This is a follow up to my previous OP Is Cosmic Consciousness responsible for reality?
There seems to be some confusion regarding the causes of collapse of wave function(which seems to creates reality) whether a conscious observer can collapse the wave function ONLY or can a designed robot/computer perform the same role. Instead of pointing out the facts, I’d like “the seekers of truth” to do it for themselves. Since apparently ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’, I attach 2 videos that cover 2 breakthrough experiments in the understanding of well known double-slit experiment and the implications of collapse of wave function by an observer on the nature of reality…
Things to watch for in the second video: At 13 min and 15 min mark the experiment identifies the difference between robot/Linux systems and humans’ effect on the double-slit experiment. At 32 min mark we can see the implications of the experiments on reductive materialism and materialistic philosophy as well as why the obvious change is necessary that resisted by the scientific community…
Things to watch for in the first video: At 2:30 min mark it is explained what exactly causes the collapse of wave function. Does an act of observing alone cause the collapse of wave function? Or rather, does the knowledge of which path determined by a conscious observer or knower do that?
The last part of the second video talks about implications of the experiment that are so mind boggling that I’m going to leave them out for another OP. For those who have curious minds, please pay a close attention to “behavior” of 2 entangled particles which either involves their knowledge of the future or we fully do not understand the concept of time…
They do go on and on about the slit experiment. The top video was interesting.
I am very reluctant to see mind/matter as touching or between our minds and matter outside our bodies. Within our bodies our soul does touch matter.
I still suspect there must be something wrong with the slit experiment. Yet maybe not.
it just seems unlikely mere observation would change a physical element.
Its spooky as someone once said.
I don’t see it as needed for creationism by the way.
Hi J-Mac,
Just a quick preliminary comment after watching the first video:
1. Evidence for backward causation is not necessarily evidence for conscious choices causing the collapse of the wave function.
2. What if the observer in the delayed choice experiment happens to be a mentally impaired person who is incapable of grasping and/or remembering the significance of the measurement made, or a very young person (a child) who is acting under an adult’s instructions? I don’t think that would alter the results of the experiment. That suggests to me that the consciousness of the observer, as such, may not be the critical factor.
3. I just came across this article on a large-scale version of the experiment, which was conducted last year. I notice it mentions that a quantum random number generator “chose” whether or not a device delayed the incoming photon. That doesn’t sound like consciousness to me.
4. I also came across this paper from 2011: Quantum mechanics needs no consciousness. Are you familiar with it?
5. What are your thoughts on the other interpretations of quantum mechanics? Which would you say are ruled out?
Sorry if you’ve heard all these questions before. I just thought I’d raise them anyway. Cheers.
Hey VJ!
Congratulations on your promotion! I hope you will have the power and authority to ban some here who fall out line, including myself. 😉
I’m not sure you structured you question clearly enough but I think I know what you mean… What causes the collapse of the wave function is the knowledge of which path and the knowledge of which path requires the knower of it. When these requirements are met, the back history is loaded up which in the thought experiment by Wheeler I think includes backward causation of millions of years of back history. This should also answer your question 2. No knowledge of which path, no collapse of wave function. Please note, that some conscious observer in Dean Radin’s experiment could not collapse the wave function because they couldn’t not concentrate on the double slit experiment.
Again, I’m hardly an expert, but my layman’s opinion is that that is one of the silliest “experiments” I’ve ever seen. I mean, for all we know the freaking music is causing the changes. That they “added” the sound aspect at some point is suspicious to begin with. And what are the criteria for being deemed “a meditator”? Certification by a Buddhist monestary? Are we sure they didn’t decide who were the meditators subsequent to seeing the results?
The whole thing seems to me (again, for whatever my non-scientist’s take is worth) to be not just utterly worthless, but laughable.
Hahaha. Exactly.
This stuff reminds me of the parapsychology “experiments” conducted in the 50s and 60s. Very enjoyable history there. And some semi-sensible philosophers were duped by various card tricks at the time.
One other thing. The pictures of historical physicists depicted there as saying that consciousness is necessary for collapse is also ridiculous. They’ve not only got Bohr there, but De Broglie. Absolutely false.
Why does this make you happy? This just proves that the existence of consciousness itself doesn’t collapse the wave function. There has to be a conscious choice involved in the creation of reality.
