Dmitri: As I read him, Eliezer is saying (1) that it’s easy to be unaware of scientific progress even once it’s made it into the literature, and (2) that at any given moment there’s plenty going on that hasn’t made it into the literature yet. #1 is sufficient to make his uncle wrong to say that no one knows how gravity works, and others wrong to say that no one’s made any progress towards understanding consciousness. #2 isn’t needed for those conclusions, but it’s interesting in its own right.
Douglas: I had a look at the paper by Rosenblum and Kutter, and I don’t see how it offers any reason to think that there’s an “observer problem” that we need to worry about. The only “problem” is that it’s difficult to reconcile some quantum phenomena with naive ideas about free will; but naive ideas about free will are notoriously difficult to make clear good sense of anyway, so this just looks like one more strike against those ideas. It sounds like Stapp instead wants to make some hand-wavy notion of consciousness fundamental to his model of the universe; if he manages to make this into an actual scientific theory with actual testable predictions, good luck to him, but it doesn’t seem like that promising a project.
Dmitri: As I read him, Eliezer is saying (1) that it’s easy to be unaware of scientific progress even once it’s made it into the literature, and (2) that at any given moment there’s plenty going on that hasn’t made it into the literature yet. #1 is sufficient to make his uncle wrong to say that no one knows how gravity works, and others wrong to say that no one’s made any progress towards understanding consciousness. #2 isn’t needed for those conclusions, but it’s interesting in its own right.
Douglas: I had a look at the paper by Rosenblum and Kutter, and I don’t see how it offers any reason to think that there’s an “observer problem” that we need to worry about. The only “problem” is that it’s difficult to reconcile some quantum phenomena with naive ideas about free will; but naive ideas about free will are notoriously difficult to make clear good sense of anyway, so this just looks like one more strike against those ideas. It sounds like Stapp instead wants to make some hand-wavy notion of consciousness fundamental to his model of the universe; if he manages to make this into an actual scientific theory with actual testable predictions, good luck to him, but it doesn’t seem like that promising a project.