De la Fenomenología a la Biología Cuántica.
Herramientas Intuitivas de Integración.Quantum Phenomenology: The World piece by piece. From Phenomenology towards Quantum Biology. Intuitive Integrative Tools (In-Tools)
El acto básico vital, el perceptivo, hemos comprobado que está estupenda mente descrito por la Fenomenología de Husserl. Como Biólogo de formación naturalista, me sorprende constatar que la Fenomenología de Husserl sí explica esta sagrada conexión vital que es la percepción; por el contrario la percepción no está explicada desde las ciencias biológicas. Al menos como naturalista percibo que Husserl habla un lenguaje sobre la percepción que sí me llega, que comprendo perfectamente, y que me parece de una sencillez y claridad extraordinarias.
Perception, as basic vital action, we find it is very well described by the Phenomenology of Husserl. As a field biologist, it is amazing for me to discover that the Phenomenology of Husserl cope very well explaining this sacred and vital conection we call perception. On the other hand the perception process I find that it is not still well explained from biological sciences. At least, as a naturalist, I perceive that Husserl talk a language about perception, that seems more familiar to me, that I comprehend better, and with great simplicity and clarity.
El tramajo polimático de conectar entre sí saberes de cualquier clase y condición, se encuentra así con joyas como esta. Basta con coger "prestada" la Fenomenología de Husserl para comprender el acto de percibir, tan tangible en cualquier rincón de nuestra actividad vital, y también, como no, en el tramajo de acechar la fauna, o cualquier organismo en un ecosistema.
The polymathic way of knowing, conecting among themselves, very different kind of knowledges, is able to make discoveries as that one. It is enough to take and use Husserl Phenomenology for a better understanding of the action of perception, so much common throughout our whole vital process. Perception is fundamental in the common naturalist activities as to look for any animal or organism in any ecosystem.
En otros espacios hemos hablado acerca de la Biología Cuántica. Pensamos que Usted y yo actuamos como biólogxs cuánticxs en los procesos de percepción. En esta ocasión nosotrxs añadimos la Fenomenología Cuántica. Todxs somos fenomenologxs, porque en nuestra vida cotidiana nos manejamos con un mundo infinito de sensaciones que cada instante atraviesan nuestras puertas de la percepción. También somos Fenomenólogxs Cuánticos. Porque toda esa infinita información está construida y es percibida, y nos construye, pieza a pieza, que llamamos sensaciones, o qualias.
In other spaces we have talked about Quantum Biology. We think that you and me act as quantum biologists in the perception processes. Today we add Quantum Phenomenology. We are all phenomenologists, because in our everyday life we try to cope with an infinite world of sensations that cross our sensorial doors every instant. We are also Quantum Phenomenologists. Because all that information is build by pieces, we call sensations, or qualia.
Estoy muy contento por encontrar que la Fenomenología Cuántica es un meme ya presente en Internet, en la Noosfera
I am very happy now because I found that Quantum Phenomenology is a meme already in the internet, in the Noosphere.
He hecho una búsqueda invitada y esto es lo que encontré
I make a search and that is what I have found.
El primero parece interesante... porque habla de "fenomenología cuántica o consciencia". Y eso me suena muy bien, ya que me gusta usar para la consciencia un enfoque fenomenológico.
The first one seems interesting... because it speaks about quantum phenomenology or consciousness. It sounds vey well to me because I like to use that phenomenological approach to consciousness...
I am you: the metaphysical foundations of global ethics - Resultado de la Búsqueda de libros de Google
These are the claims, respectively, that I call quantum phenomenology and quantum consciousness. Is either claim — quantum phenomenology or consciousness ...
books.google.es/books?isbn=1402029993...
EL PRÓXIMO ARTICULO (QUE COPIO ENTERO) PARECE BUENO... (Abajo añado otras referencias de la búsqueda...)
THE NEXT ARTICLE (complete) SEEMS ALSO GOOD... (Below I am adding other references...)
http://www.elea.org/Phenomenology/
1997, Allan Randall
Quantum Phenomenology
Dept. of Philosophy, York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
Starting with the Descartes' cogito, "I think, therefore I am"--and taking an uncompromisingly rational, rigorously phenomenological approach--I attempt to derive the basic principles of recursion theory (the backbone of all mathematics and logic), and from that the principles of feedback control theory (the backbone of all biology), leading to the basic ideas of quantum mechanics (the backbone of all physics). What is derived is not the full quantum theory, but a basic framework--derived from a priori principles along with common everyday experience--of how the universe of everyday experience should work if it operates according to rational principles. We find, to our surprise, that the resulting system has all the most puzzling features of quantum physics that make physicists scratch their heads. Far from being "bizarre" and "weird", as is usually thought, the strangest paradoxes of quantum theory turn out to be just what one ought to expect of a rational universe. It is the classical, pre-quantum universe of the nineteenth century that has irrational, mystical components. The quantum-mechanics-like theory that is developed is, furthermore, most compatible with the strictest, most uncompromisingly rationalist of the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, those which add no ad hoc elements to the theory, and which generally trace their history to the relative state formulation of Everett (also called the "many worlds" interpretation). These interpretations take the universe to be quite literally describable as a quantum wavefunction. As with any project this far-reaching in scope, I confess I have had to make some working assumptions along the way. I have attempted to isolate these, and clearly label them as points of possible future revision--they are marked in the text with an asterisk (*).
I. Introduction
If you have never been tormented by such thoughts, the words that follow will mean little to you. The search for the answers to such questions is called "metaphysics", and the approach to metaphysics I shall explore here is sometimes called "phenomenology". Broadly speaking, it was invented by René Descartes,[1] although it was further developed by many others, including Immanuel Kant [2] and Edmund Husserl.[3] Some more recent twentieth century varieties and spin-offs of phenomenology have become rather anti-rationalist in tone, but the phenomenology developed here is of the old-fashioned, rationalist flavour, in the spirit of Descartes, Kant and Husserl. Phenomenology looks at the real question that lies behind all other questions asked in science and philosophy: what is the explanation for my current conscious experience? Everything else boils down to some variation on this question. Everything else you know--the external world, your past memories--is known to you as perceptions laid before your consciousness. As such, any science, whether it be metaphysics, physics, biology or economics, must be properly grounded as an attempt to explain consciousness.
Any such exploration must start with some variation on Descartes' Cogito--"I think, therefore I am"--and build on this in a series of movements that step away from the Cogito. We will not require absolute certainty at every step, so long as each movement is motivated by an attempt to understand immediate consciousness, and not some prior prejudice about what that is. This will lead us first to the search for an object within consciousness that can be experienced with complete clarity. We will find that mathematical truth provides the basic model for clarity of experience, and that any attempt to understand consciousness will therefore be mathematical (at least until some other model of clarity is found). We will therefore want to understand what mathematics is, from the standpoint of conscious experience.
With mathematics as our primary tool, we will examine our immediate consciousness carefully, and try to build a clear mathematical model that captures the essential structure of experience. This will lead us to rediscover the basic concepts of feedback control theory.[4],[5],[6],[7] Further investigations will allow us to begin to build a proper phenomenological conception of our "world", leading to a rediscovery of the basic principles of our most fundamental physical theory, quantum mechanics.[8],[9]
II. Cogito Ergo Sum
As a starting point, anything that can possibly be doubted must initially be set aside. Since all we can know with absolute certainty is our current conscious experience, it is this immediate consciousness, which cannot possibly be doubted, that is the starting point for real science. We may at some future time find ourselves driven back to re-adopting the common sense notion of "world", but then again, perhaps not. For now, we "bracket" the world, and put the matter aside.
Descartes said that there is one thing that cannot be doubted: that I am thinking. This is one thing I can be absolutely certain of. But just what is it I am certain of? The frustrating thing about the Cogito is that any attempt to formulate it in language seems to introduce at least a tiny bit of doubt. Already, we are introducing the term "I", which is an extrapolation from consciousness. Even terms like "thinking" and "consciousness" introduce at least the possibility that we could be using language incoherently. Properly understood, then, we must separate the absolute certainty of our immediate consciousness from the particular language in which we express this certainty. The certainty of the Cogito is pre-reflective and pre-linguistic. Immediate consciousness does not itself necessarily reflect on the nature of consciousness at all, let alone make linguistic statements about it. It is this immediate conscious experience that is our starting point for science, not some particular expression of it in language.
So what, then, is this pre-reflective consciousness? We say it is absolutely certain, but this is not certainty of anything beyond the immediate consciousness of our current state of mind, not even of this linguistic expression of that very certainty. Even a fuzzy, unclear thought, in which we cannot clearly understand the object of our perception, is still absolutely certain in this respect. It is only an "unclear" thought with respect to some object within consciousness that one is conscious of. Yet if we insist on sticking to the absolute certainty of the Cogito, we cannot make the move to speaking of this object as something separate from immediate consciousness. It is the object's status in relation to consciousness that is uncertain. Almost any consciousness at all, no matter how uncertain we may be of the objects we are conscious of, is equally and absolutely certain in itself. Exceptions may be made here for states of mind where we are only quasi-conscious to begin with, such as certain states of sleep or stupor. However, as we will not be conducting philosophy in such states, for our purposes, we know them only through memory and they will not figure in our explorations. From here on out, then, we will assume that consciousness is always completely certain in itself.
