Consciousness and quantum mechanics

[mmcirvin]

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...

Comments

Kibo's birthday?

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

I was going to send him a present, but I had to pay for some software instead. Say happy birthday to him if you see him on the day.

Thanks.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

In the universe of the TV series Andromeda, the only way to travel FTL is with a technology called "slipstream", in which only conscious, organic beings may be pilots. This sets up a useful constraint for plot points, as messages must be conveyed by live couriers, and you can't have drones going through hyperspace, and so forth.

Six episodes in, they cheated, by having a race of artificial beings grow brains in jars for the purpose of being slipstream pilots. Duh.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty clever plot device. I'd forgive the brains in jars if they did something interesting with it.

[jwgh]

Reading things like this makes me realize what a ridiculously extreme materialist I am.

Even various religions disagree [. . .]

Woah, there are things that different religions disagree about?

I appreciate that Nova is carefully neutral on whether or not any of the beings he encounters in day to day life actually have consciousness, or if it's just him.

The inevitable reference to Searle occurs a little more than halfway though, I see.

Lots of italicized words

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I do find qualia pretty mysterious. But I don't see any reason that an artificial machine couldn't have them as well as a human; you don't even really need to be an extreme materialist to see that. If humans are projections of consciousness then why can't a humanlike machine be too? Their origins just involve a different physical process, that involved humans in a different way... Searle in a sense is more materialist than the strong-AI advocates, since he insists that the presence of qualia has something specific to do with the fact that it's a biological brain and not something else. Indeed, if I recall correctly he criticizes strong-AI software-ism as a type of dualism (though that might have been somebody else).

But I am also somewhat skeptical of the strong-AI people on practical grounds. I have no philosophical objections to the idea that a human could be emulated by a program running on a conventional computer, and if it worked I'd accept such a system as a conscious being; but in practice the performance of such a system would likely be so poor that it would never get any thinking done. So I tend to think that if somebody ever makes intelligent machines they will be special-purpose mechanisms that more closely resemble physical brains (not necessarily in terms of substance, but in terms of logical functioning) rather than generic function evaluators that got fed the right function.

I'm repelled by any metaphysics that allows the existence of "zombies" (beings that act exactly like people but have no qualia), so I like the idea that there is no individual soul that could be added in or taken away without observable consequences, but that the universe is simply so constructed that some kinds of events (maybe even all events!) necessarily have qualia associated with them, that the events that involve acting like a person are among those, and that our brains' ability to accumulate memory means that some of these qualia include the illusion of a unified self. Based on my very limited knowledge, this seems to be more or less what Gautama Buddha is said to have thought about the subject, though his elaborations on how this incorporates the traditional Hindu concepts of reincarnation and karma (especially the latter) seem like patch-up jobs to me. Very likely there are subtleties I am missing.

Unlike Spivack, I'm OK with defining science as limited to observations that can be replicated and shared. (Some of those could include reports of subjective experiences, which after all is really all anyone is ever doing, though I think we do have to accept that any differences in the experiences themselves that are not present in the reports are beyond the ability of science to study). I think part of the problem is that people see "non-scientific" as a pejorative, when it doesn't have to be. It's only a pejorative when used to describe something purported to be science.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Don't you understand?? When we gaze at the Abyss, it GAZES BACK!! The Universe perceives us! And... it's ANGRY!!!

[bram.livejournal.com]

Before getting very far into your post, I must interject that Nova Spivack is a man. (See, when he was conceived, his parents were on the beach and saw a ship called "Avon" but one of them saw it upside-down.)

Nova was one of my best friends from college. His grandfather is the extremely famous Peter Drucker.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for explaining...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Alan Turing would be laughing right now...

[twillis.livejournal.com]

Ah, but maybe he was a GURL until you observed otherwise.

[jwgh]

If you ever log in to ArkMOO again, remind me to tell you why that's funny.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm a farmer now, which means I gotta make hay while the sun shines, and this time of year it shines until 9!

Too late for moo'ing. Which I guess means that I shall be in suspense until Fall. Bastid.