X-Message-Number: 7932
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Cramer, Tao & Self
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 08:46:14 +1000 (EST)

Robert Ettinger writes,

>1. Peter Merel (#7911) mentions "Cramer's transactional interpretation" [of
>quantum mechanics]. Peter, could you provide a reference?

Certainly: Cramer has both his "Reviews of Modern Physics" and
"International Journal of Theoretical Physics" papers online, as well
as a good general introduction that was published in his column in 
"Analog". The first two are linked to from the last, so you might start
at "http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw16.html".

>2. On "Taoist notion of identity": It does not seem at all mystical, but--

I'll remind you you said that before we're done :-)

>Certainly my mind uses and interprets symbols to interpret the world, with
>the senses as intermediaries. The only things I can experience directly are
>the qualia in my self circuit. 

That's already quite different to the taoist idea, which is that the
differentiated world exists only as things and qualia in the mind; the
taoist notion of reality is where its mysticism resides. If you've ever
seen Escher's "The Print Gallery"


(http://www.netspot.unisa.edu.au/wm/paint/auth/escher/other/escher.print-gallery.jpg)
you'll see a pretty rendering of the taoist notion of reality ("the
Way") - it's under his signature.

Even "The Way" is only an abstraction of whatever the mysterious thing is
that is beneath abstraction; like Escher's signature, it's a patch that you
can use to cover a hole in the world. Beneath the patch there is only, and
there can only ever be, mystery.

So the taoist idea of identity has it that the self is no more or less
than any other thing in the world of abstraction; just like Escher's
gallery-observer, it's not necessary for experience. A taoist way
of dissolving the self, in contrast the the zenist methods, is to
accept more and more things as oneself, until the whole world is the
self. Since you can do that, what sense is there in abstracting one or
another form of experience as "the self circuit"?

>First, it glides past the crucial distinction between symbol manipulation and
>feeling, more or less implying that the computing part of the brain needs
>nothing more than raw sensory data to generate qualia--whereas, it seems
>certain to me, it needs a specific feature of anatomy/physiology to provide
>subjectivity, which I have called the self circuit. 

What is this distinction? What's the difference between "raw sensory data"
and "qualia"? I know that you maintain the self-circuit implements the 
difference, but I don't understand what the difference means to you
in the first place.

Peter Merel.

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