[dlorde]

And just in case DQ is still lurking in the shadows

I must support classical physics and reject QM

Wrong! Quantum mechanics underpins classical physics, as any scientist knows!  Nothing to do with dualism or choice. QM is to newtonian physics as thermodynamics is to steam engines.

[my bolding]
That's a nice way to put it!

[dlorde]

A bit more research to ponder for those who believe that moral & ethical behaviours are mediated by a consciousness external to, or independent of, the physical brain:

These are studies of morals and ethics in subjects with prefontal cortex damage.

Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex.
Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements.
Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs judgment of harmful intent.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Impact of Quantum Mechanics
on Human Values:

 Impact of Quantum Mechanics
on Human Values:
Philosophers have tried doggedly for three centuries to understand the
role of mind in the workings of a brain conceived to function according
to principles of classical physics. We now know no such brain exists:
no brain, body, or anything else in the real world is composed of those
tiny bits of matter that Newton imagined the universe to be made of.
Hence it is hardly surprising that those philosophical endeavors were
beset by enormous difficulties, which led to such positions as that of
the ‘eliminative materialists’, who hold that our conscious thoughts
must be eliminated from our scientific understanding of nature; or of
the ‘epiphenomenalists’, who admit that human experiences do exist,
but claim that they play no role in how we behave; or of the ‘identity
theorists’, who claim that each conscious feeling is exactly the same
thing as a motion of particles that nineteenth century science thought
our brains, and everything else in the universe, were made of, but
that twentieth century science has found not to exist, at least as they
were formerly conceived. The tremendous difficulty in reconciling consciousness,
as we know it, with the older physics is dramatized by the
fact that for many years the mere mention of ‘consciousness’ was considered
evidence of backwardness and bad taste in most of academia,
including, incredibly, even psychology and the philosophy of mind.
What you are, and will become, depends largely upon your values.
Values arise from self-image: from what you believe yourself to
be. Generally one is led by training, teaching, propaganda, or other
forms of indoctrination, to expand one’s conception of the self: one is
encouraged to perceive oneself as an integral part of some social unit
such as family, ethnic or religious group, or nation, and to enlarge
one’s self-interest to include the interests of this unit. If this training
is successful your enlarged conception of yourself as good parent, or
good son or daughter, or good Christian, Muslim, Jew, or whatever,
will cause you to give weight to the welfare of the unit as you would
your own. In fact, if well conditioned you may give more weight to the
interests of the group than to the well-being of your bodily self.
In the present context it is not relevant whether this human tendency
to enlarge one’s self-image is a consequence of natural malleability,
instinctual tendency, spiritual insight, or something else. What is
important is that we human beings do in fact have the capacity to
expand our image of ‘self’, and that this enlarged concept can become
the basis of a drive so powerful that it becomes the dominant determinant
of human conduct, overwhelming every other factor, including
even the instinct for bodily survival.
But where reason is honored, belief must be reconciled with empirical
evidence. If you seek evidence for your beliefs about what you
are, and how you fit into Nature, then science claims jurisdiction, or
at least relevance. Physics presents itself as the basic science, and it
is to physics that you are told to turn. Thus a radical shift in the
physics-based conception of man from that of an isolated mechanical
automaton to that of an integral participant in a non-local holistic process
that gives form and meaning to the evolving universe is a seismic
event of potentially momentous proportions.
The quantum concept of man, being based on objective science
equally available to all, rather than arising from special personal circumstances,
has the potential to undergird a universal system of basic
values suitable to all people, without regard to the accidents of their
origins. With the diffusion of this quantum understanding of human
beings, science may fulfill itself by adding to the material benefits it
has already provided a philosophical insight of perhaps even greater
ultimate value.
This issue of the connection of science to values can be put into
perspective by seeing it in the context of a thumb-nail sketch of history
that stresses the role of science. For this purpose let human intellectual
history be divided into five periods: traditional, modern, transitional,
post-modern, and contemporary.
During the ‘traditional’ era our understanding of ourselves and our
relationship to Nature was based on ‘ancient traditions’ handed down
from generation to generation: ‘Traditions’ were the chief source of
wisdom about our connection to Nature. The ‘modern’ era began in
the seventeenth century with the rise of what is still called ‘modern
science’. That approach was based on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes,
Galileo and Newton, and it provided a new source of knowledge that
came to be regarded by many thinkers as more reliable than tradition.
The basic idea of ‘modern’ science was ‘materialism’: the idea that
the physical world is composed basically of tiny bits of matter whose
contact interactions with adjacent bits completely control everything
that is now happening, and that ever will happen. According to these
laws, as they existed in the late nineteenth century, a person’s conscious
thoughts and efforts can make no difference at all to what
his body/brain does: whatever you do was deemed to be completely
fixed by local interactions between tiny mechanical elements, with your
thoughts, ideas, feelings, and efforts, being simply locally determined
high-level consequences or re-expressions of the low-level mechanical
process, and hence basically just elements of a reorganized way of describing
