Consciousness and quantum mechanics

bram linked to Nova Spivack's blog a while back; here she he has a long post about the possibility (or impossibility) of simulating consciousness that goes into a lot of interesting opinions. I disagree with large parts of it, but those are just my own opinions; I'll admit I don't know any better than she he does exactly how consciousness relates to the physical world. (thanks to Bram for the correction)

Partway down, though, it goes into something that I think is actually a popular misconception, one whose popularity (especially in New Age and motivational literature) bothers me:

Research into quantum mechanics is also arriving at the fact that consciousness plays an important, but not yet understood, role in shaping physical reality. It is clear that consciousness has a major impact on the outcome of certain types of experiments, for example. Whether you observe a particle or not determines how it seems to behave.

The impression given is that physical experiments have shown that the consciousness of an observer has an effect on experimental results. I hear this a lot, but it's incorrect. The process in question is that of "wavefunction collapse" or "reduction of the state vector", in which a system that was in a superposition of states suddenly ends up in a state with a definite value of the measured quantity. Some respectable physicists, particularly Eugene Wigner, have insisted that the thing that really produces wavefunction collapse is the presence of a conscious observer. But in practice, you cannot experimentally tell this kind of interpretation apart from one in which collapse is produced by thermodynamically irreversible events (or, for that matter, one in which there is not collapse at all, and the process is one of entanglement of the measuring system with the measured one). Interpretations aside, it is not an essential feature of quantum mechanics itself that consciousness has a direct physical role. Quantum physics is done and observed by conscious physicists, of course, but so is classical physics; there's nothing quantumly special here.

I just thought I'd clear that up...

SCTV

Some channel has been showing the syndicated, mashed-up SCTV compilations again. They seem to be mixtures of stuff from the early, ragged 30-minute episodes in which Harold Ramis hogged the camera and the more polished 90-minute episodes, and the material is pretty uneven; my theory is that the sketches in them were chosen more for the absence of music rights issues than for quality. Though the half-hour syndicated shows have their moments, if they were your only exposure to the show you might come away unimpressed (and I've heard that some people have).

Fortunately the first season of NBC 90-minute shows is out on DVD now, after a heroic effort at securing nearly all of the music rights. Sam just got the box set and we watched the first episode (which was actually also mostly a compilation, but they'd chosen their best stuff from the 30-minute seasons and added wrap-around material; the very early "English for Beginners" sketch that introduced Perini Scleroso was re-shot).

This is the SCTV I remember. So funny your head will explode, sometimes for reasons that are impossible to articulate. And you can fast-forward past the awkwardly integrated musical guests if you want.

The very first episode has "Play It Again, Bob," in which Rick Moranis's Woody Allen impression meets Dave Thomas's spookily perfect Bob Hope impression (and Joe Flaherty as a spectral Bing Crosby). I didn't know at the time that Woody Allen actually did acknowledge that his comic persona in his early films largely built on Bob Hope's.

INTEL BUYING APPLE SHOCK HORROR!

This Robert X. Cringely column, asserting that recent developments can only mean that Intel is buying Apple in an Ahab-like plot to destroy Microsoft, is pretty stupid. I have no idea whether Intel would want to buy Apple, but I don't buy the notion that the decision to switch to Intel processors is so baffling that it can be explained no other way.( point by point... )