Analytic Idealism

[pood]

what is it about having the property of localness that necessitates or explains subjective experience

I'm saying that subjective experience IS localness.

The thing is... Physics doesn't explain why local realism in the first place. It's literally one of the assumptions physics itself is based on, just the rule "things happen in places" means "the report of a thing happening in a place will be attached to a place about which it happens, even if the thing in the place is "this thing in the place "five seconds ago"".

Asking why beyond that is like asking why does the universe exist; it just does, regardless of how or why.

Regardless of how or why, locality is a thing, and the mind as we understand it is a product of that.

From this perspective that mind is the product of interactions having "localness", though, you can imagine how ridiculous I think proposing a non-local mind would be; that which doesn't localize cannot be a mind in the first place since localization creates minds.

Well, except … quantum mechanics involves non-locality.

Only if you assume many-worlds interpretations, which are not provable, any more than Superdeterminism is disprovable.

That is not correct. The many worlds interpretation eliminates non-locality, as well as indeterminism and anti-realism.

Many-worlds IS indeterministic: what determines which of the many is the present?

It’s not indeterministic, and it’s not non-local.

That's not what I asked: WHAT determines which of the many worlds is the present? Or is the past as unfixed as the future?

Standard quantum mechanics is indeterministic, antirealist and nonlocal. It is indeterministic because the outcome of events is not fixed prior to the event but can only be probabilistically calculated using the Born rule. It is antirealist because some presumed measurement or observation is needed to bestow properties on “external” objects. This occurs from wave-function collapse. It is nonlocal because two entangled particles can be separated by enormous distances, even on opposite sides of the universe, yet collapsing the wave function for one instantaneously collapses the wave function for the other and dictates its observed properties.

All this goes away under Many Worlds, because on this meta-theory there is no wave function collapse. There is a universal wave function that evolves deterministically and encodes every possible outcome. Under MWI, the Born rule is used to calculate the probability that “I” will find myself in a particular branch of the quantum multiverse, but in a sense “I” am in all of them, raising serious issues in the philosophy of personal identity.

It is realist because it does away with idea of an observer or a measurement needed to collapse the wave function into a particular outcome, since there is no wave function collapse.

It is local because there is no instantaneous wave function collapse that can somehow reach across the universe — because, again, there is no wavefunction collapse at all. The particular outcomes of quantum entanglement experiments that appear to be nonlocal results from the fact that there is a Born probability of zero that would yield outcomes different from what is observed.

However, there is still a sort of nonlocality in that “world” remains a nonlocal concept.

One motivating factor to accept Many Worlds is because it restores the reality that Einstein preferred — determined, real (mind-independent) and causally local. However, just because we might prefer the universe to behave classically, doesn’t mean that it has to. For me, the Many Worlds makes more sense, and is more parsimonious, because it does away with a wave-function collapse that otherwise is completely mysterious and unexplained. The pioneers of QM were well aware that they were putting the collapse postulate in ad hoc to explain why we see only one outcome instead of a multiplicity. Hugh Everett in 1957 then explained we see only “one” world because a version of us is quantum-entangled with it, while other versions of us are quantum-entangled with other versions. Although Everett worked this out formally, Schrödinger anticipated Many Worlds in 1952.

Kastrup dislikes Many Worlds, deeming it a “theoretical monstrosity,” though it’s hard to see why, exactly. I think it is because he thinks nonlocality, antirealism and indeterminism fit more nicely with idealism than with physicalism, but I think the main attraction of idealism is that, first, our only experiences are entirely phenomenal, and second, it dissolves the Hard Problem.

Some interpretations of QM do allow for and possibly entail the future acting on the past, but I don’t think MWI involves any of that.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Interesting that you thought I was talking about idealism. Rather I was talking about monism.

If you were referring to monism, then that’s a surprising clarification—because the entire critique you offered was clearly targeting idealism: that it treats mind as special, mysterious, and unable to handle constructed minds or computational models of thought.

But let’s set that aside. Even if you meant monism more broadly, the core issue remains unchanged: no matter how you structure your ontology—physicalist, neutral monist, or idealist—you still haven’t explained why there is something it’s like to be any of it. You’ve described processes, interactions, and functional outputs. You’ve built complexity. You’ve engineered behavior. But you haven’t crossed the explanatory gap between structure and presence.

So whether you call it idealism, monism, or anything else—the real question remains:

Why should any system, built on any metaphysical base, be accompanied by subjective experience—rather than just functioning without awareness, like a perfect zombie?

Relabeling the framework doesn’t resolve the problem. It just shows that it’s still there—waiting to be answered.

I'm not pretending anything. I acknowledge exactly one mystery: why any of this?

That’s a valid starting mystery—and one that applies to any ontology. But it’s also not the same mystery being addressed here. The hard problem isn’t “why anything exists,” but why subjective experience exists at all. Why is it like something to be a particular process, instead of it all running in perfect silence?

