Cosmos Café: Integrating Science, Art, and Time [6/5/18]

Yeah Rosen is not doing simple stuff and I appreciate that some don’t want to do the heavy lifting that others are attracted to. A special edition might be for those who like that kind of thing.

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I think you are right about that. I find myself drawn to James very much as he is one of the few psychologists who writes really well. It is said he wrote psychology like a novelist and that his brother, Henry, wrote novels like a psychologist. That is wonderfully ironic. Simondon, whom Benerji writes about, is also concerned with agency but none of this is light reading. What I had tried to do with our exercise last time on the Manning call, was to explore how the use of pronouns is actually very different at the micro level from person to person. I have yet to review that episode but I imagine there are some actualities that we can amplify further and start to develop the Semiotic Self in much greater detail. We are lagging way behind in the phenomenology department. We are, in my view, communicators in motion between dimensions. But this is probably a bigger project than what can happen on a Cafe. Irreducible Mind, which we briefly touched upon, has tons of stuff on James.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Exploring Simondon

Geoffrey, I agree that on the so called ‘measurement problem’ (wavefunction collapse, etc.) there is lot of controversy. However, most of the controversy is about the ontology of the wavefunction not if the collapse needs a conscious observer. I know of almost no physicists who defends the “role of the conscious observer” in quantum physics (Wheeler was perhaps a notable exception). The point is that the laws of QP, and which involve the ‘wavefunction collapse’ or ‘state reduction’, did not come into being with the existence of human observers, but are inherent laws of the material cosmos and which exist since the times of the Big Bang billions of years ago, i.e., much earlier than any conscious observer could exist (at least in the physical domain). What people interpret misleadingly is the fact that quantum phenomena are contextual, which means that the very same quantum system responds to an experiment according to the experimental setup. To put it bluntly, if one measures a quantum system with a specific experiment it appears with some properties, if one changes the experimental arrangement, the same system with the same initial conditions appears as having eventually the opposite properties (typical example: the wave-particle duality of the double slit experiment). This however has nothing to do with a conscious observer, it is something that holds also if nobody is observing.

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Well, I have seen some discussion of this more at the edges of mainstream physics, but I agree with your assessment. I’m more interested in the wave function itself and the wave/particle duality as having some relation to the « field effects » we have been discussing, although that, as you pointed out in the discussion with Debashish, is also pure speculation. I think the jury is still out on whether quantum physics has much to say about consciousness. What we’ve been discussing lately is Rovelli’s work on quantum gravity and its relation to thhe phenomena of time, which seems a more rewarding pursuit.

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Yes, relational time and relational quantum mechanics is interesting and one might also draw some parallels with Sri Aurobindo’s vision of matter and space-time. Meanwhile… I will go through this session and read this thread more in detail to understand better what you have elaborated on.

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Here is the link to the Rethinking Time thread, @MarcoMasi : Rethinking Time

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