[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[scerir]

Damien wrote:
> [...] at the deepest levels of reality, 
> quantum events are simply stochastic: 
> they don't just look random, 
> they *are* random, one by one [...]

One by one, yes, 'single' events are random.
 
> Everything built from them is 
> thus riddled with acausality, 
> so natural selection has no option but 
> to include this feature of the world.

The problem here, maybe, is how to define
'causality' and 'a-causality'. It is not so
easy since, in general, such a definition
involves 'time', at least for 'single'
events. But time is just a parameter, 
a pre-condition 'we' impose, it is our
clock-time. It is not sure that - at a
fundamental microlevel - there is such a time,
or such a space-time.

> Of course, maybe (even probably) there is 
> no such high-level acausality, or maybe 
> if there is it has nothing to do 
> with human experience. But the idea doesn't seem 
> to me ridiculous on its face.

Part of that a-causality arises, at the micro-level,
for single events, because there is a coexistence
between something extended, non-local, and also 
contextual ('waves' or fields of any kinds), 
and something local ('quanta' emitted, 'quanta'
absorbed). But I do not know if there is
something similar at a higher level.