I'm not really sure what your first argument is beyond the hope of a future discovery to affirm a panentheistic view.

I don't pretend to know anything about QM, but I think your second argument resembles a composition fallacy. A physicist could use QM to explain a phenomena, but the phenomena has to exist as more than a nebulous possibility. We should be seeing frequent and repeatable examples of telepathy and telekinesis, for instance, before we should be forced to explain them. Saying that there are complexities at a certain level doesn't demonstrate anything about our experience.

My argument wasn't directed at you, though, if that was your impression. It was mainly inspired by Paisley's asinine view of (anthropocentric) emotions as fundamental components to the cosmos.

This might be where a lot of confusion starts. "Information" in the context of quantum mechanics, is really a branch of probability theory (as I'm sure you're aware). To someone who might not be familiar with information theory, the mistake could easily be made that "information" requires mind. Naturally, it's counter-intuitive to state that communication could possibly happen without mind, and information theory is also about communication. But most of what we could describe as information (for instance, the spin of a specific electron) goes unobserved. Not until it's observed does it become information to us, so someone like Paisley could come to the conclusion that our observation is fundamental to the universe, and our mind is fundamental, since our perception of the fundamental parts of the universe is dependent upon mind. It's the most obscene stretch, just to arrive at the tail wagging the dog.

That's why I get so upset about the use of quantum theory as though it's some kind of magical hammer of debate victory. The issue there is basically measurement. Even on the every day common-sense level, measuring something four or five times, you still have a margin of error. That margin of error comes from the same place that information theory comes from: statistics and probability.

To abuse indeterminacy by stating that it has a serious metaphysical side beyond tongue-in-cheek speculation is to distance yourself from serious work on the problem.

Not to imply that's your position, Eloise. But what IS your position? A sort of natural order by supernatural means?

Yes, I know what you mean there, Will, but I try not to let what I write give any cause to confuse information with human observation.

The biggest mistake I see with this is that people who would do this, conflate it then with the notion of some hoodoo spirit consciousness situated behind their eyes.  That's not reality, as you've noted, the vast majority of quantum information is not classically observed by anyone or anything.

Rhetorically speaking, most healthy people with five full working senses have a tendency to rely heavily on only one of them and filter out the signals that come from others, so then even in the classical sense, the average person's concept of observation is informed by the barest and most misleading of experience. Any notion of measurement or observation is habitually framed in this veiled anthropical assumption and so equated with what that assumption represents to the person, which is our special 'minds'. Quantum observation is about as alien as aural observation to a person who equates their mind almost entirely with their visual experience, the problem is, there can be a lot of distance between a persons concept of mind and one or more of their classical senses. For example, one can be psychologically affected by white noise, probably not noticing that they are hearing it and attribute the headache, instead, to something they were looking at simply because they have no concept of background aural data being related to the state of their mind.

In the basic lack of understanding that 'mind' is not composed merely of one's conscious egotistical thoughts, we have an easily identifiable and distinct gap between the average anthropical concept of mind, and the reality of it. A gap that almost never fails to be projected into woo woo talk about the measurement problem. It is just my opinion, but I think that most people could better understand how quantum observation works if they stepped out of the box of this false equating of mind with a smaller structure composed within mind.

I refer to indeterminacy in my post only passingly (ie: "they {electrons} probably do not. {have an objective state of polarisation}), there is some experimental evidence to this statement. And my point in having done so is that objective material ground is an assumption which we need to replace if this sort of result continues.  Statistical material ground is a freakishly messy idea, we can't do science with the new super planet Jupiter-Saturn popping in and out of existence in our equations, there has to be a way for the universe as we have experienced it to be constant in calculation. Assuming an atomic unit of self-measurement is a realistic alternative. It's not a natural order via supernatural means, it's a supra natural order within which natural order has relative constancy.

Sorry for being short about this but I'm on borrowed time right now, as I have important tasks to complete and I can't neglect for long. I just quickly wanted to reply to your correction in my understanding, I'll post something more substantial soon.

But we have done that, and suffice it to say we haven't made much progress in that specific area since. This is possibly because no such thing exists.

Ahh, yeah OK, no the implications are in the realm of extreme possibility, the composition is normal, I'm just talking from the tails of its distribution so to speak- we need explanations why we do not appear to be as reactive as some evidence suggests we should be.

I can see how it does, this is probably because we are both reaching for the same position and it is only the implications which we see differently. But both of us can only augment our positions on implication with particular bias to certain logical systems. I will admit I happen to believe that the systems I am biasing have more explanatory power. But that would take a great deal more explaining and I have to go. For now, I simply concede you are right on this point.

Okay, Sorry Magilum, I was rushed. I have a little time spare now so I'll go over it again in better detail.

magilum wrote:

There would have to be something distinguishable, something that definitely is without a mentality.

