I have always stressed that my position - being naturalism - is anti transcendence and pro immanence.

And that is why materialism becomes inadequate. You need pansemiosis to deliver the "other" of general laws and constraints. You need information as a real causal thing to complement matter as the other real causal thing.

But he seems to be saying objects consist of conscious agents - that objects are constituted by conscious agents, not that objects are constituted by the perception of them by conscious agents. You see the distinction? It seems very like panpsychism, but then he denies that, also. Complicated. — Wayfarer

And he also says the conscious agents are constructing MUI icons. So no "objects", just their signs ... that somehow then have a background of process that actually, really, executes the necessary functionality.

Nothing adds up. That's my point. He says this is not idealism, or panpsychism or anything else. But then it also sounds just like that.

Hence my conclusion. He is another of many crackpots. Even university departments are full of them.

I think the realist view is that the domain of perception - the world we see - is the real world... — Wayfarer

Yes, that is a valid criticism. And the first thing they try to disabuse you of when you start studying perception and psychophysics. It is routine science itself.

Now, for you, as a naturalist, that completely undermines the basic premise of your outlook... — Wayfarer

Only if you never take a blind bit of notice of anything I have ever said. But carry on....

But you were saying there was a conscious choice to believe in the reality of something like your keyboard. We had to agree to agree somehow. It's not really a choice if I can't then make a choice about that belief. I would hardly qualify as an agent.

As a theory, realism removes that kind of problem. The world is what it is, and then I am free to act and make choices or form beliefs within those constraints. There is nothing further to have to explain about you being in the same position.

But once you start down the crackpot road, the inconsistencies just keep multiplying at each step. You are now arguing for beliefs we can't not believe, choices we can't in fact make, etc.

When we agree, concerning what is and is not, we can create objects. When we do not agree, all we have is processes which have varying descriptions depending on one's perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now the focus switches to agreement. Private wishes are not good enough. It has to happen that we desire the existence of the same object for it to be the case.

So right now I'm wishing you have no keyboard. I'm imagining that pretty hard. Did it happen?

...our MUI (multi-modal user interface) is species-specific. So it generates a shared pool of 'icons' which are common to us h. sapiens. — Wayfarer

But this seems to entangle two causal metaphysics in illegitimate fashion. If it is about the material facts of evolution and genetics where a mental model is being selected for its fit to a world, then that world is a reality standing beyond some species of agents.

As I say, I am OK with the first MUI bit of Hoffman. He says that is compatible with a realist interpretation. But then it is the attempt to jump to an idealist ontology - conscious realism - that it all falls apart.

So if we, as Homo sapiens, are forming a collective "MUI reality" by being conscious agents, rather than by being forced to adapt physically to a physical reality, then how does that work exactly? How does it fit in with lions and every other creature forming a different reality, not just a different interpretation of the one reality?

I'm sure another handwaving answer could be created. But that is how it goes with crackpot theorising. The need for further outs keeps multiplying as soon as you try to take the "theory" seriously.

By contrast, a good theory of reality does the opposite. More and more gets explained as you take it seriously and try to poke holes in it.

It's really not that difficult. We are conscious, we are active, therefore we are conscious agents. The conscious agent decides, chooses; one's own actions. Where do you find the mysterious handwaving? — Metaphysician Undercover

Where does one start? :)

Perhaps here. With your version, what happens when your conscious choice about the facts of reality conflict with my choice as a fellow agent?

I really don't think he's a crackpot, — Wayfarer

Perhaps not. But science does have social standards around these kinds of things. So in that context, that is how I would judge him.

And I would admit that within computer science, Hoffman would get more of a shrug. Computer scientists are used to making sci-fi like claims about what they can deliver with technology. The field has its own norms on this score.

I can see how consciousness creates or constructs experience... — Wayfarer

Well please tell me. I thought most people would say consciousness IS the experience. Or maybe the experience of the experience. But how could it be the cause of the experience? What does that mean?

So you or your family have never taken even an aspirin? You or your family have never had a vaccination? Honestly?

