Quantum Mechanics - Interpretations & Implications

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SilentRoamer

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« Reply #30 on: May 23, 2014, 12:28:11 pm »
Anyone see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27264552

Apparently they are making good progress and the Nature and Arxiv articles seem to support their claims. Think this is very interesting and abviously relevant for me being in the industry. Maybe in a few decades you will be able to buy Quantum Servers.

sciborg2

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« Reply #31 on: June 19, 2014, 07:24:26 am »
Anyone see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27264552

Apparently they are making good progress and the Nature and Arxiv articles seem to support their claims. Think this is very interesting and abviously relevant for me being in the industry. Maybe in a few decades you will be able to buy Quantum Servers.

Good stuff!

=-=-=

Shan Gao's paper is now on my reading list:

A quantum physical argument for panpsychism

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It has been widely thought that consciousness has no causal efficacy in the physical world. However, this may be not the case. In this paper, we show that a conscious being can distinguish definite perceptions and their quantum superpositions, while a physical measuring system without consciousness cannot distinguish such nonorthogonal quantum states. The possible existence of this distinct quantum physical effect of consciousness may have interesting implications for the science of consciousness. In particular, it suggests that consciousness is not emergent but a fundamental feature of the universe. This may provide a possible quantum basis for panpsychism.

sciborg2

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« Reply #32 on: June 29, 2014, 10:35:18 pm »
Closer to Truth: Quantum Physics of Consciousness

http://www.closertotruth.com/series/quantum-physics-consciousness

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Are quantum events required for consciousness in a very special sense, far beyond the general sense that quantum events are part of all physical systems? What would it take for quantum events, on such a micro-scale, to be relevant for brain function, which operates at the much higher level of neurons and brain circuits? What would it mean?

sciborg2

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« Reply #33 on: July 01, 2014, 10:15:59 pm »
 A talk from Anton Zeilinger on quantum physics at the University of Cape Town:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s3ZPWW5NOrw

Quantum Games & Quantum Information

sciborg2

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« Reply #34 on: July 14, 2014, 08:25:46 pm »
Jack Tuszynski: Biology on the Threshold of Quantum Revolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxqxb3xnntQ

"Dr. Jack Tuszynski presents "Biology on the Threshold of Quantum Revolution" on March 18th, 2014, in the Technology and Future of Medicine course LABMP 590 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Copyright (c) 2014, JustMachines Inc."
« Last Edit: July 14, 2014, 08:30:41 pm by sciborg2 »

sciborg2

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« Reply #35 on: July 29, 2014, 12:48:51 am »
Is quantum mechanics relevant to the philosophy of mind (and the other way around)?

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The main type of objection against interpretations involving an observer, I would say, is that they seem too reminiscent of either 19th century Idealism or early 20th century neo-Kantian and phenomenalist views (which did strongly influence said physicists). These doctrines have declined in favor of a renewal of scientific realism in the course of the 20th century.

From a realist perspective, such interpretations seem to attribute a privileged ontological status to the human brain, which is increasingly not acceptable. Was there really no definite reality before life appeared on earth? Does the moon vanishes when no one is looking? All this seems barely good enough for mystics and new age gurus (there might be more sensible anti-realist interpretations, but let’s not quibble…) However, having previously rejected the idea that phenomenal aspects of consciousness are to be addressed by biology, all of this is easily defused: a privileged ontological status of human observers only makes sense for those who pretend that biology can inform deep metaphysical questions.

Let me be more specific and draw on an example. I suggested that phenomenal aspects of consciousness could eventually be explained under a proper interpretation of physics. A possible such explanation could take the form of panpsychism: the idea that, somehow, all matter is conscious. In fact, by distinguishing phenomenal aspects from cognitive aspects of consciousness and relegating the former to physics and the latter to biology or psychology, we would have something like panphenomenalism: the idea that all matter is “phenomenal.” Anyway, in the context of either panpsychism or panphenomenalism, granting a particular role to phenomenality in physics, say, in the collapse of the wave function, does not amount to granting a privileged ontological status to the brain.

sciborg2

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« Reply #36 on: August 04, 2014, 03:57:21 am »
The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Scientists separate a particle from its properties

Things get tricky, when the system is used to measure where the neutron spin is located: the spin can be slightly changed using a magnetic field. When the two beams are recombined appropriately, they can amplify or cancel each other. This is exactly what can be seen in the measurement if the magnetic field is applied at the lower beam – but that is the path which the neutrons considered in the experiment are actually never supposed to take. A magnetic field applied to the upper beam, on the other hand, does not have any effect.

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“By preparing the neurons in a special initial state and then post selecting another state, we can achieve a situation in which both the possible paths in the interferometer are important for the experiment, but in very different ways,” says Tobias Denkmayr. “Along one of the paths, the particles themselves couple to our measurement device, but only the other path is sensitive to magnetic spin coupling. The system behaves as if the particles were spatially separated from their properties.”

Many popularized articles about the new effect have also appeared in major magazines such as on the July 27 cover of New Scientist. These articles interview the Chapman University researchers who first predicted such new kinds of quantum paradoxes.

sciborg2

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« Reply #37 on: August 07, 2014, 09:47:30 pm »
David Chalmers: Consciousness and the collapse of the wave function

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIBT6E2GtjA

A public evening lecture held by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers on May 2nd, 2014 in Göttingen.


Wic

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« Reply #38 on: August 21, 2014, 10:47:06 pm »
I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM.  Absolutely priapic.

sciborg2

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« Reply #39 on: August 28, 2014, 09:41:39 am »
I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM.  Absolutely priapic.

