Of course no one *knows* but it's not just pulled out of the air. I
read a paper several years ago that showed that what we generally regard
as "classical" randomness, e.g. coin flips, dice rolls, ... are really
strongly influenced by quantum randomness via the timing of nerve
impluses. I tried to look up the paper on arXiv just now but I don't
remember the author. But my inference from the paper was that
variations of body control, which would include eye movement and
perception, was subject to small quantum induced fluctuations on a
millisecond time scale.
Brent
On 10/8/2015 9:31 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:14 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>wrote:
​ > ​
QM says that the brains will very quickly (microseconds) diverge.
​You pulled that microsecond figure straight out of the air. Nobody
knows exactly how long it would take for quantum indeterminacy to make
2 brains diverge significantly more than, for example, taking a sip of
coffee; but I would bet money it would take many millions (if not
billions) of microseconds. ​
John K Clark
On 10/6/2015 10:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
It's not clear to me who is arguing for what. Stathis may
think that consciousness is independent of it's physical
substrate, but I don't see that he's arguing that here.
He's arguing that there can be more that one instance of
"the same" consciousness.
Yes, like for example when you are duplicated at W and M, but
still in the box, before opening the box. There are two
instantiation of the same consciousness. From the 1p view, the
person can be consistently said to be unique, at both place at
once. Once she opens the door, she get the bit of information
which differentiate her from her doppelganger.
But this is inconsistent with QM. Your view of conscious thoughts
as instantiated by computation implicitly assumes deterministic,
classical evolution of the brain, so that two identical brains
with identical perceptual inputs will have identical thought
sequences, in analogy to two computers running the same program.
As the computations are instantiated in arithmetic they are
necessarily a unity, as there can be only a single number 2. But
QM says that the brains will very quickly (microseconds) diverge.
So if duplication were possible this could provide a test of your
theory - do the duplicate's thoughts diverge even before the door
is opened. Of course duplication of brains or people is not
possible - but duplication of computers is. Computers are
deliberately designed to act deterministically; we want them to
instantiate arithmetic, not QM. Yet they do instantiate QM and
although they will not diverge quickly, they too will diverge.
Brent
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