2. Cosmic Consciousness-the experimental evidence

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…

463 thoughts on “2. Cosmic Consciousness-the experimental evidence

  1. fifthmonarchyman: God is another mind. in fact he is the prototypical mind.

    Peter thinks that “prayer studies” somehow count as evidence against his existence.

    peace

    oh please, fmm.
    If I say that there’s no flying spaghetti monster, am I denying the existence of other minds?

    And prototypical? Hah. Could hardly be more different. Like you v an ant.

  2. PeterP: PeterP thinks that prayer studies reflect on the effects of prayer. A god or gods may exist and just not give a crap.

    So it’s not about the existence of other minds specifically just their responsiveness.

    cool.

    Now describe a study to demonstrate that another human person hears your request and decides if it merits her action or not.

    peace

  3. fifth:

    How can you hope to study God’s response or lack of response to requests made to him when you can’t even effectively evaluate those of another human.

    Who says we can’t study a human’s response, or lack thereof, to requests?

    You struggle with the simplest things, fifth.

  4. walto: If I say that there’s no flying spaghetti monster, am I denying the existence of other minds?

    if the flying spaghetti monster is a mind then you are denying the existence of at least one

    walto: And prototypical? Hah. Could hardly be more different. Like you v an ant.

    You don’t know much about the Christian God do you?

    If you want to know what God’s mind is like just take a look at Jesus in the gospels.

    peace

  5. fifthmonarchyman: It’s not special pleading.

    sure it is.

    How can you hope to study God’s response or lack of response to requests made to him when you can’t even effectively evaluate those of another human.

    I would record the endpoints as do the ‘prayer studies’. That is what everyone is interested in, afterall.

    The point is that any study of this sort dealing with consciousness/responsiveness is bound to be fraught with difficulty and making the sort of blanket statements like “hits and misses” is naive.

    Not really but I guess it depends on a persons level of gullibility.

  6. fifthmonarchyman: if the flying spaghetti monster is a mind then you are denying the existence of at least one other mind.

    Exactly. At least and only one. Same for denying your particular God. Has no effect on the other minds question at all. Just another non sequitur.

  7. Now describe a study to demonstrate that another human person hears your request and decides if it merits her action or not.

    Oh, something along the lines of a doctor telling a patient they should lose some weight, drink a little less, or start exercising would fit the bill. Or a teacher suggesting that the students should start on their term paper early and not wait to the last minute as another example.

  8. fifthmonarchyman: By excluding the placebo effect you are only letting your materialist bias interfere with an assessment of the study.

    Perhaps we should take fifth as asserting that prayer is as effective as a placebo. I could agree with that.

    But then I have to wonder whether fifth thinks that his God is a sugar pill.

  9. FMM,
    If we can’t tell if other minds exist, and you would turn off a bot that exhibited the ability to converse and act like a human, then presumably you would do the same to an actual human as in both cases you can’t ever really know for sure if other minds exist.

    If you can’t know that a human acting like a human is really a human then you can’t know if a bot that is acting like a human really is conscious or not. And yet you’d turn it off regardless.

    This is what happens when your worldview is built upon nonsense. I assume you support voluntary euthanasia?. If you can turn off a bot that for all intents and purposes is human then what possible objection could you have to another bot turning itself off?

  10. walto: Exactly. At least and only one. Same for denying your particular God. Has no effect on the other minds question at all.

    Sure it does.

    There is no conclusive way to establish the existence or non existence of any one mind for exactly the same reason there is no way to establish the existence of other minds in general.

    The two issues are directly related

    peace

  11. Neil Rickert: Are you sure? That was not how I understood his comments.

    Here is an opportunity to illustrate the difficulty of inherent in these sorts of questions.

    Please describe a study that would empirically establish exactly what his intentions were.

    peace

  12. PeterP: Oh, something along the lines of a doctor telling a patient they should lose some weight, drink a little less, or start exercising would fit the bill. Or a teacher suggesting that the students should start on their term paper early and not wait to the last minute as another example.

    is the perspective respondent in this study the teacher/doctor or the pupil/patient?

    If the latter how would you determine if they heard the request and chose to ignore it rather than not hearing it at all?

    peace

  13. Neil Rickert: Perhaps we should take fifth as asserting that prayer is as effective as a placebo. I could agree with that.

    But then I have to wonder whether fifth thinks that his God is a sugar pill.

