Another post of Steve's that I want to bring forward from Part 2 into our present discussion:
"I vote this as "shiny object of the day" - a quantum mechanic who says Idealism is just good physics:
Henry asserts that physics strongly supports metaphysical idealism (these speculations were published in Nature) he argues that the mainstream wants to reconcile QM with a 19th century vision of physics. He says this is wrong.
Quantum Mechanics, he says, deals with nothing but observations, observations have the courage of numbers, numbers are nothing but mental, thus all things are mental and the universe does not exist at all except as mind.
"Mind is fundamental, matter is merely an illusion and that is physics, not philosophy or religion."
Richard Conn Henry | Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics & Astronomy | Johns Hopkins University
And I think this has been posted on the thread (part 1) before:
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.Universe.pdf
"The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time,t hat the Universe is mental. According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” But physicists have not yet followed Galileo’s example, and convinced everyone of the wonders of quantum mechanics. As Sir Arthur Eddington explained: “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”
"Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George W. Bush’s science adviser, observes that “in the Copenhagen interpretation of microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles”, but then frames his remarks in terms of a non-existent“ underlying stuff ”. He points out that it is not true that matter “sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle... The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles.”
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
@Pharoah suggested we turn to metaphysics and now we are in the thick of it -- a good thing, metaphysics, a necessary place to visit in the effort to ground our philosophy and our science in what we do learn through lived experience in the world and what we can learn through experimentation. In discussing metaphysics we can confront the yet-unanswerable question of
"the underlying stuff" Henry refers to and -- realizing that we don't yet comprehend the stages in and of the physical
evolution of nature -- at least recognize that what we have learned about nature requires consciousness and mind.
I don't think as Richard Conn Henry does, or seems to, in the first quotation from him above, that "
Mind is fundamental, matter is merely an illusion and that is physics, not philosophy or religion." It's possible that I might agree with him if I read the whole of the paper Steve cites above.
{I didn't read it at the time Steve posted it, should have, and will do so tonight.} Based on my own reading in philosophy and science and on our two years of discussions here, my view is that what we need to understand in concrete detail is the evolution of nature as we experience it before we can account for the emergence of consciousness and mind in the course of that evolution. Neither radical dualism a la Descartes nor declarations that either 'mind' or 'matter' is fundamental have withstood developments in modern philosophy and science. We are in the middle of a process of attempting to understand the evolution of consciousness and mind that links us to what I take to be the undeniable actuality of physical and mental phenomena realized in our experience of being-in-the-world. The world we exist in is actual (see MP's writing regarding 'the perceptual faith' in the world's
actuality developed out of our species' experience and thought).
Modern science (physics, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics) has recognized in our time the evolution of innumerable physical 'systems' in nature, their interrelations and interactions, and their complexity. Whether ontologically developed quantum mechanics can provide us with insight into the origin, the grounding. of all evolving physical systems in nature is still a question awaiting an agreed-upon theory of qm and q field theory based in extended experimentation. Some of the founder's of qm attempted to think through to the ontology of the quantum substrate, but over the last hundred years most experimentation in qm has been satisfied with only epistemological claims that result from standard and limited measurement experiments. Regarding "the underlying stuff" that Henry refers to, many quantum theorists recognize that a deeper substrate of physical processes might underlie what we understand as the quantum substrate. The main point I'm trying to make is that we don't know enough about physical nature itself to do more than speculate about the origins of consciousness in nature.
