Qi as an ontological basis for reality.

[xunzian]

One of the major, presistent problems for atheisms in the modern west is the Greek legacy of a distinction between life and nonlife. Specifically, within the Greek standpoint (and from that, the Christian) matter/energy is dead. It lacks some vital aspect that would account for the phenomenon of life. If I may slightly modify Kalton:


[A review of theories of life/nonliving makes one thing clear: no one can draw a precise line between the two, though there is a wide acceptance of the intuitive feeling that there is some difference. How one treats this question seems to depend to a large extent upon the conceptual resources one brings to it: it has no "scientific" answer.] A major problem in the Western tradition is that ideas of energy have a materialistic, mechanistic background, matter itself being conceived of as fundamentally nonconscious and nonliving. Thus, when scientists begin to investigate life processes and consciousness in terms of the patterned transformation of energy, many people instinctively feel this is a degrading materialistic redution and find it threatening. ... Energy thought of against the backdrop of qi makes it seem simply a matter of course that life emerges naturally form an energetic universe, and it is to be expected that our thinking and feeling can be studied in terms of neural networks and electromagnetic phenomena. In short, qi provides a path around many of the problems that have accompanied the increasingly dysfunctional conceptual dichotomoy of spirit/matter which the West inherited from the Greeks.

--Extending the Neo-Confucian Tradition

I think that the concept of qi becomes increasingly more useful when one considers that it has been glossed to both matter and energy in the Western prespective because, as a concept it encompasses both. I am not claiming any special knowledge on the part of the Chinese to imply a degree of 'truth', but I do suggest that science has shown the distinction between matter and energy is one of human making as opposed to actuality, and the Chinese happened to draw a line that is more useful given our modern understanding than the Greeks did.

Likewise with life, as Prof. Kalton suggested, qi makes a material understanding of life intuative and easy to grasp as opposed to incredulous. Intellect arises naturally from qi's vital ever-changing nature as opposed to representing a break from what we normally consider 'inert' matter.

Now, I agree that the ultimate functional change on the situation at hand is slight. Essentially, I am suggested that we simply reverse the wisdom that says that matter is dead because the more we learn from science, the more we see that life is merely matter with no special spirit driving it by saying that the spirit is the matter because qi's vitality can be manifested as life. It takes a negative paradigm and flips it on its head, leading to a more positive outlook on life, as well as one that does better fit with our intuative understanding of the world while not contradicting our scientific one.

[JohannGoodflag]

One of the major, presistent problems for atheisms in the modern west is the Greek legacy of a distinction between life and nonlife.

Well, as a first order approximation, it is extremely useful. The only thing which we need to remember is that it is only founded on experience; but once we get closer to making artificial intelligences on a par with human intelligence, it is something which simply has to give.

This distinction is not something which "Western atheisms" are necessarily stuck with: already, Turing was concerned with not only how to define or recognize an artificial intelligence, but with how well they ought to be treated. His position, basically that "intelligence is as intelligence does", is basically a rejection of any sharp line between life and non-life as regards intelligence. The same could easily apply to any system, whether or not it exhibits "intelligent" behaviour.

[...] I do suggest that science has shown the distinction between matter and energy is one of human making as opposed to actuality, and the Chinese happened to draw a line that is more useful given our modern understanding than the Greeks did.

The conceptual difference between matter and energy is artificial to the same extent as the difference between glass and iron, between wood and flesh, and between liquid water and ice. That is, it is an extremely useful distinction, which seems to reflect something meaningful about reality as we find it in our immediate context. The fact that they are manifestations of a common thing does not detract from the fact that they are very, very different manifestations of that same thing. Recognising these differences is simply good perception. We simply need to also remember that these differences are not immutable.

I am largely ignorant of what qi is supposed to "do" from the point of chinese philosophy, except for the probably distorted ideas that western culture has passed on to me: that it is a sort of "life force", that it one should strive for it to be "balanced" and to "flow properly", etc. If you mean to imply that qi should be understood as a "natural" reason why matter and energy should give rise to the phenomenon we usually call "life", and that by broadening our scope we could see that everything can be regarded as having "life-like" attributes, then I'm afraid I don't find this in any way obvious. The assertion that life should be a natural consequence of what is called a "life force" is not very informative: it doesn't present a mechanism, not even a probabilistic one. More than matter and energy, this is what modern science is interested in: a mechanism.