    The placebo effect is not about the sugar pill itself it’s about the power of the mental to effect a physical outcome.

    In this example the sugar pill is the the vocal words spoken in the prayer not it’s recipient.

    peace

  14. OMagain,

    You don’t understand

    Of course we all know that other minds exists just as we all know God exists.

    If we did not we know these things we could not function in our world.

    The problem of other minds is not about what we know it’s about what we can demonstrate empirically.

    We can’t empirically demonstrate whether any other minds (including God) exist or not.

    peace

  15. fifthmonarchyman: walto: Exactly. At least and only one. Same for denying your particular God. Has no effect on the other minds question at all.

    Sure it does.

    There is no conclusive way to establish the existence or non existence of any one mind for exactly the same reason there is no way to establish the existence of other minds in general.

    The two issues are directly related

    Oh, Fifth. I hope you realize at this late date that I heartily agree with you both that nobody can prove that there is another mind besides his in the universe and that if Gods have minds and there is a flying spaghetti monster that is a god, then

    (a) This monster will have a mind; but
    (b) Nobody will be able to prove that it does.

    That you think that kind of thing is important is lovely. In my (much more mundane) book, you’ve got an instantiation of If all A’s are B’s and John is an A, then John is a B–not some important connection between other minds and proofs of God’s existence.

  16. fifthmonarchyman: Please describe a study that would empirically establish exactly what his intentions were.

    I’m not sure of your point here (perhaps obfuscation?). I do not claim that we can empirically determine intentions.

    The entire point of my comment was question your apparent certainty about what PeterP intended.

  17. If the latter how would you determine if they heard the request and chose to ignore it rather than not hearing it at all?

    I’d ask them if they heard and understood the ‘request’ and have them sign a statement at the initiation of the study that they heard and understood the ‘request; just like the ‘prayer studies’ did. For some ‘requests’ follow up tests with objective endpoints could be used to ‘test’ for compliance or non-compliance. For example with exercise a physical test of stamina could be used or if the request was to stop smoking, tobacco or cannibis,, then blood tests looking at metabolites of those substances could be used to determine compliance or non-compliance. Just like any other study such as the ‘prayer studies’ we are/were discussing.

    there are reasons we use consent and release of liability statements and those reasons are directly related to a recipients hearing and understanding ‘requests’.

  18. I keep telling him that one has to believe something to know it, but he can’t seem to get that.

  19. walto:
    I keep telling him that one has to believe something to know it, but he can’t seem to get that.

    Because he wishes to know something else, he believes something else.

    He exemplifies what you say, he just won’t believe it.

    Glen Davidson

  20. OMagain: Liar.

    Ah, but herein lies the problem: FMM’s entire worldview — his “presuppositions” — require him to believe that anyone who claims that God doesn’t exist is massively self-deceived. And so when he says that we are all self-deceived, he’s being completely sincere. Conversely, in order for him to refrain from calling us out on our self-deception, he’d have to lie about what he really thinks.

  21. Kantian Naturalist,

    I don’t see that. He could stop saying we know this or that thing that we don’t actually believe with no harm to his argument. It’s an unnecessary and obnoxious codicil.

  22. walto:
    Kantian Naturalist,

    I don’t see that. He could stop saying we know this or that thing that we don’t actually believe with no harm to his argument. It’s an unnecessary and obnoxious codicil.

    It also seems not aimed at convincing anyone but himself and anyone else tied to such beliefs. Because it isn’t in the least bit convincing or adequately argued.

    When he accuses others of being self-deceived, however, he thereby psychologically defends his beliefs against any doubts that arise in his mind. He doesn’t appear to wish to facilitate any kind of discussion by using such accusations, but only to insulate himself from any discussion that still might occur.

    Glen Davidson

  23. GlenDavidson: When he accuses others of being self-deceived, however, he thereby psychologically defends his beliefs against any doubts that arise in his mind. He doesn’t appear to wish to facilitate any kind of discussion by using such accusations, but only to insulate himself from any discussion that still might occur.

    I just adore comments like this. The exact same thing can be said about you and your attitude towards ID and IDers. We’ll just chalk it up as a self-defense mechanism against ever being wrong.

    How does engaging in such B.S. psychoanalysis contribute anything useful?

  24. GlenDavidson: It also seems not aimed at convincing anyone but himself and anyone else tied to such beliefs. Because it isn’t in the least bit convincing or adequately argued.