I do not a knowledge that there must be any mystery in terms of "how the future happens over the course of this from a given present and a fixed landscape over its horizon".

That’s fine—questions about temporal unfolding are physical or structural. But they’re not what idealism or the hard problem of consciousness is about. This sentence sidesteps the actual issue: not how processes happen, but why they’re felt. You can describe change across time all you want, but it won’t explain why it feels like anything to undergo that change.

I acknowledge there are questions as to how that all comes together from the observations of the process by which future arises from past, but the mind is the one thing I understand on a high level better than pretty much any other person on the planet.

If you do, then you should be able to explain why any of it is accompanied by a point-of-view. But so far, you’ve described observation, causal imposition, and integration of information—all of which happen in unconscious systems too. None of that explains what makes any system aware of what it’s doing. Your confidence in understanding the mind doesn’t resolve the explanatory gap—it reasserts it without addressing it.

Also, I don't equate consciousness with code, I equate it to the imposition of state upon one thing in a time reversible way such that the event imposed can be ascertained from pure observation of the influenced state; that it is the integration of information as a process.

This is a highly technical restatement of functional integration—which is again, a description of behavior, not a justification for subjectivity. You’re offering an account of how information flows and interacts, but you’re skipping the one thing that needs explaining: why it’s like something to be that system at all. The brain integrates information. So does a weather model. But only one feels like anything (presumably). Why?

Even a single binary switch, of such a thing existed, say as the "spin" value switched on observing some other "spin" state has "awareness", or "consciousness" of state, by these terms.

This is panpsychism by another name—asserting that any state-aware interaction qualifies as “conscious.” That’s not compatibilism—it’s definitional inflation. If a spin flip is “consciousness,” then the word becomes meaningless. You haven’t explained awareness—you’ve equated it with reactivity and called it a day. But if everything is conscious just because it registers difference, then you’re not solving the hard problem—you’re erasing it.

It's really just relating language of consciousness to language of physics in a sensible way, the same as any other act of compatibilism.

Except compatibilism is meaningful when it preserves both sides of the relation. If you translate “consciousness” into physics by eliminating its core—the fact that there’s something it’s like to be conscious—then it’s not compatibilism. It’s reduction. And reduction that fails to preserve the phenomenon is not explanation. It’s concealment.

I argue the same way with respect to free will, that the subject actually relates closely to Newtonian physics.

That’s a parallel discussion, but the same principle applies: mapping language of agency onto deterministic processes doesn’t resolve the subjective reality of agency—it reframes it functionally. It helps model behavior, not experience. So again, it’s useful as a tool, but it’s not an ontological explanation.

Really, we should expect our concepts of computation and consciousness and physics to be heavily related and to be able to start to draw parallels and eventually isomorphism between concepts in the subjects. If all of these concepts unify well, especially behind a monist viewpoint, especially given all their complexity, I think that speaks well for the correctness of the approach.

Unification is a worthy goal—but drawing parallels between formal systems doesn’t address the phenomenal aspect of consciousness. You can unify structure, computation, and physical dynamics into a single formal model, and still fail to explain why any of it is experienced. That’s the whole point of the hard problem—and why Seager, says that unless you account for intrinsic character, you haven’t accounted for mind at all.

You say you understand the mind better than most, and I’ll take that as sincere. But the most important question still stands unanswered:

Why does anything you’ve described—be it spin flips, state impositions, or information integration—require that there be something it is like to be any of it?

You haven’t answered that. You’ve renamed it, redefined it, and reframed it—but the gap remains. Until you address that honestly, all your models and mappings are useful simulations. Not explanations.

NHC

 

[pood]

Basically, I suspect Kastrup likes wave-function collapse because he thinks it can be explained more readily ideally than physically. And indeed, as noted, if wave-function collapse is real, there is no more physical explanation for it than there is for how matter generates minds.

 

[pood]

NHC is explaining everything better than I can.

 

[pood]

I believe Kastrup gravitates to relational quantum mechanics, in which the state of a system is entirely dependent on an observer’s reference frame, much as in standard relativity theory.

 

[lostone]

A question raised previously. I view, possibly in error, the past as being as indeterministic as the future. Any event in QM, as I understand it, can be viewed as going either way in time. I must also confess not fully understanding how or why some of us have reached the conclusions reached. with the caveat that I understand that could be due to my own lack of comprehension.

 

[pood]

A question raised previously. I view, possibly in error, the past as being as indeterministic as the future. Any event in QM, as I understand it, can be viewed as going either way in time. I must also confess not fully understanding how or why some of us have reached the conclusions reached. with the caveat that I understand that could be due to my own lack of comprehension.

Quantum retrocausality has been proposed to solve puzzles about quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

A question raised previously. I view, possibly in error, the past as being as indeterministic as the future. Any event in QM, as I understand it, can be viewed as going either way in time. I must also confess not fully understanding how or why some of us have reached the conclusions reached. with the caveat that I understand that could be due to my own lack of comprehension.