Anyway, it is good at least that you might live consistent with your theories. That way they will certainly be put to the test of real life.

It takes lifestyle changes, good food, good water, proper movement, low stress. — Rich

Yeah, but those are physical things that we all agree are the way to help prevent disease getting started.

Biology - being semiotic - is self-regulating. It has an immune system that knows what is "self", what is "other", at a molecular level. So it can self-repair if it isn't overloaded by attacks on its system. And I have no quarrel with the idea that the modern consumer lifestyle - lived at a pace to suit an economic system predicated on free growth - isn't very healthy. Even if people in developed nations in fact live longer because they can also afford clever medical interventions to keep failing bodies on the road.

So if you or your family did get cancer, would you go to a hospital that uses medicines rather than faith healing? That was the actual question.

Would you submit your fate to these representatives of a corrupt materialistic metaphysics or seek treatment from someone expert in adjusting faulty holographic consciousness fields?

If you get cancer, are you going to go to a regular doctor, one indoctrinated by the Deep State and a corrupt shill of Big Pharma, or to your holographic holistic spirit doctor with a dream catcher and crystals spread around the office?

How deep do your own convictions run in practice? What do you think the respective mortality rates are?

It is because the science industry nowadays controls the educational process, and this is what is drummed into everyone from elementary school. It is not an accident. There is a mega industry that is being protected and watchdogs everywhere to protect it. — Rich

Yep. It's a conspiracy. Pass the tin-foil hat.

All due respect, there is a change in perspective required. You're arguing from a position of dogmatic realism. — Wayfarer

Of course I say a change in perspective is needed. And it is not so simple as replacing one species of substance monism - material realism - with another, conscious realism. Dogmatic idealism is indeed much worse than dogmatic realism as at least (reductionist) realism gives us useful theories of the world. Idealism just waves its lofty hand at everything and merely aims to "explain it away".

A crackpot thinker is anyone who fools themselves into believing a non-explanation is better than a real explanation. Just call existence a hologram, or a simulation, or a mental field, or whatever. Create a word that might sound as if its stands for a real idea, then look satisfied.

That is what Hoffman does with "conscious agents". It is meaningless hand-waving once you stop to ask what that could actually mean.

No, only a mistaken conception of it. — Wayfarer

No. Read what he says again. Because "regular physics" can't seem to account for brains with minds, we should disbelieve that it does account for worlds with material structure, like brains. We should now start over by positing "generalised consciousness" as an explanation even of material structure. And then, hey guys, this is how it all works ... mumble, mumble, mumble - networks of conscious agents!!!

Classic crackpot reasoning.

It's all relative as they say. Motion doesn't make sense without space and time, and space and time don't make sense without motion.

That is why symmetry principles are the deeper level of explanation for physics. It is about the very way a symmetry could even be broken.

The simplest notion of space has those two irreducible symmetries - translations and rotations. Those define the motions that don't make a (relative) difference in the global scheme of things. They are inertial and energy conserving. And so they are the baseline of any action.

The misconception probably at work in this thread is the usual folk physics idea that the natural state of things is to be at rest. You start by assuming stillness to be the rule, motion to be the exception. No motion without a cause, as Aristotle famously argued.

But since Newton made it explicit, any "rest" or zero velocity is just a relative state of inertial motion. To see a body as standing still is an observation that requires fixing the global context that could make it so.

It is like watching a car go past. I can make that car stationary relative to me by running just as fast alongside it. A lack of motion is just a point of view.

This then became really obvious after mechanics was relativised and spacetime united. It was shown that lightspeed was an upper bound on motion. So rest became relative to c. That is, scaled by 1/c.

The idea of "being at absolute rest" as the baseline metaphysical condition of things has been replaced by the understanding that rest is just another relative state of motion. It is the least amount of motion possible, just like c is the most, for any object with inertial mass.

So the invariance people sought in the concept of absolute rest is now found in the more basic question of what could even disturb the state of a spatiotemporal system in a way that is detectable. And translations and rotations are intrinsically undetectable. You can't look at a point and tell if it is spinning or moving, or instead, if it is standing still and you are the one doing the moving and the rotating.

