This kind of thing has always seemed redundant to me. We already have a perfectly good understanding of how decoherence causes effective collapse, by making branches of the wavefunction unable to interfere with each other. This follows automatically from the basic rules of quantum mechanics, without having to add any extra ingredients, and is absolutely necessary to get the predictions to come out right (e.g. in cosmology, where there were no conscious observers at all).
This article proposes to add an extra, ad hoc collapse mechanism determined by a system's integrated information, but what's the point? At best, it will be a more complicated rephrasing of an effect that already happens automatically, in which case it is unnecessary by Occam's razor.
This all fell from Eugene Wigner's ideas, https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/experiments... -- and he was convinced (quite rightly in my opinion) that "consciousness" causes wave function collapse. The only mistake there perhaps is thinking that consciousness is unique to humans (or any "living" thing.) Consciousness itself has traditionally been defined as a product of the brain; I think at some point we'll figure out that the formation of the brain is more likely the result of consciousness. This implies that everything is "conscious" (i.e. any quanta), and that consciousness is better defined as something that is capable of updating its state as a result of observation, rather than something uniquely human. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory - a more recent view on the nature of reality, moves in theses lines and is something I myself subscribe to. Ultimately I believe that reality is subjective from the ground up, that there is no such thing as objective reality. This is hard to comprehend since we are hard wired to state things objectively. It's a form of the "many worlds" view, except you must remember that the idea that there "are" many worlds is an objective statement, and in a universe that is entirely subjective from the observer's point of view, this utterance is not compatible with that view. It's a form of solipsism, yes, but a strict one nonetheless.
I don't think it solves anything, it just "moves the cheese" by referencing (requiring?) an undefinable "consciousness". In the spirit of Gestalt, let's break this down a bit further to try to find the fine line.
A person is a conscious being.
What if said person is asleep or intoxicated and observes the The Double-Slit Experiment?
What if person is sedated ("unconscious")?
What if there is damage to the optic center of the brain limiting perception?
What about those who believe they can see but are quite blind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrom...) ?
And what about those who can see but falsely believe they cannot?(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-blindness-is...) Does this still impart consciousness upon the system?
What if one's optic nerve is severed but the eye is otherwise functional?
Is a dissected eyeball sufficient to cause wave collapse. If not, what additional elements of the mind are required? How much additional processing is enough?
Must it be an advanced, self-aware mind with a complex eye as found in a mammal or a cephalopod? What about a single-celled organelle in plankton which can observe light and react? (https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/plankton-s-eye-made-up-of...)
I think you're proposing that this is sufficient.
And what is special about just the visible spectrum of energy? What about radio waves? Does my Sony Walkman or a cat-whisker radio collapse the quanta? What about Infrared? etc? Do the leaves of a houseplant perform this act? What about physical vibration? Does a seismometer or accelerometer perform this quantum task?
>>consciousness is better defined as something that is capable of updating its state as a result of observation
This is extraordinarily broad. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle would then seem to illustrate that every subatomic particle is conscious.
I'll not address your points individually, but instead deal with your final notes. Yes, I believe that every quantum entity may observe and cause wave function collapse _in their subjective view of the universe_. It's easy to believe everything is objectively real whether observed or not because our local views - when compared - are highly correlated/decohered.
If you find yourself talking about what it means to observe by breaking down how the eye works, then you're aligned with Wigner's thoughts on it. I am not; an observation in my world is akin to an interaction with. It does not mean "awareness" in the sense that a brain might acknowledge something detected by the eye.
Agreed, although I do believe there is an objective reality, but that it is impossible for any one consciousness to know it. So for practical human purposes it does not exist.
Seems to be a far cry from explaining the Hard Problem of consciousness.