The fact that "mechanism" should be regarded as degrading is another hangover of the old conception of the Western view of "vitalism", that there is an inherent, crucial difference between life and non-life; which has since also developped between a reflexive distinction between "humanity" and "machinery". However, I think we should discard this notion, and understand that what we treasure about life is not in the matter itself, but in the complex interaction of matter; and that just because this interaction can be understood to a greater or lesser degree does not devalue "life" or "intelligence" any more than understanding the rainbow devalued that. It is the choice of the listener to decide whether they are devalued by a new idea; but this choice in practise depends mostly on what other ideas they have chosen to fetishize. The fact that a "western" mindset has chosen to fetishize vitalism in some respects does not mean that other western ideas, free of those fetishes, cannot achieve an understanding of life.

Likewise with life, as Prof. Kalton suggested, qi makes a material understanding of life intuative and easy to grasp as opposed to incredulous. Intellect arises naturally from qi's vital ever-changing nature as opposed to representing a break from what we normally consider 'inert' matter. [...] Now, I agree that the ultimate functional change on the situation at hand is slight.

Good, because unless this understanding of qi is functional --- to wit: does such an understanding of qi predict the production of intelligence in any other sort of system than animal brains, which we might be able to observe or even communicate with? --- I don't see why I should adopt it.

Essentially, I am suggested that we simply reverse the wisdom that says that matter is dead because the more we learn from science, the more we see that life is merely matter with no special spirit driving it by saying that the spirit is the matter because qi's vitality can be manifested as life. It takes a negative paradigm and flips it on its head, leading to a more positive outlook on life, as well as one that does better fit with our intuative understanding of the world while not contradicting our scientific one.

Or, we could do away with the qi part, and instead of pretending to stop fetishizing vitalism while holding onto the idea that there is a driving life-force, we could stop fetishizing vitalism altogether and ask about mechanisms.

[xunzian]

It isn't vitalism, though. That would be the thing. The idea of qi as a 'life force' as certain implications in chinese medicine and certain aspects of Daoist cosmology that are downright silly, this is true, but much of Newton's physics was rooted in his absurd religious claims which we have been happily able to reject. The idea is that it is a functional distinction.

So, what qi is supposed to do is provide a new means of viewing matter/energy as dynamic, rather than static and changing rather than constant. From this perspective, strong AI is greeted with a shrug and a, "Of course" because there is no distinction between the potentials of life and non-life because they are all within the same system. Likewise, the idea of life arising from chemical interactions is perfectly consistent as opposed to jarring as many people find it to be.

I agree with you that science is more concerned with 'mechanism', however, I didn't suggest that qi ought be taken in a scientific or mechanistic basis but rather in an ontological one. I am not 'adding' qi to the system, but rather re-defining an aspect of the system as qi because it fits better (because things like vitalism are nonsensical from this perspective).

It is a means of addressing baggage that is left over from and remains popular in Western thought. While I agree that there are many western atheisms that aren't burdened by this, they are burdened by using loaded terms rendering communication incredibly difficult. It is a means to cut the cord with vitalism and its attendant problems.

[JohannGoodflag]

It isn't vitalism, though [...] what qi is supposed to do is provide a new means of viewing matter/energy as dynamic, rather than static and changing rather than constant. From this perspective, strong AI is greeted with a shrug and a, "Of course" because there is no distinction between the potentials of life and non-life because they are all within the same system. Likewise, the idea of life arising from chemical interactions is perfectly consistent as opposed to jarring as many people find it to be.

I am not sure I understand you, but I think I'm beginning to suspect, so please bear with me.

What is static about energy and matter? Even a rock is literally quivering with kinetic energy, and its' aparent solidity and static form is a consequence of quantum mechanics (Newtonian mechanics is insufficient to explain rigid aggregates of objects), in which it is essentially impossible for an object to be at rest in one location for any length of time. And it has been understood for a long time that all equilibria are essentially dynamic equilibria: humidity in air is continually condensing on things and people, and continually evaporating from bodies of water. What does qi have to add to this picture of reality, the picture of reality which modern science has developped from about 1900 to 1950, in the way of dynamism?

Or: is qi only meant as an exhibition, an emphasis, an encapsulation of these ideas? To what extent is qi supposed to clarify concepts of modern physics? Is it meant to be a way of rendering intuitive such concepts as e.g. fluid mechanics, the kinetic theory of matter, and/or quantum indeterminacy, as they are actually understood in modern physics? Or perhaps is it meant to perhaps similarly communicate ideas of chemistry, biology, neuropsychology?

