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Looking out for quantum consciousness in articles about quantum physics would be a good drinking game, though here it is handled with a proper amount of sceptic

Looking out for quantum consciousness in articles about quantum physics would be a good drinking game, though here it is handled with a proper amount of scepticism. The pressure is enormous for writers to include mumbo-jumbo, because people click on these articles expecting to find out that it's possible to alter the Universe with psyhic abilities, which is how quantum physics is represented in social media, especially TikTok.

ThalesX 4y ago
Having been passionate about this for awhile, I have a layman’s surface overview of the state of physics, or I like to believe so. It amused me to no end when my elderly aunt came to ask me for a tl;dr; on Quantum Physics. She stopped me shortly asking how she can control the universe with her mind. I tried to explain a bit about the famous interpretation (Copenhagen, not Von Neumann–Wigner) but she would have none of it because the business course she just attended had a segment on how to control the universe and proceeded to disregard and mock me.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  To be fair, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really fit today's world view. We have largely moved away from viewing humans or "consciousness" as something special, so the notion that an observer collapses the wave function just seems weird now. "Many worlds" or "the wave function never collapses, you are in a superposition" both make much more sense with how we currently view the world
  - ericmay 4y ago
    I’d say a good heuristic would be to include all mammals in any theory about consciousness, wave function collapse, quantum consciousness, etc. and then see if the theory still holds up. If it does, you are probably on to something. I think scientifically we will look back on “humans are uniquely conscious” as a categorical differentiation instead of a gradient with other mammals to be as absurd as believing the earth is the center of the universe. “Unique consciousness” is a quasi-religious mechanism we use at a societal level to not run around all the time terrified of death.
    - Comevius 4y ago
      No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal. As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures. https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271
      - snowwrestler 4y ago
        A mental trick that helped me understand the concept of “an observer” in particle physics is to imagine it like playing billiards in a pitch black room. In normal human-scale billiards, there are immense numbers of photons flying around bouncing off everything. The photon interactions are far too small to affect the path of a moving billiard ball, but we can detect them easily with our eyes. So we can use photons to passively observe the balls rolling around. But when you’re trying to observe a photon itself… there are no tiny photon-equivalents flying around. It’s like playing billiards in pitch black: the only way to know which direction a ball is rolling is to touch it. And you can’t touch a rolling billiard ball without changing its path somehow. Likewise, you can’t “observe” a single photon without interacting with it in some way.
        JackFr 4y ago
        I know all analogies are imperfect, but that is a really great one. It really captures the problem of observing so elegantly.
        Dx5IQ 4y ago
        Observer effect while applicable is distinct from Quantum Weirdness aka Heisenberg Uncertainty
        Comevius 4y ago
        This is a great analogy, but also in experiments the presence or absence of the measuring device like a beamsplitter determines the outcome. The measuring device, the which-way detector is the observer, and it can be regarded as a quantum mechanical system. It's correlations with the rest of the system causes the particle behavior.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    The Copenhagen interpretation never defined an observer that way. It's a non-interpretation basically, just shut up and calculate, which is still the most widely accepted approach among scientists, since there are no other falsifiable interpretations.
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      I'm reminded of learning about the grandfather paradox as a kid. I recall hearing shit about scientists saying if you were to travel back in time, you would be compelled by a universal force to do things that don't alter the future and create a paradox. Even as a kid, that sounded so idiotic. In retrospect it was almost certainly the reporting that was wrong.
      - iainmerrick 4y ago
        Is that really so weird? That's a very common version of time travel in SF, perhaps the most common. You can travel back in time, and you think you're changing history, but through a series of unlikely coincidences you end up being the person who created the history you were trying to change. Come to think of it, maybe that's more common in short stories, where the "gotcha!" format works. It's probably harder to spin that unchangeable-history gimmick out to novel length, whereas "you can change history and it has endless weird side effects" can work well in long form. I can't think off-hand of any time travel novels with unchangeable history.
        spywaregorilla 4y ago
