Quantum Theory and Consciousness

I'm just a layman but one of the things that has fascinated me about quantum mechanics is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that reality does not exist until it is observed.

There's a new movie out that addresses this and I got kind of excited about it until I read in Salon that the producer is an adherent of that bizarre hollywood charlatan that channels "Ramtha" (sp?) and that a physicist featured in the movie has now claimed his remarks were selectively edited and taken out of context.

If you know what "Schrodinger's Cat" is, what is your take?

Does reality only exist when empirically observed?

Is the cat alive, dead, or hyper-posited? Did Schrodinger have an answer or was this an illustration of the paradox of applying quantum theory to everyday experience?

(I'm an auto worker so these are not exactly the things that get discussed at break)

Originally posted by deevee

(I'm an auto worker so these are not exactly the things that get discussed at break)

Yeah, I can only imagine

Schrodinger's Pussycat jokes anyone?



I had a professor in college about 25 years ago (shtt, was it that long ago?) that gave a series of lectures titled "Dasein and the electron" that explored the idea of conciousness on a subatomic level. Deep stuff.

The cat is dead, it is the attomic particle that broke the vial of Prusic acid that is alive.

[edit on 24-9-2004 by HowardRoark]

You've just stated what is essentially the most fundamental concept in physics in the last 100years.
The problem, of course, before we even get to physics, is conciousness, and the existence of a material world. Read Bertrand Russell.

As for S's cat, it shouldn't be interpreted too literally. The cat knows (or at least... yeah, you know what I mean) if it is dead or alive. We do not. So in the cat's frame of reference, there is no quantum uncertainty. However, in ours, we cannot know if the cat is dead or alive. Mathematical physics dodges this by superposing the wave functions of the two - it's a matter of probability. The act of observing determines the truth. Sounds kinda like the x-files, if you think about it...

Fancy meeting you here Howard, I just read a book about you.

Quantum Mechanics are interesting but you should also consider the possibility that they are wrong. I'm only a freshman, so I haven't studied it yet, but I have read that the anomoly of an electron orbitting the nucleus isn't explained, that it is just taken as a fact. If it can't explain why a negatively charged object would orbit a positively charged object instead of attaching itself to it, then it is an incomplete theory. Some alternate theories claim that gravity isn't something that is inherent to all mass, but an energy that pummels us from all directions. It sounds bizarre at first, but it would work and correspond to reality in theory.

Think about it, but I pretty much agree that you shouldn't bring it up over lunch.

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I always think of quantum as the lady or the tiger, except with quantum it isn't the lady or the tiger until you actually open the door. So no one can help you. I think what i take away from it is the Universe has a potential to be in certain number of states, and one of those states is locked onto when observed [affected/disturbed by light]. But it doesn't mean that some infinite number of states possibly exist, only some small number with probabilities distributed between states.

Correct me if wrong, but isn't the 'observation' it is talking specifically about light? affecting the states. Perhaps thoughts [waves] are not substantial enough to affect the state of something physical directly. It could be that thoughts are faster or more subtle in someway than light. So knowing the state of a particle wouldn't affect it, but light used to detect that state would affect the state.
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What the bleep do we know?

[edit on 25-9-2004 by frozen_snowman]
This is the movie you are talking about.


[edit on 25-9-2004 by frozen_snowman]

Our preception of reality is based on our physical senses, interpretation of energy. The ability to do so is a chemical process that is done in our brain through a super complex neuro chemistry, but at the root of our consciousness, our very ability to percieve the attainable bandwidths of the electromagnetic spectrum, is based on the interraction of electricity and believe it or not, hallucinagenic alkaloids produced by our brain. Look into '___', some very interesting searches on google include '___', monoatomic, alkaloids, synapses, melatonin, seratonin, etc.

If the movie you mentioned is the one titled "What the BLEEP do we know?" don't even bother seeing it. It's a terrible movie selectively using quotes to market a sophomoric view about reality.

However you are bringing up a great point about reality and quantum nature.