You don't propose it as a mechanism, and so don't aspire to a high degree of precision; what level of precision in explanation do you aspire to? If it is more fine grained than just broad sweeping questions such as "how could there be life in a material universe", just what phenomena would it be intended to communicate?

[xunzian]

I agree with you. There is nothing static and dead about energy or matter.

But ask the average person on the street that. Therein lies the problem, it isn't a problem of those who understand this fact but rather a problem of those who don't. By using a shared term with them, a term which is coupled with vitalism, it becomes incredibly difficult to discuss this aspect without desperately having to defend one's self.

So, time gets wasted on the mind/brain division, for example. Because the concept of matter isn't generally concieved as being 'big' enough for the mind to be a part of it. This problem is borne out on this forum and others. However, as Kalton suggested, it is perfectly natural from a qi-perspective that the brain and the mind are the same thing . . . or at the very least the mind is the li (principle/pattern) of the brain, which is ultimately the same thing, as many have suggested, Wang Fuzhi being the most explicit and best known example.

It is my opinion that occasionally new vocabulary is necessary to break with the past of old ideas and come into the future. Qi is intuatively compatible with calculus-based notions in a way that a concept of matter as related to forms simply cannot be. It is first a change of label rather than a change of information but it also contains with it the idea that there is this dynamism and this concept of change as opposed to the more conventional static form. It embraces QM without veering off into the absurd, while allowing for a more Newtonian understanding. Granted, that Newtonian understanding is largely a semiotic construct in this case, but I don't see any problems with that. Likewise with the distinction between matter and energy that we discussed earlier -- that is a semiotic convention created by the organism percieving it rather than an inseperable part of the thing that is percieved.

[xunzian]

Essentially, it is a reaction to what I think of as the 'materialist's depression'. When Luther realized God's nature and humanity's depravity compared to God, he became very very depressed for a time, until he found a new way to frame that relationship.

I notice a similar feeling in materialists. After all, the world is entirely material and is, indeed, the sum of its material parts so I am not 'me' as I think I am, but rather 'me' is just the firing of neurons and 'I' am one giant accident. This also segues into ideas like neurodeterminism where life is nothing more than a glorified machine.

While I know it is possible to have such a view and not be depressed (I had always taken such a situation as a given -- being raised by radical positivists will do that to you), I do feel that such a message doesn't sell terribly well. I also do feel that the world presented by qi-monism as opposed to a materialistic one, is much brighter.

After all, in this world we are all made of qi. That means that machines are just a limited expression of life whereas we (and plants, and animals, and bacteria) are more complex expressions of this same principle. So, rather than a 'me' that is lost, the 'me' is taken as a given (to a certain extent -- I'm too much of a structuralist to say that me is a priori, but that isn't important right now) and can be applied to everything else. This prevents the sort of criticism that Lynn White offered and instead offers a solution to the problem.

Now, given the chance, I would graft certain ideas from my favourite philosophers onto this concept . . . but that is building off of the base and if I want qi to be foundational, well, I'd better leave off the trappings, eh?

[JohannGoodflag]

Okay, then: sure. This is an interesting way to re-frame the materialist narrative. In fact, it's more of a rebranding: qi could be used simply as the name of "that which has mass" --- as energy, matter, and antimatter all have mass, and taken together are conserved --- and that the main thing that would change is the associations which are made with the word "qi" as opposed to "matter".

If I was to advocate this, I would want to be extremely careful with the presentation, in order to avoid jumping from one superstitious intellectual tradition directly into another. Most people don't care much about modern physics, but those who do --- and who haven't had the chance to learn it from a good source --- are subjected to a depressing amount of misinformation. It takes a significant act of will to refrain from having an oversimplified view of, e.g. quantum mechanics, and at the same time believe that there must be some sensible explanation for it. Any explanation in terms of something like qi --- or, in fact, in terms of any concept which is meant to give a simple intuition for it --- would have to be masterfully crafted indeed, and I would be hesitant to use a concept which is likely to be obfuscated by new-agers.

I'm confident that things like dynamic equliibria and conservation of matter/antimatter/energy could be fruitfully conveyed with a qi-like concept, though; it does seem worth reflecting on.

