tend to find it annoying when the author obviously hasn't done very much research. In this case, of course, that means philosophical research.

My point is, that these quantum devices will display objective behavior just as complex and creative as the objective behavior of the most intelligent members of our species. So if we accept that humans are not zombies, then we must do the same with these new arrivals to the scene.

Robin Faichney wrote:

Slight difference between these cases: *we* are humans, so Occam's razor says other humans are conscious, like us. Unless you're right about the miraculous nature of the quantum pilot wave, any machine will do just what it's designed to do, so Occams' razor says we shouldn't invoke consciousness to explain its behaviour.

No one actually uses b) (i.e. the idea that it is the wave function that is the real hidden variable not the actual particle posiitons) -- not even Holland. He mentions it only in passing.

In <31da5f83.97171536@news.enter.net> chronos@enter.net (Robert G. Flower) wrote:

I agree. It is Holland's way of showing how absurd the Copenhagen viewpoint can be.

Robert G. Flower wrote:

At one point, I suspected this was an intentional conspiracy among Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli and their followers seeking get their theories connected with applications that would have economic and military importance. Once that happened, their credo ("who cares what it *means* as long as the formulas work") would become irresistable among working physicists in the trenches. The pre-war tension might have pushed this along.

But I never found (without looking exhaustively) *any* evidence for such a crass conspiracy. So now I just don't know. The virulent opposition to Bohm's proposals is also inexplicable on scientific grounds alone, as Hollands points out.

Robert G. Flower replied:

Maybe this is related: Strauss' reminiscences at the Einstein Cenenntial in 1979:

When I first met him [this would have been ~1944 when Einstein was 65] .. he said to me, 'I have recently lost confidence in the principle of *no action at a distance* and therefore have tried to base physics on the following ideas.'

He said he had observed that if you take the exponential of i times the Euclidean or Minkowski distance as the kernel of an integral transform, then the inverse of that transform has the conjugate complex expression as kernel. In other words, he was saying that this is a Hermitian operator. And he was wondering what is the set of metrics that this property characterizes; that is, you want to look at he totality of all possible metrics such that if you take e to the i times the distance as kernel of an integral transform, this kernel is Hermitian.

The way I killed his interest in this project was by finding too large a manifold of solutions. He felt that physics could not permit that many solutions [I presume this means the nonlocal ones], and if you now put in additional conditions they again assume a differential nature so at least the principle on which he wanted to build his attack, namely, that *there is action at a distance*, would then again be violated.

Ernst Strauss

(in Some Strangeness in the Proportion

(H. Woolf, ed.; Addison-Wesley, pp 481-484)

Strauss' phrase "action at a distance" can be taken to mean "nonlocality" And it fits with Pais' remark that in the 1940's "Einstein became interested in whether the fundamental equations of physics might have a structure other than partial differential equations." [Subtle is the Lord, p. 347]. Pais mentions that some of the joint Einstein-Strauss work along these lines remains unpublished.

Best regards,

Bob Flower

Applied Science Associates

Technology Transfer - Quality Control Engineering

Instrumentation & Testing

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 13:56:32 -0700

From: sarfatti@ix.netcom.com (Jack Sarfatti )

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 18:13:57 -0900 (PDT)

From: "Lawrence B. Crowell"

To: Jack Sarfatti

Robert G. Flower wrote:

To say that "quale are patterns of Q" sounds like a late-1990's rework of E.H. Walker's early-1970's proposal that "consciousness is the hidden variable" -- a remarkable speculation that deserves full exploration, but hardly a complete theory that "solves this problem."

No, that idea of Evan's is exactly wrong. Q is not the hidden variable. The particle positions are the hidden variables. Q is simply a form of the mental pilot wave. I already went through all this with Flannagan. Robert G. Flower replied:

Now I understand (and agree with) your point. I think you and Flanagan were using "hidden variable" in 2 different senses, and it helps to explain that the term can have contradictory meanings:

a. in conventional (Copenhagen) sense, "hidden variable" is a parameter needed "in addition to the wavefunction* to determine the outcome of an individual experiment (see Undivided Universe, sec. 6.5, p. 116). This is the meaning used in books like Belinfante's Survey of Hidden Variable Theories. In this sense, electron spin was a hidden variable prior to Dirac's magnetic electron theory. Or in a gas, molecule positions/momenta are hidden w/r/t thermodynamic state variables (T, P, V).

b. Holland (QTM, p. 107) was first, to my knowledge, to turn the conventional meaning on its head by taking the viewpoint that psi is the real hidden variable "in that we only derive information about it by observing the particle" (ie, local expectation values x(t)). Most causal QM theories seem to take this view.