Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!shadooby!accuvax.nwu.edu!tank!cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
From: cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Making fires and making minds - the laws of physics prevail
Message-ID: <3019@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 1 May 89 17:52:37 GMT
Sender: news@tank.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
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>In article <2792@tank.uchicago.edu> cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:
> 
> 
>>The quantity or quality that we know and experience as self and
>>conveniently refer to as Mind is so far removed from physics that most
>>physicists would just as leave pretend that it doesn't even exist. And yet
>>we know that it does. Don't we?
> 
>     The physicists do not pretend that it doesn't exist; they simply
>ignore it because it does not affect the outcomes of events on the scale
>they are used to dealing with.  They know that Mind is an epiphenomenon of
>the operation of physics, rather than the other way around.
> 
>     In order for mind to do something not predictable by physical law, it
>would have to _consistently_ move particles to extremely low probability
>positions.  That is, if the particle movements show the normal wave
>function spread, then they are following the laws of physics and not of
>Mind.  On the other hand, if they are consistently moving to the
>low-probability locations, then the physicist had better start looking for
>an external force such as Mind.  Far as I know, it's the first of these two
>situations that holds.
> 
> 
>Dan Hankins

To begin with, there is a major difference between 'physical law' and 'known
physical law'. Nothing can occur which violates physical law, by definition.
On the other hand, no one believes that physical law, as we currently
understand it, explains everything.

Now look around you. Your terminal, your desk, your hands, your clothes -
almost everything that surrounds you is in an EXTREMELY low probability
position. We're supposed to believe that life started in some protein/amino
acid soup some billion or so years ago and then randomly grew to the point
it exists today. The probabilities of such an accident occurring according
to the known laws of physics is infinitesmally small. Most physicists
I know are happy with some statement of the form 'While the organization
of the biosystem may be steadily increasing, it does so at the expense of
the environment, so the laws of thermodynamics are not violated.' As long
as the total entropy of the universe is growing, they don't worry too much
about the problem of the physical subsystem we can conveniently call Life.

Let me characterize the unknown force which impels the ever-increasing 
organization of the biosystem as Mind. Has modern physics ever shown that
no such force exists? Have they ever even tried to explain it? Am I really
supposed to believe that such a thing can really happen by random accident?
If a force exists which is capable of establishing such an enormously 'low
probability wave function' as the Earth's biosystem, in complete contradiction
to the laws of physical probability as we currently comprehend them, why
can't you accept the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this same force
really is capable of choice, which YOU have characterized as the ability to
consistantly move matter into low probability locations?

R.Kohout