        It's not weird. It's fun. But it's stupid as a serious time travel proposal. Things like "travel in back in time 5 seconds unless you see your future self is already there" create a hard paradox that this logic cannot solve. Time loops are easily broken by anyone interested in testing them.
        iainmerrick 4y ago
        You sound as confident as the protagonist of many a time travel short story! Edit to add: your comment reminded me specifically of a Ted Chiang story, "What's Expected Of Us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a I found that link via a blog post that excoriates it for its supposed logical fallacies: https://loopingworld.com/2019/07/13/debunking-ted-chiang-recurring-idea-exhalation/ https://loopingworld.com/2019/07/13/debunking-ted-chiang-rec.... I don't necessarily agree or disagree with that, but I do disagree that it's "obviously" logically wrong or inconsistent.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    You're thinking of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, not Copenhagen.
  - telmo 4y ago
    I also prefer the Many Worlds interpretation and I do think that it is gaining popularity in relation to Copenhagen, but I'm not sure what you mean by "today's world view". And who is this "we" that you write about? I prefer Many Worlds because it is a simpler explanation, so I follow Occam's razor. That's it. Consciousness and the existence of qualia remains a fundamental mystery. There is something definitely special about it, in the sense that it currently does not fit any scientific model. It is also a deep philosophical problem that started being considered millennia ago and dates at least all the way back to Plato vs Aristotle. In my experience, people who think that consciousness is somehow a settled matter simply haven't thought about it enough and are perhaps a bit naive on the many ramifications of the issue that have been explored do far.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      What surprises me is not that many people think consciousness is a settled matter; but rather, people who, when faced with the claim that "consciousness" isn't settled, are so often tempted to assert that it is that they rapidly provide another example of how it isn't.
    - didericis 4y ago
      Exactly. A related deep millennia old observation is that no one has actually seen the real world. Everything we’ve ever experienced has been filtered through our minds. Every experiment, every measuring device, every meticulously crafted model of reality… it is all inescapably limited by what we are able to experience. One could and many have argued that the reality we’ve been observing and operating in is consciousness. The “real” world could be entirely different and largely inaccessible. These kinds of thought exercises don’t have much practical utility, apart from one very important feature; they humble you. At the end of the day we don’t fundamentally know anything, and should always recognize that at its most basic root level, everything we do is an educated guess. A fundamentally skeptical and curious outlook that acknowledges our perceptual limitations is how we got all of the sophisticated models of very difficult to observe phenomenon in the first place. If we want to continue to get the best understanding of whatever it is we’re experiencing, I think it’s very important to stay humble and ensure our knowledge is treated as a hard earned set of well reasoned guesses rather than unquestionable dogma. 99.9% of objections to well established ideas and models might be a waste of time entertaining, but you never know what might turn out to be the seeds of a whole new universe of understanding that invalidates huge swaths of our existing corpus of knowledge. Most of what I’m saying here is probably obvious to a lot of readers, and I don’t think anyone in this thread is being particularly arrogant or dogmatic, but I think it’s worth reiterating. If people who understand the limits of knowledge aren’t constantly emphasizing the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, that creates fertile ground for both dogmatic assertions and unreasonable skepticism, and I think a huge amount of dysfunction in the culture at large is explained by insufficient well calibrated humility amongst otherwise very intelligent people who set an example for others.
  - dizzant 4y ago
    > We have largely moved away from viewing humans or “consciousness” as something special. Who is “we” in this comment? Christianity and Islam emphasize consciousness and the uniqueness of human experience, and their adherents still account more than 50% of the population. As much popularity as the many worlds theory is gaining, the generic “we” almost certainly still doesn’t believe it, and many (most?) probably don’t even know about it.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The CI has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness. The CI view is simply "when a quantum system interacts with a measurement device, the wave function of the quantum system changes to one of some subset of real values, with a probability given by the modulus of the amplitude of that value in the wave function". Exactly what constitutes a measurement apparatus is undefined, but it certainly doesn't involve a human. In fact, it is precisely the MWI that requires human observers for its explanations, at least to some extent, as it makes the entire notion of a classical world a fiction that only exists inside your own head because you are the one that's getting entangled with a quantum system. Any probability you compute in MWI is relative to you personally, since in MWI any possible event happens with probability 1 when checking at the universe level.