Ideas as Q.Objects

Sensory Ideas as Quantum Objects in Mental Space 2.3

(the external everyday mind)

A third sketch of a proposal.

Ian Thompson.
v2. Dec 13, 2020

Developed from “Perception in the Mental Degree 2.3” (April 20, 2020)

and from “Quantum-like Visual Recognition in Mental Degree 2.3” (June 26, 2020)

Preamble

There are many things puzzling about vision, even with a theistic framework with influx from the spiritual world. For the visual, auditory and tactile space produced by our senses seems be a mental construction, and distinct from physical space as well as distinct from the inhabited spiritual world. Such a ‘perceptual space’ seems to be unique for each creature with a mind, each person’s space does not automatically overlap with the space of the neighbors. It seems, at best, to be an external and mostly-isolated fragment of the spiritual world. Swedenborg regards these ‘natural sensations’ as the ‘sense-conceptions of the external man’ and unable to conceive of spiritual things, even though similar perceptual spaces are produced all the time in the minds of inhabitants of the spiritual world.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have also often puzzled about vision. It seems amazing that objects in 3D space in front of us can be recognized so quickly even from occluded hints, with no hindrance from a wide variety of distances and points of view. Does the brain (or software or mind?) process projective coordinate geometry in 3D in order to invariantly recognizing objects and movements without reference to most modes of presentation? Does the visual system use deductive or inductive logic for those recognitions? Does it use progressively abstract feature abstractions, or does it use predictive models with feedback about errors leading to model corrections? Does the brain or its software manufacture something like three-dimensional visual space?

And there seems to be something in quantum physics possibly related to perception or consciousness. That ‘something’ is the process of quantum measurement when a particular and final result is selected from the alternatives of quantum probabilities. Is consciousness involved in causing that process, many philosophers, thinkers and scientists have often wondered? Or perhaps we should look at quantum measurements another way, and we should ask whether is an analogy between (a) quantum processes selecting actual outcomes to restrict future options, and (b) the sensory mind being involved in similar selections when actual sensations restrict the future options for what ideas to consider for objects existing in the visual field. In a theistic framework, these analogies could well be correspondences, where the two degrees (a) and (b) are causally related to each other in ways to be discovered by a new science. Is there any real similarity or connection between sensory psychology and quantum mechanics? In our ennead scheme, they are at 2.3 and 3.3 sub-degrees respectively, so some corresponding or synchronous functions should perhaps be expected.

The visual space produced by perceptions does seem to have three dimensions, as a natural representation of the physical world. And the visual space has objects in it, each an imitation of physical objects under some perspective. Some philosophers such as Daniel Dennett have derisively called this perspective a ‘Cartesian Theater’, as then requiring another viewer (a homunculus or inner man) to actually view the objects in that mental space. How is perception then explained? However, Descartes never had such an idea (his mind was not extended at all in space), and in fact the idea seems more likely to have come from advocates of spiritual worlds, perhaps even Swedenborg. And indeed Swedenborg wrote in SD 1498 that “But He Who alone sees is the Lord”. Perhaps it is worthwhile to resurrect these ideas as a kind of ‘Theistic Theater’, especially since there is a ‘spiritual light’ from the Lord, by means of which spiritual things are seen as in a theater viewed by a spiritual eye.

Mental Space

There appear to be already three dimensions in the spiritual world. If we there face east, the 3 dimensions exist: (1) to the right-left are continuous degrees of truth (right and opposite), along with (2) front-back as continuous degrees of good (forward=good, back=opposite), and along with (3) high and low as continuous degrees that represent connections to ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ discrete degrees. We mentally explore left-right alternatives very readily, then frontward distances, then directions up, with directions behind and below much less often. That order of considerations seems to be the same in the physical and spiritual worlds.

Thus we can take that visual space is a kind of spiritual space, even if in its lowest and outermost degree. It seems there that large distances deviate from strict Euclidean geometry in ways that vary with time, but that locally there is a good 3D structure as described in the previous paragraph. Furthermore, different creatures' visual spaces do not usually join together, but mostly remain disjoint.

