Going down this rabbithole, did any of this exist before I observed it(because mine is the only consciousness I can actually confirm to myself)?
And there is no reason to expect our puny ape brains to be capable of understanding “the universe”. It would be very odd, indeed, if we were capable of doing so. Unless, of course, the universe is a product of our puny ape brains.
Let’s say our hypothesis is that the Universe was in a superposition of states, some with the Earth existing and some with it not, before the first conscious being appeared appeared and made and observation that caused a reduction to a state where the Earth definitely existed. Decoherence can explain why we do not see evidence of this previous superposition. Of course that particular hypothesis does rather beg the question as to how that conscious being came into existence, but my point is that the classical nature of the large scale does not preclude explanations of quantum mechanics which invoke consciousness.
This may be a bit off topic, but here are some excellent quotes by Einstein about his concept of religion:
“The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.”
- Einstein
“…Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
- Einstein
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
- Einstein
“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a ‘Freethinker’ in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as ‘laws of nature.’ It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Freethinker mentality.”
- Einstein
In response to a question about what was meant by his ‘cosmic religion’:
“It is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God — that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that his highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and, second, that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe.* My religion is based on Moses: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And for me God is the First Cause. David and the prophets knew that there could be no love without justice or justice without love*. I don’t need any other religious trappings.”
- Einstein
None were even experts in early 20th century neurology.
I’m pretty certain that Einstein’s idea of god is nothing like the entity you believe exists.
And also, why would I care what Einstein believes about nonexistent things? There’s sure a lot of argument from authority in this thread.
No, but the classical nature of the large scale does appear to preclude the large-scale superposition that you just hypothesized.
I also have an intrinsic problem with the “does not preclude” argument. I was just in the living room and saw no animal there. That does not preclude the existence of a unicorn there now, munching on the contents of the coffee table. However, I would want to see some credible evidence before I started inventing theories about it.
What makes you so certain that you know what I believe? You most certainly do not. It seems that you like to jump to wild conclusions without evidence. Try not to be so defensive. :dubious:
Ah, well, if Einstein says something and Begbert2 (without giving any rational argument) says that Einstein is absolutely wrong, I’m personally more inclined to listen to Einstein. I must be very biased. :D
Because I’m pretty certain that the kind of god that Einstein believed in isn’t coherent or interferent enough to generate the kind of believer who would spam a thread with terrible arguments from authority about its existence.
Of course you’re biased. You came into this thread and started spamming it with terrible arguments from authority about some god or another’s existence. This is not the act of an impartial observer.
Why don’t we put that little sentence in context, because it doesn’t have that much to do with his concept of religion when you read the rest of the paragraph:
“The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.”
From mere particle interaction, no. I think what** Mangetout** means is that the wave function collapses when any detection mechanism intrudes on the system, so that superposition for example collapses to a classical position without literally requiring an “observer”.
Indeed. The OP appears to be trying to link quantum mechanics and consciousness by naively trying to apply common intuition to profoundly non-intuitive subjects while appearing to lack any understanding of either.
My point is, that your points are all based on a misunderstanding of the primary subject area which you based them all on.
That IS a reasoned argument against them.
Given what we know of the theory about how large systems evolve quantum mechanically then that we do not observe interference effects in such systems is not a problem because quantum mechanics predicts such interference effects are for practical purposes impossible to observe.
Of course this does not mean that there is not evidence that quantum mechanics rather than classical physics governs the Universe, but that evidence exists in the observation of smaller systems.
The missing ingredient is the explanation of measurement/observation in quantum mechanics, but my point is that the Universe appears classical on a large scale does not preclude that such an explanation could involve consciousness. I’m not saying it doe, I just object to the way everyone thinks there is an easy answer to what is a difficult and unresolved question.
What sort of impact do you imagine that quantum mechanical effects would have on consciousness? Are you picturing it as randomity - noise in the system? (Which the brain would have to be compensating for and filtering out to maintain any appearance of coherence in thought or behavior.) Or are you picturing something else?
Can you provide what you think is a better description for a non-physicist/expert (like myself)?
The idea that a detector causes collapses is consistent with quantum mechanics, but there is no test we can practically perform to distinguish it from the idea that it is not until consciousness is brought into the mix that collapse occurs. It is not also not particularly satisfactory explanation, at least without further expansion, as we then have to answer what is special about the system of detector+measured system that causes it to evolve in a way that is different from the evolution of the wave equation?
I think variations of the many-minds interpretation, particularly when taking a quantum Bayesianism point of view, take a decent stab at offering an explanation of quantum measurement.
It should be understood that the collapse of the waveform in the Copenhagen Interpretation (which is one of the oldest and most widely taught interpretations) is a mathematical formalism that is not itself observed or measured; it is just a starting place for calculation which is no more realistic than instantanous mixing of gases or infinite impulse transfer in momentum. The lack of an physical ontology is problematic insofar as everything we do observe appears to be constructed in a way that has an objective reality without conflict between interactions. The Copenhagen interpretation, as useful as it is in teaching the basic operations of particle interactions at a quantum level without getting wound up with hidden variables or many worlds interpretation, is almost certainly wrong; a toy model that only works with very restricted assumptions.
As for consciousness and cognition, as much as we understand the processes of it (which is a hierarchy of different levels of processes distributed throughout the brain), there is no reason to believe it is dependent upon quantum mechanics beyond the decohered level that all chemistry obeys, and certainly not just based on the fact hat we don’t understand either quantum mechanics or cognition very well. This is purely a false equivilence.
Stranger
Then it follows that the point from GreenWyvern collapsed…
But yeah, even the mechanisms proposed about how the human mind could use quantum mechanics are not as impressive as the believers of that think it is.
I’m not trying to dispute that at some fundamental level the universe evolves quantum mechanically, and indeed one could argue that it has to be true. But there is nothing in QM that requires us to take such a totally unwarranted anthropocentric view of what “observer” means in the context of wavefunction collapse that we leap to conclusions about consciousness as a causative factor, which are even more unfounded than my unicorn hypothesis. That’s not science, it’s woo.
ISTM that the only one here who thinks there’s an easy answer is the OP.