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I don't really understand much of quantum physics - I'd say as much as someone with a passing interest in chemistry would need to (and that's pretty focused on what groups of electrons get up to), but every once in awhile I'll read about the actual problems and experiments that the old Nobel laureates got up to and all of a sudden something will fall into place. A big key was reading about the ultraviolet catastrophe and how Max Planck basically just played around with equations and sort of hit on quantizing energy levels and almost accidentally invented quantum mechanics. If my education had just been a history of all the discoveries in physics from the end 19th to mid 20th centuries (and to be fair to my education that was mixed in a bit), I think I would have been served a lot better, but I also acknowledge that could be down to my individual way of learning.
- causi 4y ago
  What I don't understand is why we call it "observation" when it should really be "interaction". The quantum weirdness resulting from the collapse of probabilities has nothing to do with a conscious observer, just whether and at what point the phenomena in question interact with something else in an observable way.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > What I don't understand is why we call it "observation" when it should really be "interaction" […] at what point the phenomena in question interact with something else in an observable way. That’s why. If it’s observable it could be observed by an observer in an observation.
  - abecedarius 4y ago
    Well, an interaction that leaves a persistent change in state in the "observer".
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Because when an object "interacts" with another object, it goes into a quantum superposition with that object. It is only when we observe that we don't see the superposition. The obvious implication that people don't like to talk about is that there is nothing special about observation, it is just that our own body goes into superposition and we only subjectively experience one of the quantum states.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      > there is nothing special about observation [...] we only subjectively experience one of the quantum states That subjective experience seem something special! There is nothing special about quantum superpositions - they are pure quantum states like any other. They are superpositions when we consider them in a particular basis. How does the subjective experience project your body - and the rest of the universe - onto one element of the right basis?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yucky 4y ago
Isn't it safe to assume that everything on TikTok is make-believe though?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  What is the point of this sort of joke? Just to confirm that we all think of ourselves as superior to anyone using tiktok? It's probably overall neither much more or less reliable than other social media like reddit, twitter, instagram and, sorry boys, HN.
  - yucky 4y ago
    It's not a joke. Social media is heavily curated for a specific agenda/angle (at best) and generally full of dis/misinformation. Why on earth would anybody consider what they see on social media to be representative of reality?
omnicognate 4y ago
Except that in this context it isn't mumbo-jumbo at all. It's a falsifiable theory proposed by one of the most distinguished mathematical physicists in the world, in the process of being falsified. Perfectly respectable, though highly speculative, science. The article didn't include it for lulz and clicks. It's directly relevant.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  No one apart from Penrose took it seriously. You might as well say that Russell's Teapot is falsifiable because you only need to look through a finite amount of space to prove it's not there.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    The theory made predictions that could be - and have been (read the article) - shown false. Do you have some other definition of falsifiability?
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      If you read the article there is still plenty of room for those effects to hide in, just like there was before these experiments were done. No one has changed their minds because of this.
      - omnicognate 4y ago
        You mean the bit where he's working on a version of Orch OR that doesn't cause bremsstrahlung? That's coming up with a new theory. You can always go away and change the theory. This isn't one of those overparameterised theory generators that can trivially explain every possible observation. He will have to materially change it to accommodate this. And why shouldn't he explore what changes would be needed to accommodate the new evidence? That's not the behaviour of a crank convinced his theory must be right regardless of any evidence. It's just a natural thing to think about when a theory is falsified. He's never described Orch OR as anything more than speculative. And frankly, what else would you expect him to do? He's 91. It's astonishing that he's still doing this sort of work at all. He's hardly going to start from scratch with a completely fresh theory at this stage, although if anybody could it would be Penrose.