I now want to use this ‘pre-existing 3D mental space’ to make a theory of vision. That is, I am taking the significance of this claim for visual 3D space to be that the vision systems of insects/animals/humans do not have to re-invent or relearn projective 3D geometry, but they can now readily exploit the 3D nature of spiritual space to begin to set up a part of it as their private visual 3D space. It might have been possible for the mental objects in 3D space to have their spatial relations encoded by substances that are not themselves in similar 3D relations (just as computer 'vision' must be encoded in digital devices), but in fact mental life is much easier. There are already 3D internal objects, relations and interactions that make setting up a 3D visual world more intuitive and available for free. Humans, of course, still have to learn much (in contrast to animals), but they are pushing on a open door. They do not have to numerically solve 3d coordinate geometry problems to even pick up a wooden block in front of them. Our visual space contains a real model of the external world, is not merely an abstract representation. But what is that ‘real model’ made of? Is it of substance or of imagination?

Sensory Ideas as Objects in Perceptual Space

Let us consider the nature of objects existing in a spiritual space. Like all existing objects, such spiritual objects will be some substance existing in some form. A spiritual substance is the motivation or underlying-love which keeps the object existing for some duration, since it is oriented to leading to some interaction or use in the future. A spiritual form is the shape or set of representations of qualities that the substance manifests at present, in particular the qualia or sensory qualities of whatever is being represented. A spiritual object may exist subconsciously as in a past experience or in memory, but something of it becomes conscious in the act of producing its appropriate interaction or use.

In the general spiritual world, such an object would be located according to the goodness of its underlying love (front-back), according to the truth of its representation (right-left), and according to the elevation of its content (higher-lower). However, the ‘perceptual space’ discussed earlier is in a being currently residing with a living body in the physical world, and that physical world – the brain of the body in particular – acts as a containant and limitation of any spiritual content. The visual cortex of the brain, therefore, can readily select specific content in the perceptual space of an embodied mind. We can assume, therefore, that for such minds the neural visual system can give rise to content in perceptual space in locations determined not by the intrinsic substances and forms of that content, but in locations that attempt to accurately represent the external physical world as seen through the senses. These are processes that we need to understand in more detail to see how perception functions while we live on earth.

What the Mind’s Eye Sees

Now consider one spiritual object in the perceptual 3D space of some embodied person. They see a chair, for example. That idea of ‘seeing a chair’ is a spiritual or mental object – not physical or material – so it is available to constitute cognitive and/or emotional processes internal to the mind. The form of the spiritual object will be all the features and properties of the chair as known to the person’s vision: its location, size, orientation, colors and textures. The substance of the spiritual object will be the motivation of the object to act or interact. Some motivation must be present. More specifically, the motivation could be a desire ‘to see the world truthfully’, or it could be a desire ‘to do something with that chair’ – maybe a desire to sit on it. Whatever the desires may be (a topic for later research), one important desired effect must be to interact with spiritual light in order to be seen in the mind. This is what must happen within the framework of the Theistic Theater discussed earlier.

Suppose that there are now many spiritual objects in our perceptual space, and they represent truthfully the configuration of physical objects seen by the senses via the visual system. Then interaction with some kind of spiritual light will lead to reflected spiritual light. This reflected light from all objects should take into account the occlusion or hiding of one object behind another in the perceptual 3D space, and thus present to a spiritual observer a two-dimension view like a photograph or image of the scene from a particular location. If the configuration of objects has been set up truthfully, then this 2D image should agree with the visual field or sheet as produced by the senses. (In higher spiritual degrees we would not expect occlusion to occur)

If this image produced by the internal model agrees with the sensory visual field, then all is good. If it disagrees, however, then there is work to be done. Perhaps something new has moved into view, and the internal model – the set of spiritual objects in our perceptual space – will need to be updated. The model has produced a predicted view, and now there is manifestly an error in that prediction, and information as somehow to be used to revise the internal spiritual model. There is a whole new subfield of neuro-psychology giving ‘predictive processing’ theories about how this might work in a information-processing system, and maybe also in the brain. We, however, want to see what must function equivalently in a combined spiritual-physical system of a mind closely coupled to a brain.

Note that there are therefore (at least) two kinds of ways to be conscious of spiritual objects, since they can interact in at least two kinds of processes. One process is the production of visual fields – that is the consciousness of its appearance as when we see with our eyes. That may happen repeatedly, for example, with each visual fixation. Another process involves interaction between the spiritual objects, as when we work out in our minds the steps needed to accomplish some objective before actually doing it physically. A third process may be when those objects are recalled from memory because of other internal mental activities. Some action or interaction is necessary and sufficient for conscious awareness, though complex actions with many components will yield a more complex structure of awareness that may yet itself have a distinct overall appearance (a topic for further investigation).