Immediate consciousness is thus our starting point, and we are not yet worried whether it is or is not consciousness of anything. In consciousness-of, there is always the possibility of error. Even for something as seemingly certain as "2+2=4", we could just feasibly be mistaken. Perhaps we erred in our calculations. Or perhaps the whole notion of addition is flawed in some way we have not considered. So "2+2=4" does not deserve the label "absolutely certain" in the same way immediate consciousness does. Yet still, such simple mathematical statements seem to have such clarity compared to almost anything else, that we will want to give them a very high degree of certainty, if not an absolute certainty. For this reason, we will distinguish between certainty in general, which admits of degrees, and the very special kind of certainty that is associated only with immediate consciousness, for which I will adopt Husserl's term "apodictic". This kind of certainty is absolute with respect to consciousness, and cannot be diminished without diminishing consciousness itself. The only kind of "relatively" or "partially apodictic" experience is one that is only quasi-conscious in the first place. Even the vaguest and most confused thoughts of normal waking consciousness are as apodictic as "2+2=4".
With just this, we will get nowhere. We need to make some nonapodictic moves away from immediate consciousness, to make any progress at all. Ideally, we would like these moves to be apodictic, but that may be asking too much. Therefore, we will mark such moves for later reference with an asterisk (*). Each one will require some justification that seems, if not absolutely certain, at least very difficult to resist. We must recognize that any such move may need to be changed in the future, and that this may require tearing down and rebuilding everything we have built that comes after. Although we will try to make all such moves as certain as we can, we will find that to retain the absolute certainty of the Cogito is impossible if any real progress is to be made. Finally, we note that it is entirely possible, even likely given our fallible natures, that some important unjustified assumptions may miss being asterisked.
The first move away from apodicticity is already contained in the Cogito, which says not just that "I think", or even just "thinking", but also "therefore, I am". This is properly thought of, not as a conclusion, an inference drawn from immediate consciousness, but purely as a definition. If we view it as an inference, we run the risk of concluding that the Cogito validates some pre-existing prejudice about existence, such as material substance or some such. The "being" that is alluded to in the Cogito is at this point purely definitional. It points to that which is absolutely certain (consciousness) and gives it a name: "existence" or "being". But we already have a name for it, "consciousness", so why all of a sudden do we need this new term? The answer is that while "existence" does not necessarily declare that there is anything beyond apodicticity, it suggests the possibility, without taking a stand on the issue. I point to consciousness and say "consciousness", then I say "existence", which I define as being simply consciousness, as something which may or may not be more than what is apodictic. So I allow that "being" may end up to be a synonym for "consciousness", but I can assume this no more than I can assume an external world. Either assumption is unjustified. The thing that consciousness is may or may not go beyond what is apodictic, but I will use the term "existence" to mean whatever consciousness ultimately is, in either case.
- (*1) "Existence" is that which is the ultimate explanation for consciousness, which may or may not go beyond the immediacy of consciousness itself.
While admitting that consciousness can be consciousness-of, we have not yet determined that this is an essential feature of consciousness, nor that it is of anything that is beyond its own apodicticity, although we have entertained the possibility. But now that we have admitted that there is such a phenomenon as consciousness-of, there is little if any certainty lost in admitting other instances of consciousness-of. Consciousness of itself, while it provides the sense of wonder, is nothing special with respect to our current move (*1). If I admit that I am conscious of my consciousness, I can likewise note that my consciousness is consciousness of a ball, or a rabbit, or whatever. These phenomena appear as things within consciousness, but I am remaining uncommitted as to whether there is more to them than what appears immediately and apodictically.
- (*2) Consciousness is consciousness-of. The objects of consciousness include consciousness itself (*1), and other objects within consciousness.
The word "consciousness", while pointing to the immediate apodictic thing that we perceive, does not fully express the sense of wonder, which by its nature questions whether there is more to its own nature, its "existence", than just the apodictic part. We look at objects within consciousness, such as balls, rabbits and consciousness itself, and the sense of wonder instills in us the desire to know if these objects have a fuller reality than just what appears to us. We are now entering our third movement. Instead of just allowing an analysis of consciousness that somehow involves parts of consciousness (the ball, the rabbit, the angry feeling, the memory of roses), we are now exploring the possibility that there may be an analysis that contains consciousness itself as such a part. This move is forced on us by the sense of wonder.
We are still not deciding conclusively that consciousness is part of something more than just its own apodictic appearance, but in asking after the possibility, in asking "why?", we are forced to at least assume as a working hypothesis that there is indeed something more, since, although consciousness itself is apodictic, it is not apodictic to us what consciousness is. No matter how hard I concentrate, consciousness does not yield up an immediate, apodictic awareness of its own nature. Indeed, consciousness seems inherently unclear to itself. While some objects within consciousness seem at least relatively clear, this core clarity quickly fades away into a fringe that cannot be pinned down. Attempt to examine it, and it slips away into nothingness. More than anything, it is this "fringy" nature of consciousness that generates in us the sense of wonder and the conviction that there must be more to consciousness than consciousness itself. We have now begun our search for an explanation of consciousness that goes beyond consciousness.
- (*3) Assume for now that there is some explanation for, or truth concerning, our immediate consciousness and what it is. This necessarily goes beyond the immediacy of consciousness, since it is not apodictic to me what my consciousness is.
III. A Preliminary Analysis of Consciousness
So far, our common sense analysis has shown us that consciousness can be consciousness-of. In (*2), we have taken this as a defining characteristic of consciousness. In order to bolster this claim, it will help to allow recollection of past apodictic experiences, in order that we might analyze them. But while these past experiences, as recollections, are apodictic, we have no way to be certain they have any past reality as apodictic in their own right, beyond our current recollection of them, or even that there is any "past" at all beyond the extent of our current consciousness. While immediate consciousness does seem to have some extent in time, this is perhaps only a fraction of a second. While speaking of our memories of the past as valid information about consciousness is, like the experience of the ball-object or rabbit-object, to admit the possibility that there is something more than just what is apodictic, it actually goes further than this. While we suspended further judgement on what exactly the ball-object is, while assuming it somehow extends beyond consciousness, we must assume more than just this for our memories, if we are to use them in any special way to analyze consciousness. For if our memory of the past is just another object in consciousness like the ball or rabbit, we are restricted to speaking only of our immediate conscious state when analyzing consciousness, something that slips away into memory before we have had proper time to analyze it. If we could not invoke memories of the past, and trust that they are memories of true apodictic, conscious experiences, we would not even be able to appeal to our own sense of personal identity. To analyze consciousness, it is necessary to look at more than just one instance of it. So we reluctantly accept memories of past consciousness as valid:
- (*4) Memories of past consciousnesses reveal real instances of apodictic awareness that exist external to immediate consciousness.
In order to properly ground further movements, we must examine various past experiences of consciousness, bringing them to mind once again and if possible reproducing them so as to experience their apodicticity again. Once we have re-experienced them, they immediately fade away, but so long as we can bring them back whenever we want, we accept them, bolstered by (*4), as valid examples with which to analyze our current conscious state.
We start by bringing an experience to mind: our perception of a ball. If we just happen upon this perception, then there it is--we did not have to work especially hard to get at it. But if we are remembering a past experience of a ball, getting this perception back into consciousness may take some doing. We may need to seek out the experience, hunting around for it, which may involve manipulating our perceptions of our body (moving it around in perceptual space until a ball comes to view). Or we may need to focus on our memory of the ball, to bring an image of it back into view. All of these things are perceptions: our memory of the ball before and after we bring the image of it back into view, our perception of the ball when we bring it to view by manipulating our perception of our body, and our perception of our body itself. All are perceptions. We do not succumb here to the prejudice of calling any of them "world" objects. Although we have already assumed that they extend beyond immediate consciousness, this means only that somehow there is a truth to what they are that we are not immediately aware of. This "truth" is not necessarily at all like our everyday notion of an external "world". Therefore, we will call such objects within consciousness, that extend beyond consciousness, "percepts". They are what our consciousness is consciousness-of, i.e., what our perception perceives. Any instance of consciousness is a perceiving act--an act of perception--that perceives objects of consciousness, or percepts (see figure 1). Perception and percept are, of course, inseperable. Together, they constitute a perceiving act. "Perception" refers to the perceiving act from the immediate viewpoint of the perceiver, while "percept" refers to the perceiving act from the viewpoint of the "truth" of the object perceived, whatever that may be. To talk of perception, then, is to take a subjective view. To talk of percepts is to take a more objective stance.
Fig. 1: The Nature of Consciousness: Perceiving a Percept.
Although we came up with this analysis by looking at consciousness, let us remain uncommitted for now as to whether we want all perceptions and their percepts to be conscious perceptions. This is mostly an issue of semantics--the definition of words--and is not of ultimate theoretical importance, but we might feasibly discover that our analysis of perception applies in a useful way to a broader range of things than just what is conscious, and we may find it useful to thus say that consciousness is only one instance of perception. But it is too early to decide on such issues yet.
Although we are not prepared as yet to say much about the objective truth of our percepts, we can now proceed to make whatever common-sensical observations about our perceptions and percepts that we want. For instance, we notice that by manipulating the "body" percept we can, with some work, bring a ball percept very strongly into view. Alternatively, by focussing on the memory of past ball percepts, we can also bring a ball percept into view, but this seems to lack the same strength. Both are, of course, equally apodictic, so we don't mean that the body-ball is more apodictic than the memory-ball. But we seem less certain that we really have a true "ball" percept before us in the case of the memory-ball. This notion of varying degrees of "strength" of percepts, then, presupposes (as so much of our cognition does) that once again there is a truth behind the percept that goes beyond what is apodictic. There is no sense in saying that one ball percept is stronger than another, unless we mean that one is more fully a true ball than the other. Strictly on their own terms, they are equally apodictic.