As for the meat of the text (pardon the pun, I just re-read “they’re made out of meat” yesterday), my amateur understanding is that there may be some degree of quantum effects in the microtubules of the brain, but that decoherence is very localized and limited, thus unlikely to have broader impact on physical systems at large. To this end, it’s unclear how a shared physical reality such as ours would allow for quantum effects from a measurement experiment, through the non quantum systems to the brain. Can someone explain the basis of the hypothesis presented by the paper in simple terms?
That's because he's not trying to explain it. The article is about quantum determinism. He offers two explanations, depending on how one views the source of consciousness, dualistically or physically. IIT doesn't explain consciousness. It's merely a correlation.
Lee Smolin’s book, “Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution” is largely about particle/wave duality and an alternate theory that never caught on: the Pilot Wave theory. It’s a Realist alternative to the Anti-Realist school of Heisenberg, etc.
As Feynman used to say, “nobody understands quantum physics”. I really don’t have a clue which theory is more “correct”. But the book’s interesting, and I recommend it.
Also, an exploration of consciousness and quantum physics is central to the Dalai Lama’s, “The universe in a single atom”. Another book I highly recommend. He’s passionate about science, and it’s a thought provoking book. In “The Profound Mind”, he goes further into various philosophies, and has some really interesting things to say on consciousness, subjectivity, etc.
Quantum Mechanics attracts a lot of “woo”. I didn’t find the Dalai Lama’s books to fall into that category — more philosophical than anything else. Just worth mentioning.
It’s a shame, in general, how much pseudoscience surrounds Quantum Mechanics — the reality of things is plenty interesting and confounding on its own! [Edit: not at all meant as a judgement on this particular article; just following a train of thought.]
Just skimmed over, but this is only about the oil droplets experiment - which would have been a great macroscopic model/demonstration of pilot wave theory.
If it fails the double slit experiment - then simply it is not a good macroscopic model/demonstration of the Broglie-Bohm quantum interpretation. But AFAIK Broglie-Bohm has been already proven to be equivalent to all the other popular quantum interpretations (if you give up locality), so it has not been falsified at all (and actually can't be - as it gives the same experimental forecasts as the other theories)
As far as I understand - we can make a random number generator decide if the automated observation of the photons passing the slits happens or not and then the pattern on the screen will change from one to the other randomly.
So we're pretty sure it's not consciousness that causes the collapse, right? Unless the RNG or the camera is conscious :)
How do you know that? Does the face a coin landed on when I tossed it with closed eyes exists before I open my eyes? If yes - how is that different? I can use a coin thrower for my RNG.
Panpsychism is really something that makes sense to me. It's a really parsimonious way of solving the hard problem of consciousness without getting into dualism or assuming anything special about matter that makes up sentient beings. I really don't think that testing this could ever be in the realm of physics, though.
I certainly find it a compelling theory, and I agree that it’s probably not testable. I lean toward consciousness being an illusion or simply non-existent. It kind of seems like we, by nature, reject this notion because it shatters our collective human psyche, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
On the other hand we have a hard time even defining consciousness.
Consciousness is probably the only thing that _cannot_ be an illusion. Whatever you may think, the fact that you are having an experience is the only thing you can know for sure (all the content of your experience could be planted into your mind, but you at least know that you are experiencing it). You really can't know if anyone else really exists and is having an experience, or if its all a dream filled with impersonators created by your own mind, but you know first hand that at least one experience is happening (your conscious experience).
Perhaps "the self", or "the idea that I am a being with a consciousness separate from all the universe" is an illusion.
> Whatever you may think, the fact that you are having an experience is the only thing you can know for sure
It seems to me that you’re defining consciousness as having thought (please correct me if I’m wrong). I’m ok with that, but I think at a minimum you’d have to agree that any creature is capable of having thought and therefore possessing of consciousness. If not, let’s say you’d argue that an ant is just reacting to chemical signals, I’d just say the same is true of humans.
Congratulations, you just re-invented Schrödinger's cat thought experiment [1]. One interpretation of this phenomenon is that the universe exists in a superposition of states until an observer causes the collapse through observation. What you dismiss as "such a stupid theory" is an idea/paradox that has confounded quantum physicists for decades.