It now takes an acceleration - some relative energy change - for this symmetry between an observer and the observed to be broken in a way both can experience.

Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world." — Wayfarer

Yeah. Hoffman says to solve the problem of consciousness, we must get rid of the world. So onwards to idealism. And then the handwaving about conscious agents that he says saves him from solipsism.

Human minds have a memory of the feeling. That is a critical thing that semiosis at the socio-linguistic level adds. The self is a socially constructed habit of thought which then serves as the anchor for remembering what it was like to be that self.

You missed the point. Even metaphysics reasons counterfactually. So if green isn't green, what else would it be? At some stage you might sound as though you are asking an intelligible question but really it isn't.

Can you find where conscious agents gets a serious definition? I couldn't. So that's where the handwaving becomes a frantic blur.

If you are interested in a deeper level explanation of inertial motion, then the standard physics route is spelt out by Noether's theorem.

Note that both constant motion in a straight line is inertial, and so is a steady rotation. And both reflect the basic symmetries of space - translations and rotations. So energy is conserved - it costs nothing to keep on moving forever in these ways - as essentially the motions make no difference in the world. They look the same if you somehow shifted your moving line or spinning point a little to the left or right. That is, it is all Galilean relative. It could be that the background spatial frame moved as a whole rather than your line or dot.

So inertial motion is intimately connected to the fundamental fact of symmetry maths that differences that don't make a difference ... well, don't make a difference. They are cost less or energy conserving. The rolling ball can roll forever, the spinning top can spin forever, as really - within their inertial frame - no one can tell which is really moving, the ball/top or the space that is the background. It is all (Galileanly) relative.

I get that, but what I don't get is the gap between 'bio-' and 'pan-', still. I can see that, given DNA, then something language-like exists. — Wayfarer

The answer is that physics takes an information theoretic view of causality these days. That is what folk are really talking about with things like the holographic principle, event horizons or light cones.

So the coding, the memory, the bits, are written into the spatiotemporal structure of the Universe itself. Of course each bit is some material degree of freedom - a particle in some state. But collectively, all those "bits of stuff" count as information, a generalised context that impinges on whatever is happening at some spacetime locale, shaping it as a physical state of constraint.

Think of the standard example of a magnetised iron bar and the way the information that is the global magnetic field keeps all the local dipoles aligned. It is about granting collective activity full status as being ontically real - a real top-down cause that cements a generalised tendency.

Something to do with meaning, one suspects. — Wayfarer

Precisely. So it gets at final cause - that which is the meaning of being, the reasons why things even are.

And it is non-mystical in that hierarchical grades of meaning can be defined. There is a natural gamut of complexity from physical tendency to biological function to psychological purpose.

Still struggling with the meaningfulness of tornadoes, or any sense in which they embody the meaning that seems intrinsic to organisms. — Wayfarer

A tornado is meaningful in the context of a weather system striving to equilibrate its thermal differences. So it is meaningful in terms of meeting the goals of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Again, there is nothing essentially mystical about this. It is just about bringing all of nature under the same general umbrella of Natural Philosophy.

Reductionism appeared to drum finality and meaning out of our scientific account of nature. Holism and systems science have been trying to bring it back in. Pan-semiosis would be a particular formalism for achieving that. Hence why a lot of scientists have gotten keen on Peircean semiotics.

But that is my point.. Why shouldn't a modelling relation feel like something? — schopenhauer1

So you agree with me that it prima facie should? You might have to quote me the bit where you say it was also your point.

Then you throw in the word "neuro" and "trillions" and that is supposed to answer why this triadic modelling is different from all other triadic-modelling... — schopenhauer1

That is a leap that you make, not me.

Is there some other triadic modelling that is different here? It would help if you could reference what you have in mind.

As to neuro and trillions, the point there is obviously to remind that there is a definite ground zero so far as the coding aspect of semiosis goes. This is about neurons in particular as the informational medium, not genes or words. Neurons do have particular qualities that justify talk of "neuro-semiosis".

