51–60 of 306 posts
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, especial…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
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
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.
There is an often-repeated statement that different quantum mechanical theories are equivalent. This is an over-simplification. Is wave function collapse is a real thing or just an approximation of what happens when a large system is entangled? Some smart people have tried to make theories where wave function collapse is a real thing. These new experiments are working to rule out those ideas. My feeling is that Evere…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Are you saying that the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation[1] does not explicitly postulate consciousness to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Ne…
I should've said no interpretation in the 21st century.
From a layman’s point of view, it seems like we grasping at straws when it comes to these thorny quantum questions. Is fair to say, for example, that we are about as clueless as our ancestors were with the bubonic plague? To a non-expert it can be difficult to separate which theories lay on solid ground and which theories are highly speculative.
It would be like accidentally discovering antibiotics during the plague. You might not know how it works or why, but you know what it does and it absolutely gets the job done.
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, especial…
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 o…
There is an often-repeated statement that different quantum mechanical theories are equivalent. This is an over-simplification. Is wave function collapse is a real thing or just an approximation of what happens when a large system is entangled? Some smart people have tried to make theories where wave function collapse is a real thing. These new experiments are working to rule out those ideas. My feeling is that Evere…
Check out "superdeterminism," first proposed by Bell (of Bell's inequality fame) himself and currently being vigorously pursued by Sabina Hossenfelder. There is no "collapse" per se according to this model and everything is really classical with hidden variables, and the entanglement comes because everything shared the same origin (the big bang). A very fascinating and in my opinion the best explanation, though it's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Harry Potter has this as a plot point in one of the books. He essentially teaches/inspires himself to a spell to save the day.