this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
93 points (93.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
587 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I came here to say this.
Modern physics already gives special status to observer objects and properties that “non-observer” objects don’t have, and every universe needs to be defined from some particular point of view instead of “objectively” from outside. There are a couple other weird things but those are two big ones to me.
And so a physicist from the 2100s where physics is defined in relation to consciousness asks a modern physicist, so why did you think it was all just atoms and numbers in an “objective” universe?
And the modern physicist says what the fuck are you talking about don’t get all weird and religious on me
And the future physicist says okay dude good luck then
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of an "observer" - it's not a conscious entity literally observing something. It's simply an object whose state depends on the quantum particle in question.
Why does the detector in the double slit experiment not cause an interference pattern if its state depends on which slit the particle went through, but then it resets its internal state after, without transmitting the result?
There's no way to fully erase the state, as information cannot be destroyed. There will always be consequences of the state measurement in the detector (e.g. through heat).
Absolutely false. You have apparently never heard of the exact aspects of quantum mechanics which so surprised physicists when they were first discovered? (which are pretty much its defining feature) IDK, it kind of sounds that way.
I’m honestly not saying it’s as simple as the pop science oversimplification of QM, even though my comment was kind of invoking exactly that oversimplification. But yes, things like having the detector erase its measurements without recording them were exactly the types of experiments which started to point to something much stranger going on than just one object’s state depending on another.
Citation
Emphasis is mine. If I’ve misunderstood something then fill me in, sure.
There's apparently a answer to this I've been told by physicists, but I've never quite understood it lol.
There is "observer-dependence" in quantum mechanics in a comparable way that there is observer-dependence in general relativity. It has nothing to do with some "fundamental role of consciousness" but comes from the fact that reality itself depends on how you look at it, it is reference frame dependent. The "observer" is just a chosen coordinate system in which to describe other things. I know, you probably got this from Kastrup too, right? Idealists have been getting desperate and resorting to quantum woo, pretending that something that changes based on coordinate system proves fundamental consciousnesses.
This is accurate, yes. The cat in the box is conscious presumably, in my opinion of cats at least, but still can be "not an observer" from the POV of the scientist observing the experiment from outside the box.
I have no idea who Kastrup is.
No idea what you're talking about with getting desperate. I got a little more detailed in another comment about what I was and wasn't claiming ("I'm honestly not saying it's as simple as" etc). I stand by my statement that QM is about quite a lot more than coordinate systems, and in my opinion will make it look weird in retrospect once physics expands to a more coherent whole that includes the special properties of the observer in a way that's something other than "yeah we don't know WTF that's about and we try not to think about it".
"Consciousness" is not relevant here at all. You can write down the wave function of a system relative to a rock if you wanted, in a comparable way as writing down the velocity of a train from the "point of view" of a rock. It is coordinate. It has nothing to do with "consciousness." The cat would perceive a definite state of the system from its reference frame, but the person outside the box would not until they interact with it.
Obviously QM is not just coordinate systems. The coordinate nature of quantum mechanics, the relative nature of it, is merely a property of the theory and not the whole theory. But the rest of the theory does not have any relevance to "consciousness."
The theory is fully coherent and internally consistent. It amazes me how many people choose to deny QM and always want to rush to change it. Your philosophy should be guided by the physical sciences, not the other way around. People see QM going against their basic intuitions and their first thought is it must be incomplete and needs to have additional complexity added to it to make it fit their intuitions, rather than just questioning that maybe their basic intuitions are wrong.
Your other comment was to a Wikipedia page which if you clicked the link on your own source it would've told you that the scientific consensus on that topic is that what you're presenting is a misinterpretation.
A simple search on YouTube could've also brought up several videos explaining this to you.
Edit: Placing my response here as an edit since I don't care to continue this conversation so I don't want to notify.
A point of view is just a colloquial term to refer to a coordinate system. They are not coordinate in the exact same way but they are both coordinate.
No, it doesn't not, and you're never demonstrated that.
We have never observed quantum effects on the scale where gravitational effects would also be observable, so such a theory, if we proposed one, would not be based on empirical evidence.
You literally said in your own words we need to take additional things into account we currently are not. You're now just doing a 180 and pretending you did not say what literally anyone can scroll up and see that you said.
Then you don't understand the experiment since the only reason it is considered interesting is because if you interpret it in certain ways it seems to imply retrocausality. Literally no one has ever treated it as anything more than that. You are just making up your own wild implications from the experiment.
The behavior of the system physically changes when it undergoes a physical interaction. How surprising!
Yes, that was what I said. Er, well... QM, as I understand it, doesn't have to do anything with shifting coordinate systems per se (and in fact is still incompatible with relativity). They're just sort of similar in that they both have to define some point of view and make everything else in the model relative to it. I'm still not sure why you brought coordinate systems into it. But broadly I agree with what you're saying here; I think I was saying the same thing.
My point was that communication of state to the observer in the system, or not, causes a difference in the outcome. And that from the general intuitions that drive almost all of the rest of physics, that's weird and sort of should be impossible.
Sure. How is it when combined with macro-scale intuition about the way natural laws work, or with general relativity?
I was clearly talking about coherence of all physics, not implying that QM on its own was internally inconsistent somehow.
This is very, very very much not what I am doing. What did I say that gave you the impression I was adding anything to it?
I am not talking about anything about retrocausality here, except maybe accidentally. I was emphasizing the second paragraph; "wave behavior can be restored by erasing or otherwise making permanently unavailable the 'which path' information."
Actually, let's back up. Time out. What do you think I am claiming is happening? What is your understanding of what I am saying?
If after you tell me, I tell you, no that is not what I am saying, and then relay what I am actually saying is happening, will you believe me? I feel like you've got a certain misunderstanding of what I am claiming spun up that you are vigorously debunking, that I probably also don't agree with, and that's where a lot of the disagreement is coming from. You can disagree with me, it is fine, but please take enough time to understand what I am actually saying instead of just disagreeing with some other thing. So what is it that you think I am saying?