And then trillions of interconnections is relevant because this is an emergent ontology. You need large numbers to get the kind of useful complexity I am talking about. A few neurons might make up a rather deterministic or robotic circuit. But a lot of them will start to show collective behaviours. This is a familiar concept now from the study of dynamical systems.

So you seem to be latching onto trigger words without understanding the context in which I would use them.

I never just throw things in. ;)

If you say only THIS modelling is experiential, your hidden theater comes into play- an irrevocable split between mind/body (your hated duality) then comes into play (whether you like it or not). — schopenhauer1

Again, you just don't appear to understand the difference between a triadic modelling relation and a dualistic computer model. One is properly connected to the world - it has to learn by doing. The other ain't. It has to be programmed and then at best runs a virtual simulation.

I fear if you can't keep these different concepts separate in your head by now, you never will.

Who said I used Newtonian notions to explain this? Straw man. — schopenhauer1

I can happily accept that you personally don't think scientifically about these things. But what I said is science does.

So, yes, why is it that there is a "feels like" aspect to some modelling and not others is a great question, and Chalmers is willing to say that it is fundamental to the universe- possibly the modelling itself is somehow experiential. — schopenhauer1

It would be a big advance to be able to say a particular notion of modelling - neuro-semiosis - does a good enough job at explaining the issue of "feels". Far better than Chalmers own half-hearted suggestion of dual aspect monism where mind is a property of information (rather than matter).

It would be victory for the triadic view. Wave goodbye to substance monism and information processing dualism.

But neuro-semiosis itself couldn't be "fundamental to the Universe". It is instead only something rather specialised - part of the emergent level of complexity we call biological life.

The pan-semiotic story is the one that talks about the Universe in a fundamental metaphysical fashion. And I have no problem with anyone labelling that a highly speculative inquiry. It is still more philosophy than science.

And either way, the pan-semiotic thesis itself stresses the huge divide between the physico-chemical level of semiosis and the biological one.

As I explained to Wayfarer, for physics, all the "mindful" informational constraints are external to the play of the material dynamics. A tornado arises because of a larger context of thermal gradients making up that day's weather.

But life and mind are the trick of being able to code for that kind of contextual information - form a memory using a symbolising mechanism like genes, neurons or words - and so take ownership of top-down causality as something packaged up and hidden deep inside.

So pan-semiosis is far from the silly mysticism of pan-experientialism or pan-psychism. It includes in formal fashion an account of exactly what changes in the transition from material systems to living systems.

We all know there is a difference. Pan-semiosis is about putting a finger on what that actually is in the most general metaphysical sense.

You aren't getting the point.. willfully perhaps. — schopenhauer1

You are just bad at making your points. You can't explain what your own words like "mentality" might mean in terms of their ontic commitments. And you are unwilling to even have a go at answering the same kind of questions you demand of others.

You ask why should an active modelling relation feel like something? I reply why shouldn't it? If you haven't got the flexibility of thought to even try to see an issue from its reverse perspective, then the problem is only yours. You disqualify yourself from proper discussion already.

Another clarification that might help here is that I have been trying to address the philosophy of mind issue of "strategies of explanation". So that is a meta-level discussion. Then there is also the scientific project that would cash out some actual strategy. But to follow that, you would need to have an understanding of the relevant literature.

So sticking to strategies of explanation, I've showed how it breaks down into three levels of increasingly sophisticated inquiry. Stage 1 is thinking consciousness is a monistic spirit stuff - substance ontology. Stage 2 is dualistic representationalism - information processing ontology. Stage 3 is triadic semiotics - sign relation ontology.

Then a separate issue is this constant demand of "explain it so I can understand why it feels like what it feels like". We can have a meta-discussion about whether science should even do this. Science is the business of explaining through sufficiently abstract generalities. Like laws or mathematical forms. If we say a ball rolls due to Newtonian Mechanics, we don't expect to get what it feels like to "be in motion".

The explanatory strategy of science is based on ... modelling. It objectivises and constructs a third person view.

