Why would you try to approach consciousness this way, as opposed to through neuroscience? Neuroscience has been making some real progress lately; what is it that you think this approach could add?
I can’t help but notice that the “self-monad” looks a lot like a “soul” in a thin, crispy quantum shell. What are the differences? Are there differences? Dressing it up this way allows you to do math with the monad. Does that math tell you anything? Especially, can any testable prediction come out of this?
You describe how to think like a quantum monadologist. If you answer these questions, I’ll be able to decide if thinking like a quantum monadologist is worth attempting.
This is not in opposition to neuroscience. It implicitly calls for attention to quantum effects in the brain, and not just electrical and chemical signaling; and then there’s the step where you explain the formal ontology of physics (used to describe the state of the monad) in terms of the ontology revealed by phenomenology, rather than vice versa. But that is all in addition.
The root of it all is that you take phenomenology seriously, and you don’t think it can be reduced to the physics we have, and you take that seriously enough to look for ways to revise the physics, both ontologically and mathematically. The majority of commenters here appear to be content with the theory of consciousness they have, or at least with the prospects for reduction of consciousness to existing physics. I am not, and we are therefore going over some of the familiar disputations in comments, but I really didn’t write this to present the case against ordinary physicalism one more time. Chalmers does that, many others have done that. Some people get it and some people don’t. This article is a sketch (and only a sketch) of a new alternative—a new starting point, rather than an argument against the old one. If you don’t feel the need for a new starting point, you may not be interested.
Is the self-monad like a soul? Yes and no, just as the brain is like and unlike a soul according to classic mind-brain identity theory. A monad is a “single substance”, but here it is not a different sort of substance. A simple monad should be able to evolve into a complex one, or vice versa, given the right boundary conditions. There is also no radical independence of it from the body; it’s a condensate of entangled electrons (or whatever) that forms as the brain develops, nothing more. As a quantum state, you might be able to transfer it into a new environment by a process resembling quantum teleportation; that’s about as close to the traditional detachability of the soul as I can get in this theory.
The one inescapable empirical conclusion is that quantum effects are functionally relevant for consciousness and cognition, somewhere, somehow. But if that’s a fact, plain old empirical neuroscience, biophysics, and psychology should turn it up eventually anyway, whether or not a theory of monads is a recognized intellectual option.
Why would you try to approach consciousness this way, as opposed to through neuroscience? Neuroscience has been making some real progress lately; what is it that you think this approach could add?
I can’t help but notice that the “self-monad” looks a lot like a “soul” in a thin, crispy quantum shell. What are the differences? Are there differences? Dressing it up this way allows you to do math with the monad. Does that math tell you anything? Especially, can any testable prediction come out of this?
You describe how to think like a quantum monadologist. If you answer these questions, I’ll be able to decide if thinking like a quantum monadologist is worth attempting.
This is not in opposition to neuroscience. It implicitly calls for attention to quantum effects in the brain, and not just electrical and chemical signaling; and then there’s the step where you explain the formal ontology of physics (used to describe the state of the monad) in terms of the ontology revealed by phenomenology, rather than vice versa. But that is all in addition.
The root of it all is that you take phenomenology seriously, and you don’t think it can be reduced to the physics we have, and you take that seriously enough to look for ways to revise the physics, both ontologically and mathematically. The majority of commenters here appear to be content with the theory of consciousness they have, or at least with the prospects for reduction of consciousness to existing physics. I am not, and we are therefore going over some of the familiar disputations in comments, but I really didn’t write this to present the case against ordinary physicalism one more time. Chalmers does that, many others have done that. Some people get it and some people don’t. This article is a sketch (and only a sketch) of a new alternative—a new starting point, rather than an argument against the old one. If you don’t feel the need for a new starting point, you may not be interested.
Is the self-monad like a soul? Yes and no, just as the brain is like and unlike a soul according to classic mind-brain identity theory. A monad is a “single substance”, but here it is not a different sort of substance. A simple monad should be able to evolve into a complex one, or vice versa, given the right boundary conditions. There is also no radical independence of it from the body; it’s a condensate of entangled electrons (or whatever) that forms as the brain develops, nothing more. As a quantum state, you might be able to transfer it into a new environment by a process resembling quantum teleportation; that’s about as close to the traditional detachability of the soul as I can get in this theory.
The one inescapable empirical conclusion is that quantum effects are functionally relevant for consciousness and cognition, somewhere, somehow. But if that’s a fact, plain old empirical neuroscience, biophysics, and psychology should turn it up eventually anyway, whether or not a theory of monads is a recognized intellectual option.