Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 07:39:50 -0700 (PDT)
To: rdumain-AT-igc.org
Subject: Philosophy, Bohm.


/* Written  8:44 PM  Jul 14, 1996 by sarfatti-AT-well.com in igc:sci.philo.meta */

Paul Bains wrote:
> 
> Jack,
> you don't like 'philosophy'.

No I don't mean I don't like philosophy. I was partly
joking. What I mean't was that the professional linguistic
academic philosophers who don't know enough modern physics
have dominated the C field up til now and taken it down
tortuous largely irrelevant blind alleys.

> But isn't philosophy involved in the creation
> of concepts like matter and mind. 

Certainly.

> Are there 'scientific concepts' in
> distinction to 'philosophical' ones?
> 

Yes, but all scientific concepts have a philosophical aspect,
but not all philosophical concepts have a scientific aspect.

> When you knock Bohm's implicate order stuff are you including the
> philosophical musings in The Undivided Universe?

I am not really knocking it strategically in the long term.
"Implicate order", like "pregeometry", "It from bit." etc are
ideas whose time has not yet come. In contrast, Bohm's earlier
"pilot wave" is an idea whose time has come, and Bohr's Copenhagen
Interpretation is an idea whose time has long passed.

What I am objecting to is that the non-physicists have 
prematurely seized upon "implicate order" as a panacea
for the Perennial Philosophy. 

Implicate order says that there is a primordial level of reality
in which both mind and matter emerge. Well it may be the W2 world
of superstrings that Nanopoulos writes about. But my point is that
right now the pilot-wave with back-action (which appears as the
Nanopoulos "friction" term in his density matrix replacement of
the reversible Schrodinger equation) is the proper language to make
quick practical advances in C-theory because of its clear mathematical 
link to the theory of complex adaptive systems being developed at the
Santa Fe Institure.

> 
> Would you bother to look at Jibu and Yasue's "Quantum Brain Dynamics 
> and consciousness". 

I have a copy of it but have not yet had time to read it. When I
do you can be sure I will post a detailed review.

> or have they lost the plot?. Like me.

Don't know yet. :-)


> Raymond Ruyer refers to de Broglie's "Continuity and Discontinuity". 
> Was this written after he'd given up his pilot wave approach on 
> Pauli's recommendation.

Pauli was an ardent Copenhagenian desciple of Bohr who eventually
became a patient of Jung's and shifted into mystical synchronicity
and alchemical studies in his dying process. Bohr's paradigm is
inherently mystical and connected with Eastern philosophy as 
Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (both with my significant help) have
made popular. All of us physicists have been deluded by Bohr's
charisma, but my pilot-wave/backaction ideas are really based
upon Einstein's opposition to Bohr. Einstein was correct on the
objectivity or reality but wrong on the necessity for locality.
Bohr was wrong on the idea that led to "observer creation of
reality", but right on the need for a "nonlocal" or "wholistic"
element to reality. Einstein late in life began to doubt his
requirement for locality, so I think I am carrying on Einstein's
battle against Bohr's Ghost. Bohm wrote his pilot-wave theory
directly under Einstein's influence at princeton even though Einstein
did not like the end-result because it was highly nonlocal.

> 
> just a few questions...I know you're busy - you've got to be fighting 
> off the heathens
> 
> Paul

You ask good thought-provoking questions. Keep doing it.
-- 
sarfatti-AT-well.com
http://www.well.com/user/sarfatti/index.html



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