I don't think anybody seriously thinks Schredringer's cat is in superposition in real world. It's a living macroscopic thing at room temperature, it interacts with the universe and would collapse immediately. So would the recording.
Well, you can scroll down to interpretations in the article I linked and choose any of the ones that fit your fancy. Or you can propose a new one. But acting like you are right and all other interpretations is wrong is merely hubris. As far as I am aware, this is an open issue and claiming that "... no on seriously thinks ..." isn't a valid or serious argument.
Except when we do the experiment in the real world we can't keep the quantum superposition for macroscopic objects from collapsing and now we're claiming it just happens because we don't know the answer.
That's the difference between declaring entangled photons be in superposition and declaring a tossed coin being in superposition because I covered it with my hand without looking.
One is state of the universe, the other is my lack of knowledge.
But sure - we can go on declaring everything entangled all the way up. Then we declare that the whole universe except the conscious observer is in a superposition of states until the observer decides to observe it or not.
The problem with that is that I'm a part of the universe and I have no proof that I have a free will independent of everything else. It just feels like it :)
So assuming everything waits for me to decide seems very self-centered and unjustified by the evidence as opposed to everything happening when it happens and my decision being predetermined like everything else.
> Except when we do the experiment in the real world we can't keep the quantum superposition for macroscopic objects from collapsing
No. You don't actually know that. Because the act of you "observing" this macroscopic object, could be the cause of this object collapsing.
So the macroscopic object that collapsed could be due the fact that you have observed it.
> One is state of the universe
You have no way of knowing the state of the universe, unless you have observed it. So if you are ever looking at any state of the universe, it is observed and has already collapsed.
> Then we declare that the whole universe except the conscious observer is in a superposition of states until the observer decides to observe it or not.
Yep that's the theory.
> I have no proof that I have a free will independent
Yes, that could be true as well.
> seems very self-centered and unjustified
So, here we get to the Crux of the matter. No matter where we say that the wave "collapses", it is all unfalsifiable.
It could be that the observes collapses it.
It could be that it was collapsed once it had any interactions with a photon or the smallest microscopic particle.
Or, as you pointed out, it could be that the universe has never collapsed, and the whole universe is in a super position right now.
And all of these positions are equally unfalsifiable. There IS no justification that any of these are correct, and there is no way of saying which is more justified.
So, yes, it is unjustified. But it is just as unjustified as any other collapse theory.
It is a fools errand to give arguments as for why one collapse theory is worse or better than any others, and they are all equally unfalsifiable.
It seems to me that one of these positions makes much more sense because it assumes the least unproven behaviour.
We measure the wave collapsed as if the cat died in minute 3 of being in the box (we can calculate that from the amount of CO2 and other methods). You say "we don't know if it really collapsed in minute 3, or collapsed now and retroactively made every measurable fact look like it happened in minute 3".
To me it sounds like "Earth can be 6000 years old - God simply made it look like it has billions of years". Sure I cannot experimentally distinguish between these options, but one is much simpler.
I guess with QM at least we "caught God doing the retroactive stuff" for small things, but we had no proof it had anything to do with consciousness, and it never seems to happen for macroscopic stuff.
It's like I see street lamp goes black when I'm near it and assume it's because I was close to it. It's easy illusion to get into, because you never see the lamps that go black when you're not around. But there's no justification that you/consciousness is needed.
You are once against picking a specific time as to when exactly collapse happens.
I would argue the opposite to you, actually, and instead say that the whole world is entangled, and the wave never collapses.
We can't even prove that collapse happens in the first place.
So, assuming that things never collapsed is actually the situation with the least amount of unproven assumptions, and it literally is not assuming that the collapse ever happens.
That's much better than saying that the wave function collapses at exactly the atomic level or something.
All of these points in time are arbitrary.
