The structural properties of matter, or whatever the underlying substance is, are sufficient to predict everything physicists want to predict
Physics attributes properties like mass and spin even to elementary particles. Are those structural properties?
About the binding problem, because of entanglement, wavefunctions aren’t just for individual particles. If two particles are described by a single nonfactorizable wavefunction, you cannot attribute definite states to the individual particles without losing information about the entangled whole.
It’s a recurring theme in quantum mind theories that this might have something to do with the binding problem. But people often seem to imagine something like “quale1 entangled with quale2”, which in the language of quantum states we might write as |quale1> ⊗ |quale2>. The problem is, that this is not entangled. It’s a “product state”, which by definition is factorizable mathematically and hence mereologically.
Truly entangled states involve multi-object superpositions that can’t be factored into single-object superpositions. So they do provide complex unities, but they don’t provide a clear way to ontologically bind together definite local properties. One might say that entanglement offers a potential solution to the unity of consciousness, but not to the binding problem, or at least that how to interpret entangled states qualically is not self-evident.
Physics attributes properties like mass and spin even to elementary particles. Are those structural properties?
About the binding problem, because of entanglement, wavefunctions aren’t just for individual particles. If two particles are described by a single nonfactorizable wavefunction, you cannot attribute definite states to the individual particles without losing information about the entangled whole.
It’s a recurring theme in quantum mind theories that this might have something to do with the binding problem. But people often seem to imagine something like “quale1 entangled with quale2”, which in the language of quantum states we might write as |quale1> ⊗ |quale2>. The problem is, that this is not entangled. It’s a “product state”, which by definition is factorizable mathematically and hence mereologically.
Truly entangled states involve multi-object superpositions that can’t be factored into single-object superpositions. So they do provide complex unities, but they don’t provide a clear way to ontologically bind together definite local properties. One might say that entanglement offers a potential solution to the unity of consciousness, but not to the binding problem, or at least that how to interpret entangled states qualically is not self-evident.