You don’t get it or you don’t want to get it, which brings me to the point that you have not shown even the slightest willingness to seek the truth… This means you are wasting my and others time…
Good bye!
walto,
Again if you have no opinion of his work because your not qualified to look at it how can you say it is laughable.
Your funny Walto:-)
Ignorant Walto and angry at gods dazz (because he thinks they made him attracted to male ass) are waste of time because their prejudice blinds their rationale thinking, if they are even capable of such…
I’m planning to do an OP on Optimism Bias and use them as examples… as well as Graur, Moran, Felsenstein, Coyne and the rest of optimistic biasses
I give you my take, but am careful to indicate that I’m no expert on the matter.
That you think that is a funny attitude to take is illustrative of where you are on such issues.
What you mean, of course, is that everyone who disagrees with you is biased. That’s possible, certainly. But since that group includes almost every person who has ever produced a thing in the fields of science or philosophy, I’ll take my chances in that group rather than in crankland.
Again VJ, I don’t think you fully grasp what has to be “behind” the collapse of the wave function… Please review my comments on your question 1 and 2 and then read the articles again..
Colewd, can you see my point, perhaps? Anybody without bias?
Those who agree, please respond!!
I’m familiar with this paper and other papers that contradict these seemingly unbiased findings”
“…The “which-path” information was measured by a macroscopic device such as D1 and D2. The results were not recorded but were instead presented to a human observer temporarily and directly such that the relevant information entered the sensory system but, at the same time, the observer was distracted in order to prevent conscious detection of this event. In other words, the information necessary to achieve phenomenal representation was available inthenervoussystem,butconsciousphenomenalexperiencewas actuallynotrealizedsolelyduetointernal psychologicalprocesses.
Thus,therewereonlynon-phenomenal (non-conscious)mental representations”
If you prevent the conscious observer from knowing the which path, his consciousness itself will not collapse the wave function, IMO…
I don’t particularly favour QM interpretations, although KN tried to convince me that I favour the Copenhagen one… I think we don’t know enough about QM because we don’t know the properties of Dark Energy.
Also, there is an inescapable conflict between QM and General Theory of Relativity. It seems on subatomic level time doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist and the explanation of that probably has something or everything to with dark energy being the bonding element between entangled particles for example…
The reason why I thought you had to favor the Copenhagen Interpretation is because you are very interested in the collapse of the wave function, and the collapse of the wave function does not arise in the other interpretations.
Kantian Naturalist,
Details, details.
J-Mac,
What I see is that you have shown through video an experiment that is evidence that consciousness can directly collapse the wave form without a measurement tool.
The night before I listened to a lecture by Max Techmark of MIT who made a similar claim but with evidence I found less compelling then your guy from Petaluma.
No one has made any real challenge to the claim in the video but just hand waving at this point. Maybe VJT has a challenge but his point is not at all clear to me.
If he has time to really engage I am interested but so far his comments are just fly by media at this point.
colewd,
Hey colewd,
The evidence for Cosmic Consciousness responsible the nature of reality is there. Finding it is harder because “the seekers of truth” try to find ways to deny it as they spread confusion just like in the papers that VJ linked.
Can you provide the link Max T. talk?
I’m working on another OP and he is the hero in it…
KEY:
Fake news = News that Trump doesn’t like.
Confusion = Information that J-Mac either doesn’t like or doesn’t understand.
“Seekers of truth” [used sarcastically] = Anyone who has interest in information of any kind, whether confusing (as understood above) or not.
Such translations are needed when talking to people like J-Mac or Colewd who, for whatever psychological reasons, are convinced of the truth of some position, whatever information or arguments may be provided to them.
J-Mac,
Hi everyone,
I just watched J-Mac’s second video, by Dean Radin (2016). I have to say it looks very interesting. For other comments on Radin’s experiments with double slit interference patterns, see here:
Thanks. I’ll try to watch soon.
J-mac
VJ,
Contrary to the statements on the blog you provided the link to, replicating Radin’s experiment is a piece of cake. The equipment is dirt cheap and a well insulated basement would suffice… My kids could and probably will do it…
Sal told me that he used to sell the lasers…
Some good comments there. But this is bigger than comments!!
Argh; that InspiringPhilosophy video is really really bad. The creator has completely missed some important subtleties of the experiment that make his conclusions completely invalid.
