Quantum Physics and Consciousness

The last few videos from PBS Space Time have actually been on the topic of quantum mechanics and consciousness and the measurement problem. I know it's trendy these days to believe we have quantum super powers but there's a good reason "corporate scientists" don't usually believe that's true. Yes scientists can sometimes be too closed minded but the same applies to the people who think quantum woohoo is a valid interpretation of reality, they ignore anything that might possibly invalidate their beliefs and dismiss the opinions of highly educated people.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder
Thanks for posting those.
The first two videos are good and show scientists are more open-minded than some people think.
But Matt O'Dowd is right that some mystical believers cherry-pick their evidence like citing something from Wigner saying consciousness causes collapse, without realizing that as the video says, Wigner looked at it more closely and eventually decided that it's not consciousness that cases collapse:

Does consciousness really collapse the wave function? A possible objective biophysical resolution of the measurement problem.

An analysis has been performed of the theories and postulates advanced by von Neumann, London and Bauer, and Wigner, concerning the role that consciousness might play in the collapse of the wave function, which has become known as the measurement problem. This reveals that an error may have been made by them in the area of biology and its interface with quantum mechanics when they called for the reduction of any superposition states in the brain through the mind or consciousness. Many years later Wigner changed his mind to reflect a simpler and more realistic objective position which appears to offer a way to resolve this issue.

Hopefully the measurement problem can be solved. Some progress has been made toward that end.

But differentiating between Copenhagen, DeBroglie-Bohm, and Everett interpretations seems to be a much harder experimental problem.

The third video is weird (or at least the topic is), and I think O'Dowd would admit that.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Because it asserts that a wave function becomes 'real' only when the system is observed, the term "subjective" is sometimes proposed for the Copenhagen interpretation. This term is rejected by many Copenhagenists because the process of observation is mechanical and does not depend on the individuality of the observer

It's amazing what you can find when you do some basic homework.

a reply to: TzarChasm
Not that I disagree with it, but what's the source for that quote?
I searched for it and never found a good source, just other people saying they found it and they didn't post a source either.

It's certainly true, use a movie camera to record an observation.
When the movie of the observation is played, every conscious observer is watching the same movie. The observation was already made by the camera, before anybody even started watching the movie.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: TzarChasm
Not that I disagree with it, but what's the source for that quote?
I searched for it and never found a good source, just other people saying they found it and they didn't post a source either.

It's certainly true, use a movie camera to record an observation.
When the movie of the observation is played, every conscious observer is watching the same movie. The observation was already made by the camera, before anybody even started watching the movie.

Wikipedia. My source for all things definitive.

Metaphysics of the wave function

a reply to: Arbitrageur I am pondering a possible effect related to temporal displacement and time dilation regression . Perhaps you or someone can provide answers to my questions. If a person could travel back into time, regardless to whether or not any dimensional splits or excursions would actually take place with the space time continuum, would said traveler digress in term of their present conscious state of awareness? In essence, would the knowledge of the present reality remain intact for the traveler, or would said memory and consciousness be essentially disintegrated as a traveler digresses through time? Quantum cosmic memory erasure may be a possibility, what if the laws of quantum entanglement known, do not stabilize coherence of conscious thought retention. A condition of "Quantum disassociation reality realm effect induced Amnesia" may possibly result. Personality, Knowledge of the point of time journey initial departure, may be digressed, as the subject traveling in time regresses to an earlier time period state. Knowledge of Present experiences and memory at point of time trip origin or so called present time of initial departure, may possibly be gone and not reinstated to the traveler exiting their initial starting point time zone of departed reality. Self awareness of thoughts and consciousness may possibly be quantum erased from the travelers memory. What could possibly keep conscious thought patterns, self awareness, memory lucidly intact and vividly consistent for a regressive time travelers past time excursion experience? The time travelers knowledge of the present may not be retained in said travelers memory. Conversely, what could cause such a traveler to retain their initial memory of the present after their have been regressed to the past? Logic seems to imply that digression of a subject traveler through time, could possibly result in memory digression or erasure. what do you think?

a reply to: TzarChasm
Thanks for the source.

a reply to: WalkingRadar57
Time travel to the future doesn't break any laws of physics, it's the result of the so-called "twin paradox" which isn't really a paradox, where the twin who travels near the speed of light returns to earth to find himself in the future and not having aged very much.

Time travel to the past is a lot more dubious, some might say it doesn't seem to be allowed. Others might suggest that wormholes or some other exotic phenomena may allow it, but wormhole theory requires such ridiculous amounts of energy for a wormhole a human could pass through that it doesn't seem very plausible. I'm very skeptical of the idea of wormhole time travel; it's a beyond fringe research subject the tax dollars of the US taxpayers helped fund as part of the AATIP contract for $22 million. You can see a snapshot from the wormhole paper here where we can see T-Rex through the wormhole and presumably the man could go through the wormhole and get eaten by T-rex.

The Pentagon compiled research into invisibility cloaking, wormholes, and warp drive


He wouldn't have to worry about losing his memory, since being a meal for T-Rex would be a bigger problem, but if he could avoid being eaten, how could the rest of him get through the wormhole but not his memory? So I doubt he could get through the wormhole at all, but setting aside that doubt for a moment, if he did, maybe he could still have his memory.

If you're following some other theoretical fringe or crackpot idea for backward time travel, you'd have to look at the details of that particular theory to see what it would predict. But if you don't have any theoretical model to go by, then the idea is just fiction so in that context you could make up anything you want, keep memory, lose memory, whatever.

By the way, when Tom DeLonge said he heard about a way a nuke could be delivered to the other side of the world in less than a minute, he never elaborated on where he got that idea, but I think that fringy wormhole paper is probably where the idea came from. Wormhole theory isn't really science fiction, but stable traversable wormholes are so fringy that I doubt anybody has to worry about any nukes being delivered to the other side of the world this way.

Here is some more about wormhole theory:

"The jury is not in, so we just don't know," physicist Kip Thorne, one of the world's leading authorities on relativity, black holes and wormholes, told Space.com. "But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That's sad, that's unfortunate, but that's the direction in which things are pointing."

So perhaps wormholes a human can travel through may not even be possible, but even if they are, NASA's Eric Christian and Stephen Hawking thought that they couldn't be used for time travel, as some other scientists like Eric Davis speculate:

"You can go into the future or into the past using traversable wormholes," astrophysicist Eric Davis told LiveScience. But it won't be easy: "It would take a Herculean effort to turn a wormhole into a time machine. It's going to be tough enough to pull off a wormhole."

However, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has argued that such use is not possible...

"A wormhole is not really a means of going back in time, it's a short cut, so that something that was far away is much closer," NASA's Eric Christian wrote.

I'm in the same camp as NASA's Eric Christian and Stephen Hawking in thinking that even if you could make a traversable wormhole, it wouldn't allow such time travel as Eric Davis speculates (that drawing of the wormhole to the Jurassic appeared in his wormhole paper).