Abstract
Hans Primas was first and foremost an esteemed scientist at the forefront of quantum chemistry. But he also had abiding and deep philosophical interests, both in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. This paper discusses Primas’ philosophical views about the nature of emergence and ultimately the relation between mind and matter. His account of emergence has a deceptively natural link to the so-called many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This link is explored and exposed as inadequate to Primas’ thought. Some more speculative remarks about the metaphysics of the mind- matter relation then conclude the paper.
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Notes
- 1.
The mechanical ingenuity of the ancients should not be underestimated however, as the discovery and eventual decoding of the Antikythera illustrates (see Freeth et al. 2006).
- 2.
By the term “atomic” it might be understood either an absolutely smallest piece of matter or a merely contingently unbreakable and very tiny piece of matter. Most thinkers of the early modern period would have opted for the second conception if they wished to endorse atomism, since they regarded an extended piece of matter as in principle divisible, say, at least, by God.
- 3.
Both Leibniz and Jacob Bernoulli, among others, attempted a quantitative explanation of Kepler’s laws in terms of vortex theories, but neither account was fully worked out or, as was eventually realized, could be worked out (see Aiton 1972 for details).
- 4.
Newton acidly observed that taking his own account of gravity as revealing a property “innate, inherent and essential to Matter” which could generate instantaneous effects at a distance would be to embrace such an absurdity that “I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it” (see Newton 2004, p. 102).
- 5.
For discussion of various aspects of Maxwell molecular vortex model see Siegel (2003), Chalmers (2001), Dyson (2007). It seems that Maxwell at first regarded these with, as Siegel puts it, “ontological intent” (Siegel 2003, p. 56) but came to see them later as heuristic aids to understanding. For Maxwell’s own presentation of his model see Maxwell (1890/1965, pp. 451ff).
- 6.
The idea that the world is made of particulate units is not refuted by Bell’s result, if the units lose their independence and are, so to speak, in a kind of universal communication with one another. Theories such as this go back to the early days of quantum mechanics with the “pilot wave” of Louis de Broglie in the 1920s. Since David Bohm’s (1952) rediscovery of the de Broglie approach it has seen extensive development; see Holland (1993) for technical details, Bohm and Hiley (1993) for a more general overview and some philosophical extrapolations). The point is that the de Broglie-Bohm approach does not reinstate the mechanistic dream.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Conway’s “game of life” was first introduced widely to the world by Martin Gardner (1970).
- 11.
John von Neumann (1932/1955) articulated and attempted to justify the postulate in his magisterial monograph. It has been the subject of a vast literature which has been largely negative because of the unattractive way that the postulate simply asserts that there will be a sudden break with the otherwise smoothly predictable evolution of a quantum system when a hard to define event of “measurement” occurs.
- 12.
- 13.
I am using the phrase “almost all” colloquially but it may also be true in the mathematical sense that the elements of the universal foliation, which are an uncountable infinity, are all save for a set of measure zero essentially classical. I don’t know whether this is provable.
- 14.
This denial is enshrined in what Wallace calls the equivalence principle (Wallace 2007, p. 318) which asserts that all that matters to assigning subjective uncertainty about some proposition, P is the quantum amplitude of P irrespective of, say, the way that P is observed or measured to be true. That means that the number of worlds “generated” by the measurement of P is irrelevant to subjective uncertainty. This seems peculiar, since many lives, including those of our quantum descendants, will hang in the balance of how many branches are pumped out by a measurement. This approach has, of course, been criticized, notably by Albert (2015) and Kent (2010).
- 15.
This option is sometimes called that of “primitive identity over time” (see Greaves 2004).
- 16.
As many thinkers who have contemplated the many-worlds interpretation have pointed out, it is actually very difficult to count the number of branches that will be generated by a measurement, just because of the vast number of connections between the measuring device and the rest of the world. So it is somewhat naive to analyze this quantum game as leading to just one rich you and one very slightly poorer you. But there is no reason at all to think that the outcome won’t have equal numbers of rich yous and slightly poorer yous, so the point of the analysis stands.
- 17.
It should also add to worries about the intelligibility of the primitive identity over time approach. The link between the quantum amplitudes and personal identity seems entirely arbitrarily imposed, without even a hint of any coherent connection between quantum measurement and the location of the self in the quantum world.
- 18.
Neutral Monism was famously espoused both by William James and Bertrand Russell as well as Ernst Mach. For an excellent historical overview and modern development of the view see Banks (2014).
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Seager, W. (2016). Primas, Emergence, and Worlds. In: Atmanspacher, H., Müller-Herold, U. (eds) From Chemistry to Consciousness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43573-2_5
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