[time 72] RE: [time 69] Spacetime & consciousness


Hitoshi Kitada (hitoshi@kitada.com)
Wed, 31 Mar 1999 02:41:25 +0900


Dear Ben,

Your recognition of my idea seems exact. Or you look like having the same
feeling or recognition of the problems as mine.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org>
To: Stephen P. King <stephenk1@home.com>
Cc: time@kitada.com <time@kitada.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 30, 1999 9:25 AM
Subject: [time 69] Spacetime & consciousness

>At 12:29 PM 3/29/99 -0500, Stephen P. King wrote:
>>Hi Ben,
>>
>> I recommend you read Hitoshi's papers. :) This is the "philosophical"
>>one.
>>
>>http://www.kitada.com/time_III.html
>
>yes, I read this before, but it does not explain why R^6 instead of R^4
>
>This is explained in another of his papers which I have not gotten through
yet
>
>Returning to
>
>>> >1) How the quantity of time (past, future, "history") as it is
>>> >considered "classically" by observers is derived from the interactions
>>> >of LSs, which give us local clocks.
>
>this is indeed tricky, but seems to me to NOT be equivalent, as you suggest,
to
>the problem of projecting R^6 to R^4, which is a quantum-mechanics-internal
>problem, standard Kaluza-klein type stuff, and much less difficult IMO.

Yes, it can be seen as one of the standard Kaluza-Klein arguments. My point
that R^6 is more fundamental than R^4 is in that space and momentum are more
fundamental than space and time in the point that space configurations
x=(x_1,x_2,x_3) and momenta p=(p_1,p_2,p_3) are the basic quantities, from
which one can define time t of the system of particles as a kind of quotients:

t ~ |x| / |p|

where |x|, |p| are "approximate" absolute values of quantum mechanical
quantities x, p, "approximate" being understood as a kind of average of
quantum mechanical obscure values. Here is a kind of contraction procedure of
R^6 to R^4 by some compactification of a small region into a point, in the
expectation that the region would be quite small compared to the classically
recognizable region. (In some of my papers, I described this "smallness" as an
uncertainty of time.)

>
>There seems to me to be a freaky ontological problem with the idea that
>centers of
>mass live in finite-dimensional Riemannian space whereas the particles that
>are averaged to yield these
>centers of mass live in Hilbert space.
>
>Hitoshi, your "philosophical" paper does not really address this
>philosophical issue.
>I'm not interested in philosophical verbiage so much as in the logic of
>this relationship.

I am too. Just I could not find a proper logical structure that suits the
situation which I want to describe.

>Quantum logic encapsulates the structure of quantum theory in an abstract
>way; is there
>a similar abstract conceptual formalism that captures this reduction?
>Logicians have formulated
>numerous "temporal logics." I would like to see a consistent "temporal
>logic" involving these
>two time scales....
>
>How do we decide when we have a system with a center of mass. to be treated
>general-relativistically and not
>just a multiparticle quantum system? Is the center of mass of 2 particles
>a GR particle?
>3 particles? 9372? Obviously there is no magic number.

There is no restriction to the number. Any system of a finite number of
particles can be a GR particle, even a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies are GR
particles.

But what then?
>do we have to view
>the GR perspective as fuzzy, as having more and more plausibility as there
>are more and more
>particles in the system, and as their mean becomes more and more stable (in
>a highly dynamic,
>high-variance quantum system there may be no reliably detectable center of
>mass over finite time
>scales).

You show in the following descriptions that you understand this point well.

>
>In psychological terms, a center of mass is the "exemplar" of a category,
>so what Hitoshi is
>proposing is that a different logic applies to categories than to
>individual elements. In the mind
>this corresponds roughly to the distinction between cognition to
>perception. QM is being posited
>as the "perceptual level" of the Universal Mind, and GR is being posited as
>the cognitive level.
>
>Consciousness I have argued serves to group perceptual features into wholes
>(wholes=
>categories, very roughly speaking). This has an interesting resonance with
>Hitoshi's theory,
>when one considers that consciousness in quantum physics is related to
>making phenomena into macroscopic events. The synthetic idea here would be
>that, once consciousness has grouped
>some percepts (particles) into a whole, this whole is then susceptible to
>the laws of wholes,
>i.e. GR, rather than the laws of raw percepts, i.e. QM.
>
>
>
>ben
>
>

As Stephen writes in [time 71] a few minutes ago, we are very close each
other, or we express the same idea just in slightly different words.

Best wishes,
Hitoshi



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