All in the mind

Andreas H. Trabesinger

Alexander R. Pruss

The Traveling Minds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is a no-collapse interpretation on which the wavefunction evolves deterministically like in the Everett branching multiple-worlds interpretation. As in the Many Minds interpretation, minds navigate the Everett branching structure following the probabilities given by the Born rule. However, in the Traveling Minds interpretation (a variant by Squires and Barrett of the single-mind interpretation), the minds are guaranteed to all travel together—they are always found in the same branch. The Traveling Forms interpretation extends the Traveling Minds interpretation in an Aristotelian way by having forms of non-minded macroscopic entities that have forms, such as plants, lower animals, bacteria, and planets, travel along the branching structure together with the minds. As a result, while there is deterministic wavefunction-based physics in the branches without minds, non-reducible higher-level structures like life are found only in the branch with minds.

Ching-an Hsiao

Any problem is concerned with the mind, but what do minds make a decision on? Here we show that there are three conditions for the mind to make a certain answer. We found that some difficulties in physics and mathematics are in fact introduced by infinity, which can not be rightly expressed by minds. Based on this point, we suggest a general observation system, where we use region (a type of infinity) to substitute for infinitesimal (another type of infinity) and thus get a consistent image with the mind. Furthermore, we declare that without world pictures we can never have ideas to any expressive events, which is the primary condition for a wave function like mind to collapse to a series of numbers. A following observation by expanding algorithm brings the final collapse: classifying the numbers and coming up with a certain yes or no answer.

R. C. Henry

Jenann Ismael

Abstract Physics has a somewhat uneasy relationship to the mind. On the one hand, minds are part of the natural universe and although much of physics is concerned with the non-minded parts of reality, recently a set of problems has emerged in physics that has placed a special focus on observers. In quantum mechanics, the contrast between what the deterministic dynamics yields and what the observer sees is at the forefront of the theory’s difficulties. In the controversies surrounding time, questions about whether the relativistic image of time can account for the subjective experience of passage and flow have been central. In general, reconciling the manifest image of the world with the image presented by science requires at least some tacit understanding of how minds work. And because the evidence for our theories ultimately comes from experience, eventually we have to be able to bring the mind itself firmly under the scope of our physical theories. On the other hand, there is a set of philosophical controversies about the relationship between the mental and the physical that many people believe physics would do well to steer clear of. This chapter argues for a division between the aspects of the mind that physics must cope with and those that it can ignore. I argue the most difficult unresolved questions about the mind can be ignored without affecting progress in physics.