Representing Possibilities and Uncertainties in the Mind

In order for a perceiving mind to consider errors in its internal spiritual representations, it must have some way of also representing possibilities, probabilities, degrees of belief, and kinds of uncertainties. Errors and other kinds of new information could then lead to revisions of degrees of beliefs and uncertainties, and that revisionary process should be an intrinsic part of our visual system.

Indeed, seeing new things has its own fascination for humans. Seeing a new color in the sky, or new views of nature, or new movements of animals or birds in a tree, or strange new paintings in an art gallery, even new plot twists in TV dramas – all generate their own focus of attraction and interest as the novelties slowly become assimilated into memory, and later into normality.

So now I am going to consider the spiritual objects not like objects in classical physics, but like objects in quantum physics. That is, spiritual objects do not always have definite locations and definite properties, but may have degrees of belief concerning every location, orientation and property. Furthermore, those degrees of belief may be correlated between different objects – as when we expect every solid object to be resting on something else if it is not being thrown. Perceptual updates from the senses are then able (in some way to be determined) to revise those degrees of belief. If some new object is seen, then the visual system must even be able to raise the belief in that object from ‘very unlikely’ to ‘almost certain’. Of course, the time taken for such a radical revision may well depend on the prior belief against it being seen!

Quantum Objects with Wave Functions

Quantum physics can represent uncertainties by a wave function , such that the probability can vary from very low to very high. The wave function expected to be ‘normalized’ so that the probabilities all sum or integrate to unity. We say that the system is in a superposition of different descriptions according to the magnitudes of the various probabilities .

For this to work, we have to map ‘degrees of belief’ onto a numerical ‘credence’ such as ‘probability of being true’, as is standard in Bayesian methods of logic which describe how such numerical measures should be updated in the presence of new information. (We can always discuss whether this mapping is reasonable and/or accurate, and whether Bayes tells us the correct updating method.).

Quantum physics can also represent correlations between two or more objects. If two objects are presented for example by coordinates and , then a wave function depending on both those coordinates, can, by entanglement, describe those correlations by their joint probability distribution |.

Quantum physics can describe numerical credences for any number objects or properties of those objects, by having very many variables … . A configuration space for combining spaces with different numbers of objects is called a Fock space, and such a space is standard in quantum field theories when virtual particles may be created or destroyed.

Quantum physics can describe the credence in the existence of an object with unknown location and/or orientation. If the location variable is , and the orientation variable is , then a wavefunction can describe a fixed orientation if is peaked around , and an uncertain position if has a constant and low value for all the locations in the region of interest reflecting a uniformly low (but not zero!) credence for such an object being anywhere in view. Actually seeing the object at location then, would amount to replacing the above uniformly-small with a new wave-function peaked around . We discuss next a mechanism for such updating of wave functions.

Updating Quantum Wave-Functions after Selection

In quantum physics as it is practiced, quantum probabilities are for a range of possibilities in measurements. So, once a specific measurement result is selected in nature, the wave function for future possibilities has to be changed. This is called the ‘reduction of the wave packet’, and it has long been controversial in the theory of quantum foundations since it does not follow the normal Schrödinger equation for variation of wave functions with time.

Every experimental physicist, however, will confirm that something like the reduction the wave-packet does occur, even if no-one is sure exactly what triggers it to occur, or even exactly when it occurs. If we regard quantum physics as describing propensities for selections, however, then it clear again that some selection processes ought to occur, even if we are not sure exactly when.

The standard formalism in quantum physics for this reduction is nevertheless well-defined and easy to calculate. If the initial wave-function is , and a measurement occurs which selects a one of the reduced range of possibilities defined by normalized wave-functions , then the new wavefunction after the measurement is, for some , one with probability . The notation is the overlap or ‘similarity’ integral This process is often called the Lüder’s reduction process. Note that the result of the selection is one of the , independent of the scaling of except as it enters into the formula for the probabilities . If some rare event should occur, then the result is still a normalized wave function.

It can be shown that this Lüder update scheme is equivalent to Bayesian updating of properties in most simple circumstance. The exception discussed (refs!) occurs when the order of two successive quantum collapses gives different results. Mathematically, that is when two successive operations do not commute: . This option may yet be useful to avoid problems when initial credences are zero.

Updating Quantum-like Objects in Perceptual Space

In a perceiving mind, presumably there are some mental objects describing perceived objects with a high degree of credence, as well as a large collection of once-experienced objects that are presently considered possibly to be seen, but with low credences since presently unexpected. We now seek a mechanism that allows the collection of perceptual-objects to be updated from the neural visual system, no matter whether their initial credences are high or low (but not zero).

