Dear Basil,

In your 1997 interview at

http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1997/interview.html

you explained your materialistic belief that "mind is not an entity in itself" and defined beables as "just those properties that the particle actually possesses independently of our measurements".

You also stated that "one of the aspects, that is missing from a quantum system, is that idea of actualization. The reason for this is that QM insists on unitary transformations. They are nothing more than the re-description. Nothing new comes out of that..."

You can try the actualization of beables with your brain at

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Vecchi.html

You stressed that "the notion of implicate order is proposed for people to experiment with it", so I'm glad to offer you an experiment with your own brain. Try it!

Also, if you model the universe as a brain,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Planat.html

perhaps you could explain the emergence of time and 3-D space as well,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Gerlach.html

BTW do you like the new term 'actualization of beables'? It's an old story, Pauli had explained it half a century ago,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/faq.html#Pauli

The roots go back to Leibnitz,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/#2

A penny for your thoughts! As you stated in your interview, the notion of implicate order "is not presented as final form, so it needs a lot of exploration and debate."

Regards,

Dimi
http://members.aon.at/chakalov
--
Dead matter makes quantum jumps; the living-and-quantum matter is smarter.
 

Note: I didn't comment on Bohm & Hiley's interpretation of QM, since I have great difficulties in understanding the notion of 'active information'. In the interview above, Basil Hiley stated that "there should be no need for the observer", and explained the notion of 'active information' as "acting on a particle at a particular time", as opposed to 'passive information' that is not accessible to the particle "at that moment". Specifically, "There is not a collapse, because the information is still there, but it is inaccessible to the particle", says Basil.

This intelligent selection of active information from the hidden pool of potentially passive information is a great mystery to me. Something should be incredibly smart to know what might be the future development of a particle, and select the active information for each and every instant 'now' from the hidden trajectory of the particle, hence making it a bona fide trajectory, albeit hidden.

Moreover, how could we map the hidden "timing" of active information to the one read by our good old wristwatch? When we say 'time-dependent Schrödinger equation', what kind of "time" do we refer to? Here Bohmian mechanics does not offer more help than the standard QM, I'm afraid. See Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory, Ch. Quantum Mechanics & Its Discontents. Can we get rid of the unitary transformations in standard QM and solve the measurement problem by some tiny little non-linear "extension"?

Recall that the "time" in a 'time-dependent Schrödinger equation' is inevitably hidden because it refers to an isolated quantum system. Such kind of "time" can not be measured with any inanimate physical clock in any inertial frame whatsoever. It's frozen. Gone. Non-existent (in present-day physics). How can we make sure that such "evolution" is indeed "deterministic"? Subsequently, how do we know that "quantum jumps" do happen in the quantum realm and are not artifacts of our non-living measuring devices? Most importantly, how can we map that hidden time of an isolated quantum system to the time read by a clock?

Let's place this last question in particular context, and see whether the Bohmian mechanics and/or the standard one can tackle the problem of mapping the hidden "time" in the quantum realm to the one measured with a physical clock. Then we might understand, and probably solve, not only the measurement problem but the Hilbert space problem as well, and outline the path toward a complete quantum gravity, the final theory in the dreams of Steven Weinberg.

There is an anecdotal story about the famous Soviet physicist Lev Landau, that he had suggested a simple solution to the time/energy puzzle due to Heisenberg: measure the energy of a particle, look at your wristwatch, and -- voila! (Lev Davidovich must have been fluent in French, I suppose.) There is no need to bother with Heisenberg: we have point-like values of two non-commutative animals. Only there is a catch: the instant 'now' which we pin down with our wristwatch corresponds to a point in 3-D space as well, so with the same recipe we can shrink the momentum of the very same particle, too. Or can we?

Of course, we can try to introduce two modes of time, as explained in my FAQ, by Basil Hiley has been so far quite reluctant to comment on this (certainly not original) proposal. He said in his interview that the prespace is "that aspect of the holomovement, from which we can abstract space-time in the form of some explicate order."

The notion of 'prespace', which is not subject to the Cartesian division, res extensa vs. res cogitans, can be traced back to Leibnitz. As to the holomovement, I think it refers to the evolution of the Holon. Only the evolution of the Holon presupposes creation and actualization of beables, and requires a much better understanding of the nature of 3-D space, etc.

Clearly, the notion of implicate order "needs a lot of exploration and debate", as Basil acknowledged above, back in 1997.

Any news in the past six years?

Dimi Chakalov
July 29, 2003