the effects of the absolutely and totally controlling microscopic
material causes.
This materialist conception of reality began to crumble at the beginning
of the twentieth century with Max Planck’s discovery of the
quantum of action. Planck announced to his son that he had, on that
day, made a discovery as important as Newton’s. That assessment was
certainly correct: the ramifications of Planck’s discovery were eventually
to cause Newton’s materialist conception of physical reality to
come crashing down. Planck’s discovery marks the beginning of the
‘transitional’ period.
A second important transitional development soon followed. In 1905
Einstein announced his special theory of relativity. This theory denied
the validity of our intuitive idea of the instant of time ‘now’, and
promulgated the thesis that even the most basic quantities of physics,
such as the length of a steel rod, and the temporal order of two events,
had no objective ‘true values’, but were well defined only ‘relative’ to
some observer’s point of view.
Planck’s discovery led by the mid-1920s to a complete breakdown,
at the fundamental level, of the classical material conception of nature.
A new basic physical theory, developed principally by Werner Heisenberg,
Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born, brought ‘the observer’
explicitly into physics. The earlier idea that the physical world
is composed of tiny particles (and electromagnetic and gravitational
fields) was abandoned in favor of a theory of natural phenomena in
which the consciousness of the human observer is ascribed an essential
role. This successor to classical physical theory is called Copenhagen
quantum theory.
This turning away by science itself from the tenets of the objective
materialist philosophy gave impetus to, and lent support to, postmodernism.
That view, which emerged during the second half of the
twentieth century, promulgated, in essence, the idea that all ‘truths’
were relative to one’s point of view, and were mere artifacts of some
particular social group’s struggle for power over competing groups.
Thus each social movement was entitled to its own ‘truth’, which was
viewed simply as a socially created pawn in the power game.
The connection of post-modern thought to science is that both
Copenhagen quantum theory and relativity theory had retreated from
the idea of observer-independent objective truth. Science in the first
quarter of the twentieth century had not only eliminated materialism
as a possible foundation for objective truth, but seemed to have discredited
the very idea of objective truth in science. But if the community
of scientists has renounced the idea of objective truth in favor of
the pragmatic idea that ‘what is true for us is what works for us’, then
every group becomes licensed to do the same, and the hope evaporates
that science might provide objective criteria for resolving contentious
social issues.
This philosophical shift has had profound social and intellectual
ramifications. But the physicists who initiated this mischief were generally
too interested in practical developments in their own field to get
involved in these philosophical issues. Thus they failed to broadcast
an important fact: already by mid-century, a further development in
physics had occurred that provides an effective antidote to both the
‘materialism’ of the modern era, and the ‘relativism’ and ‘social constructionism’
of the post-modern period. In particular, John von Neumann
developed, during the early thirties, a form of quantum theory
that brought the physical and mental aspects of nature back together
as two aspects of a rationally coherent whole. This theory was elevated,
during the forties – by the work of Tomonaga and Schwinger –
to a form compatible with the physical requirements of the theory of
relativity.
Von Neumann’s theory, unlike the transitional ones, provides a
framework for integrating into one coherent idea of reality the empirical
data residing in subjective experience with the basic mathematical
structure of theoretical physics. Von Neumann’s formulation
of quantum theory is the starting point of all efforts by physicists to
go beyond the pragmatically satisfactory but ontologically incomplete
Copenhagen form of quantum theory.
Von Neumann capitalized upon the key Copenhagen move of bringing
human choices into the theory of physical reality. But, whereas the
Copenhagen approach excluded the bodies and brains of the human
observers from the physical world that they sought to describe, von
Neumann demanded logical cohesion and mathematical precision, and
was willing to follow where this rational approach led. Being a mathematician,
fortified by the rigor and precision of his thought, he seemed
less intimidated than his physicist brethren by the sharp contrast between
the nature of the world called for by the new mathematics and
the nature of the world that the genius of Isaac Newton had concocted.
A common core feature of the orthodox (Copenhagen and von Neumann)
quantum theory is the incorporation of efficacious conscious
human choices into the structure of basic physical theory. How this is
done, and how the conception of the human person is thereby radically
altered, has been spelled out in lay terms in this book, and is something
every well informed person who values the findings of science
ought to know about. The conception of self is the basis of values and
thence of behavior, and it controls the entire fabric of one’s life. It is
irrational, from a scientific perspective, to cling today to false and inadequate
nineteenth century concepts about your basic nature, while
ignoring the profound impact upon these concepts of the twentieth
century revolution in science.
It is curious that some physicists want to improve upon orthodox
quantum theory by excluding ‘the observer’, who, by virtue of his subjective
nature, must, in their opinion, be excluded from science. That
stance is maintained in direct opposition to what would seem to be
the most profound advance in physics in three hundred years, namely
the overcoming of the most glaring failure of classical physics, its inability
to accommodate us, its creators. The most salient philosophical
feature of quantum theory is that the mathematics has a causal gap
that, by virtue of its intrinsic form, provides a perfect place for Homo
sapiens as we know and experience ourselves.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Conclusions :