    It doesn’t have to be, it says so in the Bible.

  25. Mung: I just adore comments like this. The exact same thing can be said about you and your attitude towards ID and IDers. We’ll just chalk it up as a self-defense mechanism against ever being wrong.

    How does engaging in such B.S. psychoanalysis contribute anything useful?

    So?

  26. newton:

    Mung: I just adore comments like this. The exact same thing can be said about you and your attitude towards ID and IDers. We’ll just chalk it up as a self-defense mechanism against ever being wrong.

    How does engaging in such B.S. psychoanalysis contribute anything useful?

    So?

    What a stupid claim by Mung. He treats very different situations as if they were the same.

    I argue against ID using facts, I don’t simply state presuppositions like FMM does, and as Mung typically does (like in that scurrilous and evidence-free attack). But Mung can’t be bothered to deal with the facts, he just stupidly conflates very different actions and calls them the same due to his own inability to understand crucial differences.

    Glen Davidson

  27. Kantian Naturalist: Ah, but herein lies the problem: FMM’s entire worldview — his “presuppositions” — require him to believe that anyone who claims that God doesn’t exist is massively self-deceived.

    One does not have to deny God’s existence only not affirm it.

    And so when he says that we are all self-deceived, he’s being completely sincere.

    He also holds the position that certainty is not required for knowledge. He may sincerely hold the position but he also accepts he is possibly wrong . And there is the problem. He is not qualifying his statement. Something people have asked him to do repeatedly, pointing out this problem.

    Conversely, in order for him to refrain from calling us out on our self-deception, he’d have to lie about what he really thinks.

    He is stating the self-deception as fact not opinion. That is not honest.

  28. GlenDavidson,

    But Mung can’t be bothered to deal with the facts, he just stupidly conflates very different actions and calls them the same due to his own inability to understand crucial differences.

    Categorically denying an alternative argument is one action.

  29. colewd:
    GlenDavidson,

    Categorically denying an alternative argument is one action.

    Yes.

    WTF does this have to do with anything, except for the fact that you make claims that are shown to be wrong, which you then ignore in order to shift the goalposts?

    You should be concerned about your denial of alternative arguments. It’s what you do.

    Glen Davidson

  30. Mung now

    Mung: I say that to make an assertion is to make an argument.

    and yet
    Mung then

    Mung: An assertion, you fool, is not an argument.

    🙂

  31. GlenDavidson,

    You should be concerned about your denial of alternative arguments. It’s what you do.

    Like when you make believe you understand the tradeoffs of biological design?

  32. colewd:
    GlenDavidson,

    Like when you amake believe you understand the tradeoffs of biological design?

    OK, explain it to me. Especially explain why the tradeoffs of “biologic design” look like the tradeoffs of unthinking evolutionary processes.

    You have no evidence involved with your idiotic claim that I don’t understand the tradeoffs of biologic design. You, of course, don’t, but merely bring up the issue to prop up your baseless a priori beliefs, and to avoid understanding the import of evolutionary predictions.

    So yes, you’re very good at denying every bit of evidence for evolution and against design, while you have never offered a single piece of legitimate evidence for it. Your staggering bias is the only thing that you have going for your belief design, which is propped up with your projection of said bias onto those of us who care enough to learn to discuss the evidence.

    Glen Davidson

  33. GlenDavidson,

    OK, explain it to me. Especially explain why the tradeoffs of “biologic design” look like the tradeoffs of unthinking evolutionary processes.

    They don’t at all. You have created a false image in your mind. How do you get a eukaryotic cell that is finely tuned for variable cell division, differentiation, and oxygen acquisition from a blind and mindless process.

    Biology is build one cell at a time from inception to a mature animal.

  34. colewd:
    GlenDavidson,

    They don’t at all.You have created a false image in your mind.How do you get a eukaryotic cell that is finely tuned for variablecell division, differentiation, and oxygen acquisition from a blind and mindless process.

    How do you get it from thinking processes? Have you ever once thought of the issues of actual design, rather than simply defaulted to it without a thought?

    Biology is build one cell at a time from inception to a mature animal.

    So? And why does it still involve ancestral forms?

    Explain why the chicken wing develops from right to left, as shown below.

  35. The design reason for beginning with five digits is what? The design purpose for why a rigid fused bone structure forms from cartilage that once turned into articulated dinosaur hands is what?