Well, reductionist science certainly does that. A holistic or systems science approach - one that attempts to include subjectivity, meaning, interpretation, purpose, observers, etc, in its larger triadic model - does then have a chance of starting to say something about why it feels like what it feels like.

Even Hard Problem promoters like Chalmers agree that we know a lot about why it feels like what it feels like from neuroscientific explanations. Why is drunkenness what it is? Why do visual illusions have their particular quality? Why are the objects we see made artificial sharp by Mach bands around them, or organised by Gestalt effects?

It is just that Chalmers then calls these easy problems. The game is to raise the bar until it reaches the eternal self-referential metaphysical question of "why anything?". Why should anything be anything, let alone green be green, or the Universe a something rather than a nothing?

Fine. That is another meta-level discussion we can have. It seems obvious that science - and reason itself - can't deal with any question rationally unless it can define its counterfactuals. So the issue is as bad for philosophy as it is for science.

As you can see, there are a variety of meta-issues that lie at the back of any discussion about the best strategies of explanation. You can't just plunge into things in confused fashion. Otherwise only confusion results.

Ah, the neuro brings with it the Cartesian Theaters. — schopenhauer1

You keep repeating what the modelling relation approach explicitly rejects. If you want someone to defend representationalism to you as an ontology, you need to go elsewhere.

Did you even read what I wrote? I was suggesting just that.. It is YOU who are not excepting your own logic to its ultimate conclusion, which is that ANY modelling can be experiential. — schopenhauer1

I was more specific. It is not modelling per se - as that is the representational story of computational information processing and Cartesean theatres that I have criticised. It is the modelling or sign relation of neuro-semiosis - a more advanced notion which you show no evidence of understanding as yet.

Now, I don't think that current philosophical lexicon allows that anything can have a 'degree of reality'; things are either existent, or not. — Wayfarer

And that is precisely what Peircean metaphysics embraces. It is based on there really being degrees of concrete or crisp existence. At a deeper level, things are vague or begin in Firstness. Anaximander started metaphysics rolling with the same idea - the Apeiron.

So the lexicon certainly exists. But as we know, it is not a mainstream approved mode of thought. Reductionism rules. And so vagueness or degrees of reality are standardly treated as being just a matter of observer ignorance or uncertainty, not a genuine ontic issue.

Russell made the famous case for this. Imagine a badly blurred photograph of Mr Jones. Well, the image is vague it seems. It could be Mr Smith or Mr Patel if we squinted. Yet still, points out Russell, the image itself is some definite set of marks. So the vagueness is epistemic - about what we can know - rather than the photograph itself being physically indeterminate.

So you are always up against this attitude. And even when quantum indeterminism showed up, the mindset remains to demonstrate that any vagueness or degrees of reality are only an epistemic issue, not something to do with reality itself.

But anyone dealing with emergence in nature has less of a problem. It starts to become obvious that emergence means starting out actually vague and then approaching counterfactual definiteness or concreteness "in the limit".

However, the fact of neuroplasticity provides sufficient reason to reject epiphenomenalism. In other words, physical and mental conditions and activities have mutual effects. — Galuchat

Yes I agree. That is why the story has to be foundationally triadic. There must be the two things of a separation of causality, and then the third thing which is their interaction.

And neuroscience has no problem with this. It already says that neural firing may be a physical process, but what is "really going on" is an informational process. Or taking the even more sophisticated view, the whole is a semiotic process, a sign relation. Or to borrow from psychology, we are talking about an enactive or ecological process. Mind is not epiphenomenal but just what it feels like to be a model in interaction with a world, really doing something.

This is evidence of correlation, not necessarily of causation. In other words, is it neurophysiological activity which causes recognition, or recognition which causes neurophysiological activity? — Galuchat

The simple answer is that at the informational level of analysis, the causation is holistic - a systems mix of top-down constraint and bottom-up construction. So asking which causes which is just a bad reductionist question. It takes both in interaction for some particular state of experience (or modelling) to emerge.

