Vesselin Petkov
Note: All quotations in square brackets [] refer to the corresponding paragraphs of Herbert Muller's paper posted on the Karl Jaspers Forum: http://www.douglashospital.qc.ca/fdg/kjf/57-tamul.htm
What I definitely like in H. Muller's paper is that he tries to discover the common reason leading to puzzles and paradoxes in different areas of human knowledge. The implications of his attempt, if successful, may be enormous. What he is essentially proposing may perhaps constitute the greatest paradigm shift in modern history. The accumulation of persistent existence of puzzles in different areas of knowledge (including the mind-body problem) can be interpreted in Kuhn's terminology as the beginning of revolutionary science. And if H. Muller can convincingly demonstrate that one of the effects of the proposed working ontology is to eliminate those puzzles (paradoxes), then the paradigm shift from mind-independent reality (MIR) to working ontology may become inevitable.
However, as far as the fundamental concept of MIR is concerned, I believe we are still in the period of normal science (in Kuhn's terminology). The paradoxes may be an indication of the beginning of revolutionary science, but only at the level of concrete sciences, not at such a fundamental level that requires a change in the concept of reality. That is why I see this work as addressing issues on the nature of human perception, not on the nature of reality. I am perhaps too brainwashed by the (naïve?) realism doctrine that I am unable to see reality in the way H. Muller sees it. For this reason I will choose to comment only on those points in the paper for which I will be able to provide arguments that clearly support, in my view, the realistic belief in MIR.
My disagreement with H. Muller starts from his basic assumption that "the term MIR is self-contradictory" [8] or even more clearly "the aim of finding the mind in a supposedly mind-independent reality (of brains, neurons, tubules, quanta, etc.) is self-contradictory" [2]. In my view, that aim is self-contradictory only if MIR is interpreted to mean "mind-free reality". If, however, "MIR" is understood in the ordinary sense that the existence of reality is independent of the mind, there is no contradiction at all. On the contrary, the existence of the mind is implied by the insistence that the mind cannot affect the existence of reality. The existence of every person's mind is indeed mind-independent but, as I said, I do not see the contradiction elaborated in H. Muller's TA1 . The existence of every person's mind does not depend on the other persons' minds.
In this situation - both MIR and the mind exist - we do face the hard (mind-body) problem. In my view (based on arguments part of which are given in TA 48), the only promising approach toward this problem is the one outlined by H. Weyl: "The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time" (1).
This is the mind-body problem in the framework of special relativity. Reality, according to relativity, is a frozen, timeless four-dimensional world (block universe). The contradiction between this view and the ordinary view that we realize ourselves only at the present moment (and believe that the whole world exists only at this moment) is removed, as Weyl suggested, by assuming that our self-realization (self-awareness) has nothing to do with the existence of the universe. It is our consciousness (the entity that makes us realize ourselves at the moment "now") that "reads" the information and the (given at once) succession of three-dimensional (in fact, two-dimensional) images stored in our brain, but we incorrectly interpret that information in a sense that there exists a single three-dimensional world which constantly changes in time.
Weyl's view has profound implications. As our consciousness is always localized in a small area of our worldline (our body existing equally at all moments of our life) - what we perceive as our presently existing three-dimensional body - it unavoidably follows that our past and future bodies are without consciousness. So, according to relativity there is really a mind-body parallelism - mind (consciousness) and body equally exist but do not interact. The mind only "reads" what is stored in the body, but cannot influence (change) it since its history is forever given in the block universe. The body does not have the chance to affect the mind either.
If this looks too radical to some, I wonder what their reaction would be if they carried out the logical analysis based on Weyl's view (which itself is based on special relativity and the experiments confirming it). The conclusion one reaches after performing such an analysis is to some extent the opposite of what H. Muller proposes (if I understand him correctly): if, for instance, you return to Earth after having stayed in the International Space Station for a year and look at the people around you, you will see not just MIR, but mind-free reality - the minds of the people around you will be about two hundredths of a second in your future (in the twin paradox the minds would be in the past). Life would be much simpler if this were just an eccentric statement, but, unfortunately, this is quite a real problem. In my view, once the issue outlined above is properly studied and resolved - one way or another - we may have a clearer idea how to deal with the hard problem.