I think the central misunderstanding is what he says at 7:59-8:30 in the video (emphasis mine):
The misunderstanding here is that you can never detect a pattern for any individual photon. D0 detects positions, not patterns. In order to see a pattern, you have to gather together the detection positions from a bunch of similar runs, and do statistics to see where there were more vs fewer photons were detected.
So, let’s try taking that into account and go over the experiment again: we run the experiment a bunch of times, and then gather together all of the D0 detection points from runs where the twin hit D3 or D4, run our statistics, and find a clump pattern. Well, actually the two clumps overlap a lot, so it’s really more of a single smear, but this isn’t terribly important; so far, this mistake doesn’t seem to matter.
But take a look what happens when the twin is detected at D1 or D2: gather those runs, do statistics, and you find… a smear (/”clump”) pattern! It’s exactly the same pattern as with the D3&D4 runs! In order to see an interference pattern, you need to split the runs based on whether the twin was detected at D1 or D2; you’ll see an interference pattern with the D1 points, and a different interference pattern with the D2 points. The two patterns are complementary, meaning that the peaks of one match up with the valleys of the other, so when they’re added together the interference effect vanishes and all you see is the basic smear pattern.
The second half of this video from Matt O’Dowd on the PBS Space Time channel explains it with helpful graphics. It’s a followup to two of his previous videos (“How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past” and “Quantum Eraser Lottery Challenge”), explaining why the quantum eraser can’t be used to send information back in time and win the lottery. IMO these videos are a much better overview of the experiment than the InspiringPhilosophy one, although I have some reservations. Matt tends to set up dramatic strawmen (pointing out what “appears” to be the case), but doesn’t always make it completely clear that they are just strawmen, and not actually correct. Also, be aware that he labels the detectors differently: his A and B correspond to D3 and D4, while his C and D correspond to D1 and D2.
You don’t need to take my word for it, or Matt’s either. Compare figures 3 and 4 of the original paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9903047.pdf), and note how their peaks and valleys line up.
Anyway, the net result of this mistake is that the conclusions of the InspiringPhilosophy video are completely baseless. There’s no actual reason to think there’s any sort of backward-in-time causality here. It’s entirely possible that the measurement at D0 is influencing (forward in time) whether the twin photon goes to D1 or D2, or even that the correlation is a result of something else influencing them separately. The results in this experiment could even be explained by a local hidden-variable theory (although those are ruled out by the Bell tests).
He’s wrong about pretty much everything else in the video as well: the experiment doesn’t actually have any nontrivial implications for when (or even if) collapse occurs; he’s wrong about it having something to do with what someone knows about the particles (other than that if you don’t know the D1 vs D2 result, you can’t split the D0 detections and get interference patterns), and he’s even wrong about the 2012 experiment (9:09 – 9:58 in the video) involving conscious choice (according to that paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.4834.pdf, “The choice between the two measurements is made by using a quantum random number generator (QRNG)”).
About the only thing the video gets right is near the beginning, where he says “…many people misunderstand the implications, because they don’t understand the experiments.” He just doesn’t realize he’s talking about himself.
Gordon Davisson,
Uh-oh. A truth seeker. Go get ’em guys!
I’ll take that bet. You, like FMM, are all talk. You’ll never actually do anything.
It’s a piece of cake you’ll never get to eat. I look forwards to the youtube video proving me wrong.
I agree with walto. What happens when you play the music backwards?
Made my day.
😀
Gordon Davisson,
What is your opinion of consciousness being a causal factor in the wave function collapse based on the experiment you critiqued?
KN has already pointed out that the collapsing of the wave function is an assumption of the Copenhagen interpretation, and that the Copenhagen interpretation requires the measuring apparatus be described in classical physics terms. Can you connect the dots? Can you describe “consciousness” in classical physic terms, Billy? If you can’t, STFU
Thanks. I tried pointing out to J-Mac that his own view entails that “cosmic consciousness” (aka God) is governed by the laws of classical mechanics, but to no avail.
Gordon Davisson,
Holy schnikes Gord!
It looks like the cherry-picking season started early this year… at least where Gord comes from… lol
Listen!!! Because I really mean it: I’m no going to waste my time on explaining the fundamentals of QM, such what thought experiment means or how entanglement works… If you don’t know these elemental concepts, maybe you shouldn’t be writing long, pointless posts where you contradict yourself more then once… Unless you really believe that Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time… lol
If you want to really learn about retro-causality, look up the pigeonhole quantum experiment.