    You’ve never explained anything by design, you never will, and you’ll never care that you can’t. You’ll just blunder along endlessly pretending that design explains because “evolution doesn’t.” Which wouldn’t follow even if it were true.

    Glen Davidson

  36. J-Mac:
    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

    Um, dude… I took a year of graduate QM in college, and also participated in a seminar on the philosophical implications of QM. I’m far from an expert on the subject, but I do in fact know the fundamentals. In fact, I feel entirely confident in saying that I understand the subject much better than you do.

    And I don’t suppose you can point out anywhere that I actually contradicted myself?

    If you want to really learn about retro-causality, look up the pigeonhole quantum experiment.

    I assume you’re referring to “The quantum pigeonhole principle and the nature of quantum correlations” by Y. Aharonov et al? If so, it’s interesting, but I don’t see how it implies any sort of retro-causality. First, notice that they didn’t actually perform an experiment, they proposed one and used theory to predict the results. The theoretical analysis they used assumes entirely forward-in-time causality. Short summary:

    Step 1: they start by distributing three particles between two “boxes” (/states) in a state where each particle is in a equal-parts superposition between being in each of the two boxes, and none of them are entangled.

    Step 2: they arbirtarily pick two of them and measure whether they’re in the same box or not (without measuring which particle is in which box).

    Step 3: they independently measure each of the particles to see if they’re in a particular superposition of the two boxes (different from their initial state).

    At the end, they look at the runs where all three particles were found to be in that particular superposition in step 3, and find that in those cases step 2 found the two particles were in different boxes. What’s interesting about this is that they’d have gotten the same results in step two with any pair of particles, but steps 1 and 3 treat all three particles the same, so the result at step two seems intuitively to imply that none of the three particles were in the same box at that point (which is weird because there are three particles but only two boxes).

    Again, this is interesting and counterintuitive, but it doesn’t imply that the result at step 3 influenced the result at step 2. Quite the opposite, they describe it as the result of step 2 influencing the result at step 3. Specifically, they describe the state of the wavefunction after the step 2 measurement when it found the particles in the same boxes (see equation 6) and point out that that state is orthogonal to the state they look for in step 3 (meaning that from that intermediate state they’ll never see the selected final state in step 3). So it’s not that finding the selected sate in step 3 causes the particles to be in different boxes in step 2, it’s that finding the two particles in the same box in step 2 prevents the particles from being found in the selected state in step 3!

    Here is a quote from the paper you linked [note: this refers to the 2012 paper by Ma et al that’s mentioned in passing in the original video -GD] that contradicts your assumption and actually supports the main point of this OP:

    […trimmed -GD] “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.” [trimmed again -GD]

    Short summary: they’re overstating the implications of the experiment, because the results are also entirely consistent with the interpretation that the two particles were never entangled at all, and that the result of the final measurement was influenced by the earlier measurements (rather than vice versa). The basic problem with the argument here is the same as with the two-slit version the video concentrates on: there’s a correlation between the results of the earlier measurements and the final measurement, but correlation doesn’t tell you the direction of the causal influence. You can interpret the experiment as having the final measurement influence the earlier ones, but it works equally well if you interpret it as the earlier ones influencing the final one.

    I won’t do a detailed analysis of the experiment. There are three different measurements involved, each of which has two possible choices of what to measure and two possible results, so the number of permutations of possible measurements and results would make it a repetitive slog. For anyone who understands QM, I’ll just point out that for any individual run the three measurements involved all commute, meaning that you’ll get the same results (in terms of outcome probabilities and resulting final states) no matter what order you apply the measurements to the system’s initial state; therefore, treating things in the actual order they happened in will get the same result as if you apply them in reverse order (as they do in that paper).

    If you apply the final measurement to the wavefunction first, you do get an intermediate state where the two other photons are entangled, but that’s entirely due to the choice to apply the last measurement first. If you apply the measurements in the order they actually happened, you get strictly non-entangled intermediate states and the same end results. The appearance of retro-causality is entirely a result of assuming retro-causality, so the whole argument is circular.