How can our world of billions of thinkers ever come into general concordance
on fundamental issues? How do you, yourself, form opinions
on such issues? Do you simply accept the message of some ‘authority’,
such as a church, a state, or a social or political group? All of
these entities promote concepts about how you as an individual fit
into the reality that supports your being. And each has an agenda of
its own, and hence its own internal biases. But where can you find an
unvarnished truth about your nature, and your place in Nature?
Science rests, in the end, on an authority that lies beyond the pettiness
of human ambition. It rests, finally, on stubborn facts. The
founders of quantum theory certainly had no desire to bring down
the grand structure of classical physics of which they were the inheritors,
beneficiaries, and torch bearers. It was stubborn facts that forced
their hand, and made them reluctantly abandon the two-hundred-yearold
classical ideal of a mechanical universe, and turn to what perhaps
should have been seen from the start as a more reasonable endeavor:
the creation an understanding of nature that includes in a rationally
coherent way the thoughts by which we know and influence the world
around us. The labors of scientists endeavoring merely to understand
our inanimate environment produced, from its own internal logic, a rationally
coherent framework into which we ourselves fit neatly. What
was falsified by twentieth-century science was not the core traditions
and intuitions that have sustained societies and civilizations since the
dawn of mankind, but rather an historical aberration, an impoverished
world view within which philosophers of the past few centuries have
tried relentlessly but fruitlessly to find ourselves. The falseness of that
deviation of science must be made known, and heralded, because human
beings are not likely to endure in a society ruled by a conception
of themselves that denies the essence of their being.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

A Gazzaniga’s The Ethical Brain:


