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Article 6191 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott)
Subject: Re: Quantum consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Jun10.142117.25171@cs.yale.edu>
Keywords: quantum mechanics,consciousness
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Organization: Yale University, Department of Computer Science
References: <1992Jun9.213723.15570@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jun10.125059.23742@cs.ucf.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1992 14:21:17 GMT
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In article <1992Jun10.125059.23742@cs.ucf.edu>, clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke) writes:
|> In article <1992Jun9.213723.15570@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew  
|> McDermott) writes:
|> > 
|> > In article <1992Jun8.133106.293@cs.ucf.edu>, clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas  
|> Clarke) writes:
|> > |> >
|> > |> Isn't being conscious of non-superimposed states isomorphic to
|> > |> "choosing" which state to observe?
|> > |> 
|> > 
    [dm:]
|> > Only if you picture minds as being outside the universe and looking in.  
|> > If minds are just physical systems, then the problem of why a mind in a 
|> > given branch of the universe is conscious of just that branch is exactly
|> > the same as why a billiard ball collides only with billiard balls in its 
|> > branch of the universe.
|> 
|> Observer O1 sees events {e(t<T)}U{e1(t>=T)}
|> Observer O2 sees events {e(t<T)}U{e2(t>=T)}
|> where e1(T) is different from e2(T) (subsequenct events may differ
|> also).
|> A physical argment from continuity would say that since 
|> O1=O2 for t<T then O1=O2 at t=T.  So as Einstein might have
|> said "God rolls the dice and lets O1 see e1 and O2 see e2."
|> 
|> I fail to see how this differs in essentials from a single
|> observer watching "God roll the dice" to determine
|> the outcome of an observation (that is a 
|> "wavefunction collapse").

You still have the wrong picture, in which O1 and O2 are floating outside
the universe, and God is assigning them different branches to observe. 
The right picture is that there is a physical system O that observes its
universe, and at time T it splits into O1 and O2.  O1 and O2 are *defined*
in terms of which branch they're in, so there is nothing arbitrary about
which branch each observes.  (Of course, the reality is that the universe
is splitting into uncountably many copies constantly, but these binary
pictures are simpler to visualize.)

					-- Drew McDermott


