Hi Glenn,

I agree that physics is compatible with idealism if by idealism you mean the sort of approach Leibniz uses. He is often called an idealist, but he makes it clear that there is a real universe of goings on that is distinct from the point of view that is the subject/monad, even if that universe is ‘reflected within’ the monad. Bascially, it is not an idealism that says that there is no mind-independent reality. Even for the monad much of the real universe is only perceived in a totally confused and indeterminate way, but it is still ‘out there’ in infinite detail. Put another way all goings on are reflected in all other goings on, if confusedly and do not belong to and are not created by any particular observer observing.

So if idealism just means that everything is ‘mental’ that is fine, except that if we want to have useful descriptions of the interactions between such ‘mental’ entities the best system we have is physics so it is unclear what is gained by calling events ‘mental’. Dynamism is the neutral position of saying that all we presuppose are the dynamic relations, without committing to calling things mental or physical. It is the only approach consistent with physics in the sense that it denies any additional token quiddities.

I certainly do not assume that we are in a universe that ‘contains a form in spacetime’. That is thing-ism again. In Leibniz’s terms space and time are abstractions from the quantitative aspect of dynamic relations. This was his big argument with Newton. There are no things in anywhere. So no, I am not making those metaphysical assumptions.

A block universe that is somehow ‘static’ or ‘unchanging’ is a metaphor that shifts 4D Minkowski space into a language of 3D space (fudged to 4D even though nobody can do that) without time – asking one to imagine a block sitting there. It is thing-ist again. The block universe does change because change is what you get with time and Minkowski spacetime has time in it. It is just playing around with envisagings of metaphysical problems when we know envisaging can only confuse. Space and time are not ‘like anything’ except in the sense that they are like what they are like to us in ordinary experience. So questions like ‘has the future really already happened’ are just meaningless.

With regard to what my field variables would be representing I don’t think they represent anything. They are dynamic field variables. They are the pattern of the relation. There are no ‘things’ that they represent.

Fifty years ago as a teenager I arrived at a metaphysical framework that I called electrical point consciousness. I ascribed sentience to every point in the universal EM field. This is in fact what Leibniz did in his youth (around 1670). However, on returning to the problem forty years later I realized that a point in spacetime is no good because it has no dynamic power of its own – it is just a place – and in fact because of Heisenberg uncertainty there may be no real infinitesimal points. Leibniz seems to have realized something similar and shifted from a’physical point’ to a ‘metaphysical point’. A metaphysical point is not one point in space but rather one dynamic individual. It has a point of view but that is not from a point but from an ‘aspect’ that is focused on a domain that is its ‘body’ but continues out to include the whole universe. This is exactly what we see in a quantum wave equation. We have a V term that has no boundaries and therefore covers potentials in the whole universe, but values for V only affect the solution to the equation non-trivially in a local domain often called a ‘wave-packet’. For the modes of excitation that occupy ordered bits of matter the analogy with Leibniz is particularly striking because the values for V for an acoustic mode are tied very tightly to the domain of that bit of matter. Thus if there is piezoelectric coupling the photon field to which a phonon is coupled is tightly restricted to the ‘body’ that vibrates.

In other words, like Leibniz I am not cutting out a segment arbitrarily. I am giving the subject a special relation in a domain defined by the wave equation but a notional relation to everything else as well. Also we are not talking of thing-ist content of spacetime but always of relation to a mode. Each ‘I’ is a different mode. Since our brains are not overlapping there will be very little overlap in the domain of non-trivial influence on a ‘you’ and a ‘me’. But of course if we were talking of robots we could probably construct one in which the field of potentials influencing two subjects overlapped.

Yes, I think it unlikely that any human subject, in the form of a mode, lasts more than a few milliseconds. However, there is something very odd about acoustic modes here which relates to their being Bose modes with a wide range of possible energy contents (i.e. with a wide range of possible quantum number for the notional ‘number of particles’). This is where it is very hard to read the metaphysical implications and it might be that we can legitimately treat a neuron as an enduring subject over many years.

If you experience typing on a computer my suggestion is that a neuron gets an input of potentials that have a pattern that usefully indicates typing on a computer. The neuron could be in a vat, as long as someone plugs in synaptic boutons that will fire the right pattern of signals. Whether in that situation the pattern would be 'useful' is doubtful but that seems obvious, and an unrelated question. This is why I think functionalism is a dead end. It gets tied up in issues of broad and narrow content and Putnam’s confusions about externalism which arise purely from philosphers not taking care with their words. Before discussing things like RoboMary one has to be very clear what one is meaning by reference and meaning etc etc and to be aware of the ascertainment problems that cloud all statements about what experiences are like.

The weasel words in David Chalmers functionalist account are ‘of sufficiently fine grain’. If function is dynamic relation then to get the right experience you would need the right relations – and presumably down to the finest grain there is to get it absolutely right. That ends up with an identity theory that no longer needs to be called functionalism. I cannot see any conceivable reason why events in silicon chips should seem to some mode within anything like what they feel like to modes in neurons, even if one was allowed to make such a comparison. Apart from anything else inputs to the electron modes that support semiconductivity in a computer would only seem to have two relevant degrees of freedom, instead of 40,000 in a neuron.