Why are so many physicists loathe to admit that consciousness plays a part in quantum mechanics? They hide behind cop outs like a Copenhagen Interpretation that deliberately avoids explaining how information about the state of one particle can influence the state of another over an arbitrarily long distance.
Why are so many physicists loathe to admit that consciousness plays a part in quantum mechanics...
Zachary Kelly
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Isaiah Gonzalez
>Why are so many physicists loathe to admit that consciousness plays a part in quantum mechanics?
Because it doesn't. Anyone claiming it does is peddling pseud trash.
Michael Phillips
>Because it doesn't
It does though. It's been proven time and time again that the only thing that collapses the wave function is obtaining information. Experiments have been performed where the ONLY change has been preserving or destroying which way information and the interference pattern formed according to whether information was gained or not. The myth that it's the detector that causes collapse was a push back against quantum mysticism that is completely false.
Joshua Davis
So without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with anything else you've written, right away I notice you're equating "obtaining information" with "consciousness."
Are you just defining any sort of "obtaining information" as your version of what "consciousness" is? Or are you going the other way around and redefining "obtaining information" as only counting if a human is the one doing the "obtaining?"
Anthony Hernandez
Consciousness has nothing to do with obtaining information. Any information leak occurs long before you are conscious of it, when photons scatter after hitting the object with quantum coherence.
Jack Roberts
All nuclear processes depend on quantum mechanics. One or two generations of stars lived, fused atoms into heavier elements, forming the very heaviest in the supernova explosions which seeded the next generations of stars -- and their planets.
All this happened before life, before consciousness, existed anywhere in the universe.
Which seems to present a not-so-slight problem for this theory.
The "observation" which leads to decoherence (the cat no longer being dead AND alive) is just an interaction with something else. It doesn't mean a human has to look inside the box. The cosmos can get along just fine without us (or with animals or aliens.)
Gabriel Davis
The collapse only occurs if it provides information that a conscious observer could use to determine the state of a particle in superposition. If information is provided that shows which slit the photon passes through it collapses, if the information is destroyed (but detectors still active) then it does not and an interference pattern forms.
Julian Peterson
>If information is provided that shows which slit the photon passes through it collapses, if the information is destroyed (but detectors still active) then it does not and an interference pattern forms.
Then it has nothing to do with consciousness.
>information that a conscious observer could use
That's just information, you're trying to force consciousness to matter where it doesn't.
Evan Turner
The problem here is that observation has been proven to "create" the past history once superposition collapses. When the state of schrodingers cat is observed it instantly creates a past history that corresponds to that state. If the cat is alive it creates a history of the cat sleeping or walking around the box, if the cat is dead then a history of the body in decay is created. Thus there is no reason to believe the universe was actually in any definite state at all before an observer snapped it into one and created the history in reverse.
Lincoln Howard
>there is no reason to believe the universe was actually in any definite state at all before an observer snapped it into one and created the history in reverse.
Yeah, no reason at all except causality. How did you get any "observers" in the first place? No "observers" according to you means no reality, so even if "observers" could retroactively create past reality there would still be no reason for them to start existing in the first place.