Sarcasm?

=-=-=

David Bohm: A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter
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The relationship of mind and matter is approached in a new way in this article. This approach is based on the causal interpretation of the quantum theory, in which an electron, for example, is regarded as an inseparable union of a particle and afield. This field has, however, some new properties that can be seen to be the main sources of the differences between the quantum theory and the classical (Newtonian) theory. These new properties suggest that the field may be regarded as containing objective and active information, and that the activity of this information is similar in certain key ways to the activity of information in our ordinary subjective experience. The analogy between mind and matter is thus fairly close.

This analogy leads to the proposal of the general outlines of a new theory of mind, matter, and their relationship, in which the basic notion is participation rather than interaction. Although the theory can be developed mathematically in more detail, the main emphasis here is to show qualitatively how it provides a way of thinking that does not divide mind from matter, and thus leads to a more coherent understanding of such questions than is possible in the common dualistic and reductionistic approaches. These ideas may be relevant to connectionist theories and might perhaps suggest new directions for their development.

The Sharmat

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« Reply #40 on: September 03, 2014, 08:44:30 am »
Anyone see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27264552

Apparently they are making good progress and the Nature and Arxiv articles seem to support their claims. Think this is very interesting and abviously relevant for me being in the industry. Maybe in a few decades you will be able to buy Quantum Servers.
Great. Strap a module on it that makes it do optimization problems about itself and you got yourself a self-aware computer.

We're all doomed. See you in the Skynet death camps.

sciborg2

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« Reply #41 on: September 24, 2014, 03:32:54 pm »
The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley

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BH: Yeah, but don’t forget, if you just do the simple Bohm theory, you don’t see any of this. I’m now telling you we see the Bohm theory in the light of this deeper process. I used to give the lectures on the Bohm theory, because you cannot ignore it. It’s there whether you like it or not. But then people believed that’s what I really thought nature was. But to me, that’s a Mickey Mouse model. It’s not the driving force of what David and I were doing. This would just be a certain level of abstraction.

So I am not a Bohmian in the Bohmian mechanics sense. Chris Fuchs came down to me once after a lecture and says, “How nice it is to meet a Bohmian.” And I said: “I beg your pardon? Where?” I’m not a Bohmian. What we are discussing is not mechanics. Bohm says in his quantum-theory book, the original one, quantum mechanics is a misnomer. It should be called quantum non-mechanics.

GM: Because you shouldn’t think of it in terms of a mechanistic motion of particles?

BH: Yes, it’s nothing like that. It’s not mechanism. It organicism. It’s organic. Nature is more organic than we think it is. And then you can understand why life arose, because if nature is organic, it has the possibility of life in it.

Wilshire

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« Reply #42 on: September 24, 2014, 07:16:16 pm »
Anyone see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27264552

Apparently they are making good progress and the Nature and Arxiv articles seem to support their claims. Think this is very interesting and abviously relevant for me being in the industry. Maybe in a few decades you will be able to buy Quantum Servers.
Great. Strap a module on it that makes it do optimization problems about itself and you got yourself a self-aware computer.

We're all doomed. See you in the Skynet death camps.
That is brilliant :D. Glad I glanced at the last page worth of comments.
One of the other conditions of possibility.

Wic

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« Reply #43 on: October 03, 2014, 03:54:41 am »
I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM.  Absolutely priapic.

Sarcasm?

Much sarcasm.  QM is not the kind of model where you get the gist of it and then get to go out and express your personal theoretical interpretations as though they were valuable - there's a reason for a phrase that comes up often, 'shut up and calculate'.  It's not the kind of thing we can easily make sense of, internally.  Which makes the kind of people who think they've made sense of things on that scale, inadequate in any explanatory capacity.

sciborg2

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« Reply #44 on: October 03, 2014, 07:06:45 pm »
I think you're exaggerating the inability of philosophers to come to terms with scientific discovery, though I would agree we know so little about QM trying to say any philosophical argument is definitive gospel would be a mistake.

In fact, we may know even less than before:

Are weak values quantum? Don't bet on it

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New work asserts that a key technique used to probe quantum systems may not be so quantum after all, according to Perimeter postdoctoral researcher Joshua Combes and his colleague Christopher Ferrie.

Over the past 20 years, a strange idea called a "weak value" has taken root in quantum information science.

Many of the things you can do with quantum technologies entail being able to gain information from quantum systems. But there is a quantum conundrum: we can't say what a particle is doing when we're not looking at it, but when we do look at it, we change its behaviour.

But what if we could look "a little"? Well, that's a weak measurement, a concept which is central to the notion of a weak value. The basic idea of weak measurement is to gain a little bit of information about a quantum system by only disturbing it a little bit; by doing this many times, one can ultimately gain quite a bit of information about the system. Weak measurements have applications in quantum information technologies such as quantum feedback control and quantum communications.

Obtaining a weak value involves taking a weak measurement of a particle. It also – counterintuitively – depends on throwing out the majority of the results, carefully selecting only a few to keep in an effort to screen out particles which were knocked off-course by the act of measurement.

In this way, researchers believe they can gradually build up a picture of the typical behaviour of particles even between measurements. When these carefully gathered and screened measurements produce something unexpected and (apparently) quantum, that's called a weak value. Weak values are a whole new window into the quantum world.

Unless, of course, they're not. What if weak values aren't quantum at all?

"We're skeptical of the whole field," says Joshua Combes. Combes is a postdoctoral fellow at Perimeter and the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), and he has just published a Physical Review Letters paper critical of weak measurement.