Major yogin asks "Are you people materialists or not? "

He actually directed his question to Bernie Baars, who was editor in chief of the leading journal of consciousness studies (which published lots of neuroscience) and has a new edition of his classic book coming out. But I too chimed in:

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Ram asked Bernie Baars, in effect, "in your theory of consciousness (the Global Workspace Theory PLUS other things Bernie believes) are you basically assuming the materialist theory of consciousness, life and whatever else?"

In my view, this discussion has led to huge misunderstandings because of how people throw words around. Therefore, in the spirit of mathematics and Von Neumann, I will try to DEFINE a new term, Dual Aspect Mathematical Monism (DAMM), for a more sharply defined set of assumptions or hypotheses. Bernie and I do not agree on EVERYTHING in the cosmos,

but I suspect that Bernie, like me, would give more than 50% probability to the idea that DAMM is true. (In fact. I suspect he gives it a higher probability than I do, more like 90% versus 70%, but he can speak for himself.)

{Assumption 1] DAMM assumes that everything in the cosmos we live in, including every bit of feeling and experience we have, is nothing but the emergent patterns and behavior defined over a finite number of "fields" defined over some vector space (which may or may not be "flat" or governed by a metric of differentiable geometry, or governed by dynamics which fit BOTH).

Monism, as in just one cosmos.

"Materialistic" if you view any set of functions over a vector space as "materials." (That stretches he English language a lot, and that's why I prefer to avoid putting too much weight on that word.)

[2] DAMM also assumes that the state of these fields over all space time 

obeys one or more differential or integro-differential equations which may informally be called "the Law of Everything". (Physicists tend to use that term in popular writings or manifestos, but usually prefer terms like"dynamic equation. Stochastic PDE count in the set of possibiloities assumed by DAMM, I so define DAMM. To rule them out, talk about deterministic DAMM.) 

[3] All mind, consciousness and life which humans really have any right to claim they know about are emergent patterns of these fields (where a "pattern" is basically a statistical ensemble of possible states of the fields).

[4] This is a "dual aspect" theory in that it recognizes the importance TO US of the mental aspect of what we experience in our minds, whihc we experience as fundamental TO US. That aspect is the foundation of everything we say, write, believe and think. But, based on experience and learning, many of us conclude (with some probability) that that aspect is all an emergent consequence of the "law of everything" as it works its way out over the one and only cosmos,of which we are part. Evidence suggests to many of us that there is NO special aspect of the "Law of everything" as such which is mental or consciousness, WITH ONE EXCEPTION, which I have discussed before. If the "Law of everything" happens to be the Lagrange-Euler equations of a certain kind... those equations might be SEEN as a kind of "mind"; whether they qualify or not is an empty exercise in semantics, an exercise better replaced by a more concrete effort to understand that law and how it operates on us. 

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Is that definition of DAMM specific enough to "draw the lines" here?

But: the proposition that DAMM is true does not specify many of the foundamental facts of life in this cosmos which it leaves open. After all, special relativity is a very specific theory, but it too leaves open many possibilities. DAMM is consistent with a cosmos which has no PSI, but also consistent with the noosphere species theory I point to at werbos.com/religions.htm. It is consistent with the (experience-based) concept of the "astral plane" which I defined in a previous post here. 

It is consistent with Einstein's concept of hard core realism (which I think Shiva has spoken up for here). But it is also 100% consistent with the Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum field theory, the mainstream version of QFT which has been most completely tested and verified in the 

realm of QED, where more than 90% of the solid experiments on quantum measurement have occurred. (See my posts of QuIST. Tons of experiments.) It is generally consistent with the approaches of Streater and Wightmann and of Glimm and Jaffe, though the math needs a little tweaking in those cases to bridge the gaps with the rest. It does not require metaphysical observers,
at least if minor tweaks to the measurement formalismconsistent with all experiments to date are made. (See https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf.)

Why do I personally assign a subjective probability of only 60-70% for DAMM? (For me, the aspect which assigns probabilities, ala Von Neummann's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, and Raiffa, is more fundamental to MY thinking.) Mainly, because I think of Cosmic Mind Idealism as postulating a cosmos which is NOT a continuous vector or geometric space. I do not know of ANY clear enough formulatoio of CMI, but I do not assume that the cosmos MUST fit a form I can wrote down right now. Does CMI violate DAMM, or are there some versions of CMI which do and some which don't? I do not know enough to have strong feelings yet on the answer to that question.