Michael S. Gazzaniga is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist. He was
Editor-in-Chief of the 1447 page book The Cognitive Neurosciences,
which, for the past decade, has been the fattest book in my library,
apart from ‘the unabridged’. His recent book The Ethical Brain has a
Part III entitled Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and the Law. This
part addresses, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, some
of the moral issues that have been dealt with in the present book.
The aim of his Part III is to reconcile the materialist idea that brain
activity is determined with the notion of moral responsibility, which
normally depends upon the idea that we human beings possess free
will.
Gazzaniga asserts:
Based on the modern understanding of neuroscience and on the
assumptions of legal concepts, I believe the following axioms:
Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, while
people are personally responsible agents, free to make their own
decisions.
One possible interpretation of these words – the quantum-theoretic
interpretation – would be that a person has both a mind (his stream of
conscious thoughts, ideas, and feelings) and a brain (made of neurons,
glia, etc), and that his decisions (his conscious moral choices) are free
(not determined by any known law), and that, moreover, the rules
that govern his brain determine the activity of his brain jointly from
the physically described properties of the brain combined with these
conscious decisions. That interpretation is essentially what orthodox
(von Neumann) quantum mechanics – and also common sense intuition
– asserts.
If this interpretation is what Gazzaniga means, then there is no
problem. But I believe that this is not what Gazzaniga means. Earlier
on he said:
The brain determines the mind, and the brain is a physical
entity subject to all the rules of the physical world. The physical
world is determined, so our brains must also be determined.
This seems to be suggesting that by ‘determined’ he means determined
solely by physically described properties, as would be the case if the
concepts of classical physics were applicable. However, what he actually
said was that “the brain is a physical entity subject to all the rules
of the physical world”. The rules of the physical world, as specified by
contemporary (orthodox quantum) theory, explain how the brain is
governed in part by the brain and in part by our conscious choices,
which themselves are not governed by any known laws. If this physicsbased
understanding of ‘determined’ is what Gazzaniga means then
there is no difficulty in reconciling the fact that an agent’s brain is
‘determined’ with the fact that this agent’s person is ‘free’: the agent’s
brain is determined partly by his brain and partly by his conscious
free choices, and hence the person whose actions this brain controls is
likewise jointly controlled by these two factors, neither of which alone
suffices.
If this contemporary-physics-based interpretation is what Gazzaniga
meant, then he could have stopped his book right there: that
interpretation is in complete accord with common sense, with normal
ethical theory, and with contemporary physics. Thus the fact that he
did not stop, but went on to write his book, including Part III, suggests
that he is using not the quantum mechanical meaning of ‘determined’;
but rather the meaning that would hold in the classical approximation,
which exorcizes all the physical effects of our conscious choices.
Indeed, he goes on to say:
If our brains are determined, then [. . . ] is the free will we seem
to experience just an illusion? And if free will is an illusion,
must we revise our concepts of what it means to be personally
responsible for our actions?
I am assuming in this appendix that Gazzaniga is adhering essentially
to nineteenth century physics, so that ‘determined’ means automatically/
mechanically determined by physically described properties
alone, like a clock, and that he is thus endeavoring to address the
question: How can one consider a person with an essentially clocklike
body-brain to be morally responsible for his actions? How can we
uphold the concept of ethical behavior within the confines of an understanding
of nature that reduces each human being to a mechanical
automaton?
Gazzaniga’s answer is built upon a proposed restructuring (redefining)
the meanings of both ‘free will’ and ‘moral responsibility’. Following
an idea of David Hume, and more recently of A.J. Ayer, the word
‘free’ is effectively defined to mean ‘unconstrained by external bonds’.
Thus a clock is ‘free’ if the movements of its hands and cogs are not
restricted by external bonds or forces. However, the ‘free will’ of traditional
ethical theory refers to a type of freedom that a mechanically
controlled clock would not enjoy, even if it had no external bonds.
This latter – morally pertinent – kind of free will is specifically associated
with consciousness. Thus a physically determined clock that
has no consciousness is not subject to moral evaluation, even if it
is not constrained by external bonds, whereas a person possessing a
conscious ‘will’ that is physically efficacious, yet not physically determined,
is subject to moral evaluation when he is not constrained by
external bonds. Thus the morally pertinent idea of ‘possessing free
will’ is not the same as ‘unconstrained by external bonds or forces’.
The Hume/Ayer move obscures the morally pertinent idea of freedom,
which is intimately linked to consciousness, by confounding it with different
idea that does not specifically involve consciousness. This move
throws rational analysis off track by suppressing (on the basis of an
inapplicable approximation) the involvement of consciousness in the
morally relevant conception of ‘free will’.
Ethical and moral values traditionally reside in the ability of a person
to make discerning conscious judgments pertaining to moral issues,
coupled with the capacity of the person’s conscious effort to willfully
force his body to act in accordance with the standards he has consciously
judged to be higher, in the face of strong natural tendencies
to do otherwise. The whole moral battle is fought in the realm of conscious
thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Where there is no consciousness
there is no moral dimension. Moreover, if consciousness exists but is
permitted by general rules to make no physical difference – that is,
if consciousness is constrained by the general laws to be an impotent
witness to mechanically determined process – then the seeming struggle
of will becomes a meaningless charade, and the moral dimension
again disappears.
It is the imposition, by virtue of the classical approximation, of
this law-based kind of impotency that eliminates the moral dimension
within that approximation. The morally pertinent free will is eradicated
by the classical approximation even if there are no external
bounds. Calling a system ‘free’ just because it is not constrained by
external bonds does not suffice to give that system the kind of free will
that undergirds normal ethical ideas.
Gazzaniga’s attack on the problem has also a second prong. He
avers that: “Personal responsibility is a public concept.” He says of
things such as personal responsibility that:
Those aspects of our personhood are – oddly – not in our brains.
They exist only in the relationships that exist when our automatic
brains interact with other automatic brains. They are in
the ether.
This idea that these pertinent things are “in the ether” and exist “only
in the relationships” is indeed an odd thing for a materialisticallyoriented
neuroscientist to say. It seems mystical. Although ideas about
personal responsibility may indeed arise only in social contexts, one
would normally say that the resulting ideas about personal responsibility
exist in the streams of consciousness of the interacting persons,
and a materialist would be expected to say that these ideas are ‘in’ or
are ‘some part of’ the brains of those socially interacting persons. Yet
if the causes of self-controlled behavior are wholly in the brains and
bodies of the agents, and these brains and bodies are automatically
determined by the physically described body-brain alone, then it is
hard to see how these agents, as persons, can have the kind of free will
upon which our moral and ethical theories are based. Some sort of odd
or weird move is needed to endow a person with morally relevant free
will if his body and brain are mechanically determined.
But if some sort of weirdness is needed to rescue the social concept
of personal responsibility, then why not use ‘quantum weirdness’. The
quantum concepts may seem weird to the uninitiated, but they are
based on science, and they resolve the problem of moral responsibility
by endowing our conscious choices with causal influence in the selection
of our physical actions.
It is hard to see the advantage of introducing the changes described
by Gazzaniga compared to the option of simply going beyond the inprinciple-
inadequate classical approximation. Why do thinkers dedicated
to rationality resist so tenaciously the option of accepting (contemporary
orthodox quantum) physics, which says that our conscious
choices intervene, in a very special and restricted kind of way, in the
mechanically determined time development of the physically described
aspects of a system – during the process by means of which the conscious
agent acquires new knowledge about that system? Because acquiring
new knowledge about a system normally involves a probingem, it is not at all weird that the system being examined
should be affected by the extraction of knowledge from it, and hence
comes to depend upon how it was probed.
The advantages of accepting quantum mechanics in cognitive neuroscience,
and ultimately in our lives, are:
• It is compatible with basic physical theory, and thus will continue to
work in increasingly complex and miniaturized empirical situations.
• It specifies how a person’s consciously experienced intentional
choices are represented in the physically described aspects of the
theory.
• It removes the incoherency of a known-to-be-real ontological element
that contains the empirical data, yet resides in a realm that
has no law-based connection to the flow of physical events.
• It provides a foundation for understanding the co-evolution of mind
and brain, because each of these two parts contributes to the dynamics
in a way that is linked to the other by laws that are specified,
at least in part.
• It provides for a free will of the kind needed to undergird ethical
theory.
• It produces a science-based image of oneself, not as a freak-accident
out-cropping – with consciousness riding like a piece of froth on
the ocean – but rather as an active component of a deeply interconnected
world process that is responsive to value-based human
judgments.