ThalesX 4y ago

Having been passionate about this for awhile, I have a layman’s surface overview of the state of physics, or I like to believe so. It amused me to no end when my elderly aunt came to ask me for a tl;dr; on Quantum Physics. She stopped me shortly asking how she can control the universe with her mind. I tried to explain a bit about the famous interpretation (Copenhagen, not Von Neumann–Wigner) but she would have none of it because the business course she just attended had a segment on how to control the universe and proceeded to disregard and mock me.

wongarsu 4y ago
To be fair, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really fit today's world view. We have largely moved away from viewing humans or "consciousness" as something special, so the notion that an observer collapses the wave function just seems weird now. "Many worlds" or "the wave function never collapses, you are in a superposition" both make much more sense with how we currently view the world
- ericmay 4y ago
  I’d say a good heuristic would be to include all mammals in any theory about consciousness, wave function collapse, quantum consciousness, etc. and then see if the theory still holds up. If it does, you are probably on to something. I think scientifically we will look back on “humans are uniquely conscious” as a categorical differentiation instead of a gradient with other mammals to be as absurd as believing the earth is the center of the universe. “Unique consciousness” is a quasi-religious mechanism we use at a societal level to not run around all the time terrified of death.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal. As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures. https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271
    - snowwrestler 4y ago
      A mental trick that helped me understand the concept of “an observer” in particle physics is to imagine it like playing billiards in a pitch black room. In normal human-scale billiards, there are immense numbers of photons flying around bouncing off everything. The photon interactions are far too small to affect the path of a moving billiard ball, but we can detect them easily with our eyes. So we can use photons to passively observe the balls rolling around. But when you’re trying to observe a photon itself… there are no tiny photon-equivalents flying around. It’s like playing billiards in pitch black: the only way to know which direction a ball is rolling is to touch it. And you can’t touch a rolling billiard ball without changing its path somehow. Likewise, you can’t “observe” a single photon without interacting with it in some way.
      - JackFr 4y ago
        I know all analogies are imperfect, but that is a really great one. It really captures the problem of observing so elegantly.
      - Dx5IQ 4y ago
        Observer effect while applicable is distinct from Quantum Weirdness aka Heisenberg Uncertainty
      - Comevius 4y ago
        This is a great analogy, but also in experiments the presence or absence of the measuring device like a beamsplitter determines the outcome. The measuring device, the which-way detector is the observer, and it can be regarded as a quantum mechanical system. It's correlations with the rest of the system causes the particle behavior.
- Comevius 4y ago
  The Copenhagen interpretation never defined an observer that way. It's a non-interpretation basically, just shut up and calculate, which is still the most widely accepted approach among scientists, since there are no other falsifiable interpretations.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    I'm reminded of learning about the grandfather paradox as a kid. I recall hearing shit about scientists saying if you were to travel back in time, you would be compelled by a universal force to do things that don't alter the future and create a paradox. Even as a kid, that sounded so idiotic. In retrospect it was almost certainly the reporting that was wrong.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      Is that really so weird? That's a very common version of time travel in SF, perhaps the most common. You can travel back in time, and you think you're changing history, but through a series of unlikely coincidences you end up being the person who created the history you were trying to change. Come to think of it, maybe that's more common in short stories, where the "gotcha!" format works. It's probably harder to spin that unchangeable-history gimmick out to novel length, whereas "you can change history and it has endless weird side effects" can work well in long form. I can't think off-hand of any time travel novels with unchangeable history.
      - spywaregorilla 4y ago
        It's not weird. It's fun. But it's stupid as a serious time travel proposal. Things like "travel in back in time 5 seconds unless you see your future self is already there" create a hard paradox that this logic cannot solve. Time loops are easily broken by anyone interested in testing them.
        iainmerrick 4y ago
        You sound as confident as the protagonist of many a time travel short story! Edit to add: your comment reminded me specifically of a Ted Chiang story, "What's Expected Of Us": https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a I found that link via a blog post that excoriates it for its supposed logical fallacies: https://loopingworld.com/2019/07/13/debunking-ted-chiang-recurring-idea-exhalation/ https://loopingworld.com/2019/07/13/debunking-ted-chiang-rec.... I don't necessarily agree or disagree with that, but I do disagree that it's "obviously" logically wrong or inconsistent.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  You're thinking of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation, not Copenhagen.
- telmo 4y ago
  I also prefer the Many Worlds interpretation and I do think that it is gaining popularity in relation to Copenhagen, but I'm not sure what you mean by "today's world view". And who is this "we" that you write about? I prefer Many Worlds because it is a simpler explanation, so I follow Occam's razor. That's it. Consciousness and the existence of qualia remains a fundamental mystery. There is something definitely special about it, in the sense that it currently does not fit any scientific model. It is also a deep philosophical problem that started being considered millennia ago and dates at least all the way back to Plato vs Aristotle. In my experience, people who think that consciousness is somehow a settled matter simply haven't thought about it enough and are perhaps a bit naive on the many ramifications of the issue that have been explored do far.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    What surprises me is not that many people think consciousness is a settled matter; but rather, people who, when faced with the claim that "consciousness" isn't settled, are so often tempted to assert that it is that they rapidly provide another example of how it isn't.
