Mindless Sensationalism: A Quantum Framework for Consciousness
Abstract
Description
The ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics are expressed in lay terms for philosophers of consciousness and others. A framework is proposed and explained for the `psycho-physical-parallelism' between conscious experiences and the mathematical structures of quantum physics (e.g., a set of quantum operators obeying some algebra, and a quantum state giving the expectation value of each operator). In particular, it is proposed that each set of possible conscious experiences has a measure given by the expectation value of a corresponding operator (a positive-operator-valued measure). Then one has a generalization of the Weak Anthropic Principle named the Conditional Aesthemic Principle: given that we are conscious beings, our conscious experiences are likely to be typical experiences in the set of all conscious experiences with its measure.
36 pages, no figures, LaTeX, invited contribution to be published in Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Quentin Smith and Alexandar Jokic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). (This is mainly a philosophical account of the ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics in quant-ph/9506010 and elsewhere.)
36 pages, no figures, LaTeX, invited contribution to be published in Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Quentin Smith and Alexandar Jokic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). (This is mainly a philosophical account of the ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics in quant-ph/9506010 and elsewhere.)