This kind of presupposition infuses so much of our thinking, that the more of these analyses of perception that we do, the harder it becomes to imagine going back on the analysis move (*3). We are constantly presuming that there is truth in our percepts. We presume, in the very act of remembering the ball, that there is a "true" percept we are trying to bring up, even if we fail to succeed in fully bringing it to view. We presume this even when we imagine objects that we normally believe to be imaginary--like unicorns, for instance. As imaginary as we feel the unicorn objects is, we still feel it is possible to be more or less successful in bringing one before our mind's eye. We feel (at least much of the time) that body-percepts bring the truth more fully to view than memory-percepts, yet the pure apodicticity of the experiences does not tell us any of this. Our very perception of the body-percept is of something more than just what is in consciousness, and we perceive that this percept brings more of the "true" object into view than the memory manipulations did. Of course, these feelings of truth could all be bogus, for unicorns and balls alike, but it seems we cannot help but make such presumptions in our very act of perceiving. Even postulating that perhaps these presumptions are bogus presumes some truth to the matter of whether they are bogus that lies beyond immediate consciousness. The more we examine experiences the more we realize that all experience is perceptual in the sense we have laid out above, and that by its very nature, conscious experience forces us to believe in some kind of truth. Playing the sceptic, we can certainly step back and question this, but not without abstaining from any investigation or analysis of consciousness at all.
IV. Behaviour is the Control of Perception
We see that perception always involves some kind of search through percept-space. Even when we just happened across the ball-percept, it is not as if we did no work at all. We still had to focus our attention onto what was already in view, and pick out the ball-percept from the background context in which it appeared. For the body-ball percept, we searched by manipulating our perception of our body. For the memory-ball, we manipulated our memory. In all these cases, it was not at all clear exactly what we were manipulating. In fact, we do not even necessarily feel when we search our memory that there is something in particular that we are manipulating at all, at least not as clearly as for our body. But even for the body, it is not at all clear what we are doing when we will ourselves to "move arm" or "turn head" and so forth. All we can really say is that we somehow "focus attention" on bringing into view whatever it is we want to bring into view. Our manipulations, whatever they be manipulations of, seem to be attempts to achieve certain results in our perceptions. So we thus say that they are manipulations of the percepts within consciousness, although we remain uncommitted as to exactly what goes on that allows us to achieve such manipulations (perhaps the percepts are only manipulated indirectly). All we know is that we feel some kind of indefinable desire within us, that we want to perceive something (a "ball" percept perhaps), and that we can "focus attention", in some weird mysterious way, that allows the percept currently in consciousness to change into one that is more like what we want, bringing the desired percept more fully into view. This mysterious manipulation process, achieved by some sort of focussing of attention, we will call our "behaviour". The manipulation of the percept, we will call "control" of the perception (or its percept). Behaviour is the control of perception.
V. The Possibility Structure of Perception
For what is this perception of the ball? As an apodictic conscious experience, it necessarily involves more than the ball--everything from the surrounding environment around the ball, to the vague feeling of hunger in my tummy, to the sense of the chair pushing up on me whilst I sit here contemplating the ball. To isolate the ball in this way from the rest of my experience is an analysis, which necessarily includes the possibility of further control, that would bring hidden aspects of the ball into view. It is because I perceive the ball percept as a ball, that I feel that I could manipulate my body percept so as to see the rear side of it. Likewise, I feel that I could do this by manipulation of my memory-percepts, although we guess from past experience that this will produce a view of the rear side that has less clarity (although we are as yet still in the dark as to what is behind this difference in clarity).
The memory-manipulation technique we will call "imagination". We have not at this point established why we feel this is a different kind of control, we simply recognize that there is a kind of manipulation that has a unique feeling about it that characterizes certain types of control. Such imagination-percepts, while usually less clear than body-percepts, seem to be usually easier to control. The body-ball-percept, for instance, we seem to only be able to manipulate within a very narrow range. When we encounter the appearance of roundness we associate with the word "ball", we find this characteristic of out perception to be very stable. But when we manipulate the imagination-ball-percept, we can achieve a much wider range of percepts. We can totally transform the ball, morphing it from a round shape into a cube, or into an elephant shape. The price we pay for this increased ability to control is a decrease in the strength--the clarity--of the results.
Further reflection reveals something very interesting. Even body-percepts seem to have an element of imagination-control in them. A Necker cube is an interesting example. The reader should now manipulate his/her eyes and head body-percepts so as to bring a "Fig. 2" percept into view. This body-percept will probably appear to you as containing a cube. Its simple uncluttered lines make the imagination component easier to see than in most other body-percepts. It can be manipulated so as to become a cube from (at least) two completely different points of view. With practise, you can readily flip back and forth between both views. The two percepts are clearly different, and yet there is something that is even more clearly seen as fixed and common to both. It is this part that we feel has the strength of a body-percept. The part that we can flip at will seems to be an imaginary component of the core body-percept. Yet any body-percept, no matter how strong its impression, must like the Necker cube be detached from its environment, with its various parts seen in relation to each other in a particular sort of way, before we can even say we are conscious of a percept within consciousness at all.
Fig. 2: Necker Cube Reveals the Possibility Structure of Perception.
So is the Necker cube a body-percept or an imagination-percept? Well, it is some of both. We had to use our body to bring it initially into view, but then we used our imagination to manipulate it so as to be a stable percept of some kind. It is harder here than in the ball case to decide what components of the perception to call "body-manipulated" and what to call "imagination manipulated". The Necker cube can be transformed into all kinds of notably different percepts in imagination (even more than just the two cubes if you work at it), and yet all these different percepts seem united by the strength of the underlying body-percept. We see that to some extent perception is hierarchical, with layers of imaginary perception built on top of other base layers, which may or may not be imaginary. These base layers, on their own terms, contain implicit in them a whole range of possible imaginary extensions. This, we will call the "possibility field" of the perception.
Later on, when the Necker cube is no longer readily in view, we can bring the percept back into view wholly in imagination. The result is not only far weaker, but requires more work. So we see not only that there seems to be an imaginary component to all our percepts, but also that sometimes it is imagination-manipulation that is more difficult than body-manipulation, rather than the other way around.
VI. The Perceptual Possibility Field
Concentrating on body-percepts seems to hold little promise. Every time we find something with that characteristic strength and clarity we associate with body percepts, it seems to have an inherent hidden nature that we just cannot fully get at. While body-percepts seem on the whole clearer than imagination-percepts--more fully present before the mind's eye--we are frustrated to find that they all, every last one of them, still seem to have an inherent lack of clarity. There is always something hidden from our view that makes it impossible to see the full object before us. So next we search imagination-space for a clear percept. Here, while most percepts are even less clear than in body-space, we do find some percepts that just might qualify as "clear", such as "2+2=4". While we are not sure right away if this qualifies, we seem sure that we do have a handle on something that is far clearer than the ball-percept in any of its incarnations, bodily or imaginary. When we try to perceive the ball-percept more clearly, it fades into the fringe of consciousness, without any sense of fully containing the percept within consciousness. But "2+2=4" is completely different. Here, there is no fading into a fringe. Or, at least, we feel that the core percept, the foreground, can somehow be detached from the fringe or background (see figure 3). We have a strong sense that there is somehow an object here that is completely contained within consciousness.
The "truth" of the "2+2=4" object as something apart from apodicticity appears clearly before us, even though we are still not entirely sure of the exact nature of the object we so clearly see. This seems paradoxical at first, but further examination of other clearly present logico-mathematical objects convinces us that we can clearly see that there is a completed truth to a percept without distinctly seeing what that truth is. The reason is that the truth appears to us as "over-constructed". Yes, we have managed through our control manipulations to construct within our perceptual field a percept without a fringe. Yet this detached core seems itself to have its own inner core and fringe! There is at least a little bit more within the detached core than just the truth of "2+2=4". There are, for instance, notational details that are irrelevant to truth..
The "clear" versus "distinct" distinction is crucial to understanding the nature of what we have and have not gained with the "2+2=4" insight. As something "clear", the percept that lies within a fringed field now somehow seems to stand on its own without the fringe. This is totally unlike the ball percept, for instance, in which we detected an essential incompleteness. Somehow, we seem able to control our perception in such a way as to produce a stable percept that can be seen as a completed object. Like the imaginary morphing of a ball-percept into a cube-percept, or the imaginary flipping of a Necker cube, we can likewise transform this new completed percept into an uncompleted one. We can transform it, so that the other unclear aspects of the perceptual field become "re-attached" to it, so to speak, and suck it back into the vagueness of the fringe.
Fig. 3: The Perceptual Field: Clear and Unclear Core Percepts.
Examining the truth of "2+2=4", for instance, we can move fluidly from seeing the truth of the statement as self-evident and independent of the rest of the perceptual field, to "re-attaching" it by focussing attention away from the truth of it to the perceptual details such as the particular notation in which it is expressed, the shape of the "+" symbol, et cetera. Now we are seeing something that is not a completed object. We are seeing the body-percept layer underneath the imaginary layer that allows the detachment. Yet, once we learn to see the completed truth, it seems always easy to switch back to the completed view, just like the perceptual control involved in the Necker cube flip.
Further investigation reveals many other perceptions that have this kind of crystal clarity, or completeness. This is completely different from the "apodicticity" of immediate consciousness. Percepts are apodictic without being at all clear, with fuzzy fringes that leave perhaps most of the object completely obscured. Being 100% certain that an object is before you, perhaps incompletely, is not at all the same as being 99% certain that an object is fully before you. Complete clarity, while not apodictic with respect to "truth" or the perceptual object, does nonetheless generate a high degree of certainty within us. We have a strong feeling that "2+2=4" is a completed truth, even though we recognize some small chance that we could be deluded or in error.