    If you don’t understand that, how about some counter-proof-texting from the paper that originally proposed this experiment: “Delayed choice for entanglement swapping”, by Asher Peres (heavily trimmed, and with my emphasis added):

    Abstract. Two observers (Alice and Bob) independently prepare two sets of singlets. They test one particle of each singlet along an arbitrarily chosen direction [the earlier measurements -GD] and send the other particle to a third observer, Eve. At a later time, Eve performs joint tests on pairs of particles (one from Alice and one from Bob) [the final measurement -GD]. According to Eve’s choice of test and to her results, Alice and Bob can sort into subsets the samples that they have already tested, and they can verify that each subset behaves as if it consisted of entangled pairs of distant particles, that have never communicated in the past, even indirectly via other particles.

    [….]

    3. The paradox

    There can be no doubt that the particles that were independently produced and tested by Alice and Bob were uncorrelated and therefore unentangled. Each one of these particles may well have disappeared (e.g., been absorbed) before the next particle was produced, and before Eve performed her tests. Only the records kept by the three observers remain, to be examined objectively.

    How can the appearance of entanglement arise in these circumstances? […detailed analysis trimmed…]

    It is obvious that from the raw data collected by Alice and Bob it is possible to select in many different ways subsets that correspond to entangled pairs. The only role that Eve has in this experiment is to tell Alice and Bob how to select such a subset. Clearly, Eve has to be honest: if she does not perform her measurements in the correct way and if she reports fake data, Alice and Bob will not select good subsets, and then their analysis will readily expose Eve’s misbehaviour.

    In summary, there is nothing paradoxical in the experiments outlined above. However, one has to clearly understand quantum mechanics and to firmly believe in its correctness to see that there is no paradox.

    …So according to Peres, the retroactively-created entangled state is only apparent, not actually real. The real situation is that the particles produced and measured by Alice and Bob are not entangled, they just appear to be when post-selected based on the final measurement made by Eve. Thus, there’s no real paradox.

    BTW, I should also note that (as usual), there don’t appear to be any actual humans “in the loop”. Alice, Bob, and Eve (Peres’ paper) / Victor (Ma et al) are just labels for different players involved in the experiment, and it doesn’t really matter if those players or humans or devices. (Note: Alice and Bob are standard fictional characters used when describing communications systems.) If you look at the diagram of the actual experimental setup (figure 2 on page 10 of the Ma et al paper), Alice, Bob, and Victor all consist of various optical and related gear, with no humans anywhere in the diagram.

  37. Nice, Gordon.

    I’m going to predict, however, that within no more than a couple of hours j-Mac or Bill will again claim that nobody has proferred a word of criticism with respect to their crankish claims, and that people who don’t agree with them are just biased.

    Because, you know, it makes them feel good when they say stuff like that.

    Anyhow, thanks for your careful critique.

  38. walto: I’m going to predict, however, that within no more than a couple of hours j-Mac or Bill will again claim that nobody has proferred a word of criticism with respect to their crankish claims, and that people who don’t agree with them are just biased.

    No, it’ll be at least two or three days.

    Because, you know, it makes them feel good when they say stuff like that.

    I think the psychology is more interesting than that. They need materialism to be false because they cannot see why life is worth living if it is true. This makes them psychologically incapable of recognizing that the evidence doesn’t support their quirky beliefs.

    Anyhow, thanks for your careful critique.

    Seconded!

  39. walto: In my (much more mundane) book, you’ve got an instantiation of If all A’s are B’s and John is an A, then John is a B–not some important connection between other minds and proofs of God’s existence.

    I think we pretty much are in agreement here.

    I don’t think that the fact that God is a mind is all that important except that it helps to illustrate the futility of trying to prove or disprove his existence with empirical evidence

    I take that to be your position as well.

    You can’t prove that the flying spaghetti monster exists if he is a mind. The closest you can ever come is to prove that a physical body matching the description of the FSM exists.

    peace

  40. fifthmonarchyman: I don’t think that the fact that God is a mind is all that important except that it helps to illustrate the futility of trying to prove or disprove his existence with empirical evidence

    I take that to be your position as well.

    You can’t prove that the flying spaghetti monster exists if he is a mind. The closest you can ever come is to prove that a physical body matching the description of the FSM exists.

    Just for the record, in case anyone’s interested, I disagree completely: I think that we can establish through transcendental argument that minds other than one’s own exist. I just don’t think that one can establish that God’s mind is one of them.

  41. Neil Rickert: So what? Why should this be a reason for concern?

    It’s only a reason for concern when people unwarrantedly believe or act as if other Minds should be empirically demonstrated to exist before their existence is accepted.

    That sort of attitude can lead to all sorts of problems for society.

    peace

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