> retroactive stuff
There is nothing retroactive about any of this. Before collapse, it exists in a state of it not happening and happening at the same time. That's not retroactive.
> You are once against picking a specific time as to when exactly collapse happens.
Well Many Worlds assumes multiple universes that's kinda big assumption too. But I agree it's the most elegant interpretation.
> All of these points in time are arbitrary.
If we exclude Many Worlds then collapse happens. We have to conclude it can happen for microscopic objects at least.
What I cannot understand is how people then jump to assume it's consciousness that is the important distinction. What's the reasoning here? We can't even define it, we don't know if we have it, we don't know if it's important, why put it it physics?
> There is nothing retroactive about any of this. Before collapse, it exists in a state of it not happening and happening at the same time. That's not retroactive.
Ok, if you don't go back and recreate everything that happened when I observe it then you have to remember all the possible paths and chooses one of them when I look at it.
If I had to code the universe I wouldn't write it in such a way that it needs to remember everything that could happen but was never observed by a player :) Seems like a huge waste of resources if I could just as well cull the statetree early.
We even have an interaction that AFAIK cannot be isolated (gravity) - how's that working with the cat in a box? When it falls dead it curves spacetime outside of the box differently after all.
> AFAIK cannot be isolated (gravity) - how's that working with the cat in a box?
If you want to argue that the gravitation effect of something, causes the act to be "observed" by the person, that's fine. But that's still an observation.
That is still the person "observing" the effect, because they are now effected by it. And you have no way of knowing when exactly the wave function collapsed.
It could have collapsed at any time.
So back to your original example, it would not be the camera recording it that collapses it, it would be the gravity waves being "observed", or whatever.
Sean Carroll mentions something to the effect that we are just part of the measurement. I personally feel more comfortable with that explanation as it seems detached from the human need to feel special.
I just don't see why consciousness would require any sort of special physics. We live in a world full of emergent phenomena, and consciousness seems like it should just be another one of them.
This is all neatly sidestepped by many-worlds: the wavefunction collapses that you observe send you down one trouser of time. It may look like you're influencing the world, but you're really just being dragged along by it. Non-sentient things are doing the same thing in the same way.
There is no collapse. One can create pairs of entangled particles and send streams of these in opposite directions - left and right for example. When particles on the left are measured, it causes the so-called collapse of the wave function and that of its paired particle that went to the right. This means one can "collapse" the wave functions of one stream of particles (right) by taking measurements of the other (left). The thing is, the particles on the right behave exactly the same way regardless of weather their wave function has been collapsed. In other words, no one can tell if this collapse has even occurred. Why is it talked about as a discrete event?
I’m not sure I follow. Aren’t entangled particles in superposition until they’re measured? That would mean we have no way of saying they behaved the same way, until we measure them — at which point the “spin” of the particles will be random and opposite.
Also, “measurement” doesn’t have to mean “by a human”. Particles in effect “measure” each other when they collide — which is one theory as to why we don’t see quantum effects at a macro scale — there’s too much stuff colliding into each other, collapsing the wave function.
A book that’s pretty fascinating in this regard is “Life at the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology”. It explores how birds navigate the magnetic field via quantum effects that we once thought couldn’t “survive” at a macro scale. Fascinating.
It seems to me that you can't think that consciousness causes quantum collapse, and also hold to a purely materialist idea of consciousness. Because if consciousness is a purely material phenomenon, then it arises from a bunch of interactions of quantum systems. Then "consciousness causes quantum collapse" reduces to "a bunch of quantum interactions cause quantum collapse", which is kind of unhelpful.
To put it a different way: For this to make any sense, consciousness has to be something different. It can't be just material.
How many people believe in both CCC and materialism though? Virtually all physicists, who tend toward materialism, have rejected CCC; the people who believe in CCC tend to be panpsychists already. You're correct but kind of aiming at a strawman.