Originally posted by shbaz
Fancy meeting you here Howard, I just read a book about you.

good book , give Atlas Shrugged a read , it has a free energy machine in it and must have been inspired by Tesla due to the era that AYn Rand grew up in . Excellent thoughts that detail much of our world today , that lady was SMART !!

We The People is also a good read by the same author . Great reflections on society .

In response to the post ,

If we were not here to observe the universe , would it still exist ? I think it would but it would be a mute point with no one to recognize it , so in that respect it could not exist in our frame of thinking . Observations and experiments are what make things real to us . String theory at the moment is more a philosophy and may always be so without any observable proof .

I don't believe that all possibilities happen until observed like the theory of superposition implies but do give some merit to to the idea that the unobserved and unproovable do not exist ( yet!) String theory and god are two examples that come to mind .

Something either is , or is not ... It is a tiger behind the door , or it is a woman . The cat's well being is known upon observation , it is not both alive and dead at the same time .
Proabability is like odds at the track , they give an educated guess , but no one knows who wins until they see it .

Originally posted by slank
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I always think of quantum as the lady or the tiger, except with quantum it isn't the lady or the tiger until you actually open the door. So no one can help you. I think what i take away from it is the Universe has a potential to be in certain number of states, and one of those states is locked onto when observed [affected/disturbed by light]. But it doesn't mean that some infinite number of states possibly exist, only some small number with probabilities distributed between states.

Correct me if wrong, but isn't the 'observation' it is talking specifically about light? affecting the states. Perhaps thoughts [waves] are not substantial enough to affect the state of something physical directly. It could be that thoughts are faster or more subtle in someway than light. So knowing the state of a particle wouldn't affect it, but light used to detect that state would affect the state.
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No, that's what I thought at first but after reading "God and The New Physics" by Paul Davies he described a series of experiments (that I can't adequately explain) that involve observation with no physical intervention

I've read Atlas Shrugged, and the free energy device is a side note to the larger message of the book. It was interesting though.

I started a thread on the same topic about two months ago. It had links to recent academic papers that argued that a 'quantum' origin for consciousness was, in fact, the case.

However... I can't seem to find that thread (I must be doing something wrong with the search engine). If someone was really interested in this it would be worth finding, though, because it has links to a few articles/papers.

Originally posted by deevee
I'm just a layman but one of the things that has fascinated me about quantum mechanics is the seemingly inescapable conclusion that reality does not exist until it is observed.

See I have actually been following this for the past ten years or so and it is not quite what you would be lead to believe. There is nothing all that special about humans as people thru out the history of man would like to believe. 'Reality', 'Existence' or what ever you would like to call it would still exist if the human race did not.

If no one looked at the moon would it still be there? Yes, but not as our perception of reality defines it. This is not because of the moon's independent self-existence, but because of our false concept of our independent self-existence. If only animals looked at the moon during this time, what would it be called? Bark? Wolf? Meow? It really makes no difference as the phenomenon would be the same. Like all things, it is simply our egotistical definitions in relationship to ourselves and not to the phenomenon itself.

This is not to be confused with Non-Locality. Which is something without the requirement of perception to exist.

Just wanted to comment that I have been pretty fascinated with this for some time as well. The existence of quantum particles is an indication that not all is as it seems. I think of some of the unexplained stuff that goes on, including psychic phenonemon, ghosts, and the nature of where we go when we die.

-P

DeeVee are you saying that with quantum mech theory that it is the lady, tiger or whatever behind the door and that openning the door may or may not change that?

As far as reality existing or not based on our observations, I find that a bit difficult to believe. I think we conceptualize the Universe as we observe it, but that is our mind creating some abstraction handle to deal with it. The abstractions we use to deal with the Universe and it's actual deepest nature's could be quite different.

We look at a 'car' and see/perceive some abstract notion of a machine that with fuel can move. What does it look like, how does it drive, is it sexy? But in fact it is an incredible assortment of atoms/molecules that are some close enough approximation to some abstract design to work approximately that way. In fact it is some astronomical number of iron, carbon, etc atoms with various covalent, metalic and other bonds. In other words just a hunk of metal. At exactly what point is a car a 'car'? when enough parts are correctly assembled to make an engine run without stopping? does it have to have the transmission and wheels turning? tires? an enclosed cab? apolstered seats?