And then in this representationalist account of perception formation, the physiology falls out of the picture. The information process paradigm makes that clean divorce between the software and the hardware. So physiology simply supports the computations and - by design - plays no causal role in shaping them. It is the logic of the program which dictates the play of the patterns.

But as I say, the semiotic view of neuroscience takes the next step - the same as biology did to get rid of the mysteries surrounding the mechanisms of living processes. We can get rid of the lingering ghost in the machine, the elan vital, in the same fashion.

So this is where the epistemic cut of biosemiosis comes in. The whole point of the informational processes is to be in active regulation of physical processes. A computer may have a hard divorce between information and matter - hence computer analogies adding fuel to the Hard Problem bonfire - but organisms are all about the pragmatic interaction between information and matter.

This is the paradigm shift with enactive/ecological/embodied approaches to perception. The mind is all about regulating material processes, entropic flows. Consciousness is what it is like to be not just some pattern of information, but to be information doing stuff. It is all about the feeling of being intimately connected as a "self" with a point of view, some interest, that serves to control a world of physical events as much as is possible.

Nothing can make sense about the mind/brain connection until you actually stop thinking that this is the fundamental issue. You have to get past the monism of good old fashioned theism - a belief in inhabiting spirits. Then you have to get past the dualism of good old fashion computationalism - all the representationalist psychology where there is a mysterious self passively watching an inner theatre neural display. You have to arrive finally at a triadic sign relation ontology which speaks to the conjunction of model and world.

And yet when you get high, neuroscience finds that messing with neural signalling is the prosaic cause. Or if you recognise your grandmother, specific neural connections light up.

So to claim that brains aren't responsible for consciousness is now a crackpot view. Pass the tin hats.

Poor old Schop. The question was simple. Why shouldn't it feel like something to be modelling the world?

It might be obvious to you that you use a standard term in idiosyncratic fashion. But why should it be obvious to me?

Weird.

What are you talking about?

In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. It is also called dual-aspect monism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-aspect_theory

What we have is a quantum field which is embued with memory and consciousness. — Rich

I'd love to see the Nature reference on that.

(But then Nature is part of the establishment conspiracy against morphic field research, blah, blah, blah, pass around the tinfoil hats.)

The quick answer is that I am talking of a neuro-semiotic process of modelling the world in a self interested way. And so just in saying that, we can see that there is active modelling going on. And why would we not expect modelling - of the vast complexity of a brain with trillions of connections, and plugged into real-time action - should not "feel like something"?

What good causal objection is there to there being something that it would be like to be in a modelling relation with the world? It would have to feel like something surely? Or can you give some good reason why this modelling, this sign processing, can't be experiential?

Sure, no computer processing doing information processing would have this lived experience quality. We can point to a computer's physical disconnect from real life. All it needs is its umbilical cord that plugs it into a wall socket. In sits blindly in its little world.

But a neural network type computer starts to seem something different. It in fact has a semiotic architecture. It works by learning to anticipate the world. And surely there must be something that it is like to be anticipating the world the whole time? Even if a neural network so far is not even at the level of a cockroach so far as its complexity goes.

Anyway, you get the idea. If there is anticipation-based world modelling going on which is based on maintaining a fundamental distinction between "self" and "world", then why shouldn't that action, that process, be felt in exactly those terms? At exactly what point in the analysis does being experiential seem to drop out of the equation?

When questions are so off the mark, yes, ignore them. But if you have a go at defining your ontology with clarity as requested, then sure, we can come back to them.

Although I would mention Peirce insisted on the creative spontaneity of semiosis as a process before Whitehead and others. It is an essential part of anyone's holistic view. Although creativity doesn't then mean "conscious". It means that existence is founded on basic indeterminism - what Peirce called tychism in opposition to the synechism or continuity of constraints.