Further investigations of perception reveal other completed truths, although the more complex these truths become the less certain we are that we have properly constructed them. After a certain level of complexity is reached, we retain certainty only if we trust our memories and at some further point only if we trust ink on paper. Yet, we remain certain that these mathematical objects are in general there, to an infinite degree of complexity, however uncertain we may be of them individually. For instance, the truth that there are an infinite number of primes seems quite certain when held firmly in one's mind, yet we do not hold all of the primes in our head. Recognition of the truth of certain small, manageable mathematical objects requires a recognition of further mathematical objects beyond what is clearly seen. Seeing the "truth" of "2+2=4" allows us to just as clearly see that there are an infinite number of similar additions that we cannot clearly see at all. It is here where the move from consciousness to consciousness-of is finally clearly seen as revealing an external reality. But that external reality is not (at least not as yet) a material world. It is the world of mathematical objects, some of which are too complex to ever be realized as actual percepts. They are implied in the perceptual possibility field of simpler percepts that we can realize. They all seem to be what we might like to call "mathematical", although they do not necessarily involve numbers. Some simply seem to be structures, as in geometrical intuitions, for instance. Any abstract entity that can be precisely and completely described leaves us with this sense of "clarity".
Yet, how very odd that it is at the same time quite unclear what exactly this "clarity" is! The problem thus far is that most of these so-called completed analyses are constructed in various different languages (the language of arithmetic versus the language of geometry, for instance). In order to determine our criterion for perceptual completeness (i.e., clarity), we need to find a common language that can describe any completed percept. If we are successful at finding such a language, we can then attempt to apply it to a description of the more common uncompleted percepts, hoping to be successful at likewise analyzing them (although we will not be guaranteed of success, as it may turn out that the fringy uncompleted percepts require a more powerful language than the mathematical language that describes the simpler completable ones).
While the "truth" of "2+2=4" convinces us we have a completed object in our perceptual field, we see by focussing first on the truth, then on the notational details, then on the truth again, via a Necker-style flipping, that it is not totally clear to us how the clearly present percept differs from other clear objects we can bring into view. If I picture 2 apples being added to a bin containing another 2 apples, and note that there are four apples resulting, my perceptual field as a whole is very different than when I see "2+2=4" written out in arithmetical notation. Focussing on the unclear notational details of the apple-bin-percept (the apples, the bin, and so forth) is quite different than focussing on the unclear details of the "2" symbol and the "+" symbol. Yet I seem to be able to perceive a truth behind both of these that is the same! Indeed, here seems to be the key to my feeling that I am experiencing a completed percept. By translating one fringy perception into another fringy perception, via a Necker-style perceptual flipping, I can see something that is the same for both, that due to the translation appears less fringy than either on its own. Only in this case, the flipping does not reveal a core percept that I would likely think of as a body-percept. Instead, it reveals a completely abstract and imaginary core, but one with far more evident objective reality than the body-percept revealed by the Necker flipping. It is fortunate that we did not jump too quickly to conclusions from the Necker cube example, and decide prematurely that such perceptual flipping always reveals a "physical" underlying body-percept, for here is an example where such flipping reveals, much more clearly, an underlying imaginary percept. (The reader should keep in mind that when I say "imaginary percept", I do not mean that it lacks reality outside of consciousness. All I mean is that our perception of it, regardless of its objective status, was achieved through manipulation of that ineffable thing we call "imagination", rather than the ineffable thing we call "body"--at least this distinction is thus far relatively ineffable, which is not to say we cannot perhaps later advance towards a clearer understanding of it).
Fig. 4: Flipping between different fringy representations of a clear percept.
I can see now that the perceptual object is something distinct from the apple representation and the arithmetic representation. Each representation is "over-constructed", since my construction of the object was necessarily within a fringy perceptual field, and this fringe cannot be 100% detached from the core. At least a little of the fringe always remains. Yet the object itself, the percept, was completely clear (since the "truth" seemed maximally self-evident). Yet it was not completely "distinct" from its construction in alternative languages. The translation from apple-language to arithmetic language, and vice-versa, was helpful, and certainly made the already clear percept more distinct, but not totally or maximally distinct. There are always other languages that we have not even thought of in which the truth of "2+2=4" could be expressed. To attain maximal distinctness through perceptual flipping, we would have to translate "2+2=4" into all possible languages. This, of course, is impossible in practise, but we can approach this ideal by translating the expression into as many different languages as we can.
Figure 5 shows the basic difference between clear and distinct perceptions using the nonmathematical example of a house-percept. Since, unlike mathematical truths, a house-percept is never completely clear in the first place, figure 5 should be taken with a grain of salt. It is included as a pedagogical device, and not a strict example of a clear perception, for which "2+2=4" is still far superior.
Fig. 5: Three apodictic perceptions, with increasing house-certainty.
In making this distinction between clarity and distinctness, we seem to have hit upon an even better understanding of the analytic nature of perception. We saw earlier in our analyzing of the ball-percept that there was inherent in the percept a range of possibilities not immediately present to consciousness. Not all perceptions are part of this "possibility field" that surrounds the core of the percept. For instance, the perception Abe Lincoln had just before being shot cannot be part of my possibility field for my ball-percept, since I cannot through mental control flip myself into a Lincoln perceptual state.
But now wait just a minute--on the other hand, maybe I can flip myself into Lincoln! That I indeed can not seems thoroughly reasonable, but is actually an assumption that we cannot fully justify here, one that will be necessary in what follows. Personal identity, we presume, constitutes a particular flow of consciousness. Perceptions in my future are ones that can remember being me in the past. Perceptions in the past are ones that I can remember being. None of Abe Lincoln's perceptions can remember being me, nor can I remember being them. That surely places Abe's mental experiences outside my perceptual possibility field, does it not? Of course, astute readers will notice the considerable amount of hand-waving I am indulging in here. I have failed to clearly state what I mean by "can remember", for instance. Surely very few of my future conscious states will actually remember this very moment. In fact, my future self might completely forget this particular moment, and we would still presume it deserved to be called a future version of me. However, to delve further into what it is that unites perceptions into a single identity is beyond the scope of this paper. However, while it is unclear how I unite perceptions into a personal identity, we can certainly for now presume that somehow I do have such an identity, and that this includes some possible perceptions and not others.
- (*5) My personal identity includes only some possible perceptions and not others. All are somehow implied in the possibility field of my current consciousness.
All aspects of the field are tightly constrained by two factors: (1) mathematical possibility and (2) personal identity. Naturally, there is much room here for debate as to what should be included as part of this "field", and I confess I am drawing a particular picture here of a particular scope. No clear method has yet been given for specifying the full field of possibilities. Should all the mathematical truths implied by "2+2=4" be included, even if they are too complex to actually achieve a perception of? Taken to an extreme, all possible perceptions might thus be included in everybody's perceptual field. How then could we distinguish between different perceptions, or different individuals? The answer is that, however great a scope is given to the "field", the possibilities included have a definite distribution, with some closer to the core than others. In other words, the field must not be defined simply as a set of possible percepts, but a set of percepts and possible percepts with a definite distribution, which I will (arbitrarily) divide into four main sections:
- (1) a core which is the percept as perceived in consciousness (e.g., ball-percept),
(2) a fringe of consciousness into which the core gradually fades (e.g., background noise),
(3) a possibility field of attainable percepts within the fringe (e.g., other hidden views, the other view of the Necker cube),
(4) a possibility field of unattainable percepts in the outer fringe (e.g., all possible shapes, all mathematical objects).
Exactly how broad we want the "field" under consideration to be, and exactly how we want to construct the possibility distributions, will depend on the nature of the manipulation we are attempting. Different kinds of control will yield different distributions of possible percepts. The translation of "2+2=4" into different percepts with the same core is an attempt to detach the core from the fringy field. It is thus just another example of perceptual control, where "truth" is the stable thing being controlled for (rather than a stable visual image, etc.). All perceptual control seeks stability and thus some kind of detachment of the core is being sought. Clear percepts are simply those in which we feel that the detachment is complete, rather than merely relative.
VII. A Phenomenology of Mathematics: The Analysis of Analysis
The ability to translate from various different representations seems crucial to the objective nature of analysis. So far, we have seen that analysis has a Platonic character to it. We seem, in translating the percept, to capture more of its distinct objective essence. Furthermore, no matter how many times we translate, it seems we cannot completely "deconstruct" the object. While we can morph and twist and change the notational details of "2+2=4", we really cannot ever change it into "3+3=6" or "1282=16384". Each mathematical truth seems to have this objective quality to it, that its truth is independent of the notational details we use to represent it. To extract this core essence of the truth before us, we need to be able to recognize what is common between the different perceptual fields. Plato would say that we were accessing the "form" of which the different perceptions were mere instances. So we will adopt this language and call whatever it is that is common between different perceptions the "form". A true form has not been completely described so long as the percept remains unclear. A clear percept yields a completely constructed--but also possibly over-constructed--form, which is the percept that is perceived. But just what is a form? We will now try to analyze our currently vague and unclear form-percept into something clearer.
What we are essentially attempting in the following is to construct a universal language. This language will fall short, of course, since it must itself be expressed in a particular language, but if we can capture in one language what is common between them all, we can at least express our clear percepts in a single language that provides near-maximum distinctness, and this will prevent our having to constantly translate between all possible languages we can think of, just to make a percept more distinct. But just as we could never translate between all possible languages, if we do find a language of near-maximum distinctness, this language will, like our multiple translations, only provide a relative, not total or absolute, distinctness. And we may find that there are several competing languages that are all pretty good at delivering distinctness, but in different ways, so that we cannot really settle on just one.
Church proposed a formalism called the l-calculus that I believe comes very close to having the universality we are looking for. It is simple and elegant, and can express any mathematical truth that can be expressed. Since we are calling mathematical truths "forms", let us start with a specific example of a form from everyday life, say a health insurance form that needs to be filled in with your name and address and the like. A single health insurance form can be filled in with many different combinations of names and addresses. When John Smith and Jane Doe fill in the same application form, they end up with two different particular instantiations of the same general form. To instantiate the general form into a particular filled-in form, they fill in the blanks. As in:
- Name: ________ Þ Name: John Doe
where "Þ" represents the "filling in" process
We need to add the blanks, so that we can fill them in and truly have a form. We call this abstract S-expression a "l-expression". It is written as follows:
- (lx.P)
where x and P stand for S-expressions (perhaps concrete, perhaps abstract).[10]
- ( (lx.P) I ) Þ O
- (l____ ."Name: ____") (Jane Doe) Þ "Name: (Jane Doe)"
l-forms get much more interesting when we allow Jane to fill in the "Name" blank with yet another form! Perhaps she wants the application form to apply to the entire Doe family, so in the "Name" blank, she enters "____ Doe".
