Douglas, this is difficult because you appear to prefer to allude to your position rather than state it.
Quantum mechanics, at least according to some ways of interpreting it, does indeed say that some events don’t have any explanation beyond “that’s the way it happened to go”. So far, so good; but what does that have to do with whether the mind and the brain are the same thing? (Actually, I think physicalists would generally say not “the mind and the brain are the same thing” but something more like “the mind is something the brain does” or “the mind is a set of patterns in what the brain does”.)
I suppose the “Copenhagen interpretation” of QM makes conscious observation responsible for wavefunction collapse; but, speaking of “earlier misunderstandings of what science says about the nature of reality”, it might be worth mentioning that AFAIK just about all physicists these days prefer other ways of looking at QM that don’t have that feature.
But I may very well be misunderstanding you or missing the point in some other way. Let’s be more specific. You say that Eliezer’s post reveals that he’s working with bad cached ideas, and that they’re shown to be bad by quantum mechanics. So could you please give a specific example of something Eliezer said that is incompatible with quantum mechanics?
Douglas, this is difficult because you appear to prefer to allude to your position rather than state it.
Quantum mechanics, at least according to some ways of interpreting it, does indeed say that some events don’t have any explanation beyond “that’s the way it happened to go”. So far, so good; but what does that have to do with whether the mind and the brain are the same thing? (Actually, I think physicalists would generally say not “the mind and the brain are the same thing” but something more like “the mind is something the brain does” or “the mind is a set of patterns in what the brain does”.)
I suppose the “Copenhagen interpretation” of QM makes conscious observation responsible for wavefunction collapse; but, speaking of “earlier misunderstandings of what science says about the nature of reality”, it might be worth mentioning that AFAIK just about all physicists these days prefer other ways of looking at QM that don’t have that feature.
But I may very well be misunderstanding you or missing the point in some other way. Let’s be more specific. You say that Eliezer’s post reveals that he’s working with bad cached ideas, and that they’re shown to be bad by quantum mechanics. So could you please give a specific example of something Eliezer said that is incompatible with quantum mechanics?