The concept that consciousness might cause quantum collapse is untestable. Quantum systems that have not been observed by conscious observers are fundamentally unobservable, by definition. Let me put that another way. No conscious mind will ever be able to observe anything about a quantum system that has never been observed by a conscious mind.
I mean, this is so far out of my wheel house I can't even claim to know anything about this stuff. But why couldn't a form of an unconscious camera exist? We could theoretically just look at pictures of the past from an unconscious camera and therefore never collapse the system?
I think the idea is that once you look at the picture, that's a mind observing the event. The system "collapses" when it grows big enough that a consequence of it affects you.
This should be similar to the idea explored by the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.
Though we observe the effects of the double slit experiment on the wall with the interference pattern. Thereby not collapsing the system and taking a screenshot of the un-collapsed system?
I would argue the wall is an unconscious camera in my example. Because when observed during the experiment, the interference pattern disappears. But not if it's observed after.
Secondly, the more and more I re-read the parent comment. The less and less sense it makes.
>No conscious mind will ever be able to observe anything about a quantum system that has never been observed by a conscious mind.
That isn't really true in concept though, as in my example, we observed a quantum system at play that wasn't observed during its' "execution" so to speak. We literally wouldn't be discussing quantum experiments and quantum experimental phenomena if his statement was "completely" true.
The camera's unconscious record of the past would just be deemed to exist in an uncertain state until it has been observed by a human. Same if you'd trained a pigeon to watch and report the results.
In looking at the photo you observe the system and collapse it. There is no difference between your eye and the camera. Both connect the quantum system to your conciousness.
Everything causes quantum collapse. The major engineering challenge of quantum computing is getting a computer to not cause collapse for long enough to do your computations.
But saying a system is at room temperature is actually just a way of expressing your ignorance about a system's microstate. It's taking off your glasses and saying "I don't have any idea what this system is doing in detail, all I personally know is how much energy it has per degree of freedom in the system".
Not necessarily. All apparent casual connections are just an artifact of the timeflow, which on its own might be nothing but a consequence of a particular coordinate choice.
If I understand you correctly, the timeflow would be different with a different coordinate choice. That can't be right - the physical results would be different simply because of a coordinate choice.
The physical results might be the same. Imagine your universe is that of an empty 2D plane with a single unit circle in it and you use euclidean metric, but 1 of 2 coordinates you experience as time. From your perspective the life of the matter in that universe starts at T0 as a point, then grows to a line of length 2, then shrinks back to a point.
Now there might even be a "physical law", describing the evolution of that line as "time" goes (and I am sure there is a simple one), that has "cause" and "effect". But in the end no matter which direction you choose as "time", the law is the same.
Now I leave the question of how can you exist in this universe open (or rather obviously impossible in any meaningful sense), but there might be other more complex constructs, that permit "intelligence" along a certain dimension, and it is another question whether our universe is one of these.
"Observation" involves interacting with the system under test, thereby necessarily changing the system. It is this interaction that results in quantum collapse.
Yes.
With our consciousness, we become curious and ask questions. We devise experiments that lead to quantum collapse.
Is "consciousness" the only cause of quantum collapse? I guess that depends on the simulation we're in.
For a slightly better answer we need physicists rather than philosphers - and need to consider at what scale the quantum measures work - and what scale they're observing at.
This was brought up in the energy healing episode of Netflix’s Goop docuseries.
The tools physics uses to measure elementary particles lacking the precision to not disturb the system being observed is a failure of the tools and not sufficient to reasonably imply that human consciousness has anything to do with the fact that observing a system disturbs the system under observation.
Far more interesting and grounded along these lines is Penrose’s Orch OR; consciousness is a fundamental physical structure or law of the universe itself that our brains have evolved to access.
This article proposes to add an extra, ad hoc collapse mechanism determined by a system's integrated information, but what's the point? At best, it will be a more complicated rephrasing of an effect that already happens automatically, in which case it is unnecessary by Occam's razor.