- (l____."Name: ____") (l____.(____ Doe))
Þ "Name: (l____.(____ Doe))"
- (l____."Name: ____") ((l____.(____ Doe)) Billy)
Þ "Name: ((l____.(____ Doe)) Billy)"
Þ "Name: (Billy Doe)"
Some l-forms may require many more than just two evaluation steps before halting. In fact, some never halt at all. Perhaps the simplest example of a nonhalting form is:
- (lx.(x x)) (lx.(x x)) Þ (lx.(x x)) (lx.(x x)) Þ (lx.(x x)) (lx.(x x)) Þ . . .
Note that "does not halt" does not mean "requires an infinite number of steps to halt". The latter is a nonsensical statement--there are an infinite number of steps in the evaluation of a non-halting form, so the form never halts. There is, in general, no final result to a l-evaluation that we could clearly perceive if only we could evaluate the form for an infinite amount of time. An infinite evaluation simply has no final result.[11] It is thus also nonsensical to imagine taking the "output" of a non-halting form and passing it as input to another form (or rather, another "function", which is what we call a form that lacks input--but since a function is a concrete S-expression, it lacks objective reality until given some input to process). The full infinite evaluation of a form can be considered as part of the perceptual field 1-4, but never 1-3, since we cannot in practise perceive all of it.
It is easy to see that the process of substitution at each evaluation step is analogous to physical time, and thus we could call it "l-time". We can also see that any percept that can be clearly detached from the fringy field thus necessarily has a temporal quality. Static percepts are fictions, necessarily unclear and nondetachable from their perceptual fields without introducing a temporal component. If we at some point were to discover that our entire perceptual field can be analyzed as a form, we would be able to declare the same for all conscious perception: that it is necessarily temporal. But since we are not yet justified in concluding this, we will simply state for now that it is consistent with our observation of perception in general, which does indeed seem, even when very unclear, to always have a temporal character. Try to observe, by focus of attention, some typical unclear percept, such as a visual image. This is very difficult, as the percept keeps changing in our very attempt to observe it, as it moves within its possibility field. But getting as close as we can get to pinning it down and detaching it from the background field, we find it seems irreducibly temporal in quality.
The result of each step of a l-evaluation depends on the previous result, and is predetermined in a precise way by it, so evaluation can be thought of, not just as abstraction, but also as a model of causation or mechanism. So we see that "abstraction", "causation" and "mechanism" are just different words for the same thing. You may have guessed by now that the l-calculus can also be viewed as a simple and elegant model of computing (in fact, the popular computer programming language LISP is a version of the l-calculus [12]):
- ( (lx.P) I ) Þ O
P is the "program"
I is the "input" or "environment"
O is the "output" or "value" of the computation.
- (*6) The Church-Turing Thesis: all possible clear percepts (i.e., all mathematical truths) can be expressed as l-forms (i.e., recursive structures).[13]
By "in principle", it is meant that although we ourselves may lack the resources to make our own percepts clear and distinct, they are as things-in-themselves, in truth, analyzable l-forms. Perhaps they could be made clear to larger-brained creatures, superbeings, that were so much smarter than us that they did have the resources to fully analyze us and make our percepts clear to them. Those who oppose the strong AI view, however, believe that, while our unclear percepts may have a formal component, the universal language we have constructed above is not sufficient to describe the full range of our perceptions even in principle--our unclear percepts, complete with field and fringe, would escape analysis even by the most intellectually gifted rational superbeings. Our perceptions, they claim, are not l-forms at all; they are something of a completely different kind. This issue we cannot settle yet, and we will not settle here. However, until such time as we know how to look for a better universal language, or have specific reasons to believe our current language is incomplete, my own view is that the only sensible research path is to continue to try and analyze perception with the formal tools at hand, and see how far we can go towards making all our perceptions clear and distinct. For even if it is true that human perception goes beyond what is formalizable, the only way to determine this is still to attempt a formal analysis, since no one has yet come up with a way to be precise non-formally. Perhaps at some point we will have sufficiently exhausted all possible ways of formalizing human perception, and will be convinced that the job cannot be done, but for now we have no real recourse, if we want at least to try to be precise, but to adopt the rationalist assumption that human perception is formalizable--at least as a working hypothesis to be confirmed or falsified as time goes on. This is the rationalist assumption--that everything we experience has a rational explanation. It is not a claim that one can rationally demonstrate the assumption to be true, but rather it is a particular approach to science, which takes the assumption as its primary operating assumption.
- (*7) The Rationalist or Strong AI Hypothesis: all perception is clearly and distinctly perceivable, at least in principle (i.e., it consists of distinct percepts, expressible as l-expressions).
Our formal language, the l-calculus, can itself be made more distinct by translating it into various basis languages. A search through book-percept-space via body manipulation reveals many different formulations of this universal language, the equivalence of which has been demonstrated with great clarity.[14] One is called "Turing machines". Another is called "first-order predicate calculus plus set theory". Another is called "cellular automata", another the "NAND/NOR-gate" and yet another "combinatory logic". There is also one called "English" and another called "German". These last two are not very efficient at expressing clear and distinct percepts, being much better suited to describing unclear percepts, but they are adequate to the task.
We discover that whatever can be expressed with total clarity in any of these languages can be made more distinct by translating it into as many of the others as possible. All such languages are called "Turing-equivalent". This class of languages is sometimes called the set of recursive functions (although I would prefer to say recursive structures or forms, since a function by itself cannot be evaluated, as it lacks any input). This gives us the full power of arithmetic and number theory and the rest of mathematics. Thus I will now proceed to use mathematical formalism freely without necessarily expressing everything explicitly in the l-calculus, which is sometimes too awkward. Anything that can be precisely described mathematically, and programmed into a computer, can be expressed as a recursive form, and will thus be grounded in our universal language. Now that we have analyzed analysis, we are prepared to more properly analyse the perceptual field.
VIII. Hierarchical Perceptual Control Theory
Figure 6 shows a simple schematic of the simplest type of control system, which combines various elements of the preexisting perceptual field to produce a new percept, according to the "basis" specified by the PERCEPT() function. This is compared to the referent by the COMPARE() function, the result of which is used to control the percept via the OUTPUT() function, which transforms the result of the comparison into an action that will (hopefully) bring the new transformed perceptual field more into line with the referent.
If the PERCEPT() and OUTPUT() operators are taken as simple sums and COMPARE() is taken as a subtract function, we have the simplest possible feedback control system. I am not claiming here of course, that perceptual control is really built like this, just that this is a recursive formalization that captures what we have been able so far to analyze concerning perception. Future discoveries of the structure of our perceptual field may force us to fill in more details, make the situation more complicated, or even force us to redesign our model completely.
Fig. 6: Perceptual Field Generation.
Some reflection will reveal that there is a hierarchical structure to perception, which we have already noted in outline. Perhaps the thing-in-itself is not literally formalisable as a strict hierarchy, but there is some kind of hierarchy there after a fashion. Take for example, the act of driving to work in your car. You are continually controlling for perceiving yourself near the centre of the road by acting on the steering wheel percept. But why are you doing that? Examine yourself very carefully, and you will discover that you are in fact controlling for getting to work, only on a somewhat longer time scale. On an even longer time scale, you are controlling for making money, and ultimately for being happy. Some of these references may only be on the fringe of your consciousness, even nonconscious, in spite of the fact that they are influencing your every move.
The simplest model we can build with recursive functions would look something like figure 7. The referent at each lower level is supplied by the behaviour of the higher level. The referent for the staying-on-the-road subsystem is supplied by the behaviour of the getting-to-work subsystem, for instance. The perceptual input for each higher level system (the input to its PERCEPT() function) is taken from the percepts of all the lower level subsystems.
At all levels in the hierarchy we are acting to achieve a stable percept, according to the basis language in which our perception is expressed, determined by PERCEPT(), COMPARE() and OUTPUT(). This is the feedback loop. We could feasibly have all kinds of different feedback loops within us, some perhaps in conflict with others. This would certainly explain certain feelings of tension that we feel all the time (such as "I want to go to work, and make money, but at the same time I want to stay in bed and sleep").
Fig. 7: Hierarchical Perceptual Control: Driving to Work.
Figure 8 shows a graph from a computer simulation of a simple control system controlling its percept, bringing it in line, over time, with the referent. When there is a disturbance to the referent, the system acts to bring perception back to a stable state. This kind of behaviour is universal in all things that we call "living", not just those we call "conscious". Earlier we said that the terms "perception" and "percept" were being kept open for possibly wider applicability than just conscious perception. Here we see an appropriate broader definition. The simple system depicted in figure 8 is a single comparator that does a simple subtract of a scalar percept from a scalar referent. As such, it is no doubt not even remotely conscious, but it is a control system with an identifiable percept. If we were given a larger system in which this controller was embedded, it would be possible to isolate the controller clearly from the rest of the system as something that perceives, even if we were not told ahead of time what was "organism" and what was "environment", and even though consciousness is not really even an issue at such a simplistic level (we would simply look for stabilities that maintain themselves in the face of disturbances).
Fig. 8: A Simple System Controls Its Perception Against Disturbance.