  - didericis 4y ago
    Exactly. A related deep millennia old observation is that no one has actually seen the real world. Everything we’ve ever experienced has been filtered through our minds. Every experiment, every measuring device, every meticulously crafted model of reality… it is all inescapably limited by what we are able to experience. One could and many have argued that the reality we’ve been observing and operating in is consciousness. The “real” world could be entirely different and largely inaccessible. These kinds of thought exercises don’t have much practical utility, apart from one very important feature; they humble you. At the end of the day we don’t fundamentally know anything, and should always recognize that at its most basic root level, everything we do is an educated guess. A fundamentally skeptical and curious outlook that acknowledges our perceptual limitations is how we got all of the sophisticated models of very difficult to observe phenomenon in the first place. If we want to continue to get the best understanding of whatever it is we’re experiencing, I think it’s very important to stay humble and ensure our knowledge is treated as a hard earned set of well reasoned guesses rather than unquestionable dogma. 99.9% of objections to well established ideas and models might be a waste of time entertaining, but you never know what might turn out to be the seeds of a whole new universe of understanding that invalidates huge swaths of our existing corpus of knowledge. Most of what I’m saying here is probably obvious to a lot of readers, and I don’t think anyone in this thread is being particularly arrogant or dogmatic, but I think it’s worth reiterating. If people who understand the limits of knowledge aren’t constantly emphasizing the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, that creates fertile ground for both dogmatic assertions and unreasonable skepticism, and I think a huge amount of dysfunction in the culture at large is explained by insufficient well calibrated humility amongst otherwise very intelligent people who set an example for others.
- dizzant 4y ago
  > We have largely moved away from viewing humans or “consciousness” as something special. Who is “we” in this comment? Christianity and Islam emphasize consciousness and the uniqueness of human experience, and their adherents still account more than 50% of the population. As much popularity as the many worlds theory is gaining, the generic “we” almost certainly still doesn’t believe it, and many (most?) probably don’t even know about it.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The CI has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness. The CI view is simply "when a quantum system interacts with a measurement device, the wave function of the quantum system changes to one of some subset of real values, with a probability given by the modulus of the amplitude of that value in the wave function". Exactly what constitutes a measurement apparatus is undefined, but it certainly doesn't involve a human. In fact, it is precisely the MWI that requires human observers for its explanations, at least to some extent, as it makes the entire notion of a classical world a fiction that only exists inside your own head because you are the one that's getting entangled with a quantum system. Any probability you compute in MWI is relative to you personally, since in MWI any possible event happens with probability 1 when checking at the universe level.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I don't really understand much of quantum physics - I'd say as much as someone with a passing interest in chemistry would need to (and that's pretty focused on what groups of electrons get up to), but every once in awhile I'll read about the actual problems and experiments that the old Nobel laureates got up to and all of a sudden something will fall into place. A big key was reading about the ultraviolet catastrophe and how Max Planck basically just played around with equations and sort of hit on quantizing energy levels and almost accidentally invented quantum mechanics. If my education had just been a history of all the discoveries in physics from the end 19th to mid 20th centuries (and to be fair to my education that was mixed in a bit), I think I would have been served a lot better, but I also acknowledge that could be down to my individual way of learning.
causi 4y ago
What I don't understand is why we call it "observation" when it should really be "interaction". The quantum weirdness resulting from the collapse of probabilities has nothing to do with a conscious observer, just whether and at what point the phenomena in question interact with something else in an observable way.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > What I don't understand is why we call it "observation" when it should really be "interaction" […] at what point the phenomena in question interact with something else in an observable way. That’s why. If it’s observable it could be observed by an observer in an observation.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  Well, an interaction that leaves a persistent change in state in the "observer".
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Because when an object "interacts" with another object, it goes into a quantum superposition with that object. It is only when we observe that we don't see the superposition. The obvious implication that people don't like to talk about is that there is nothing special about observation, it is just that our own body goes into superposition and we only subjectively experience one of the quantum states.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > there is nothing special about observation [...] we only subjectively experience one of the quantum states That subjective experience seem something special! There is nothing special about quantum superpositions - they are pure quantum states like any other. They are superpositions when we consider them in a particular basis. How does the subjective experience project your body - and the rest of the universe - onto one element of the right basis?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

