Dear David,



I’ve been working through your non-materialist physicalism (Hilbert-space realism, “fire in the equations,” and the binding-by-coherence thesis). To check I’ve got the picture right, may I run a few precise questions by you?



  1. Ontology and mapping







  1. Do you identify a single “phenomenal moment” with a pure state |\psi\rangle (or its projector P=|\psi\rangle\langle\psi|) of some brain-localized subspace of the universal Hilbert space, or with a larger entangled state that only approximately factors to “the brain”?

  2. Is subjecthood tied to support of |\psi\rangle within a particular tensor-factorization (e.g., \mathcal H_{\text{brain}} \otimes \mathcal H_{\text{env}})? How do you avoid basis-dependence when individuating subjects?







  1. Phases, basis, and invariants







  1. When you say “phase information is phenomenally relevant,” do you mean relative phases of amplitudes in a chosen feature basis (color, shape, etc.)? If so, what fixes that basis—neural encoding, decoherence, or something principled?

  2. Are there basis-independent characterizations of qualia (e.g., via spectrum of \rho, entanglement measures, or gauge-invariant phase holonomies), or is the phenomenology essentially basis-relative to neurofunctionally defined coordinates?







  1. Binding and (in)coherence







  1. Is phenomenal binding literally the presence of off-diagonal terms in \rho spanning distributed feature subspaces (i.e., task-relevant coherences), and “mind-dust” the corresponding diagonal mixture?

  2. Do you expect these coherences to be inter-neuronal, intra-neuronal (e.g., within dendritic trees or membranes), or at sub-neuronal substrates? What spatial extent matters?







  1. Timescales and dynamics







  1. You often point to sub-femtosecond coherent “frames.” What sets that scale (energy gaps, molecular vibrational bands, electronic times)? What lower/upper bounds do you actually endorse?

  2. What is the concrete story for temporal integration: how do fs-coherent moments yield ms-scale reportable contents? Is there a proposed readout/integration operator or known neural mechanism that accumulates or phase-locks these micro-events?

  3. Do classical rhythms (gamma, beta…) play any constitutive role, or are they purely epiphenomenal readouts of the underlying quantum story?







  1. Testability and falsification







  1. On your molecular matter-wave interferometry proposal: which degrees of freedom are the best targets (membrane electrons, ion channels, aromatic rings, microtubules you don’t privilege, etc.)? What mass/coherence length and de Broglie wavelength do you think are required to see task-locked interference?

  2. What would falsify the account in your view: (a) repeated failure to find any task-relevant brain coherence beyond trivial thermal noise; (b) finding coherence, but never aligned with the classically implicated neurons; or something stronger?

  3. Are there near-term indirect signatures you expect (e.g., specific anesthetic effects that selectively scramble relative phase while sparing firing rates; distinctive pump–probe spectra; phase-specific perturbation via ultrafast pulses)?







  1. Relation to Orch-OR and standard objections







  1. Relative to Penrose–Hameroff: you reject gravity-induced collapse and keep unitary dynamics. Are your substrates and predicted timescales otherwise overlapping, or do you see your target DOFs as fundamentally different?

  2. On Tegmark-style decoherence rates: you embrace “too-fast” decoherence as a feature. What minimum coherence time and coherence topology are necessary and sufficient for a bound phenomenal moment?







  1. Scope, ethics, and edge cases







  1. Does the view imply panpsychism strictly speaking, or only pan-experiential structure where there is the right kind of coherence? Is moral salience proportional to any quantitative coherence measure?

  2. Can there be superpositions that correspond to multiple subjects at once, or is a “subject” always tied to a single bound state? How do you treat dreaming, anesthesia, and split-brain in this formalism?







  1. Worked examples and math desiderata







  1. Could you sketch a minimal worked toy model (explicit |\psi\rangle, basis, phases) for a tiny “red-circle” percept, and show how altering relative phases changes the qualitative character while keeping amplitudes fixed?

  2. Do you favor any specific entanglement or coherence metric (e.g., mutual information across feature partitions) as a candidate correlate of phenomenal unity/intensity?





If you’ve already addressed any of these in a compact spot, a pointer would be perfect. Thanks for taking the time—these clarifications would help me (and others) engage your proposal at the right technical level.



Best,

Jan 




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