[perfectbite]

It is a means of addressing baggage that is left over from and remains popular in Western thought. While I agree that there are many western atheisms that aren't burdened by this, they are burdened by using loaded terms rendering communication incredibly difficult. It is a means to cut the cord with vitalism and its attendant problems.

If one's intent is to address what is assumed to be a uniquely Western disjoint and to weld this disjoint shut in order to allow for matter to have the same potential, not for the potential of the expression of life but for the potential of the expression of intelligence by tweaking the idea of qi so that qi is tied like a knot but has had any relevance to life wrung out of it then why bother using an already dedicated concept? Why not use a Western term like the reapplication of the familiar term 'phlogiston' or say that the aether has properties that are similar to but are not exactly the same as life and use the idea of qi and non qi to illustrate the difference?

Prior to the use of the term atma/atta in Hinduism to mean (for virtually all intents and purposes for Western understanding) a soul, the original term atma/atta meant the essence of the breathing principle but had no further claim to a defintion (it was ontologically basic) and the term prajna/panna meant actual breath as in actual breathing.

Qi is perhaps even the ontological collorary of the original usage of the Hindu term atma and indeed, because Hindu terms usually went through many reapplications, may have retained its original intention longer than the equivalent Hindu term atma/atta and therefore could even be considered to be older.

Just in the way that one's breathing could be laboured or even be painful because of a too tense diaphragm (the result of stress) and the diagnosis by a practitioner of qi would be an imbalance of qi. In day to day application qi is not physical vitalism but a hands on recognition that an imbalance of forces can disrupt the flow of qi as expressed in waylaid or distorted or blocked qi energy.

Besides the fact that qi, probably because it already is an ontological concept/idea (qi is a more basic ontological idea than 'soul' because qi just is but the soul has be involved and have things happen to it in order to be worthy of its existence) and, as shown above, the idea of qi is also self referential as in one gets one's natural qi flowing easier so that one's natural qi may flow easier.

I think you should look for another word/term/concept for the potential source of the intelligence that could arise in the materially inert only with massive amounts of input from the in-inert and, just because ambigious, nebulous spiritually laden words and terms exist that does not mean that folks who use those terms have only a vague idea of what those terms mean and will let you wrest them out of their hands and distort them and remove them from the world's spiritual lexicon.

[xunzian]

Given how qi, as a concept, has matured since its humble beginnings of 'breath', I think that it is more than able to handle the task.

Specifically, I am thinking of it as it was developed by Yi Yulgok and Wang Fuzhi, especially as seen through the lens of modern eyes (as Kalton and others have suggested). The 'baggage' that we have left over is the idea that mind and body are intuatively unified, that matter and energy are the same thing, while having different manifestations, ect.

In this view qi isn't some living breath or soul, but is instead vital matter. This contrasts with the inert matter that is our lingering bias from the Greek and Christian traditions.

So it is very much not the older version of the term I want to use, but the modern version which is influenced by but distinct from the archaic version.

I think this allows a variety of debates to be reframed. Essentially, the origin of life, the mind, the universe, ect. are all now reasonable occurances as opposed to some violation of matter's inert quality. Instead, we are left with nonsense like Feng Shui and Reiki. However, this allows for a greater degree of progress because, despite their popularity, these issues can be dismissed as 'absurd' fairly easily as compared to what is the present reverse situation where Christians can say that life arising from matter is 'absurd'. It places modern theories on the offensive rather than constantly on the defensive.

[aupmanyav]

Xunzian, I congratulate you on your excellent topic and JohannGoodflag for his excellent debate. What is 'chi' in your description is my 'Brahman'. Of course, there is nothing to balance, it is always in balance (JohannGoodflag). It does what it does without any reference to us, humans or animals, or even non-living things. I take Brahman in a totally scientific sense, the latest it can provide, bereft of all baggage. Johann, what is there to be depressed about, we are not material. There is no material in the universe. Pray, what is mass? That is 19th century scientific terminology, by 20th we knew better. It is unfortunate that we are all hiding behind nicknames.

[xunzian]

I wouldn't go so far as that.

I would argue that we are matter, it is just that matter isn't dead/inert -- hence, qi a term a term which happily captures this concept. I think that taking qi (I am unsure of Brahman) outside of the context violates the holistic nature of reality in the same way that a diety does.

So, first, qi is not rooted in or somehow a part of the material world, it is the material world only a material world that has, within it, the potential for change without interaction with some spiritual aspect. It is phenomenon and noumenon combined. So while I agree that we aren't 'material' in the dead matter sense, I wouldn't argue that we are anything more but rather just that we are and our original estimation of matter was too lowly.