It is entirely feasible that our own consciousness arises from the unconscious behaviour of many such mini-controllers working in parallel, and that as we move out in the hierarchy from the conscious controllers in the core, to the fringier controllers, consciousness just gradually fades into nonconscious perception, without there being a firm line between the two. This is a reasonable hypothesis, as it builds our perceptions out of lower level entities that work essentially the same as the ones we built from what we actually know about our own conscious perceptions. But that does not mean that the hypothesis is necessarily true, and since we will not be developing or justifying our theory of cognition any further in these pages, I will leave it at that for now.
IX. The Distribution of the Perceptual Field: Quantum Phenomenology
When we analyze a percept through the use of a controlled manipulation, we move from one percept to another, via a manipulation in which is implicit some language we have chosen as a basis on which to form a stable percept. This sometimes appears as a forced act of will, especially over longer time scales, but appears to work more automatically for perception on the faster time scales, as in image perception. Here, while the work is done more automatically, the percept still involves control of a stable percept, forming a foreground out of the background. If you examine yourself carefully, you will see that you are doing some work, although it is relatively effortless. The basis language, as part of the perceptual field, is perhaps readily accessible, perhaps not. It can thus at least potentially be brought to the foreground as a percept itself, although perhaps in practise only by superbeings capable of fully understanding us. Nonetheless, the basis language and the percept-object are both possible percepts (*7).
We will represent the basis of a percept, itself a percept, within the "< |" symbols, called a "bra" for reasons that have nothing to do with women's underwear, and which will become clear shortly. In the current example we have two different basis languages for the two-plus-two percept:
- <>
- | two-plus-two >
The entire perceptual field, fringe and all, of any one particular expression of the ket-percept in some basis language is given by combining the complementary brackets, to form a bra-ket, or bracket:
- <> ,
<>
- Quantum Rule #1: Put what you know clearly and distinctly in the ket. Put your unclear, indistinct perceptions in the bra.
- <> (bra-ket notation)
percept(perception) (functional notation)
(l percept) (perception) (lambda notation)
The computation that is performed by the function call percept(perception) will, if fully formalized, actually produce the entire conscious perceptual field that is consciousness of the specified percept. This is not a static object that the computation somehow produces as an "output value". Rather, the very object that is consciousness is itself a process, a necessarily temporal thing. It is the very running of the abstract computer program that is the perceptual field, not some static end result. The bra-ket
So two-plus-two(apples) yields our conscious apple-adding experience. The apple-basis, as mentioned earlier, can be detached as a percept itself, which we (perhaps) use to manipulate or transform the "2+2=4" arithmetical percept. We think of this as control within imagination. When it happens more automatically, without conscious willing or focus of attention, we think of it as control via the body and are more apt to call it an "observation" than willful control. An example would be the observance of a ball by directing our eyes towards it. Say there is a table on the other side of the room, possibly with a ball under it. We look up from the page, directing our eyes in that direction. There are many possible percepts we could perceive by doing this. The field of possibilities becomes actualized as we move our eyes to the table. We might, for instance, see the ball on top of the table, or we might see it underneath. Both are perceptual possibilities, and both are easily brought to view within imagination. If we check for the ball's location in this fashion, we could describe the perceptual field as ball-percept(ball-on-table), or
In order to include in our representation both this basis that we are calling the "look-ball operator" and the more specific ball-under-table basis that we already placed in a bra, we here introduce the general idea of an "operator", which will be defined as an act of manipulation that transforms a percept in its possibility field. If we have but one operator, it is just equivalent to the basis, or bra. If we have one operator that acts on a given basis, we call it an operator on the given basis language. Thus, for the ball percept, the "look-ball" basis can be viewed as an operator that we use to focus on the ball-percept, producing the (perhaps unclear) ball-on-table observation. We enclose an operator in vertical bars, "| |", so that it can be placed within the bra-ket:
- ball-percept(look-ball(ball-on-table)) (functional notation)
Figure 9 shows two different operators that we will use in our example: look-ball and look-sky, which involves looking up from this page and out the window at the sky, instead of at the table. Two possible perceptual results are shown for the look-ball operator, and one for the look-sky operator. In reality, there are many more possible results. Note that the possibilities within the perceptual field are necessarily restricted here by our choice of operator/language. We are talking about all possible perception that could result from this action. This is necessarily restricted by what is (1) mathematically possible and (2) by our personal identity. The consciousnesses that perceives these "results" must thus in some way "be able to remember" being me looking at this page moments before. The precise criterion to be applied here would require a more complete theory of consciousness, of course, but the basic idea is simple enough: what mathematically possible perceptions count as possible within this context is determined by our criteria for personal identity, and what is mathematically possible..
There are, of course, far more possibilities than are shown in the diagram, although we will find it convenient to talk as if these were the only possibilities, as a pedagogical tool only. Please take careful note that no claim is being made here about what is "physically possible", since the existence of an external world is still bracketed by the Husserlian epochê. As long as a result fits into the context of the given basis, which includes my sense of personal identity, then we must include it when attempting to compute a probability distribution for the perceptual field. So long as both the ball under the table and the ball on the table are mathematically possible percepts to have, then we must include them both.
Fig. 9: Looking up from the page: 2 possible actions, 3 possible results.
We see immediately that a completely phenomenological theory of consciousness, while it may yet find a place for the material "world", is surely never going to be a theory of One True World. Already, we see that it can only be a theory of many possible worlds. This conclusion is not quite justified, even given (*7), for it is always possible that were we to fully formalise consciousness, we would find that there actually is only one possible result of looking at the table. This seems hardly credible, however. Surely, although we may see the ball on the table, it was still a mathematically possible perception to see it under the table. In any case, we will assume this viewpoint for now.
- (*8) Working assumption: it seems reasonable to assume that for most ordinary observations, there is more than one possible perception that could result.
We will call such entire-situations (containing entire perceptual fields within them) "worlds". We call it an "entire situation" or "world" instead of an "entire perceptual field" because this is the ket, the thing-in-itself that we want to make clear, so if not detachable from our entire perceptual field, it must be bigger than it, merely containing it:
- world(look-ball(ball-on-table)) (functional notation)
<> (bra-ket notation)
So, although it is too soon to jump to conclusions, we will go ahead and use the term "world" for this self-identity-based ket. And since the common sense material world is still bra-ketted (if the reader will excuse the pun), in accord with the epochê, we absolutely cannot go from our ket-based notion of "world" to the traditional notion of a metaphysically "material" world that goes beyond what is perceivable even in principle.
Recall that the ball-percept as a world is the thing-in-itself, so if formalized to full clarity, it may well be extremely complex compared to the seeming simplicity of the unclear, vague ball-percept as it appears apodictically before consciousness. The earlier bra-ket expression formalized the entire conscious experience of observing a ball on the table, given that we turn our heads and look to see its position. To fully formalize the expression is to clearly know the percept (we may need to solicit the help of our superbeing friends). If we express it in the l-calculus we achieve a high degree of distinctness. Nonetheless, we can achieve greater and greater adequacy of expression, or distinctness, by expressing the percept in as many different ways as possible, since taking whatever is common between all these things will give us the distinct "thing-in-itself" (at least in the unreachable limit of all possible languages). Thus the thing-in-itself can be seen as a kind of combination over all possible representations of it (in all possible languages), as discussed in previous sections. By "combination" I simply mean whatever is meant by "take what is common amongst". Although doing this is essential to human cognition and our understanding of forms, we do not yet know what this operation is, since we cannot yet formalize our entire perceptual field. A complete formalized theory of cognition, possibly based on hierarchical perceptual control theory, might make this clearer. For now, we will just call it the COMMON() or INTERSECTION() or Ç() function:
- <>
<> = Çx <>
where x here ranges over all possible ways of viewing the ball as on the table
- Quantum Rule #2:
|y> = Çx |x|y>
Presuming that our entire-perceptual-situation, or world, is indeed a thing-in-itself that has objective form or truth and can be analyzed, then the action of some operators to achieve control may be more likely to produce certain resulting perceptual states than others. |world> will have a kind of probability distribution, depending on what operator we choose to apply. |world> should thus be quantifiable in terms of a particular probability distribution for some class of results.
By saying that there is a particular probability distribution, I mean that not all results are equally probable. A probability distribution requires more than just a collection of possibilities. A possibility field does not necessarily yield a nontrivial probability field. If all we have is a collection of various possibilities, there is no reason to suppose that any are more likely than any others. Nontrivial probability distributions require that the possibilities be grouped into "equivalence classes", sets of results that are considered, for the purposes of probability calculations, to be the same.
It is easy to see that there are natural-seeming equivalence classes for perception. If we recognize commonalities, or formal structure, in our perception, the basis language for our perception can form the basis of a probability distribution. For instance, in the space of Necker cube perceptions, we would group more than one possible figure as roughly the same result. If we are controlling for a particular point of view, trying to flip from one to the other, there are many possible results that we would accept as equivalent. Sometimes, this is a result of conscious decision. We decide that certain results are similar enough to deserve to be classified together. But other times, it may simply be because entirely different percepts can yield exactly the same perception. For instance, although there may be noticeably different percepts that we would treat as equally belonging to the "ball-on-table" class, there may also be many different, distinct percepts that cannot be distinguished by us, from our personal point of view within the core of consciousness. So for us, these are truly identical results (on the bra side), but in reality, they must be treated as different things-in-themselves (on the ket side). This appears to be the case, if the world is truly a recursive structure as we have assumed (*7), since much of the specific probabilistic structure of the world seems complex and arbitrary to the untrained eye. Although extensive phenomenological experiments with body-manipulations [17] have revealed numerous "laws of nature", no complete and clear rationale in terms of formal structures has ever been offered for these laws. They appear ultimately arbitrary. Although such laws might eventually be completely formalised, the point here is that this would take much work, and the result would hardly be intuitively obvious to the untrained eye. The fact that body-percepts have this unclear partly unpredictable, partly predictable structure, is what leads us to label the world "material" and presume that there is something about it that goes beyond what can be clearly and distinctly perceived. Nonetheless, I cannot completely justify this move, so I will mark it for later reference:
- (*9) Assumption of complexity: assume for now that in most ordinary observations, there are multiple distinct possible percepts that are indistinguishable to consciousness, and that the number of such distinct percepts is different for different perceptions. By :"indistinguishable percepts", we mean that there are different possible percepts that would produce identical consciousnesses (not that any individual consciousness has actually had an opportunity to compare the percepts and find them identical).