Here is a quote from the paper you linked that contradicts your assumption and actually supports the main point of this OP:
“With our ideal realization of the delayed-choice entanglement swapping gedanken experiment, we have demonstrated a generalization of Wheeler’s “delayed-choice” tests, going from the wave-particle duality of a single particle to the entanglement-separability duality of two particles41. Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured. If one views the quantum state as a real physical object, one could get the seemingly paradoxical situation that future actions appear as having an influence on past and already irrevocably recorded events. However, there is never a paradox if the quantum state is viewed as to be no more than a “catalogue of our knowledge”2. Then the state is a probability list for all possible measurement outcomes, the relative temporal order of the three observer’s events is irrelevant and no physical interactions whatsoever between these events, especially into the past, are necessary to explain the delayed-choice entanglement swapping. What, however, is important is to relate the lists of Alice, Bob and Victor’s measurement results. On the basis of Victor’s measurement settings and results, Alice and Bob can group their earlier and locally totally random results into subsets which each have a different meaning and interpretation. This formation of subsets is independent of the temporal order of the measurements. According to Wheeler, Bohr said: “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered phenomenon.”7,8 We would like to extend this by saying: “Some registered phenomena do not have a meaning unless they are put in relationship with other registered phenomena.”
Thanks Gord!
Let me know if you have some more of the papers that contradict you misunderstandings… They may come in handy…lol
J-Tard, J-Tard, does whatever J-Tard can
If you are going to continue to embarrass yourself, whom I’m going to have left that is not going to be on ignore?
Let’s put it this way: Is the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, that you so love, say complete, IYV? Does it account for all or even the most of phenomena in QM that we know of today?
You remind me of a pack of dogs where the smallest dog; the coward dog, barks after the brave dogs have already done their braking and lost interest…
Good bye stupidisimo!
As far as I can see, there’s no evidence either for or against a special role for consciousness, either from this experiment or in general. (Note: Dean Radin’s experiment would be a counter to this, but I don’t put much stock in it.) An important thing to notice about this delayed-choice experiment (and most of the other QM tests) is that they don’t directly involve any conscious entity. In this experiment, the photons are detected by mechanistic detectors, which feed electrical signals to a mechanistic coincidence counter. The output of the coincidence counter is then recorded, probably mechanistically, but the paper doesn’t describe this part of the experimental setup.
It’s possible (but unlikely) that a human watched the output of the coincidence counter throughout the experiment. It’s possible a computer recorded the results, and a human looked at them days or months later. It’s possible no human ever looked at the detailed results, just a statistical summary generated by a computer program. At some point and in some form, humans looked at the results, but the experimenters considered this so irrelevant to the experiment that they didn’t bother to document it. Again, this is typical of this sort of experiment; humans are considered irrelevant to the phenomenon being studied, so they get left out of the experiment design and description.
Another thing to note is that the experiment design assumes that measurement devices produce definite results (not uncollapsed superpositions of different results). In this delayed-choice experiment, they say that the photon has been detected (or not) at D0 before its twin is detected at one of the other detectors; they take into account the response time of the D0 detector, but not when/if a human looks at the result. If we assume that the detections don’t collapse into definite states until a human looks at them (which would be sometime after the coincidence counter has processed the signals), then the experiment didn’t actually test what it set out to test. Specifically, if the result at D0 doesn’t take on a definite value until after the detection at D1-D4, then there’s no actual delay in the delayed choice experiment. Again, this is typical of QM tests; for instance, the Bell’s inequality tests I’ve looked at don’t actually involve separate humans examining results at two different locations, which would be necessary for a proper Bell test if conscious observation was what mattered.
Mind you, this is not actually evidence that conscious observation doesn’t cause wavefunction collapse; the experiment designs assume that detectors produce definite results, but they don’t test this assumption. In fact, it’s incredibly hard (going on impossible) to test this assumption. Superposition and entanglement effects are only really detectable when the same thing happens over and over, so you can see consistent statistical effects over many runs. In this experiment, for example, if the BBO crystal doesn’t produce photon pairs in the same entangled state over and over, or the path lengths to the D1/D2 splitter vary by more than a quarter wavelength or so, or the D0 position calibration varies too much, or… pretty much anything goes out of whack, then the interference effects will get smeared out and become undetectable.