H. Muller considers reality unstructured, if I understand him correctly. He believes that it is our mind that structures it. However, the main question science is trying to answer is "What is the structure of reality?" We create theories and test them to see whether they adequately reflect that structure. In some cases the experiments confirm our models, in some cases they do not. If it is we who structure reality, why some of the models fail. H. Muller says we see what works and what does not. But this is precisely the question: "What makes some of the models work?". In my view, the answer is the existence of a given structure of reality which is completely independent of our minds and our existence; if our models do not reflect adequately that structure, they do not work.
As a physicist I cannot agree with most of H. Muller's views on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In his view, "MIR-belief causes the weirdness, or at least some of it" [47]. I would rather say what most realists are saying - that our incomplete knowledge of MIR is the true reason for the quantum puzzles. There exist different attempts to describe the structure of the quantum object, but what I believe is the most promising hypothesis is the so-called 4-atomism. Its essence is bringing the idea of atomism to its logical completion - discreteness not only in space but in time as well (4-atomism); the reference to the original publication and its brief description are given in Section 2 of (2). This hypothesis offers resolutions (at least on a conceptual level) to a number of quantum mechanical paradoxes including the meaning of the superpositional state and the collapse of the wavefunction. What is promisingly original in the 4-atomism hypothesis is its radical approach toward the way we understand the structure of an object. The present understanding is that an object can have structure only in space. The 4-atomism suggests that an object can be indivisible in space (like an electron) but structured in time.
Concerning the collapse of the wavefunction H. Muller writes "The collapse is a change in the subject/object system, not in an MIR-system" [50]. When an electron is caught by a proton to form a hydrogen atom the wavefunction of the free electron (predicting equal probability of finding the electron theoretically in all the space) collapses to an area of the size of the hydrogen atom. There is no subject (or even a detector) in this case. The 4-atomism hypothesis offers a nice resolution to this issue as well without the need for a subject.
It seems to me that H. Muller understands the uncertainty principle as caused by observation: "a (macroscopic-derived) picture of QM events undisturbed by observation (by photons) is not possible" [65]. This does seem to be the case since he bases his discussion on Heisenberg's explanation/ description of the uncertainty relations. Now it is recognized that Heisenberg's account is not accurate. It is not the observation that is causing those relations. A convincing example is the existence of virtual quanta - their very existence is governed by the energy-time uncertainty relation, but no observation (or an interaction with a detector) is involved.
For H. Muller the answer to the question of what dimensions are is: "The dimensions are our products (and thinking tools), not something we discover outside" [67]. I do not see any proof for such an understanding. The question whether dimensions are something external is directly related to the issue of the ontological status of Minkowski spacetime. If indeed "dimensions are our products" then we can structure our subjective experience in such a way that we can express everything in terms of space AND time (not spacetime); so, we can never talk about such things as four-dimensional spacetime that we can never visualize. However, there exist strong arguments (see TA 48) which demonstrate that the price for rejecting the four-dimensionality of reality is a contradiction with the experimental evidence supporting special relativity. Therefore, those arguments indicate that we are not free to choose with how many dimensions we can describe reality, which means that dimensions do belong to the external reality.
My last comment is on "human experience does not cause or invent the quantum events - although it structures them, as it does with all experiences" [72]. This will be an unusual conclusion, because the quote is one of the statements in H. Muller's works that prevent me from truly understanding his position. What is the meaning of the quoted statement? Do quantum events exist mind-independently? If our experience does not invent them they should exist independently of the human mind and experience. But if this is the case, the quoted statement implies MIR.
References:
(1) H. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1949), p. 116.
(2) V. Petkov, Acceleration-dependent electromagnetic self-interaction effects as a basis for inertia and gravitation, http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9909019