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07 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. That's how this little book of two essays begins. The first essay was first published with the same title fifty years ago, and it became influential. Now, in the second essay, "Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus," Nagel enhances and restates his case for a monistic account of the apparent mind-body dualism. He suggests the two are perhaps ...inseparable aspects of some one thing, for which we do not at present have a concept....

Admittedly, it's not my area. I have never understood exactly what "the problem of consciousness" is. May I innocently suggest that human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, ultimately, of our genetic programming. This allows us to place consciousness on a separate analytical plane from that of the human body, without denying strict materialism. For an analogy, the programming underlying Conway's Game of Life yields a rich taxonomy of scurrying and flying screen images, yet these would be he impossible to anticipate from even a complete understanding of the programming.

Actuakky, Nagel briefly considers this, yet he prefers a more radical view. Perhaps [conscious states] are emergent, relative to the properties of atoms or molecules. But if they are not, this view would imply that the fundamental constituents of the world, out of which everything is composed, are neither physical nor mental but something more basic. I'm too conservative for that. Still, Nagel is thought-provoking and knows his subject.

To take an outrageous liberty, allow me to quote one of Nagel's sentences [with my substitutions] to defend cosmic ancestry — I think we will have reason to believe in the truth of [cosmic ancestry} only if the observable facts ...cannot be explained without appeal to [the tenets of cosmic ancestry] – or perhaps only if the best explanation must appeal to them. The argument works equally well, I think.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel, ISBN:9780197752821,
Oxford University Press, 2024.
10 Feb 2013: review of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel, 2012.
12 Apr 2023: a glimpse of Conway's Gane of Life with an example of a surprising image.

01 Oct 2024 Book Reviews
Quanta and Fields by Sean M. Carroll There is certainly room for future generations to clarify the situation in inportant ways. I welcome this admssion in Quanta and Fields, a new book by physicist Sean M. Carroll. He is far more comfortable with quantum theory (QT) than the author of the book I reviewed yesterday. For example, Carroll does not much worry about the difference between observing a phenomenon, and disturbing/affecting it. But the subatomic details of QT get very deep, mathematical discussion. If you are interested and well-informed already, this book will be useful.

Both books acknowledge that QT is incomplete. Kay thinks the underlying philosophy is entirely nonsensical. Carroll recognizes that QT works in mysterious ways, but, as he amply demonstrates, it works! The theory of evolution has the opposite crisis. The underlying philosophy — neo-darwinian mutation and selection — is clear enough, but it doesn't work!

Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean M. Carroll,
Penguin Random House, 01 May 2024.
Testing Darwinism... explains that the theory of evolution does not pass basic tests.

30 Sep 2024 Book Reviews
Escape from Shadow Physics, by Adam Forrest Kay Quantum Theory has been a secondary preoccupation of mine since I was in college. I have never been satisfied with the prevailing Copenhagen interpretation — and neither has Adam Forrest Kay. His new book forcefully explains why dissatisfaction is warranted, with a thorough history of how the subject developed, and how it took a very wrong and lasting turn. I was surprised to realize that there was murkiness under the science I learned in high school. I originally thought that spin parity could be explained without entanglement. Ultimately I learned that Bell's inequality proves that local hidden variables cannot be the solution. (On this point, Kay thinks otherwise, I believe.)

Kay advocates a speculative research avenue to restore clarity and logic to the subject. He starts by noticing another medium that also exhibits both wave and particle phenomena simultaneously, called hydrodynamic quantum analogues (HQA). It would be a return to the "pilot-wave" theory of DeBroglie and Bohm. I entrely support imaginative exploration of this sort, but I did not carefully follow his endorsement of this model. It reminded me of an analogy with gears and vortices of James Clak Maxwell's, when he was a student. For quantum theory, I suspect that the historical success of both wave and particle physics may have blinded us to an underlying reality that requires concepts and vocabulary that we do not currently have.

For history of quantum theory, Kay is excellent. He also digresses to other subjects where science went wrong, such as the phlogiston theory. There he writes, "Because fake problems are hard to solve, the way out is to drop them." I thought immedately of today's theory of evolution, where the hardest questions — how did this or that genetic program originate? — are are no longer even asked.

Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory by Adam Forrest Kay, 423 pages, ISBN:1399609599,
Basic Books, 18 Jun 2024.
Robust Software Management lists examples of genetic programs that look unaccountable.
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