- |
given that we look for the ball, and given our entire perceptual context, or world.
- |
P(ball-on-table | look-ball | world) = -------------------------------------------
| |look-ball | world> |
- Quantum Rule #3: [18]
- |
P(x|y) = ------------
| |y> |
- Quantum Rule #4:
Si P(xi|y) = 1
- Quantum Rule #5:
P(x|y) = P(y|x)
We will use figure 9 as an example, and assume it exhausts all the possible perceptions that could result from applying the look-ball operator (which is absurd, but it simplifies our analysis). We will assume that figure 9 shows percepts as they are distinguished from one another by consciousness, and that in fact, while sun-in-sky is the only possible thing-in-itself that results from look-sky, there are actually four possible distinct results from look-ball:
- |p1> =
|p2> =
|p3> =
|p4> =
- P(ball-on-table|world) = 0.75
P(ball-under-table|world) = 0.25
We thus conclude that the world, if it is a rational (*7), complex (*9) structure, cannot be deterministic with respect to our observations. There will always (or at least often) be more than one possible outcome of an observation, and thus more than one perceptual consciousness with an identity that remembers being the single "me" that chose to make the observation in the first place. Our consciousnesses therefore continually splits with every observation we make (or at least those that meet our complexity requirements). Since the world is defined in terms of personal identity, this means that the world itself is continually splitting as we make observations. This result is predicted by quantum mechanics, but is usually seen as a bizarre, inexplicable result. Only when quantum mechanics is developed as a phenomenology does the result seem natural and just what one would rationally expect.
However, one never sees the reverse, a consciousness splitting backwards in time--such as two consciousnesses merging into one. While this seems counter to the nature of consciousness, there is no reason to rule it out completely. So we simply note that it has not yet been observed, whilst keeping our eyes open for counter-examples.
Fig. 10: Quantum Reduction of the Perceptual Possibility Field
Figure 10 shows the world-splitting that results in our example. Note that the world function, y, since it is identified with personal consciousness, must necessarily produce, as it runs on, all possible perceptions that the conscious being could have. y is called the "Schrödinger wavefunction" in quantum mechanics, and is what we are calling the perceptual possibility field. Given a complex world, with a nontrivial probability structure, the history of a conscious personal identity cannot be described as the running of the world, i.e., as a recursive structure, since that would be an enumeration of all possible histories, whereas any one person is only ever conscious of one of these histories. Since each time the world splits, more than one consciousness results, we only experience one of many possible futures, resulting in a subjective "collapse" or "reduction" of the possibility field. In quantum physics, this reduction is called the "collapse of the wavefunction", and it is a matter of great controversy as to whether the other worlds are truly "real" or if somehow there is something more to the world than the formalism of quantum mechanics. Treating quantum theory as a phenomenology gives a much different picture than the traditional formulations, heavily favouring what is known as the "many-worlds" or Everett interpretation of the theory.[19] Of course, the theory developed in this paper is not really the full quantum theory. The precise nature of the forms involved has not been worked out here, and the jury is currently still out as to whether it will ever be possible to truly derive the reduction of the wavefunction in purely probabilistic terms over an ensemble of worlds. My point is not to show that the full-blown theory of quantum mechanics can be derived from rationalist principles, but simply that the essential elements that have been traditionally considered weird and inexplicable can be.
But why is it, you might be asking, if all rationally conceivable possibilities are real, that when I look at a table, and then look away and look back a few seconds later, the table is still there? Why do I only experience a world in which tables are stable and don't just disappear at random or turn into giant pink bunny-rabbits? If these "weird" events are possible conscious states for me to have, then why don't I ever experience them? The answer given by both my quantum phenomenology and actual quantum physics (as interpreted by Everett) is that these possibilities are in fact really there in your perceptual possibility field 1-3, even the giant pink bunny rabbit. But for large, complex objects like tables, such "strange" possibilities have very low probability, while what we think of as stable possibilities have much higher probability. Only when we are dealing with simple objects with little or no inner complexity, such as electrons and photons, do the probability distributions become uncomplicated enough to produce consciously noticeable effects that are "weird" and nondeterministic. So even the table's turning into a pink bunny-rabbit is allowed in quantum theory. But tables turn into rabbits in only a vanishingly small percentage of worlds, so although it happens in some worlds, we never observe it in practice.
X. Conclusion
As such, this view of the world is both the most extreme kind of rationalism, refusing to accept anything that cannot be clearly and (relatively) distinctly conceived of, and at the same time the most extreme kind of empiricism, as it grounds all that is rational in terms of experience, and what it views as requiring rational explanation is restricted to what is experienced. Radical rationalism and radical empiricism meet in the phenomenological method.
If you disagree with the methods used, or the assumptions made along the way, then the challenge still remains for you to explain why such a method, based entirely on common sense experience and rational principles, has, in spite of its flaws, predicted the essential features of our most accurate physical theory ever, those very features that were considered surprising, even shocking, when the theory was initially discovered. This, in spite of the fact that no use was made along the way of any of the results of the sophisticated physical experiments that forced the physics community, against strong empirical predilections, to accept what it by and large considered an extremely counter-intuitive theory.
References and Notes
[2] Immanuel Kant (1781). Critique of Pure Reason (2nd. Ed.), Norman Kemp Smith (Trans.). http://csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu/philosophyProject/sellars/kant/kant.html, 1781, 1787, 1985, 1996.
[3] Edmund Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Dorion Cairns (Trans.). Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1929, 1950, 1995.
[4] Aristotle. "Nicomachean Ethics," In: The Basic Works of Aristotle, pp. 935-1126. Random House, New York, c. 335-322 BC, 1941.
[5] Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (2nd Ed.). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1948, 1961.
[6] W.R. Ashby. An Introduction to Cybernetics. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1956.
[7] William T. Powers. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing, Hawthorne, NY, 1973.
[8] Nick Herbert. Quantum Reality. Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1985. [The best nonmathematical introduction to quantum theory that I know.]
[9] Marvin Chester. Primer of Quantum Mechanics. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987. [The best mathematical introduction to quantum theory that I know.]
[10] The bold-face characters are place-holders for S-expressions, but are not themselves S-expressions. They are a way of talking about S-expressions, and are called, along with the S-expressions containing them, "meta-expressions," or "M-expressions." Most so-called S-expressions you see in print are actually M-expressions. An M-expression that stands for a l-expression is called a "function."
[11] Although it is possible the expression could approach a particular S-expression in the limit. However, it takes another l-expression referring to the nonhalting one to establish this. In itself the l-expression just produces an infinite sequence of new expressions.
[12] In fact, I have used the terminology of LISP in this paper. The actual terms used vary somewhat from one version of the l-calculus to another.
[13] Church and Turing, of course, did not formulate their version in the phenomenological terms we are using. They talked of things that would "naturally" be considered as "computable". However, many different versions (some ontological, some epistemological, some cognitive) of the thesis are held by various schools.
[14] George S. Boolos and Richard C. Jeffrey. Computability and Logic (3rd Ed.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974, 1989. [An excellent technical introduction.]
[15] Recall that "fully detached" means that what we detached we completely detached, not that we managed to detach exclusively what we were after without dragging anything else in with it (the percept is clear but only relatively distinct).
[16] To make the entire arithmetic version clear would mean performing ((l two-plus-two)(arithmetic))(languageX), where languageX is some language that allows us to represent our entire perceptual field within itself. (It is likely that languageX cannot exist for us, although the computation could perhaps be carried out by the superbeings).
[17] I refer here to scientific experiments, which have established laws such as those of Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg. It is a mistake to see these as empirical and therefore outside the realm of phenomenology. Such experiments are fully phenomenological; they simply rely more heavily on body-manipulations than imagination-manipulations. Their main practical difference from thought (i.e., imagination) experiments is that they are very difficult to set up and carry out, and so we must accept the word of others as to their outcome (which would be another unjustified move and require an asterisk (*11)). However, there is no reason in principle we could not carry them out for ourselves and reproduce the results, just as we reproduce our own imaginary results.
[18] Readers familiar with the mathematics of quantum mechanics should be careful about drawing too close a parallel between the system I am developing here and quantum mechanics. Bear in mind that quantum mechanics is an a posteriori theory built on highly sophisticated experimentation, and is capable of making extremely precise predictions. I am developing here an a priori theory that is not quantum mechanics, but bears a striking resemblance to it, in that it has all the same "paradoxical" characteristics. I do not pretend that a priori methods will be able to take us as far as the a posteriori theory. Expressions in Dirac notation in this paper do not correspond to expressions in Dirac notation for quantum mechanics. For instance, in quantum theory, the Dirac expression yields what is called an "amplitude", which is squared to calculate the actual probability of an event. This squaring does not appear in my treatment. My a priori theory may or may not become more like quantum mechanics as it is developed.
[19] Hugh Everett, III. "'Relative state' formulation of quantum mechanics," In: The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, DeWitt & Graham (Eds.), pp. 141-149. Princeton U. Press, Princeton, 1957, 1973.
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 333.000 de quantum phenomenology. (0,11 segundos)
Sugerencia: Buscar sólo resultados en español. Puede especificar el idioma de búsqueda en Preferencias.
