(part 2)
Your ability to communicate your phenomology traces backwards through a clear causal path through a series of facts, each of which is totally orthogonal to facts about what is ontologically fundamental.
Since your phenomenology, you claim, is a fact about what is ontologically fundamental, it stretches my sense of plausibility that your phenomenology and your ability to communicate your phenomenology are causally unrelated.
I'll quote myself: "The appeal to quantum entanglement is meant to make possible an explanation of the ontology of mind revealed by phenomenology, it's not meant to explain how we are subsequently able to think about it and talk about it, though of course it all has to be connected."
Earlier in this comment, I gave a very vague sketch of a quantum Cartesian theater which interacts with neighboring quantum systems in the brain, at the apex of the causal chains making up the sensorimotor pathways. The fact that we can talk about all this can be explained in that way.
The root of this disagreement is your statement that "Facts about your phenomenology are facts about your programming". Perhaps you're used to identifying phenomenology with talk about appearances, but it refers originally to the appearances themselves. My phenomenology is what I experience, not just what I say about it. It's not even just what I think about it; it's clear that the thought "I am seeing " arises in response to a that exists before and apart from the thought.
Non-causal ontological structure is suspicious.
This doesn't mean ontological structure that has no causal relations; it means ontological structure that isn't made of causality. A causal sequence is a structure that is made of causality. But if the individual elements of the sequence have internal structure, it's going to be ontologically non-causal. A data structure might serve as an example of a non-causal structure. So would a spatially extended arrangement of particles. It's a spatial structure, not a causal structure.
it's not connected! Quantum entanglement is totally disconnected from how we are able to think about and talk about it!
Either quantum entanglement is disconnected from consciousness, or consciousness is disconnected from thinking and talking about consciousness.
Could you revisit this point in the light of what I've now said? What sort of disconnection are you talking about?
The word "love" already has a meaning, which is not exactly easy to map onto the proposed definition.
In your scenario, you are proposing a 1-to-1 mapping between the properties of ontologically fundamental experiences and standard quantum mechanics.
Let's revisit what this branch of the conversation was about.
I was arguing that it's possible to make judgements about the truth of a proposed ontology, just on the basis of a description. I had in mind the judgement that there's no in a world of colorless particles in space; reaching that conclusion should not be a problem. But, since you were insisting that "people can't tell the difference between ontologies", I tried to pull out a truly absurd example (though one that occasionally gets lip service from mystically minded people) - that only love exists. I would have thought that a moment's inspection of the world, or of one's memories of the world, would show that there are things other than love in existence, even if you adopt total Cartesian skepticism about anything beyond immediate experience.
Your riposte was to imagine an advocate of the all-is-love theory who, when asked to provide the details, says "quantum mechanics". I said it's rather hard to interpret QM that way, and you pointed out that I'm trying to get experience from QM. That's clever, except that I would have to be saying that the world of experience is nothing but love, and that QM is nothing but the world of experience. My actual thesis is that conscious experience is the state of some particular type of quantum system, so the emotions do have to be in the theory somewhere. But I don't think you can even reduce the other emotions to the emotion of love, let alone the non-emotional aspects of the mind, so the whole thing is just silly.
Then you had your advocate go on to speak in favor of the all-is-balloons theory, again with QM providing the details. I think you radically overestimate the freedom one has to interpret a mathematical formalism and still remain plausible or even coherent.
What we say using natural language is not just an irrelevant, interchangeable accessory to what we say using equations. Concepts can still have a meaning even if it's only expressed informally, and one of the underappreciated errors of 20th-century thought is the belief that formalism validates everything: that you can say anything about a topic and it's valid to do so, if you're saying it with a formalism. A very minor example is the idea of a "noncommutative probability". In quantum theory, we have complex numbers, called probability amplitudes, which appear as an intermediate stage prior to the calculation of numbers that are probabilities in the legitimate sense - lying between 0 and 1, expressing relative frequency of an outcome. There is a formalism of this classical notion of probability, due to Kolmogorov. You can generalize that formalism, so that it is about probability amplitudes, and some people call that a theory of "noncommutative probability". But it's not actually a theory of probability any more. A "noncommutative probability" is not a probability; that's why probability amplitudes are so vexatious to interpret. The designation, "noncommutative probability", sweeps the problem under the carpet. It tells us that these mysterious non-probabilities are not mysterious; they are probabilities - just ... different. There can be a fine line between "thinking like reality" and fooling yourself into thinking that you understand.