You have to explain what you mean by discrimination and sign mediation. Explain it, don't repeat the same language. Also, you use the term "emerges". That to me sounds like you just hid the Cartesian Theater in the "emerging" process. This "steam" of emerging ectoplasm (the illusion) comes out of the right amount of sign-signifier-referent- material-form process compilation. — schopenhauer1

Why do I have to explain everything to you when you won't explain anything to me? I keep asking you to say what you really mean by a term like mental. I even helpfully supply you with my view of the differences between the monistic and dyadic ontologies you appear to be mixing up.

Now you simply again reply in terms where you talk about representational analogies - a theatre - or an ontological substance - steam, ectoplasm ... which is then (cue representational analogy) the "illusion".

So sure, I could waste a lot more time explaining a triadic sign relation approach to you. But if you keep just telling me it sounds like disguised monism/dualism to you, then that confusion remains all yours. You haven't yet figured out the ontic difference between treating consciousness as a substance vs as a representation.

That is why I urge you to have a go and defining "the mental" cleanly. You will see more plainly how you are dancing between monism and dualism - using each to criticise the other - and never actually starting to understand a triadic view of ontology.

Yep I agree with the paper that reality really is probabilistic. So a picture of a wavefunction - in picturing a "field" of probabilities rather than an actual material field - is about that reality and not merely our usual observer uncertainty. But you have been arguing for an actual material field. And not just an ordinary one, but some holographic consciousness field that has the substantiality to record an interference pattern on it.

Sometimes it is helpful to ruminate over one's autobiography. It provides lots of insight into oneself. — Rich

Well you had a good go at me. Now its your turn. If you want to advance your own position, let's hear how you would defend it against my specific criticisms.

You need to ruminate on your autobiography. — Rich

I've made a sufficient number of points against your position. If you have no answers, we can all draw our own conclusion.

including one if the great geniuses of modern physics — Rich

Sure, Bohm produced both good science and crackpot ideas. That is not unusual among mathematical/scientific geniuses. Newton was famous for his alchemy too. There are tons of such examples.

But that's OK because science is an institution designed to sort the wheat from the chaff like this. Bohm's good ideas are in the textbooks and did real things like help build nukes. His other suggestions quickly fizzled within science and now are only recycled - with little real understanding - among those who are fans of anything esoteric.

Bohm's pilot wave interpretation had scientific respectability for a while precisely because it was anachronistically materialistic. Like Einstein and many others - still in shock from what quantum mechanics had revealed - felt that science had got as far as it had by presuming reality to be local and deterministic. That metaphysics had really worked for 400 years. So why abandon it until you were really forced to. Bohmian mechanics was one attempt to not to have to change the deep metaphysics of physics. It was respectable on that score.

But it didn't pan out. Roll on 60 or 70 years it is broadly accepted that determinism and locality have to be junked as "images of reality". Or at least, the best they can hope for is that they are emergent features - how things look in the classical limit.

So to cling on to the past hope of yesterday's physicists is what counts as anachronistic materialism.

And mistaking the pictures of quantum field theory to be pictures of actual quantum fields, rather than field-like pictures of quantum statistics, doesn't make this less anachronistic. Whether it is classical particles or classical waves you have in mind, both are just as much old hat when it comes to what QFT is about.

I figure you'd be back trying to save particles. — Rich

No. I'm just pointing out the beginner's mistake you are making about what a QFT picture of an atom or anything would represent. You are thinking of some actual substantial entity - like a wave. A scientist is thinking of the geometry of some collection of statistical predictions.

I agree MU makes the same mistake in complementary fashion. He thinks physicists really might believe fundamental particles to be dinky spherical objects.

You are both as wrong as each other in a perfectly complementary fashion.

Bohm's causal model says the probabilistic quantum potential field is very, very real, and propagates through distance and effects through form. — Rich

Sure. Bohm gave it a crack and fair enough. But it fell at the first hurdle. It couldn't be relativised (without making unrealistic presumptions about Born probabilities). And given Bell's inequalities, there is no hope of recovering any kind of conventional determinism anyway.

So these days to be a Bohmian is a pretty surefire way of telling the world you are a crank. Much like going on about Bergson. And if you bring in Sheldrake, it's a slam-dunk. Bring on the dancing Wu-Li masters.