yucky 4y ago

Isn't it safe to assume that everything on TikTok is make-believe though?

giraffe_lady 4y ago
What is the point of this sort of joke? Just to confirm that we all think of ourselves as superior to anyone using tiktok? It's probably overall neither much more or less reliable than other social media like reddit, twitter, instagram and, sorry boys, HN.
- yucky 4y ago
  It's not a joke. Social media is heavily curated for a specific agenda/angle (at best) and generally full of dis/misinformation. Why on earth would anybody consider what they see on social media to be representative of reality?

omnicognate 4y ago

Except that in this context it isn't mumbo-jumbo at all. It's a falsifiable theory proposed by one of the most distinguished mathematical physicists in the world, in the process of being falsified. Perfectly respectable, though highly speculative, science. The article didn't include it for lulz and clicks. It's directly relevant.

thrown_22 4y ago
No one apart from Penrose took it seriously. You might as well say that Russell's Teapot is falsifiable because you only need to look through a finite amount of space to prove it's not there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- omnicognate 4y ago
  The theory made predictions that could be - and have been (read the article) - shown false. Do you have some other definition of falsifiability?
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    If you read the article there is still plenty of room for those effects to hide in, just like there was before these experiments were done. No one has changed their minds because of this.
    - omnicognate 4y ago
      You mean the bit where he's working on a version of Orch OR that doesn't cause bremsstrahlung? That's coming up with a new theory. You can always go away and change the theory. This isn't one of those overparameterised theory generators that can trivially explain every possible observation. He will have to materially change it to accommodate this. And why shouldn't he explore what changes would be needed to accommodate the new evidence? That's not the behaviour of a crank convinced his theory must be right regardless of any evidence. It's just a natural thing to think about when a theory is falsified. He's never described Orch OR as anything more than speculative. And frankly, what else would you expect him to do? He's 91. It's astonishing that he's still doing this sort of work at all. He's hardly going to start from scratch with a completely fresh theory at this stage, although if anybody could it would be Penrose.