Remarks On The Mind-body Question Pdf ✓

To understand the weight of this document, one must first understand the battlefield of the mind-body problem in the mid-20th century. Prior to Davidson, the dominant theories were locked in a stalemate:

The essay is over 60 years old, but not yet in the public domain everywhere. Always respect publisher restrictions. remarks on the mind-body question pdf

Wigner imagines a friend inside a lab measuring a spin-½ particle. Wigner, outside, describes the whole lab (friend + apparatus + particle) with a wavefunction that remains in superposition. But to the friend, a definite result occurred. Wigner asks: Is the friend’s conscious experience also in superposition? If not, then consciousness cannot be described by the wavefunction—meaning consciousness is outside physics. To understand the weight of this document, one

When researchers search for the they are typically looking for the text of a lecture delivered by Donald Davidson, later published in Essays on Actions and Events (1980). Wigner imagines a friend inside a lab measuring

“The consciousness of a dog or a cat is, as far as we know, qualitatively similar to that of a human. But the laws of quantum mechanics would have to be different for inanimate matter.”