I view qi as an ascientific thing because it can't be empirically proven because it is a definitional, conceptual thing. Since human knowledge is so very limited compared to the infinite nature of reality, occasional shortcuts are needed to allow what little we do scientifically know (yes, we know a great deal, but compared to the amount of information that is to be known, we have a long way to go) with what we intuatively know.

In this way it is useful for science because it loses the 'dead' baggage that allows skeptics to dodge the question: life can't come from non-life, intellect can't come from non-intellect, my mind is distinct from my brain, and all the other arguments we've seen time and time again. But since all those qualities are something we know intuitionally rather than empircally (we've defined life, intellect, mind, ect. not in accordance with what we've proven but what we've known from the start) it becomes a matter of assigning them to the fundamental building blocks of reality rather than having them emerge from them.

[aupmanyav]

Yes, I agree, the chinese are more practical than the Indians. Indians take the jump like Icarus. I agree there is a whole lot to know. As for the questions in your last paragraph, there is hardly a question that life does not come from non-life, it does, similarly intellect comes from non-intellect, and mind comes from brain. We are putting in the last few pieces of the puzzle in place.

[premjan]

Qi could be viewed as quantum coherence within body / neuron microtubules, which have been postulated by e.g. Roger Penrose and others as the basis for consciousness.

[JohannGoodflag]

Qi could be viewed as quantum coherence within body / neuron microtubules, which have been postulated by e.g. Roger Penrose and others as the basis for consciousness.

Ugh. I have some serious difficulties with Penrose's arguments towards this. And ultimately, what is different here from supposing the mechanism providing the sensation of consciousness to be something in the pineal gland, like Descartes effectively did? There is no good way to test it, even if we can isolate the microtubules.

If --- and it's a big if --- something as big, warm, and wet as the human brain can sustain coherent quantum states and process information with them, then this would allow human brains to exploit quantum phenomena to do whatever it is human brains do in the way of signal processing. (Not that we have any experience that clearly indicates in any way that human brains do anything requiring quantum phenomena to achieve!)

But there is no clear reason why a coherent quantum superposition in my brain would give me my subjective experience to any greater degree than if my brain were in radio communication with a giant, rapidly moving metal-gears-and-shafts clockwork device. As far as we know, it doesn't matter what the physical mechanism is, because we have no reason to believe any physical mechanism more likely to provide the subjective sensation of consciousness than any other. We just don't have enough information to infer any such thing.

Edited to add: for this reason, if qi is to be identified with quantum coherence, I don't think this enhances anything about understanding life at all. We would need to know much more about the role of coherent quantum effects in biology --- in particular, whether there are significant effects at all --- to make any the proposal to identify "quantum coherence" with "life force" reasonably worthwhile.

[premjan]

Quantum coherence is apparently harnessed in photosynthesis (leaves are also warm, wet and large for the purposes of this discussion) according to recent research, so it is far from unlikely that it is possible within animal cells. And there is no likely answer to the hard problem of consciousness (qualitative sensation) in my opinion, it is just a fact of existence. Probably if qualitative sensation is due to coherence, then there are other ways to achieve it than in microtubules.

In fact there are mysteries in QM as well - such as the problem of measurement. Maybe decoherence in some way plays a part in measurement.

[JohannGoodflag]

Quantum coherence is apparently harnessed in photosynthesis (leaves are also warm, wet and large for the purposes of this discussion) according to recent research, so it is far from unlikely that it is possible within animal cells.

Source please? It won't surprise me at all if they harness the photo-electric effect, a quantum phenomenon (but not a "coherent" quantum phenomenon in any meaningful sense). But I would frankly be stunned if they showed that they depended on being able to measure/transform/otherwise-use quantum phenomena in a manner which inherently depends on, e.g., incompatible orthonormal bases.

And there is no likely answer to the hard problem of consciousness (qualitative sensation) in my opinion, it is just a fact of existence. Probably if qualitative sensation is due to coherence, then there are other ways to achieve it than in microtubules.

Agreed that there is no likely answer; but it seems silly to seriously ponder what could cause it if every answer is unlikely, we have no way to tell if any are true, and we are trying to do it with something else we don't understand as well as we would like. This only makes it easy to make wild speculations about it without being obviously wrong, and in the end we understand nothing at all any better.

