The distinction between agentic and non-agentic archetypes is elegant and addresses a real problem in idealist frameworks. If everything is mind, why doesn't everything collapse the wave function?
One question the framework raises for me: if agentic archetypes collapse superpositions through volitional acts, we still need to explain what determines which outcome they select. The collapse is attributed to consciousness, but the selection mechanism remains open.
An alternative framing: what if consciousness doesn't collapse anything? If the underlying structure is already complete and atemporal, containing all outcomes simultaneously, the agentic archetype doesn't select an outcome. It finds itself correlated with a branch that was always already definite.
The chair's archetype and the mind's archetype would then differ not in their power to collapse, but in their capacity to have a perspective at all. Non-agentic archetypes have no vantage point. Agentic ones do. And it's the vantage point, not the collapse, that makes the difference.
“we still need to explain what determines which outcome they select. The collapse is attributed to consciousness, but the selection mechanism remains open.”
This is a deceptively simple question, which requires that we stand back and look at a larger and more nuanced picture. I discussed this in more detail in this post: https://consceng.substack.com/p/free-will-and-idealism
In brief: the physicalist mindset, which I think we have all inherited, there are two ways things come about: deterministic cause-and-effect, and random chance. Probabilistic events are a combination. E.g. tossing a coin has a 50/50 chance of heads and tails, but the individual outcome is chance. If we drill down into that, we find that the coin is actually following mechanical cause-and-effect from tiny air currents, imbalances in the flicking thumb, etc etc. But then we look at quantum events eg a radioactive emission. This is now completely undetermined (modulo the probability distribution from the Born rule), and people say it is ‘random’.
Notice that this is essentially a negative concept: randomness is not a positive force but an apparent absence of a force. This smells a bit fishy - causeless event - a bit difficult to conceptualise … but OK physics is replete with conceptually hard things.
So now let’s shift to mental monism. Everything that happens is produced by a conscious mind - either a personal mind or the background consciousness I call ‘metamind’ (Berkeley’s God, whatever). Whether it’s ‘deterministic’ or ‘random’ in the physical domain, it’s still an act of volition. As I see it, personal acts of volition are of the same type of thing as the metamind’s acts of seemingly deterministic action and seemingly random. The difference is my personal volitions are conditioned by the peculiarities of my mind. We’re dealing with a singular category of motive force, just volition. On this view, what we take to be permanent physical laws were volitional acts in the creation of this world, and are persistent in time. So, the question of whether our actions are free or driven by laws is a false dichotomy. Seemingly random events are acts of free will by the metamind; the creation of persistent laws are acts of free will by the metamind; my voluntary actions are acts of free will by an instantiation of the same universal agency (Brahman in the Advaita Vedanta).
I hope that brief summary makes sense.
Thanks for your alternative framing. Yeah, if we were dealing with a Tegmarkian universe then the two would be equivalent. But how would you account for free will and the ability of a brain to report nonphysical conscious experiences, if consciousness does not have the collapse as a means of intervening in the world. Are you supposing that the mind chooses the branch?
Yes, that is precisely what I am supposing, with one important qualification.
In the Block Universe, all branches already exist simultaneously as definite structures. The mind does not create the branch by choosing it. It finds itself correlated with a branch that was always already there.
The distinction matters. Collapse models require consciousness to produce a physical effect, a causal intervention that selects one outcome from a superposition. This faces the interaction problem you identified: how does a non-physical mind do physical work?
Navigation avoids this entirely. The mind does not intervene in the physics. It resonates with a specific branch of an atemporal structure. No new physics is required. No causal gap to bridge.
On free will: if all branches exist simultaneously, the question shifts from "can the mind change the physical outcome?" to "what determines which branch the mind finds itself on?" The answer, in my framework, is resonance, the alignment between the mind's state and the structure of a particular branch. This is not determinism because the mind is not inside the physical rendering. It is not randomness because the selection is not causeless. It is a third category: perspectival navigation through a complete structure.
Your metamind and my Sorgente are doing similar work. The difference is that in my system the structure is already complete and atemporal, so neither determinism nor free will applies at the fundamental level. Both are local descriptions of something that was always already resolved.
