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  • Enaction for QBists: A unified metaphysics in a new paper by FQxI Essay Competit

In 2023, US-based science journalist Amanda Gefter claimed joint first place in FQxI's essay competition (https://forums.fqxi.org/d/4037-how-to-unsplit-the-world-quantum-mechanics-cognitive-science-and-the-subject), which asked how science could be different. Gefter's was a philosophical essay that considered the subject-object distinction in the foundations of modern science. She argued that the QBist interpretation of quantum mechanics and the enactive approach to cognitive science provide examples of how to move beyond this view and "unsplit the world."

Gefter has developed her thinking further and in a new preprint (https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04230), "Enaction for QBists,"

I don’t agree with this view because I think that this view seems to mix consciousness and agency into the one mysterious thing: “participator”.

I think that consciousness and agency are distinguishable aspects of the world, and I think that agency/ activity/ participation can logically only occur when/ after an entity is conscious of the on-the-spot situation. Knowledge/ consciousness of the on-the-spot situation is a necessary aspect of the world, and agency/ activity/ participation is a separate thing that occurs in association with it.

Discern difference, distinguish, discriminate, identify, perceive what is currently true in oneself and one’s surroundings, know what is time-place on-the-spot point-of-view true. That is what knowledge/ consciousness does; that is the function of knowledge/ consciousness.

This is as necessary for particles in their low-level mathematical environment as for people, and other living things, in their more complicated high-level environment. Truth must be discerned; there is no Platonic realm external to the universe taking care of capital-T Truth: this is the job of consciousness.

When it comes to the low-level mathematics of the world, low-level consciousness is necessary to discern difference, distinguish, discriminate, identify, perceive what is currently true, know what is time-place on-the-spot point-of-view true when it comes to the low-level categories, numbers and relationships that exist in the world.

For higher-level living things on the other hand, higher-level knowledge is clearly a bit of an active construction. When it comes to living things being able to sense what is true about the surrounding world, all “true” information initially comes in the form of low-level categories, numbers and relationships, and any higher-level knowledge/ consciousness/ information about the world is like a story that the organism must construct out of this basic low-level information.

But agency/ activity/ participation in the world is a different thing.

I think Gefter makes a case which fails for the same reason that a lot of philosophy of consciousness fails: it fails to account for the conscious person who is making the philosophical argument, or the conscious person who is doing the maths.

The conscious person who is making the argument and the conscious person who is doing the maths has oversight of a system (that exists in their mind, or is physically represented on paper or screen), but this system fails to be a system without the presence of the conscious oversight and the agency of the person who has the oversight.

In a standalone system, there is no way you can cut out the necessary oversight and agency aspects.

If you want to have a real-world (i.e. standalone) mathematical system, there is no way to excise the necessary consciousness/ oversight/ knowledge aspect of the world or excise the necessary agency aspect of the world.

These aspects do not emerge from a system, or the operation of a system, or “loops” in a system: instead, they are the basic underlying requirements FOR a system to exist in the first place.

This preprint seems to rely quite a lot on the concept of a “system”. But, for a start, what IS a system, what IS a self-contained standalone real-world system? It is not just this particular preprint: no one ever seems willing to say, or even hazard a guess, what a self-contained standalone real-world system is.

The short answer is that a self-contained standalone system requires not only equations (representing relationships between categories) and the numbers that apply to these categories; a self-contained standalone system requires logical connective symbols to represent other necessary aspects of a self-contained standalone system.

So, even BEFORE you get to the supposedly-existing “loops” in the system, you’ve got necessary logical connective aspects (symbolically representable as (e.g.) IF, AND, OR, IS TRUE, and THEN) in a self-contained standalone system.

These necessary logical connective symbols very, very obviously represent a mind-like, agency-like, aspect of the system, even BEFORE you get to the supposedly-existing “loops” in the system!!!!

Over and over again, people fail to first succinctly define what a self-contained standalone real-world system is supposed to be, and so they subsequently make big mistakes in their conclusions about systems.

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