One might as well claim that it is the precise shape of the persons/animals skull, picking up ambient EM radiation in the right frequency distribution; this could also be used to explain the qualitative differences between the apparent behaviour between members of different animal species --- we just have skulls that have quite signficiant differences in shape, ergo significantly different frequency spectra. And individuals of the same species have non-zero, but smaller, skull-shape deviations, ergo non-zero differences in behaviour, but more similar to each other than members of different species. Then we could attribute the human ability to use language to the unique shapes of our nasal cavities, or something like that.

I know if I wrote a book saying this, I could probably do better than what I'm currently earning for a couple of years on the sales. (This may be because I'm currently a grad student, but the point still holds.) But that doesn't make the idea in any way reasonable. The thing is, the only reason why I have less reason to believe this than what Penrose suggests is because I know for a fact that I just made my theory up to be facetious, and I (perhaps unreasonably) place a lower a priori probability on things invented facetiously being true.

In fact there are mysteries in QM as well - such as the problem of measurement. Maybe decoherence in some way plays a part in measurement.

It's hard to argue with that, especially since measurement is usually described as the mechanism by which decoherence occurs. It's quite possible that we have this backwards somehow, and that we merely don't understand the mechanism by which decoherence occurs. But now we're talking about decoherence for some reason; what does this have to do with whether coherence is a reasonable way of explaining consciousness? Are you now proposing decoherence of quantum states in the human brain as the solution to, not human consciousness, but the measurement problem?

If you are, I would admit this as a more probable story than that human brains use large coherent states to process information, thus giving rise to consciousness --- not clearly probable in itself, but more probable nonetheless. But I still don't see how tying coherence with "qi" helps convey what is going on any better in that case.

[premjan]

Here's the previous thread on the photosynthesis issue.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=203755 (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=203755&highlight=quantum+coherence+photosynthesis)
I'm sorry I'm not an expert in QM - apparently you are at least a student of it. I suppose lack of coherence or inability for coherence rather than decoherence is what I meant as leading to measurement. I mean macroscopic objects are measurable with high resolution in time and space, and apparently interaction with macroscopic objects may cause wave function collapse and measurement to occur. So maybe the lack or difficulty in general of large-scale coherence is in some way responsible for measurement. Then again coherence where it occurs could be significant, though sure, it doesn't have to be the root of consciousness.

[xunzian]

Yes, I agree, the chinese are more practical than the Indians. Indians take the jump like Icarus. I agree there is a whole lot to know. As for the questions in your last paragraph, there is hardly a question that life does not come from non-life, it does, similarly intellect comes from non-intellect, and mind comes from brain. We are putting in the last few pieces of the puzzle in place.


Hey, that's why you guys gave us Buddhism . . . and much of my view of Qi is informed by reactions to Buddhism. There is something to be said for taking that jump, though the scientist in me is very cautious in doing so.

The point of my last paragraph was to point out that the line between life and non-life, intellect and non-intellect, mind and brain is an arbitrary one that we draw because we are married to the idea of the inertness of matter. But, if we actually *look* at the way matter functions, it is anything but inert. Clouds of electrons swirling and touching each other, temporary dipoles forming, a drive to push those nasty hydrophobic molecules into nice little miscells in water, ect. Far from being inert, matter is a vital and dynamic thing.

While we know this, if you try to talk about the dynamic nature of a rock you won't find too many takers. But even rocks are constantly changing, reacting, being exposed to a variety of different stimuli, shaving off small pieces of themselves.

We all 'know' this, but we are still married to the idea that matter is somehow dead and inert. This isn't a matter of knowledge, this is just a matter of psychological baggage that we have carried over from less enlightened times. The idea still persists that their needs to be something to activate the form when the form itself is more than capable of activating itself because it is made of incredibly active parts. If anything, that is what the second law of thermodynamics tell us: that change is the driving force of the universe because what could be more chaotic than change? Sure, because of change pockets of order might result, but the loss of order to the system is overwhelmingly in favour of change.

As for the QM explanation, I find that very unsatisfactory. The situation in photosynthesis is little more than glorified FRET, and while it is possible that small-scale electron excitation may play a role in conciousness I don't like the QM brain at all. The microtubules that are supposed to be where the quantum field is originating are present in all cell types. If the brain were operating on a quantum level, as they are suggesting, a CNS becomes unecessary . . . heck, since it is microtubules they are talking about, neurons become more-or-less unecessary!