Henry P.Stapp

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

dlorde :

You're a lousy reader and a lousy scientist ( which makes what you said about Stapp's scientific, philosophical and other skills worthless and irrelevent ) , since you still cannot see that QM have been superseding  the materialist mechanical determinist mainstream false "scientific world view " you are still equating and confusing with science  ,and you cannot but try to refute non-materialist views but through your false materialism = wrong from the very start= starting from a false premise or belief assumption which are ...the false materialist world view  that's no science,  that Matthew J.Donald provided criticism of Stapp 's work is worthless  also  , in the sense that he is a materialist, and hence most of his views he takes for granted as science are just materialist beliefs  : i will not read or listen to views coming from materialists ( I viewed them enough to be able to say that they are mostly materialist bullshit , no science )  , since materialism is false   , and hence most of your own views are also worth nothing , since they are mostly based on the false secular religion in science that's been equated and confused with science for so long now .
I said that classical physics were /are approximately valid but fundamentally incorrect : they are thus still valid of course , to some extent at least , QM have been superseding classical physics , in the sense that they can explain what classical physics cannot (especially thus at the atomic molecular and sub-atomic levels ) and more : QM thus do have more explanatory power than the fundamentally incorrect classical determinist mechanical physics .

See Ethics from the point of view of Stapp's interpretation of QT , and from that of neuroscientist Gazzaniga  here above  ...