I should be transparent about one thing. Resonance as the selection mechanism is a primitive in my framework, not an explanation. I cannot specify its physical mechanism because the mind, in my system, is not inside the physical rendering. Every framework has a primitive at this point. Yours is volition. Mine is resonance.
What guided me toward navigation rather than collapse was not a conviction that my primitive is truer than yours. It was a preference for the primitive that requires the least additional physics inside the rendering. Collapse needs a causal bridge between the non-physical and the physical. Navigation does not. That asymmetry felt like the more conservative starting point.
Both primitives are pointing at the same mystery from different directions.
Well, I'm in a quantum superposition of agreement and disagreement. ;)
On the one hand, the metamind approach resonates with me. It is actually similar to my approach of universal consciousness manifested as a universal quantum field.
On the other hand, as you know, I don't agree with the idea that QM compels us to embrace the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation as a solution to the measurement problem, which ultimately leads to scarcely credible forms of idealism where we must believe the whole universe was in superposition and suddenly came into existence only once there was a conscious observer looking at it. Frankly, it makes no sense to me. My standpoint is that the metamind alone does all the heavy lifting, also in and through our individual minds and brains. This perspective doesn't require reality to collapse into existence only once one of us brings it about. Moreover, I would refine your theory by explaining more clearly how a conscious collapse could circumvent the objection that we should observe statistical deviations from the predictions of QM beyond the so-called "psi experiments". In my theory this is not necessary in the first place: one can have agency in the world with agential collapse but without postulating violations of the statistics predicted by the Schrödinger equation plus the Born rule, or invoking violations of energy conservation. Furthermore, the distinction between "physical" and "unphysical" is not clear. Saying that the physical is "unreal" and only the mental is "real" merely shifts the question from "un/physicality" to "un/reality" without really solving it. These are the points I expect referees to raise.
In any event, I'm fully on board with the archetypal understanding of reality and the metamind–QM connections. I think we are both, together with others, working towards something that is laying the groundwork for a paradigm shift in our scientific understanding of reality.
The distinction between agentic and non-agentic archetypes is elegant and addresses a real problem in idealist frameworks. If everything is mind, why doesn't everything collapse the wave function?
One question the framework raises for me: if agentic archetypes collapse superpositions through volitional acts, we still need to explain what determines which outcome they select. The collapse is attributed to consciousness, but the selection mechanism remains open.
An alternative framing: what if consciousness doesn't collapse anything? If the underlying structure is already complete and atemporal, containing all outcomes simultaneously, the agentic archetype doesn't select an outcome. It finds itself correlated with a branch that was always already definite.
The chair's archetype and the mind's archetype would then differ not in their power to collapse, but in their capacity to have a perspective at all. Non-agentic archetypes have no vantage point. Agentic ones do. And it's the vantage point, not the collapse, that makes the difference.
“we still need to explain what determines which outcome they select. The collapse is attributed to consciousness, but the selection mechanism remains open.”
This is a deceptively simple question, which requires that we stand back and look at a larger and more nuanced picture. I discussed this in more detail in this post: https://consceng.substack.com/p/free-will-and-idealism
In brief: the physicalist mindset, which I think we have all inherited, there are two ways things come about: deterministic cause-and-effect, and random chance. Probabilistic events are a combination. E.g. tossing a coin has a 50/50 chance of heads and tails, but the individual outcome is chance. If we drill down into that, we find that the coin is actually following mechanical cause-and-effect from tiny air currents, imbalances in the flicking thumb, etc etc. But then we look at quantum events eg a radioactive emission. This is now completely undetermined (modulo the probability distribution from the Born rule), and people say it is ‘random’.
Notice that this is essentially a negative concept: randomness is not a positive force but an apparent absence of a force. This smells a bit fishy - causeless event - a bit difficult to conceptualise … but OK physics is replete with conceptually hard things.