Resultados de la búsqueda
-The answer given by both my quantum phenomenology and actual quantum physics (as interpreted by Everett) is that these possibilities are in fact really ...
www.elea.org/Phenomenology/ -Quantum Phenomenology for Heavy-Fermion Systems. I. Formulation of ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de Y Kuramoto - 1990 - Citado por 41 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum Phenomenology for Heavy-Fermion Systems. I. 2835 the left-hand side is by 8% too small.17) Thus we expect from the comparison in Fig. 2 that ...
jpsj.ipap.jp/link?JPSJ/59/2831/[hep-ph/9407252] Quantum Phenomenology for the Disoriented Chiral ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de RD Amado - 1994 - Citado por 48 - Artículos relacionados
Title: Quantum Phenomenology for the Disoriented Chiral Condensate. Authors: R. D. Amado, Ian I. Kogan. (Submitted on 7 Jul 1994) ...
arxiv.org › hep-ph - En caché[quant-ph/9709004] Quantum Phenomenology with the Path Integral ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de T Calarco - 1997 - Artículos relacionados
Abstract: A quantum measurement model based upon restricted path-integrals allows us to study measurements of generalized position in various ...
arxiv.org › quant-ph - En caché- [PDF]
QUANTUM PHENOMENOLOGY WITH THE PATH INTEGRAL APPROACH
- [ Traducir esta página ]Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
QUANTUM PHENOMENOLOGY. WITH THE PATH INTEGRAL APPROACH. T. Calarco,1'2 R. Onofrio,1'3 C. Presilla,4 and L. Viola1 dipartimento di Fisica "G. Galilei", ...
isis.roma1.infn.it/~presilla/papers/pap31/pap31.pdf Quantum Phenomenology and Physics
- [ Traducir esta página ]Quantum Phenomenology and Physics, 7.5 hp. Kvantfenomen och fysik, 7.5 hp (7.5 ECTS). First level, Full time. Print. Time-dependent perturbation theory, ...
sisu.it.su.se/search/show_education_info/.../en?area... - En cachéHarry P. Reeder
"Quantum Phenomenology," in Young-Ho Lee and Soon-Young Park eds., Phenomenology of Nature: Festschrift in Honor of Kah Kyung Cho, (Seoul: Korean Society ...
www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/reeder/ - En cachéCERN Document Server: Record#265860: Quantum phenomenology for the ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de RD Amado - 1994 - Citado por 48 - Artículos relacionados
21 Jul 2009 ... We consider the quantum state describing theDisoriented Chiral Condensate (DCC), which may be produced in high energy collisions.
cdsweb.cern.ch/record/265860 - En cachéQuantum phenomenology for the disoriented chiral condensate
- [ Traducir esta página ]de RD Amado - 1995 - Citado por 48 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum phenomenology for the disoriented chiral condensate. RD Amado, Ian I Kogan Physical Review D 51:11, 190-200, American Physical Society, 1/1995.
link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.51.190- [PDF]
Quantum Phenomenology for the Disoriented Chiral Condensate
- [ Traducir esta página ]Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Versión en HTML
de RD Amado - 1994 - Citado por 48 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum Phenomenology for the Disoriented Chiral Condensate. R. D. Amado. Department of Physics, University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA 19104 ...
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.117&rep...
Resultados 11 - 20 de aproximadamente 333.000 de quantum phenomenology. (0,11 segundos)
Resultados de la búsqueda
Quantum phenomenology for heavy-fermion systems. I, Formulation of ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de Y KURAMOTO - 1990 - Citado por 41 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum phenomenology for heavy-fermion systems. ... Antiferromagnetism ; Quantum effect ; Phenomenological theory ; Anderson model ; Electron correlation ...
cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=19321275CiNii - Quantum Phenomenology for Heavy-Fermion Systems. : I ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]Quantum Phenomenology for Heavy-Fermion Systems. : I. Formulation of the Duality Model. KURAMOTO,Yoshio; Department of Applied Physics,Tohoku University ...
ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110001960813/enFrom Quantum to Emergent Gravity: Theory and Phenomenology
- [ Traducir esta página ]What the Pierre Auger Observatory can and cannot tell about Quantum Gravity Phenomenology: spectrum, composition and origin of the highest energy Cosmic ...
pos.sissa.it/cgi-bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=43 - En cachéQuantum Phenomenology for Heavy-Fermion Systems. I. Formulation of ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de Y Kuramoto - 1990 - Citado por 41 - Artículos relacionados
A quantum mechanical phenomenology for heavy-fermion systems is formulated. The effective Lagrangian for low-energy excitations contains a localized ...
adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990JPSJ...59.2831KQuantum phenomenology for the disoriented chiral condensate
- [ Traducir esta página ]de RD Amado - 1995 - Citado por 48 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum phenomenology for the disoriented chiral condensate. Authors: Amado, R. D.; Kogan, Ian I. Affiliation: AA(Department of Physics, University of ...
adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995PhRvD..51..190AMathematical problems of relativistic physics - Resultado de la Búsqueda de libros de Google
Irving Ezra Segal, George Whitelaw Mackey - 1967 - Mathematics - 131 páginas
CHAPTER I Quantum Phenomenology We begin by treating the notion of a physical system, keeping as closely as possible to the use of concepts having a fairly ...
books.google.es/books?isbn=0821811029...- [PDF]
Quantum Algebras, Particle Phenomenology, and (Quasi)Supersymmetry
- [ Traducir esta página ]Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
de AM GAVRILIK - 2002 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum Algebras, Particle Phenomenology, and (Quasi)Supersymmetry. 543 implying that, with θ. 2. = 0 imposed, the limit of the ratio in (13) should be ...
www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C0107094/papers/Gavrilik540-547.pdf PhysicsWorld Archive » Volume 16 » Quantum-gravity phenomenology
- [ Traducir esta página ]de G Amelino-Camelia - 2003 - Citado por 90 - Artículos relacionados
Quantum-gravity phenomenology. Author. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia. Published: November 2003; Page(s): 43–47; Article Type: Features ...
physicsworldarchive.iop.org/index.cfm?action=summary... - SimilaresCiteSeerX — Quantum Phenomenology for the Disoriented Chiral ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]CiteSeerX - Document Details (Isaac Councill, Lee Giles): We consider the quantum state describing the Disoriented Chiral Condensate (DCC), ...
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.50... - En cachéThe Reference Frame: Phenomenology of quantum gravity
- [ Traducir esta página ]21 Jul 2007 ... The best theoretical physics blog that the search engine can offer you, by a Czech conservative string theorist, focusing on high-energy ...
motls.blogspot.com/.../phenomenology-of-quantum-gravity.html - En caché
Resultados 21 - 30 de aproximadamente 333.000 de quantum phenomenology. (0,20 segundos)
Resultados de la búsqueda
6.4 Quantum gravity - phenomenology
- [ Traducir esta página ]de C Barceló - Citado por 141 - Artículos relacionados
Hopefully investigation of appropriate analogue models might be able to illuminate possible mechanisms leading to this kind of quantum gravity phenomenology ...
www.emis.de/journals/LRG/Articles/lrr.../articlesu26.html - En cachéI am you: the metaphysical foundations of global ethics - Resultado de la Búsqueda de libros de Google
Daniel Kolak - 2004 - Philosophy - 644 páginas
These are the claims, respectively, that I call quantum phenomenology and quantum consciousness. Is either claim — quantum phenomenology or consciousness ...
books.google.es/books?isbn=1402029993...Semiconductor quantum dots: Theory and phenomenology
- [ Traducir esta página ]de VA Singh - 1999 - Citado por 1 - Artículos relacionados
Semiconductor quantum dots: Theory and phenomenology. VIJAY A SINGH*, V RAN JAN and MANISH KAPOOR t. Physics Department, Indian Institute of Technology, ...
www.springerlink.com/index/WN4X535571086407.pdf - SimilaresJohn Ellis: Quantum Gravity Phenomenology: nice hat, but where are ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]Off to College Station, Texas for a small workshop on the possible phenomenology of quantum gravity hosted by the Mitchell Institute of Theoretical Physics ...
qd.typepad.com/24/2005/05/quantum_gravity.html - En cachéHEP Institutes in SPAIN
IngentaConnect Pseudogap and Quantum-Transition Phenomenology in ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]de JL Tallon - 2003 - Citado por 7 - Artículos relacionados
Pseudogap and Quantum-Transition Phenomenology in HTS Cuprates. Authors: Tallon, J.L.1; Loram, J.W.2; Panagopoulos, C.2. Source: Journal of Low Temperature ...
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/jolt/2003/00000131/.../00463664;...Postgraduate Program Members
Barcelona, CU, Gravitation, Quantum Field Theory, M, garriga@ffn.ub.es. Gavela, Belén, UAM-IFT, CU, Particle Physics Phenomenology ...
www.ft.uam.es/docencia/.../profesorado_postgrado_ing.html - En cachéQuantum Dots: Phenomenology, Photonic and Electronic Properties ...
- [ Traducir esta página ]4.1 Introduction 4.1.1 What are they? The research of microelectronic materials is driven by the need to tailor electronic and optical properties for ...
www.spiedigitallibrary.org/ebooks/spie/press.../pm129_ch4 - En caché- [PDF]
Quantum Gravity Phenomenology and the Standard Model Jorge Alfaro ...
Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
Quantum Gravity Phenomenology and the Standard Model. Jorge Alfaro Solis. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile jalfaro@puc.cl ...
www.sochifi2008.cl/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/j-alfaro-puc.pdf Proceedings of the Thirteenth Rencontre de Moriond, Les ... - Resultado de la Búsqueda de libros de Google
J. Thanh Van Tran, France. Commissariat à l ... - 1978 - Hadrons - 561 páginas
books.google.es/books?isbn=2863320025...
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario
yesyukan