P.S.: Those specific Stapp's excerpts you were asking me to display here are ,once again, 2 lengthy and 2 technical to post here .
And since i am not qualified  to try to give a summary of all that , i will not risk distorting them .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

A materialist scientist such as dlorde   here who has been equating and confusing his own materialist false beliefs with science thinks that he is in a position ,ironically paradoxically enough haha , to question Stapp's scientific philosophical ethical ...work through his own false materialism which he has been taking for granted as ...science haha : tragic-hilarious : that dlorde still does take his own false materialist beliefs for granted as science is evidence enough for the fact that the observed is mind-dependent (we all in fact do distort the  "observed" objective reality  thus out there  via our minds through our a -priori held beliefs ,regarding the nature of reality )   , even at the macroscopic level thus : that illusory separation between the mind and the physical reality , between the mind of the observer and the observed is a myth thus = they are inseparable : QT has proved the fact that our thoughts ,consciousness or mind do intervene in  our interpretations of the physical reality = inevitable : our own daily experiences do prove that fact to be correct on the macroscopic level thus also .
Worse : scientists do design experiments in ways which fit into or suit their own expectations or their a-priori held beliefs : major proof ? : materialism as a false belief , a false outdated superseded 19th century philosophy , a false world view or a false conception of nature has been taken for granted as science ,as the 'scientific world view " ...no wonder .

Who's the poor scientist ,and the lousy philosopher , you dlorde or Stapp , the latter that has almost 50 years of experience on the field .
Stapp that 's a visionnary scientist thinker enough to dare to challenge the false absurd outdated mechanical materialist determinist mainstream  superseded by QM  'scientific world view " ...

The answer is obvious ...it doesn't take a genius to know just that .

Amazing ...

[alancalverd]

Just one more time, Don, before I give up trying to help you.

1. There is no conflict between quantum mechanics and classical physics. QM underpins Newtonian physics and explains a few things that are not obvious in a continuum model.

2. No scientist who understands and uses quantum mechanics thinks otherwise.

3. If you read my last posting, you will see that quantum mechanics cannot be dependent on consciousness, however you define it.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Just one more time, Don, before I give up trying to help you.

1. There is no conflict between quantum mechanics and classical physics. QM underpins Newtonian physics and explains a few things that are not obvious in a continuum model.

2. No scientist who understands and uses quantum mechanics thinks otherwise.

3. If you read my last posting, you will see that quantum mechanics cannot be dependent on consciousness, however you define it.

1-I did not say there was .See above .

2.Who said otherwise ?

3-It's a matter of interpretation of QT : clearly Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others + all the founders of QT thought , and rightly so,that QT was / is mind-dependent .
Even at the macroscopic level , it is cristal-clear that the observed is mind -dependent ( we all distort the observed objective reality through our conscious a-priori held beliefs : materialists , for example , see life , nature , man and the rest of the universe as being mechanical determined ...dualists ,idealists or otherwise  do not ) : we all view reality through our own a-priori held world views that do shape our consciousness and hence our behaviours , thoughts , feelings , emotions, ethics , actions, ....
Major proof for the fact that the observed objective reality is mind -dependent ? ,even at the macroscopic level : materialism as a false belief in science that has been taken for granted as science or as the 'scientific method " ,since the 19th century at least thus .
Besides, we all do experience the fact every single day of our lives that our own consciousness does have causal effects on our brains and body via triggering our physical actions .
A fact only materialists idiots or fools can deny as such .
Since materialism assumes or rather believes that matter is the only reality out there , then it's pretty logical from the materialist point of view at least that the mind is in the brain or the mind is just brain activity , and hence the mind has no causal effects on matter ,brain or body .
So, try to separate science from materialism  then ,for your own sake ,as a scientist  .

[dlorde]

Stapp's just doing the usual business of working back from an incoherent cultural/philosophic assumption based on special pleading, and struggling to find a way to connect it to physical reality. In this case the assumption is that people are 'morally responsible agents' because they have a special kind of control that only they can exercise - what he calls "the morally pertinent idea of ‘possessing free will’" - that somehow transcends physical causality (special pleading). Naturally, it's not easy to connect what is beyond physical causality to causal physical processes. The best he can do is find a point of unknown causality in QM (the outcome of decoherence) and say the (unspecified) magic happens there.

What puzzles me is why he, and so many others (usually religious apologetics) find it necessary to explain the abstract cultural conveniences of moral responsibility and free will in these terms. If there's anything more to it than having an excuse for (i.e. not feeling guilty about) blame, punishment (and, perhaps retribution), I'd like to hear it.

Personally, I see my free will as the freedom to act as determined by what makes me uniquely 'me' - my state of mind at the time of the decision, which in turn, is determined by the genetic inheritance my parents gave me, and a lifetime of development and growth, interaction with my environment and experiences; what I've been taught, and what I've learnt, and what I've thought about. That's what makes me uniquely 'me'; what else do the advocates of causal transcendence think should be involved?

