Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Melencolia I Part 6: Quantum Leaps


Part 6 of my Melencolia series can be found here. I reproduce the introduction to this paper below:

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1     Introduction
In this short paper I make a proposal as to the nature of quantum leaps. These “leaps” are the apparent discontinuous changes of the quantum mechanical Hilbert vector, a vector which otherwise moves continuously according to a deterministic wave equation. I have come down in favour of the view that these leaps are literal rather than apparent. The following paper is largely a qualitative discussion of a subject which could no doubt bear a lot more rigorous quantitative formulation. However, in this Melencolia I series my sights are really on the evolutionary and OOL questions and I hope I have enough in this paper on quantum leaping to assess its impact on my general objectives. But having said that I’m not quite sure just where this paper leaves my ideas about a declarative model of evolutionary computation. For on the face of it my proposal on quantum leaping seems to hamstring the searching that would be needed to find the configurations of life: This is because the “leaps” would, apparently, clear the quantum signalling field before it could make any worthwhile discoveries. One little consolation, however, is that in conceiving matter as a combination of a coherent object and a shadowy gravitational field I find some scope for fixing the energy problem thrown up by proposing literal quantum leaps.

The general idea that guides the Melencolia I series is the view that intelligence is a process, a process with a general declarative structure, of search, reject and select. Thus, the life generating processes are, in this context, viewed as intelligence at work and therefore open to observational scrutiny. This very much contrasts with the views of the de-facto ID community who envisage intelligence as a kind of black box very distinct from natural processes. This black box gets little or no analytical treatment from the de-facto IDists.  In contrast one thing that encourages me to pursue the endogenous ID proposal is the fact that the our current understanding of the mind suggests conscious cognition is very much bound up with the material organisation of the brain;  That is, we do not see “mind” down at the low neuronal level;  these low level elements are wholly impersonal. But at the high level personality becomes apparent. Likewise we don’t see cosmic intelligence/personality operating at the low particulate level, but we may only see it in the big picture. This is not to say that current molecular views of the mind are the full answer; for example, we may eventually have to feed into to the mix the ideas of people like John Searle, Roger Penrose or whoever.

As I continue to use this series to explore the processes that generate life there is, I feel, little chance I’m following anything like the right path. But as I always say: Enjoy the journey while you can because the destination may not be up to much! And below, the journey so far…..

Also relevant are these links:

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