I don't think I can state my response to this any more clearly, but I'll try. We have distinguished mentality, originally we excepted everything but human intellect, and that became our basis for comparison. From that basis we have detected responses which physically match the human behaviour we ascribed to intellect in all biological organisms down to plants.  Yes, plants respond to stimuli in ways we would have only expected to be able to attribute to something with intellect. The likeness can only be noted in careful time-lapsed experiments, it's not an ordinary observation that suggests plant life possess some form of recognisable mentality; one might say that plant life thinks very slowly compared to human life, but this would be quite obviously opposed to It does not think at all.

The Dodder Plant (this Blog cites it's sources at the footer)

Ultimately it may be that there is no such thing as not mind-like. It is a possibility which we can justifiably consider.

Magilum wrote: 

I meant the suggested implications would be a composition fallacy.

I'm presuming by implications you mean what I said about your finger reacting electromagnetically with your keyboard. Is that right?

If so, I admit this is an extreme example, but the point ultimately is that if the electron polarities of object surfaces are not determined by some objective law of the universe, then we get left with no hypothesis as to how we actually can exist. At the moment we are still assuming an objective universe exists, of course, but we have also begun to violate this assumption at the quantum level. It would appear as though, eventually, we will face the need to come up with a better assumption to replace it.

Magilum wrote:

A physicist could use QM to explain a phenomena, but the phenomena has to exist as more than a nebulous possibility. We should be seeing frequent and repeatable examples of telepathy and telekinesis, for instance, before we should be forced to explain them. Saying that there are complexities at a certain level doesn't demonstrate anything about our experience.

None of which contradicts my original point; it may actually advance it.

Because we are both arguing for monism, no doubt. Probably nothing I say will contradict your point, most likely I will only advance the same basis in a slightly different direction relying on different models to explain circumstances along the way. I am thinking you would probably draw on evolutionary theory a lot more than me, which would bring evolution's assumptions of time contiguity, independent space and classical locality into your explanation. I avoid these because in my opinion they have lost a lot of weight in explaining reality to us - even though sciences outside of physics and mathematics still frequently rely on them.  Not that I would ignore evolution, I would just be fitting it to a different background picture (there is no contradiction between quantum and evolution, it just offers a slightly different worldview), but my foundational assumptions would be of a quantum universe rather than a classical one, evolutionary theory that relies on a classical universe would not inform my explanation as it would yours.

Because of this gap we'd see very different implications from hypothesising simple mind. Time is always an easy one to demonstrate so I'll use that - the implications you see would be bounded in time, this is necessary to the model that has explained those implications. On the other hand, I don't see implications bounded in time because I do not assume, nor can I, that time bounds physical phenomenon. Time is relata, the idea that time constrains cause-effect events to occur is cum hoc and can't be implied here.

Is this where we find philisophical panentheism? In an underlying order?

Um, yes and no. No if you're thinking I mean to establish that an intrinsic order exists, point to it and say "God did that. The End". But otherwise yes, that is my claim, that an "I am in the father and the father in me" is detectable in an underlying order to the universe. 

PS. I didn't like making that claim in such a bare way, establishing it could be a long process.

I agree with this, it forms part of the philosophy.

No, we probably can't, and there's good and bad in that. A best hypothesis of mind will have to render this issue neutral, I think.

Okay, now I see where you would think that magilum and I would approach this from a different angle (you mentioned evolution before). Not that I can speak for madge, but from an evolutionary standpoint, a creature's adaptation over generations is a kind of confirmation of the physical limitations of its environment. That is, the mind tunes to the universe. So to me, the fact that we describe the universe in terms of mind is circular. But I'm not clear on how your philosophy handles that.

Yes, and I'd rather make it clear than jump to claims, naturally. The fact that we have minds and thus must conceptualise the universe in terms of mind is circular, but alternately we must describe mind in terms of the universe and the theory shouldn't have to fight with any of the evidence, wherein, not only are we running out of distinctions between intellect and the ground of intellect, we have major physical theories which reject events bounded in time. This does not mean that evolution is suddenly no longer bounded in generations, it means generations bounded in time is an assumption which has much less weight. 

{Aside: You can drop that assumption and the theory still works, time only dangles on the outside of generations anyway, so it's not really necessary to anything but the implications you're left with { Or Drop independent space it strengthens evolutionary theory, but it should also make you rethink adaptation.} }

If intellect is of the universe (and it is unless we claim dualism which goes nowhere) then it is not bounded by time, space or locality, the ground of intellect cannot be separated from intellect by an independent agency. This takes away all the constraints that would force the notion of a mind-like universe to be circular. It is now a direct, justified assumption, intellect is only separated from its fundamental unit, by its own manifestations.