Both of the above books are revolutionary attempts to bring consciousness back into the scientific picture of reality from which it was excluded by Descartes and Galileo during the Renaissance. Both of them are basically correct (IMO) but they are also both incomplete.
In Nagel’s case the incompleteness is due to the fact he’s neglected to pay enough attention to physics – to quantum mechanics. The only thing he says about QM is that because it is probabilistic, it provides scope for the teleological evolution of conscious organisms (“psychegenesis” in my own terminology) that he’s arguing is the only reasonable naturalistic explanation still remaining on the table after materialism is rejected. He does not mention the measurement problem or any of the interpretations.
In Stapp’s case the incompleteness is because he does not mention evolution at all. His theory involves what he calls “the Participating Observer” collapsing the wavefunction (this is not an optional part of his theory – it’s what the whole thing is about). But both of them accept that brains are required for minds (minds are complex things, the PO is not a mind but the observer of a mind). This leaves us with the question “What collapsed the wave function before the first conscious organism evolved?”, and Stapp makes no attempt to answer it. The problem is that if something else was collapsing the wavefunction before conscious organisms existed in the cosmos, then why would we need to posit consciousness as collapsing the wavefunction now?
This looks like a fatal problem to the people who raise it as an objection to Stapp’s theory. But it is not. There is a very obvious default answer. What collapses the wavefunction before conscious organisms did? Answer: nothing did. And if nothing was collapsing the wavefunction during that phase of cosmic and biological evolution, then the cosmos can only have been in an MWI-like superstate. Every possible outcome would be occurring in an ever-expanding MWI-like multiverse. This would absolutely guarantee that in one very special timeline, all of the events take place which lead to the evolution of conscious organisms. Then at the moment that psychegenesis is completed in that special timeline – the abiogenesis-psychegenesis timeline – the primordial wavefunction would have collapsed. This provides a perfect, beautiful explanation for Nagel’s teleological evolution but without the need for any of the teleological laws that Nagel says we should be looking for. Not only do we not need these teleological laws, we don’t need God either. Or at least, we don’t need a God which is capable of making decisions about the course of evolution – we don’t need any divine intelligence. Everything needed to make it happen is already there.
Please somebody tell me they have understood what I am trying to explain. I believe it is the key to unlocking the whole paradigm shift we’re trying to manifest. Between them, Nagel and Stapp are providing almost everything needed as a scientific foundation for 2R. My argument above joins their two theories together not only with each other but with a whole bunch of other stuff too. It provides the missing explanation for the Cambrian Explosion. It explains why we can’t find any aliens out there – because the primordial superposition could only collapse once – psychegenesis could only happen in one timeline, and only on one planet. Which puts Earth back at the centre of the universe. And we’ve got rid of the measurement problem in QM, and the hard problem of consciousness. And it doesn’t end there. This opens up a whole new paradigm to explore. The implications are mind-boggling and I’ve never had anybody to discuss this stuff with.
Does anybody get it?
Edit: to help people understand. What is completely new about my own proposal is that it combines two radically different interpretations of quantum theory. It proposes that there have been two phases to cosmic and biological evolution. Something like MWI was true before conscious life existed, and consciousness has been causing the collapse since then. The phase shift occurred just before the beginning of the Cambrian explosion. What we’ve failed to understand is that at that moment it wasn’t just a new branch of life that came into existence (conscious animals), but that a new sort of existence had emerged. This is exactly what Nagel says we should be looking for:
What has to be explained is not just the lacing of organic life with tincture of qualia but the coming into existence of subjective individual points of view – a type of existence logically distinct from anything describable by the physical sciences alone.
On their own, neither Stapp nor Nagel are providing enough of the picture. You have to put them together before the gestalt shift can take place.
I have never encountered another person who has read both of these books. I have so far only encountered one person who understood the core idea when I explained it briefly to them. He was a French physicist I ran into on Reddit, who was somewhat frustrated at how poorly understood the interpretations of QM are within the wider scientific community.