Frankly our minds work on a rather juvenile [read duh or doh] level for most things. I suppose we cover enough various categories of things on/at this level to attribute a lot of capability to our brains, but macro reality at the possibly infinite granularity at which it exists is simply impossible for our brains to deal with. We would reach information overload in less than an instant.

Perhaps that is the beauty of the thing. Luckily our biological automation takes care of so much we don't really have to pay all that much attention to reality and the Universe is free to do what it does without us interfering in much of any way.

Anyone see the problem with that?

omg here i go using a current technology analogy (anyway). It is like using a computer nowadays. If you use some windowing [read GUI] type operating system and have compatible software it becomes pointing and clicking to a great degree, with maybe some typing thrown in for good measure. The stuff going on behind the scenes is just too deep a swamp to wade in. You can learn vast amounts of stuff that you may or may not ever use.

We live our lives ontop of systems of systems of systems of biology that we have inherited from billions of years of evolution (and longer if you believe in space life seeding). And yet we understand so little of our basic functioning and operation. When you are born there is no 'user manual'. Has anyone ever done a wrote determination of how to operate a human body? A comprehensively priority balanced analysis of how it operates and how we can maintain and operated it best? That could be useful. Ya think?

I just had a weird thought, could technology become such that it was more important to be able to interface some artificial thing like a computer, society, politics, etc than to have to know about biology, chemistry and physics? I mean it works functionally like that for a lot of people, but push comes to shove and a crude but working understanding of science is more relevant. Could you imagine some point at which technology actually creates reality? Or is that just some pipe dream?
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Originally posted by slank
DeeVee are you saying that with quantum mech theory that it is the lady, tiger or whatever behind the door and that openning the door may or may not change that?


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Exactly!! That is what is so freaky about quantum theory and what caused Einstein to reject it as absurd.

Bohr said anyone who is not astounded by quantum theory doesn't understand it.

It has been experimentally proven over and over that (analagously speaking) there is BOTH a lady AND a tiger behind the door, and observation causes one of these realities to emerge.

This is not to be confused with statistical probability (as in odds on a sporting event) that predict the liklehood of an outcome but for which there can be only one true outcome)

Experiments have been conducted which prove that the act of observation with all other interference removed, dictates reality.

I am by no means an expert, only someone trying to come to grips with this fascinating subject. What I read is science, not pseudo science, and I have posted this in order to pick the minds of those more educated than I.

I hope that those who have a deep understanding of this field will correct any of my misconceptions and perhaps direct me to further reading. (as some of the posts have done already)

Is there a distinct state of a particle prior to looking at it?
In other words it has a fixed state before it is observed.

It isn't that there is no actual state prior to being observed, is it?
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Originally posted by slank
Is there a distinct state of a particle prior to looking at it?
In other words it has a fixed state before it is observed.

It isn't that there is no actual state prior to being observed, is it?
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Yes and no. It's a really bizarre concept. They call it hyper-position where the lady exists AND the tiger exists and observation collapses a probability wave that allows one of the two realities to emerge.

The distinct state of the particle cannot be adequately determined as per "Heisenberg's Uncertaninty Principle" which in essence states that you can know a particle's velocity but not its position and vice versa.

Einstein rejected it because he said "God does not play dice with the universe" but apparently He (whoever He is) does.

At the quantum level the dice are always rolling and the numbers don't come up untill we look.

I believe we manifest our own realities through self and collective consciousness and intention, but the realities we manifest, existed already, and thus every quantum choice, is effectively a string in the fabric of the universe, where every reality already existed as a parallel universe, all we do is arrive at it from our own string(the destination we perceive to be the future) Hence, what I am saying, what seems to be travelling in time, is nothing more than a string of quantum choices of existing realities

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So observation causes a convergence to a single state from a source of divergent states.

Is there a limited array of possible outcomes? [a short list, as opposed to an infinite set of possibilities]
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