[Ethos_]

Just one more time, Don, before I give up trying to help you.

1. There is no conflict between quantum mechanics and classical physics. QM underpins Newtonian physics and explains a few things that are not obvious in a continuum model.

2. No scientist who understands and uses quantum mechanics thinks otherwise.

3. If you read my last posting, you will see that quantum mechanics cannot be dependent on consciousness, however you define it.

1-I did not say there was .See above .

2.Who said otherwise ?

3-It's a matter of interpretation of QT : clearly Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others + all the founders of QT thought , and rightly so,that QT was / is mind-dependent .
Even at the macroscopic level , it is cristal-clear that the observed is mind -dependent ( we all distort the observed objective reality through our conscious a-priori held beliefs : materialists , for example , see life , nature , man and the rest of the universe as being mechanical determined ...dualists ,idealists or otherwise  do not ) : we all view reality through our own a-priori held world views that do shape our consciousness and hence our behaviours , thoughts , feelings , emotions, ethics , actions, ....

It should be obvious to everyone participating in this thread that Don is beyond help. He won't listen to reason, he won't compromise, it is highly unlikely that he ever will. I'm giving up on him, more important things to do besides trying to coax him toward reality.

[dlorde]

You're a lousy reader and a lousy scientist ( which makes what you said about Stapp's scientific, philosophical and other skills worthless and irrelevent )
... that Matthew J.Donald provided criticism of Stapp 's work is worthless  also  , in the sense that he is a materialist, and hence most of his views he takes for granted as science are just materialist beliefs

Rather than address the arguments, you explicitly use an extreme version of the 'Poisoning the Well' fallacy - we're materialists therefore our criticisms are 'worthless and irrelevant'; priceless!

P.S.: Those specific Stapp's excerpts you were asking me to display here are ,once again, 2 lengthy and 2 technical to post here .

That rings hollow, given you're in the habit of posting entire chapters of other people's work  []

And since i am not qualified  to try to give a summary of all that , i will not risk distorting them .

So post the relevant chapter and page references (as I requested last time).

[dlorde]

3-It's a matter of interpretation of QT : clearly Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others + all the founders of QT thought , and rightly so,that QT was / is mind-dependent .
Even at the macroscopic level , it is cristal-clear that the observed is mind -dependent ( we all distort the observed objective reality through our conscious a-priori held beliefs : materialists , for example , see life , nature , man and the rest of the universe as being mechanical determined ...dualists ,idealists or otherwise  do not ) : we all view reality through our own a-priori held world views that do shape our consciousness and hence our behaviours , thoughts , feelings , emotions, ethics , actions, ....

Do you really think 'Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others' were talking about subjective reality?  [)]

[dlorde]

It should be obvious to everyone participating in this thread that Don is beyond help. He won't listen to reason, he won't compromise, it is highly unlikely that he ever will. I'm giving up on him, more important things to do besides trying to coax him toward reality.

True; these days I'm posting for the exercise and entertainment - as I said before, whenever it gets boring you can just wait a while, and he'll always come back with some new inanity []

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Just one more time, Don, before I give up trying to help you.

1. There is no conflict between quantum mechanics and classical physics. QM underpins Newtonian physics and explains a few things that are not obvious in a continuum model.

2. No scientist who understands and uses quantum mechanics thinks otherwise.

3. If you read my last posting, you will see that quantum mechanics cannot be dependent on consciousness, however you define it.

1-I did not say there was .See above .

2.Who said otherwise ?

3-It's a matter of interpretation of QT : clearly Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others + all the founders of QT thought , and rightly so,that QT was / is mind-dependent .
Even at the macroscopic level , it is cristal-clear that the observed is mind -dependent ( we all distort the observed objective reality through our conscious a-priori held beliefs : materialists , for example , see life , nature , man and the rest of the universe as being mechanical determined ...dualists ,idealists or otherwise  do not ) : we all view reality through our own a-priori held world views that do shape our consciousness and hence our behaviours , thoughts , feelings , emotions, ethics , actions, ....

It should be obvious to everyone participating in this thread that Don is beyond help. He won't listen to reason, he won't compromise, it is highly unlikely that he ever will. I'm giving up on him, more important things to do besides trying to coax him toward reality.