So now let’s shift to mental monism. Everything that happens is produced by a conscious mind - either a personal mind or the background consciousness I call ‘metamind’ (Berkeley’s God, whatever). Whether it’s ‘deterministic’ or ‘random’ in the physical domain, it’s still an act of volition. As I see it, personal acts of volition are of the same type of thing as the metamind’s acts of seemingly deterministic action and seemingly random. The difference is my personal volitions are conditioned by the peculiarities of my mind. We’re dealing with a singular category of motive force, just volition. On this view, what we take to be permanent physical laws were volitional acts in the creation of this world, and are persistent in time. So, the question of whether our actions are free or driven by laws is a false dichotomy. Seemingly random events are acts of free will by the metamind; the creation of persistent laws are acts of free will by the metamind; my voluntary actions are acts of free will by an instantiation of the same universal agency (Brahman in the Advaita Vedanta).
I hope that brief summary makes sense.
Thanks for your alternative framing. Yeah, if we were dealing with a Tegmarkian universe then the two would be equivalent. But how would you account for free will and the ability of a brain to report nonphysical conscious experiences, if consciousness does not have the collapse as a means of intervening in the world. Are you supposing that the mind chooses the branch?
Yes, that is precisely what I am supposing, with one important qualification.
In the Block Universe, all branches already exist simultaneously as definite structures. The mind does not create the branch by choosing it. It finds itself correlated with a branch that was always already there.
The distinction matters. Collapse models require consciousness to produce a physical effect, a causal intervention that selects one outcome from a superposition. This faces the interaction problem you identified: how does a non-physical mind do physical work?
Navigation avoids this entirely. The mind does not intervene in the physics. It resonates with a specific branch of an atemporal structure. No new physics is required. No causal gap to bridge.
On free will: if all branches exist simultaneously, the question shifts from "can the mind change the physical outcome?" to "what determines which branch the mind finds itself on?" The answer, in my framework, is resonance, the alignment between the mind's state and the structure of a particular branch. This is not determinism because the mind is not inside the physical rendering. It is not randomness because the selection is not causeless. It is a third category: perspectival navigation through a complete structure.
Your metamind and my Sorgente are doing similar work. The difference is that in my system the structure is already complete and atemporal, so neither determinism nor free will applies at the fundamental level. Both are local descriptions of something that was always already resolved.
I should be transparent about one thing. Resonance as the selection mechanism is a primitive in my framework, not an explanation. I cannot specify its physical mechanism because the mind, in my system, is not inside the physical rendering. Every framework has a primitive at this point. Yours is volition. Mine is resonance.
What guided me toward navigation rather than collapse was not a conviction that my primitive is truer than yours. It was a preference for the primitive that requires the least additional physics inside the rendering. Collapse needs a causal bridge between the non-physical and the physical. Navigation does not. That asymmetry felt like the more conservative starting point.
Both primitives are pointing at the same mystery from different directions.
Well, I'm in a quantum superposition of agreement and disagreement. ;)
On the one hand, the metamind approach resonates with me. It is actually similar to my approach of universal consciousness manifested as a universal quantum field.
On the other hand, as you know, I don't agree with the idea that QM compels us to embrace the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation as a solution to the measurement problem, which ultimately leads to scarcely credible forms of idealism where we must believe the whole universe was in superposition and suddenly came into existence only once there was a conscious observer looking at it. Frankly, it makes no sense to me. My standpoint is that the metamind alone does all the heavy lifting, also in and through our individual minds and brains. This perspective doesn't require reality to collapse into existence only once one of us brings it about. Moreover, I would refine your theory by explaining more clearly how a conscious collapse could circumvent the objection that we should observe statistical deviations from the predictions of QM beyond the so-called "psi experiments". In my theory this is not necessary in the first place: one can have agency in the world with agential collapse but without postulating violations of the statistics predicted by the Schrödinger equation plus the Born rule, or invoking violations of energy conservation. Furthermore, the distinction between "physical" and "unphysical" is not clear. Saying that the physical is "unreal" and only the mental is "real" merely shifts the question from "un/physicality" to "un/reality" without really solving it. These are the points I expect referees to raise.
In any event, I'm fully on board with the archetypal understanding of reality and the metamind–QM connections. I think we are both, together with others, working towards something that is laying the groundwork for a paradigm shift in our scientific understanding of reality.