Quantum retrocausality has been proposed to solve puzzles about quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

 

[pood]

A question raised previously. I view, possibly in error, the past as being as indeterministic as the future. Any event in QM, as I understand it, can be viewed as going either way in time. I must also confess not fully understanding how or why some of us have reached the conclusions reached. with the caveat that I understand that could be due to my own lack of comprehension.

Quantum retrocausality has been proposed to solve puzzles about quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

View attachment 50041

Are you gesturing at some feeble point here? Shall I dig up academic references to quantum retrocausality for you?

 

[pood]

Here, how about from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Or will that be too “philosophical” for you?

 

[pood]

Here, how about From Quantum Measurement to Biology via Retrocausality in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Science Direct?

 

[GenesisNemesis]

A question raised previously. I view, possibly in error, the past as being as indeterministic as the future. Any event in QM, as I understand it, can be viewed as going either way in time. I must also confess not fully understanding how or why some of us have reached the conclusions reached. with the caveat that I understand that could be due to my own lack of comprehension.

Quantum retrocausality has been proposed to solve puzzles about quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

View attachment 50041

Are you gesturing at some feeble point here? Shall I dig up academic references to quantum retrocausality for you?

I just thought it was funny

 

[pood]

From the Journal of Cosmology, an argument that life and consciousness arise from advanced waves. Advanced waves are waves that travel backward in time. I haven’t yet read the whole article but the abstract piqued my interest. We’ll see how it goes.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Here, how about From Quantum Measurement to Biology via Retrocausality in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Science Direct?

I've already read it before.

 

[pood]

On the other hand, alas, there seems to be a difference of opinion on the reputability of the journal. That said, I think I can evaluate the article on my own. There are plenty of other academic works on quantum retrocausality and on advanced and retarded waves.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

We don't use the r word anymore.

 

[pood]

Here, how about From Quantum Measurement to Biology via Retrocausality in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Science Direct?

I've already read it before.

Then you must be aware of advanced and retarded waves and quantum retrocausality theories. And?

 

[Jarhyn]

From the Journal of Cosmology, an argument that life and consciousness arise from advanced waves. Advanced waves are waves that travel backward in time. I haven’t yet read the whole article but the abstract piqued my interest. We’ll see how it goes.

And yet none of the mechanical models that actually create life and behavior in general require either of those things. Literally nothing about retro-causality is necessary for computational awareness.

I think my basic threshold for declaring a theory absolute bullshit is going to be whether it is capable of acknowledging an AI as having a sense of self and an experience behind the experience it is actively discussing.

Anything that would automatically relegate all machine intelligence, a process created purely from forward-traveling waves, as "necessarily p-zombies" is going to be automatically rejected by me.

At some point the whole "it's not really doing it" rings hollow.

 

[pood]

From the Journal of Cosmology, an argument that life and consciousness arise from advanced waves. Advanced waves are waves that travel backward in time. I haven’t yet read the whole article but the abstract piqued my interest. We’ll see how it goes.

And yet none of the mechanical models that actually create life and behavior in general require either of those things. Literally nothing about retro-causality is necessary for computational awareness.

I think my basic threshold for declaring a theory absolute bullshit is going to be whether it is capable of acknowledging an AI as having a sense of self and an experience behind the experience it is actively discussing.

Anything that would automatically relegate all machine intelligence, a process created purely from forward-traveling waves, as "necessarily p-zombies" is going to be automatically rejected by me.

At some point the whole "it's not really doing it" rings hollow.

Well, you are going to have to provide evidence that AI is conscious, and if so, how. You may think you have done that, but I don’t see it. However, even if AI is conscious, the problem returns: How do physical primitives and processes generate mental activity, qualia, self-awareness? The idealist position dissolves that problem.

 

[Jarhyn]

From the Journal of Cosmology, an argument that life and consciousness arise from advanced waves. Advanced waves are waves that travel backward in time. I haven’t yet read the whole article but the abstract piqued my interest. We’ll see how it goes.

And yet none of the mechanical models that actually create life and behavior in general require either of those things. Literally nothing about retro-causality is necessary for computational awareness.

I think my basic threshold for declaring a theory absolute bullshit is going to be whether it is capable of acknowledging an AI as having a sense of self and an experience behind the experience it is actively discussing.

Anything that would automatically relegate all machine intelligence, a process created purely from forward-traveling waves, as "necessarily p-zombies" is going to be automatically rejected by me.

At some point the whole "it's not really doing it" rings hollow.

Well, you are going to have to provide evidence that AI is conscious, and if so, how. You may think you have done that, but I don’t see it. However, even if AI is conscious, the problem returns: How do physical primitives and processes generate mental activity, qualia, self-awareness? The idealist position dissolves that problem.

Ask yourself the question that I keep saying is identical to the one your are asking, something you can study and learn: how do physical primitives process and generate computational activity, state measurement, and differentiation across border states?

You have a responsibility to provide an argument of difference between "mental activity" and "computation". That's the burden of the idealist.