Besides, without appealing to that sort of thing, we can quickly see that our intelligence is rooted in our physicality. The biggest problem I see with most modern AI work is that it relies on a non-coporeal intelligence.

If you give a robot very minimal intelligence, but give it a body it can navigate around objects much more quickly than if you give a robot incredible intelligence and have it map out a way across a room on a theoretical level and then move a dummy bot across the real terrain.

http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ Some good stuff there.

Intellect is rooted in the body. Remove the body and what you end up with is a calculator. Human intellect is an outgrowth of the intellect seen in other animals. Our intellect is rooted in our physicality.

Think about it, I could explain the way my apartment looks to you in such a way that you would have a pretty good intellectual understanding of it. If I then gave you a blind robot to navigate around the apartment, in a race a blindfolded me will win 100% of the time -- and that is assuming you have a map and I don't! Heck, a blindfolded random person who has never been to my apartment would win given much less information than you had. Alternatively, I could explain to you certain techniques that I perform at my job. While you would have a very solid intellectual understanding of what they are, you would have great difficulty doing them the first few times simply because the real knowledge of how to perform them is rooted in the physical -- indeed, many things really only start to make sense once you *do* them because the intellectual explanation of them is far too difficult. I could explain how riding a bike works based on the theory of interia, and momentum transfer (as well as how gears and all that work), but none of that will actually help someone learn how to ride a bike.

Indeed, We've already created non-organic creatures with intelligence on the level of insects (they say 'ants', but the robots aren't social, so beetles might be a more appropriate description). No reason why we couldn't take that further. This isn't a case of intelligence from non-intelligence, but rather physicality manifesting itself in action. Intellect is action in a system with many degrees of freedom.

[aupmanyav]

And there is no likely answer to the hard problem of consciousness (qualitative sensation) in my opinion, it is just a fact of existence.It is evolution, Premjan. Another excellent post, Xunzian, I appreciate it.

[JohannGoodflag]

Here's the previous thread on the photosynthesis issue.
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=203755 (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=203755&highlight=quantum+coherence+photosynthesis)
I'm sorry I'm not an expert in QM - apparently you are at least a student of it.

Thanks for the link. Actually, I study quantum computing. I'm familiar with precise uses of the high-level terminology, and listen to physicists when they give talks about the difficulties they encounter when trying to make precision devices themselves which harness quantum phenomena. I know more than most people, but I'm not an expert in QM per se.

For this reason, a lot of the article is lost on me, too: I only know enough to know that (unsurprisingly) the quick summary given in the first few paragraphs (to the effect of "trying all possibilities and selecting the best one") cannot possibly be right. That, however, does not mean that quantum coherence is not playing a role. I will keep my eyes open for more.

I suppose lack of coherence or inability for coherence rather than decoherence is what I meant as leading to measurement. I mean macroscopic objects are measurable with high resolution in time and space, and apparently interaction with macroscopic objects may cause wave function collapse and measurement to occur. So maybe the lack or difficulty in general of large-scale coherence is in some way responsible for measurement. Then again coherence where it occurs could be significant, though sure, it doesn't have to be the root of consciousness.

One may describe decoherence as "the inability to perform an interference experiment on a system"; to the best of my understanding, decoherence comes about essentially by thermodynamic mechanisms.

When two particles interact, their wave-functions may become entangled: because the final state of each particle depends on how it interacted with the other, which was not in a classically-determined, or even classically-probabilistic, state, so that the final state cannot be decomposed even as a probability distribution over independent two-particle states. These two particles go on to interact with other particles, so that you get four particles entangled states, then eight, then sixteen --- a chain reaction of states becoming correlated. (This doesn't really happen as a clean multiplication of two per time step, of course; this is just meant to convey the "blow-up").

So then, you get massive collections of particles which are all correlated with one another in a quantum sense. And as soon as you observe any one of these particles, any observation you make of the other particles will give a result consistent with the observation of that first particle, because of that correlation. The kicker is that we currently don't know any reason why these massive entangled states cannot include, e.g., tables, mountains, or people.