You're just projecting again : you are all so blinded and indoctrinated by materialism that you cannot but equate it or confuse it with science , no wonder that most scientists today do also  , since materialism has been equated with the 'scientific world view " for so long now .
That's by the way THE major proof for the fact that the observed objective reality gets distorted by the mind of the observer through his /her a -priori held beliefs or world views ,THE major proof for the fact that the mind of the observer does intervene in relation to the observed , and that the separation between the mind and the physical reality , between the observed and the observer is a scientific myth .

[Ethos_]

True; these days I'm posting for the exercise and entertainment - as I said before, whenever it gets boring you can just wait a while, and he'll always come back with some new inanity []

When I first started reading this thread, I found Don very interesting and considered him to be quite intelligent. As time has progressed and I began to see this pattern of his, for constant repetition of his spurious sources, I've come to the conclusion that he is not as bright as I once thought. To tell you the truth, I don't think he really understands this questionable theory that he uses as his source. I doubt he's intelligent enough to separate the facts from the fiction and simply takes the assertions of these sources as real science. And he is so committed that even were he to realize the errors, he would just casually ignore them.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

It should be obvious to everyone participating in this thread that Don is beyond help. He won't listen to reason, he won't compromise, it is highly unlikely that he ever will. I'm giving up on him, more important things to do besides trying to coax him toward reality.

True; these days I'm posting for the exercise and entertainment - as I said before, whenever it gets boring you can just wait a while, and he'll always come back with some new inanity []

Yeah ,right , just keep on deluding yourself then .
See above .

[Ethos_]

It should be obvious to everyone participating in this thread that Don is beyond help. He won't listen to reason, he won't compromise, it is highly unlikely that he ever will. I'm giving up on him, more important things to do besides trying to coax him toward reality.

True; these days I'm posting for the exercise and entertainment - as I said before, whenever it gets boring you can just wait a while, and he'll always come back with some new inanity []

Yeah ,right , just keep on deluding yourself then .
See above .

The only delusion being exercised here is taking Stapp's word on these questions for granted. Look in the mirror Don!

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

3-It's a matter of interpretation of QT : clearly Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others + all the founders of QT thought , and rightly so,that QT was / is mind-dependent .
Even at the macroscopic level , it is cristal-clear that the observed is mind -dependent ( we all distort the observed objective reality through our conscious a-priori held beliefs : materialists , for example , see life , nature , man and the rest of the universe as being mechanical determined ...dualists ,idealists or otherwise  do not ) : we all view reality through our own a-priori held world views that do shape our consciousness and hence our behaviours , thoughts , feelings , emotions, ethics , actions, ....

Do you really think 'Von Neumann , Einstein, Bohr , Heseinberg and others' were talking about subjective reality?  [)]

No, QT is the one that's subjective ( The founders of QT saw it as such ,remember ) : mind -dependent = a matter of interpretation , that's why there are a lots of interpretations of the Copenhagen interpretation of QT , the latter depends largely on the a -priori held beliefs or world views of the scientists thinkers in question,as we see that reflected in this very thread through Stapp's and through the materialists ' interpretations of QT  such as those of yourselves   .
The observed objective reality out there  in general , either at the microscopic or macroscopic levels , gets distorted by the mind of the observer through the a-priori held beliefs or world views of the observer which do shape his /her mind and hence his thoughts ,behaviours , ethics , actions ....

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

You're a lousy reader and a lousy scientist ( which makes what you said about Stapp's scientific, philosophical and other skills worthless and irrelevent )
... that Matthew J.Donald provided criticism of Stapp 's work is worthless  also  , in the sense that he is a materialist, and hence most of his views he takes for granted as science are just materialist beliefs

Rather than address the arguments, you explicitly use an extreme version of the 'Poisoning the Well' fallacy - we're materialists therefore our criticisms are 'worthless and irrelevant'; priceless

!

I told you you were a lousy reader , didn't i ? You have just confirmed that fact , once again :
I said that since materialism gets equated with science , then most materialists ' views, including those of yourself as a materialist thus , are just materialist bullshit , no science .
See above ,and try to read carefully what i have been saying .

P.S.: Those specific Stapp's excerpts you were asking me to display here are ,once again, 2 lengthy and 2 technical to post here .

That rings hollow, given you're in the habit of posting entire chapters of other people's work  []

And since i am not qualified  to try to give a summary of all that , i will not risk distorting them .

So post the relevant chapter and page references (as I requested last time).

Ok, next time then .