Detecting whether the measurement apparatus had gone into a superposition or not would require setting the entire apparatus up with that level of consistency (potentially down to the subatomic level) over a large number of runs, and that’s pretty much impossible. This means that once something as complex and messy as a detector has gotten involved, you can’t tell whether the superposition has collapsed or not. You get indistinguishable results whether the detector causes collapse immediately. vs. whether collapse happens later when a human happens to glance at the results, vs. whether collapse happens when the experiment’s results are accepted for publication, vs. whether collapse happens when a badger happens to look at a copy of the paper that someone dropped, vs. whether collapse never happens at all (i.e. the many-worlds interpretation). There’s just no way to tell.
(BTW, the results are also consistent with some interpretations, such as the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation or the transactional interpretation, that don’t involve any real phenomena corresponding to superpositions and collapse.)
Ok, one final point before I finish. You probably think my suggestion that badgers might be what causes collapse is just me being silly (and you’re right), but the only reason to take that possibility less seriously than the consciousness possibility is a
Gordon Davisson,
pre-existing bias that consciousness might have a special role in the universe and badgers probably don’t. If you’d started with a bias that badgers might have a special role in the universe, you’d take that possibility seriously and think the consciousness one was silly. The argument that QM supports a special role for consciousness is really just people reading their own biases into QM and mistaking that for support.
Gordon Davisson,
Do you know what optimism bias is?
Suppose for the sake of argument, that consciousness of observers really does play a role in causing wavefunction collapse (that me looking at something causes it to enter into some definite state). What the hell does that have to do with COSMIC consciousness? Why is the entire universe now suddenly a conscious mind with intentions, personality, and will? I don’t see the connection.
Has anyone anywhere done any work to connect the dots?
So if noone looks at some photons, their wavefunctions don’t collapse. Okay, but then nobody is looking at them. Now what? Where does a cosmic mind enter into the picture?
Do you know what optimism bias is?
I see this as quite simple. J-Mac has disproved his god exists.
If wavefunctions don’t collapse without an observer, and when we observe them they collapse then they are not being observed before we observe them, right J-Mac?
But given they have not collapsed until we observe them there cannot be another observer, god, observing them, or they’d already have collapsed.
And according to J-Mac it takes a conscious observer to collapse them.
Therefore there is no god.
I don’t expect J-Mac to explain where I’m wrong regarding this, as no doubt I am, he’ll just make some (to him) pithy comment about my preconceived biases then he’ll pretend to put me on ignore.
Yeah. I don’t see the relevance here. 🙂
For what it’s worth I am convinced that consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction.
However I’m equally convinced that the problem of other minds means that we will never be able to conclusively demonstrate this empirically.
It’s as if the universe is rigged at it’s core to make us believe that other minds exist but also prohibit us from ever proving it.
That profound realization is awe inspiring to me. Your mileage will of course vary 😉
peace
OMagain,
I’m sure you know I would appeal to the incarnation and our union with Christ to explain the paradox you mention.
😉
peace
If they collapse there is a mind.
They might not ever collapse.
Then instead of reality we have potentiality
A universe of potential never realized. Just patiently waiting for an observing mind
quote;
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.
(Rom 8:19)
end quote;
peace
Yes that is what I am assuming is true for the sake of argument.
Humans look at the photons, and then the wavefunction collapses and we get to declare which slit the photon went through as a particle, not a wave. This implies nobody looked at them before we did (that they were waves until we looked at them). So it is our minds that collapse the wavefunction. But that implies God wasn’t observing them, or it would imply God doesn’t have a mind.
Ever hear of the incarnation and our union with Christ?
When those who are united with Christ observe them then God also observes them.
for some background check this out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
Also keep in mind that God sans the incarnation is outside of time so “when did he observe it? ” is a meaningless question when it comes to God
peace
Cool story bro.
I like this argument. But a “quantum idealist” (as I shall name the view) could respond by suggesting one of two ideas:
1. A conscious mind is always necessary for collapsing the wave function, but God only collapses those wave functions that we don’t. So all wave functions are collapsed by either us or by God, which is why we have a determinate universe.
2. God causes all wave function collapse either immediately or mediately. A good case for mediated wave function collapse is that God is the cause of our own consciousness, which He created by collapsing the wave functions in the quantum particles that comprise our brains.
So whereas (1) splits the division of labor between us and God, (2) basically says that God is ultimately responsible for all wave function collapse but He delegates some of that to us (and presumably to other conscious minds).