Greetings Peter,
I can see now why you said we have a view in common -- we do -- and I understand this paper much better than your previous.
Something that has not changed between us, however, is that your work is so much more ambitious than mine -- I have to look for a solid "hand hole" to grasp, in order to make useful and comprehensible remarks.
First, let me list the assumptions on which we unconditionally agree:
-- a continuum of consciousness
-- a wave function of noncollapsing potential
-- Correlation of measurement events without assuming the existence of particles
-- The falsity of LEM for physical applications
I won't comment on how you get there because it will inevitably lead to a technical argument, and the minutiae are unimportant. Instead, I'd like to take one narrow piece from your essay that has generated volumes of commentary (and acrimonious dialogue) -- the Monty Hall problem -- and try to show how it binds what we know locally to what we can determine globally:
Mathematicians will always agree -- that given x contestants choosing 1 of 3 doors, two of which hide a goat, and the third a new car -- one can predict that over many iterations or many contestants simultaneously choosing from sets of doors that (by the law of large numbers) 1/3 of the contestants will win cars.
The singular case in which the host (Monty) opens one door of the two that a contestant has not chosen -- and reveals a goat, then asks the contestant if she would like to switch choices -- raises the question of whether the contestant has a winning advantage by switching the choice, or staying with the first.
Naively, one thinks that -- because Monty has shown one of two doors that the car is *not* behind, that the odds of choosing the winning door have been increased some 16% (from 1/3 to 1/2) by choosing to switch. In fact, though, the odds are still 1 in 3 whether the contestant switches the choice or not.
Even though the contestant knows in advance that Monty will never open the door with a car behind it, this information adds nothing to her knowledge of what door the car is behind. In other words, a potential choice (the door identified but not yet opened), does not change the energy state of the system.
To see why, compare this scenario to the Schrodinger Cat experiment. The decay rate of the substance that emits a particle and triggers the hammer that breaks the vial that releases the poison that kills the cat -- is precisely known. The energy potential of the hammer is identical to the pre-choice of door in the MH problem -- If Monty lifts the lid on the box and declares "the cat is alive," or "the cat is dead," it has no effect on the decay rate of the material or the energy potential of the hammer.
Monty, however, *cannot choose* to say "the cat is dead," because we *know* that the conditions under which the cat dies are fully determined, even though hidden in a black box. There is absolutely no point in Monty communicating to us that the cat is dead, and here's why:
If the cat were dead, the experiment is ended -- just as if Monty opened the door with the car behind it while the contestant still has a choice pending. It doesn't happen, because Monty knows which door the car is behind. He isn't an observer making a binary choice; he's the guiding principle *behind* the measurement choice. This is the same principle by which Joy Christian successfully argues for the choice that Nature makes independently of physical observers, and which guarantees real binary measurement of anticorrelated values.
Ultimately, the free will hypothesis prevails, because -- and I made this point repeatedly in the great "debate" over Christian's result -- *unless* Nature has a choice, human observers have no free will. The energy cost to remove the middle value is equal to the observer's choice to change the state of the system.
Anyway, good job and all best wishes in the competition!
Tom
