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 macroscopic "causes" is also a problem, if you want to have the usual materialist ontology of mind and you also want to say that mental states are causes.
What bothers me about your viewpoint is that you are solving the problem that, in your view, some things are epiphenomenal by making an epiphenomenal declaration - the statement that they are not epiphenomenal, but rather, fundamental.
So I posit the existence of what Dennett calls a "Cartesian theater", a place where the seeing actually happens and where consciousness is located; it's the end of the sensory causal chain and the beginning of the motor causal chain. And I further posit that, in current physical language, this place is a "quantum system", not just a classically distributed neural network; because this would allow me to avoid the problems of many-to-one mappings and of derived macroscopic causality. That way, the individual conscious mind can have genuine causal relations with other objects in the world (the simpler quantum systems that are its causal neighbors in the brain).
Is there anything about your or anyone else's actions that provides evidence for this hypothesis?
"genuine" causal relations is much weaker than "ontologically fundamental" relations.
Do only pure qualia really exist? Do beliefs, desires, etc. also exist?
That's way too hard, so I'll just illustrate the original point: You can map a set of three donkeys onto a set of three dogs, one-to-one, but that doesn't let you deduce that a dog is a donkey.
You can map a set of three quantum states onto a set of {, , }
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.
No, it means ontological structure - not structures of things, but the structure of thing's ontology - that doesn't say anything about the things themselves, just about their ontology.
Could you revisit this point in the light of what I've now said? What sort of disconnection are you talking about?
A logical/probabilistic one. There is no evidence for a correlation between the statements "These beings have large-scale quantum entanglement" and "These beings think and talk about consciousness"
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
You would have to be saying that to be exactly the same as your character. You're contrasting two views here. One thinks the world is made up of nothing but STUFF, which follows the laws of quantum mechanics. The other thinks the world is made up of nothing but STUFF and EXPERIENCES. If you show them a quantum state, and tell the first guy "the stuff is in this arrangement" and the second guy "the stuff is in this arrangement, and the experiences are in that arrangement", they agree exactly on what happens, except that the second guy thinks that some of the things that happen are not stuff, but experiences.
That doesn't seem at all suspicious to you?
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.
You are correct. "balloons" refers to balloons, not to quarks.
I guess what's going on is that the guy is saying that's what he believes balloons are.
But thinking about the meaning of words is clarifying.
It seems like the question is almost - "Is 'experience' a word like phlogiston or a word like elephant?"
More or less, whatever has been causing us to see all those elephants gets to be called an elephant. Elephants are reductionism-compatible. There are some extreme circumstances - images of elephants I have seen are fabrication, the people who claim to have seen elephants are lying to me - that break this rule. Phlogiston, on the other hand, is a word we give up on much more readily. Heat is particle bouncing around, but the absence of oxygen is not phlogiston - it's just the absence of oxygen.
You believe that "experience" is fundamentally incompatible with reduction. An experience, to exist at all, must be an ontologically fundamental experience. Thus saying "I see red" makes two claims - one, that the brain is in a certain class of its possible total configuration states, those in which the person is seeing red, and two, that the experience of seeing red is ontologically fundamental.
I see no way to ever get the physical event of people claiming that they experience color correlated with the ontological fundamentalness of their color, as we can investigate the phlogiston hypothesis and stop using it if and only if it turns out to be a bad model.
What is a claim when it's not correlated with its subject? The whole point of the words within it has been irrevocably lost. It is pure speculation.
I really, really don't think, that when I say I see red, I'm just speculating.
It's almost a month since we started this discussion, and it's a bit of a struggle to remember what's important and what's incidental. So first, a back-to-basics statement from me.
Colors do exist, appearances do exist; that's nonnegotiable. That they do not exist in an ontology of "nothing but particles in space" is also, fundamentally, nonnegotiable. I will engage in debates as to whether this is so, but only because people are so amazingly reluctant to see it, and the implication that their favorite materialistic theories of mind actually invo...
...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.