All that's a digression, but the idea that QM could be the formal theory of any informal concept you like, tastes of a similar disregard for the prior meanings of words.
Temperature is an average. All individual information about the particles is lost, so you can't invert the mapping from exact microphysical state to thermodynamic state.
So divide the particle velocities by temperature or whatever.
Most of the invertible functions you mention would reduce to one of a handful of non-redundant functions, obfuscated by redundant complexity.
How do you tell what's redundant complexity and what's ontologically fundamental? Position or momentum model of quantum mechanics, for instance?
...Now I'd add that the derived nature of
...at least not if you accept a certain line of anthropic argument.
Thomas Nagel famously challenged the philosophical world to come to terms with qualia in his essay "What is it Like to Be a Bat?". Bats, with sensory systems so completely different from those of humans, must have exotic bat qualia that we could never imagine. Even if we deduce all the physical principles behind echolocation, even if we could specify the movement of every atom in a bat's senses and nervous system that represents its knowledge of where an echolocated insect is, we still have no idea what it's like to feel a subjective echolocation quale.
Anthropic reasoning is the idea that you can reason conditioning on your own existence. For example, the Doomsday Argument says that you would be more likely to exist in the present day if the overall number of future humans was medium-sized instead of humongous, therefore since you exist in the present day, there must be only a medium-sized number of future humans, and the apocalypse must be nigh, for values of nigh equal to "within a few hundred years or so".
The Buddhists have a parable to motivate young seekers after enlightenment. They say - there are zillions upon zillions of insects, trillions upon trillions of lesser animals, and only a relative handful of human beings. For a reincarnating soul to be born as a human being, then, is a rare and precious gift, and an opportunity that should be seized with great enthusiasm, as it will be endless eons before it comes around again.
Whatever one thinks of reincarnation, the parable raises an interesting point. Considering the vast number of non-human animals compared to humans, the probability of being a human is vanishingly low. Therefore, chances are that if I could be an animal, I would be. This makes a strong anthropic argument that it is impossible for me to be an animal.
The phrase "for me to be an animal" may sound nonsensical, but "why am I me, rather than an animal?" is not obviously sillier than "why am I me, rather than a person from the far future?". If the doomsday argument is sufficient to prove that some catastrophe is preventing me from being one of a trillion spacefaring citizens of the colonized galaxy, this argument hints that something is preventing me from being one of a trillion bats or birds or insects.
And this could be that animals lack subjective experience. This would explain quite nicely why I'm not an animal: because you can't be an animal, any more than you can be a toaster. So Thomas Nagel can stop worrying about what it's like to be a bat, and the rest of us can eat veal and foie gras guilt-free.
But before we break out the dolphin sausages - this is a pretty weird conclusion. It suggests there's a qualitative and discontinuous difference between the nervous system of other beings and our own, not just in what capacities they have but in the way they cause experience. It should make dualists a little bit happier and materialists a little bit more confused (though it's far from knockout proof of either).
The most significant objection I can think of is that it is significant not that we are beings with experiences, but that we know we are beings with experiences and can self-identify as conscious - a distinction that applies only to humans and maybe to some species like apes and dolphins who are rare enough not to throw off the numbers. But why can't we use the reference class of conscious beings if we want to? One might as well consider it significant only that we are beings who make anthropic arguments, and imagine there will be no Doomsday but that anthropic reasoning will fall out of favor in a few decades.
But I still don't fully accept this argument, and I'd be pretty happy if someone could find a more substantial flaw in it.