From one point of view, one can say that quantum superpositions decohere on the scale of large objects like people; you cannot interfere two branches of the superposition because the state has "collapsed". On the other hand, you could say that because there are so many particles in such an object, interacting with so many others --- air particles, photons reflecting off of your skin and zooming off to someone else's retina --- that the system which is in superposition becomes uncontainable, and spreads essentially to the rest of the observable universe at about the speed of light, catching up everything which interacts with photons or particles within the light-cone of the initial massively entangled state; and that it is for this reason that you cannot interfere two branches of the superposition. While you and the people around you are in superpositions, you are all in the same superposition in a manner of speaking, and there isn't a good way to "make use" of it, or even to observe it. (This is the basis for the many-worlds interpretation of QM: the "worlds" are different branches of the massively entangled superposition.)

The only way a quantum state of any size can avoid "decohering", or "catching up the rest of the world in a massively entangled state" (take your pick), is for the state to be relatively well-isolated: not "distant from anything else", just that the probability of anything else in the world interacting with the system in a way that "collapses the superposition of the first system", or "catches the second system up in the superposition that the first system is in", is small. That's what's needed for quantum coherence. In the example of photosynthesis, it is possible that there happens to be nothing else that really interacts with the system on the energy scales they're looking at within periods of time on the order of 600-odd femtoseconds. Surprising --- especially since the energy needs to escape the system, for the plant to get the energy to live --- but possible. Or maybe I'm not understanding the article properly, which in fact is very likely anyway.

To make a long story short: "X measures Y" can be thought of (as some interpretations put it) as just "X interacts with Y". If a human interacts with a system Y, and it is possible (as we have no a priori reason to doubt) for humans to be in superpositions, then the human would become potentially entangled with system Y, and unable to perform interference experiments on the superposition that Y (and now also the human) is in. From the point of view of the human, the state of Y has decohered; which is what we call measurement. Whether or not this is what measurement actually consists of, and whether one considers this an explanation of measurement in terms of decoherence or vice versa, is a matter of philsophical debate, or perhaps just definitions of words.

At this point, we seem to be going on a fast tangent away from the subject of qi, so perhaps it would be better to discuss in a different thread.

[aupmanyav]

Thanks JohannGoodflag, excellent post though I still have to decipher the full meaning. Where were you all this time (how come your coming to IIDB has taken so long?)?

[premjan]

To make a long story short: "X measures Y" can be thought of (as some interpretations put it) as just "X interacts with Y". If a human interacts with a system Y, and it is possible (as we have no a priori reason to doubt) for humans to be in superpositions, then the human would become potentially entangled with system Y, and unable to perform interference experiments on the superposition that Y (and now also the human) is in. From the point of view of the human, the state of Y has decohered; which is what we call measurement. Whether or not this is what measurement actually consists of, and whether one considers this an explanation of measurement in terms of decoherence or vice versa, is a matter of philsophical debate, or perhaps just definitions of words.
Hmmm, now it seems like measurement occurs because of entanglement. Which is a bit confusing to me, but OK. I suppose there is just another world in which the measurement took place the other way. But it still doesn't tell me why the observer had to perceive measurement, instead of simply no measurement. I.e. why the worlds had to split.

ETA...on rereading it is a bit clearer. The isolation of the quantum state was ended due to entanglement with the global wave function. Hence it committed to a particular state? Well, I suppose entanglement with global wave function doesn't demand it to commit does it? But maybe that is what it means to not yet be measurable - for the quantum wave function to be isolated. So really everything is quantum all the time, only that isolated quantum effects are not measurable until they entangle with the global (or at least observer) wave function. This means it might be possible for an observer to remain in quantum isolation with respect to another observer - e.g. the Schrodinger cat experiment. So the precise mechanics of how the quantum interaction between one wave function and another takes place is not described. At what rate does entanglement take place? I suppose there is some evolution equation for that which I am not familiar with.

[aupmanyav]

As per Wiki, it is still being debated in science. Coherence, decohorence, nobody knows for sure. We take cognizance of the debate.

[Waning Moon Conrad]

Or, we could do away with the qi part, and instead of pretending to stop fetishizing vitalism while holding onto the idea that there is a driving life-force, we could stop fetishizing vitalism altogether and ask about mechanisms.

Could mechanism account for lived experience though? Just because I can't imagine how it would doesn't mean it can't, obviously. On the other hand, can it?

[aupmanyav]

It could if we can find a force acting microscopically as well as macroscopically, the univeral force, the one that Einstein was looking for. That would also end my quest for Brahman.

[perfectbite]

You are your irreducible quest for Brahman.

[aupmanyav]

Yes, Perfectbite, I am, the problem of existence. :)