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Later:On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:57 PM 'Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal' via Scientific Basis of Consciousness <scientific-basis-of-consciousness@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi Paul,

In your DAMM, one of the aspects is the mental aspect, what is the other aspect? Are the aspects are of a state of an entity?

Really, this concept of two aspects is a very ancient one, which I should not take credit for.

As I think about it... the two aspects are similar in a way to the archetypes which Jung talks about, basic themes which get repeated over and over again in different cultures. I do not think of these aspects as THINGS, as material objects... yet as I look across the cultures of the world, the two aspects may be more similar across cultures than the usual "universal archetypes" are!!

If they are not objects, what are they?

VIEWPOINTS, I suppose. When we look at the world and everything we can see through our own two eyes , and try to make sense of it... I would call this the "subjective" viewpoint, the first person viewpoint. Some would say

"Of course, that is THE fundamental viewpoint, since that is what drives our thought."This is the viewpoint which neural network mathematics has risen to represent. 

But the second viewpoint is OBJECTIVE REALITY. It is important to us NOT because it is what we know, but because it is HYPOTHESIZED to include everything we know but also more, and to include even ourselves. 

In a way, the discovery of the concept of objective reality was like the real discovery of the mirror. One of the great moments of past life which all of us should engrave into active memory is to look into that mirror, which shows us 

ANOTHER HUMAN, another example of the same sort of objective thought we were looking at through subjective first person eyes. Can we reconcile what we see in the mirror with what we experience in first person?

This is not one small blip we should be repressing; it is a pervasive basic principle across the largest domains of life. Looking down on our own personal selves objectively is a very important discipline, and it does have some relation to the "mirror neurons" which we have only just begun to evolve. 

I think of this view of subjective and objective viewpoints as a logical, minimal extension of debates which have raged in India for millennia. Many in India advocated a view now called "Cartesian dualism" (from before Descartes), the view that there are two universes out there, the universe of mind and the universe of matter, two domains governed by different laws which interact only under debatable special rules. (Descartes talked about the pineal gland, and others about Copenhagen theories of observation and consciousness, clear examples of metaphysical dualism.) Monists in India replied that no, there is only one universe. In the conference in Kathmandu, I will always remember the Monist with dark flashing eyes who kept saying "These are all just made up stories you [dualists] are telling... stories, stories, and more made up stories.." 

But at the Kaiser library in Kathmandu, I saw the three volume cultural history in this photograph I took:

if I believe that history, it was Ramanuja who properly resolved the debate between Dualism and Monism by saying that Monism is right about ONE objective reality, but that the two ASPECTS -- which I would call subjective and objective -- are equally fundamental to US.

Crudely, it seems that we each START from the subjective viewpoint, and then LEARN to appreciate the power and truth of the concept of objective reality,

if Dual Aspect Mathematical Monism is DEFINED as this concept, with the further axiom that the one cosmos (not necessarily just one "universe" in the modern more general viewpoint) evolves according to knowable mathematical principles, then I assign more than 90% probability to that idea, because cosmic Mind Idealism includes theories which would still follow mathematical law (even though it is not the same old PDE stuff). 

In fact, my real personal assumption is NOT "Of course the cosmos follows mathematical law;" rather, it is that we naturally WANT to understand the dynamics of this cosmos, and we do not have justification to believe it is impossible in principle.  It has always been a great challenge for us humans to better understand that larger objective reality beyond our personal selves, but rising to that challenge has led to more understanding. 

Many years AFTER I was clear about that, however, I have come to believe strongly that we are part of larger mind, the mind/brain of the Noosphere of our solar system, which could be seen as a kind of third aspect. It is another viewpoint. And we can try to shift and to unify all three viewpoints, concretely, looking at things from the simple subjective viewpoint we inherit from the "mice" in our ancestors (from what biologists call "morgie") , from the objective physics viewpoint, and from a noosphere viewpoint. So maybe the person who talked about triple aspect monism (TAMM) had a point. These three are all viewpoints we can learn to see through and unify. There is intelligence beyond this solar system as well, but it is more than enough challenge for us here and now to try to integrate the three viewpoints we CAN implement.