Such a mechanism should start with a set of quantum-like objects in perceptual space. Such objects have their own uncertainties concerning location, orientation, and perceived features, whether those uncertainties are large or small depending on the range of possibilities with credences measured by the magnitudes of the wave-functions distinguishing those objects. A subsequent interaction with spiritual light will then give a superposition of the spiritual view of those objects as seen by the mind’s eye. That is, the spiritual view will have consequentially its own initial uncertainties arising from the superposition of different configurations of the objects being seen in perceptual space.

Now comes the most important step. For this, we have to assume that the measurement-events that occur somewhere, according to quantum physics, occur also at least in the visual cortex when specific sensations are registered. (This perhaps might confirm many popular suspicions that ‘consciousness causes quantum collapse’, even though the story is now a little different.) That is, I want now a scheme where some reduction-of-the-wave-packet events occur simultaneously in the quantum degree 3.3 as well as in the sensory-spiritual degree 2.3. (This is what we might have expected from correspondences, as discussed in the preamble.). There may be randomness in the visual-cortex events in the brain and, though the scope of randomness is very small, it is not zero. That is, measurement events and quantum collapses must occur there though their effects there may be small. Their most important effects are from the corresponding-simultaneous collapse events in the sensory mind.

What we have now is that when the visual cortex settles on visual sensations, a measurement event with quantum collapse occurs to render them completely specific, definite and actual. A correspondingly-equivalent collapse occurs in the sensory mind, and in that mind selects a specific visual field from among the all the initial superpositions of uncertainties of visual views there. This collapse thus produces now a specific, definite and actual visual field in the sensory mind that corresponds exactly the actual sensations settled upon in the visual cortex. So the probabilities of these selections are determined only by the overlap integrals in the quantum physics of the brain, and not by the overlap integrals of the wave functions in the sensory mind. The mental outcomes follow the physical outcomes exactly, because the physical is a containant or selector of spiritual motivations or dispositions.

This selection by the sensory system of a specific visual field in the sensory mind is joint action of motivations there, within the limits of selection from the visual cortex. It will therefore be a major conscious event, as we know well when we consciously inspect our own visual field.

The selection of a specific visual field will also select among the uncertainties of the perceptual objects that lead to the originally-uncertain visual field, and will thus reduce the uncertainties of the perceptual objects. That is, we become more certain of what we are seeing when the visual cortex feeds through information from the bodily sense. As we hoped would happen!

Additions on Dec 13, 2020:

Binocular Vision

There are several mechanisms by which we perceive distance. There is (1) distance estimation from the eye muscle movement needed to focus the lenses of the eyes, (2) binocular vision from the different views seen by the two eyes, (3) binocular vision from the eye muscle movement needed to converge the two eyes to the same object, and (4) observed movements visual positions when we even slightly move our head. As well as memories from previous perceptions and previously-seen relations between objects.

It might have been possible in the above theory for simply the different views seen by the two eyes to be two distinct 2D visual sheets, with each having its on part of the visual cortex that pins down those sheets. However, in normal life we do not have two visual sheets: only when the one or both eyes are not functioning correctly and (say) one is pushed out of alignment.

A more plausible mechanism is that information from the two eyes (views as well as muscle positions for focus and for alignment) are combined in the visual cortex. In fact, distance estimation seems to principally concern objects at individual visual fixations, and not the whole visual field. Thus the cortex provides its own distance estimates, and adds that information to the visual field in some way that is yet to be investigated.

Role of Randomness

We might have thought that there would be considerable randomness in this theory, because of essential role of quantum observations or selections that do have intrinsic randomness. And also because the quantum-like state taken as existing in mental space have very wide spreads of uncertainties, perhaps much greater spreads than physicists (those who are not many-world theorists) would expect to see in their laboratories.

However, all the randomness is only because of quantum uncertainties in the neural activities in the brain. We know that the brain is a warm noisy environment, but there must be some such uncertainties. These uncertainties may perhaps be influenced by mind-to-brain causation – the topic for another study – but they are removed completely. There is also some need for quantum selection or actualization or ‘reduction of the wave packet’, even it is on a very microscopic and molecular scale within the nerve cells.

All the present theory requires is that are some reductions of quantum uncertainties in the process of the neural cortex settling on a specific sensory view. For then our theory has that same reduction event also selecting among the mental uncertainties. That is, the uncertainties in mental space are not reduced by their own randomness – which would be rather large – but by the randomness of specific neural selection events – which are small as on a microscopic scale.