[sciborg2]

@Callan:

If I'm understanding you right, is causality an illusion as each page of the flipbook is independent of the others?

So then what we see as causality is just convenient...fine tuning? 

 

[sciborg2]

Non-locality & Entanglement:

Wikipage

An excerpt from Peat on Bohm has a good overview of history. -> EPR paradox, Aspect's experiment.

So the perhaps obvious question is can you use this send messages at superluminal speeds? Kaku explains why this likely isn't possible.

Of course,

And on the weird[er] side you can have entanglement between particles that don't exist at the same time.

[sciborg2]

Julian Barbour on Does Time Exist?

Julian Barbour, visiting professor at the University of Oxford and the author of The End of Time, addresses the question, Does Time Exist? Barbour explores the history of scientific thought on the concept of time and presents his own interpretations of what time is.

[sciborg2]

Julian Barbour talks more on time being illusory in this video, A New Kind of Causality. I started watching this last night but it keeps cutting out for me.

 

"There are serious indications from attempts to create a quantum theory of gravity that time must disappear completely from the description of the quantum universe. This has been known since 1967, when DeWitt discovered the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

I shall argue that this forces us to conceive explanation and causality in an entirely new way. The present can no longer be understood as the consequence of the past. Instead, I shall suggest that one may have to distinguish possible presents on the basis of their intrinsic structure, not on the basis of an assumed temporal ordering. If correct, this could have far-reaching implications. Hitherto, because the present has always been interpreted as the lawful consequence of the past, science has made no attempt to answer 'Why' questions, only 'How' questions. But if there is no past in the traditional sense, we must consider things differently. Thus, if we eliminate time, we may even be able to start asking "Why" questions."

[Cüréthañ]

Thanks for the links, I will endevour to check them out.  Strapped for time lately.

[sciborg2]

Thanks for the links, I will endevour to check them out.  Strapped for time lately.

Well if there's no time QM's always waiting for you to get back to it right? 

Here's something on QM & Idealism.

While much of the Reality Sandwich stuff on QM seems to rely too heavily on extrapolating the "Consciousness Causes the Collapse of the Wave Function" interpretation I noticed that one was written by a professor of physical chemistry.

And now that I showed the depths of the rabbit hole here's much less controversial stuff  ->

Here's something about how quantum entanglement plays a role in holding DNA together.

Here's something on the role quantum entanglement may play in photosynthesis.

Migration via quantum mechanics?

[sciborg2]

Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature?

Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another. Being in two places at once. Communicating information seemingly faster than the speed of light.

This kind of weird behaviour is commonplace in dark, still laboratories studying the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, but what might it have to do with fresh flowers, migrating birds, and the smell of rotten eggs?

Welcome to the frontier of what is called quantum biology.

[sciborg2]

Quantum Entanglement Benefits Exist after Links Are Broken

Lloyd admits this finding is baffling—and not just to him. Prem Kumar, a quantum physicist at Northwestern University, was skeptical of any benefits from quantum illumination until he saw Lloyd’s math. “Everyone’s trying to get their heads around this. It’s posing more questions than answers,” Kumar states. “If entanglement does not survive, but you can seem to accrue benefits from it, it may now be up to theorists to see if entanglement is playing a role in these advantages or if there is some other factor involved.”

As a possible explanation, Lloyd suggests that although entanglement between the photons might technically be completely lost, some hint of it may remain intact after a measurement. “You can think of photons as a mixture of states. While most of these states are no longer entangled, one or a few remain entangled, and it is this little bit in the mixture that is responsible for this effect,” he remarks.

[Phallus Pendulus]

Do you believe in the theory of quantum particles (which sometimes disappear and re-appear mysteriously) vanishing into alternate universes?

What interests me about quantum mechanics is that the world of sub-atomic particles is almost its own world, governed by rules and causes that we humans barely even begin to understand (yet). The deeper you go into the physical foundations of nature, the further away from human reason and common sense you get. IIRC, Bakker said something similar about neuroscience - you get to a point where "normal" logic and common sense don't apply anymore.

(Bakker was making a point about Pavlov and the behaviorists, AFAIK. They ran into the same "wall" where the human brain's inner workings just couldn't be described by common sense anymore. Not that this has anything to do with quantum physics, just that it's a similar case of the human brain only going so far.) 

[sciborg2]

Do you believe in the theory of quantum particles (which sometimes disappear and re-appear mysteriously) vanishing into alternate universes?

What interests me about quantum mechanics is that the world of sub-atomic particles is almost its own world, governed by rules and causes that we humans barely even begin to understand (yet). The deeper you go into the physical foundations of nature, the further away from human reason and common sense you get. IIRC, Bakker said something similar about neuroscience - you get to a point where "normal" logic and common sense don't apply anymore.

It's possible particles vanish into alternate universes, but it seems like we're at the point when there are lots of possibilities:

Quantum shadows: The mystery of matter deepens

There is a way to do that: you use light to control the detector designed to probe the light. First you prepare a "control" photon in a quantum superposition of two states. One of these states switches the interferometer to an open, particle-measuring state, and the other to a closed, wave-measuring state. Crucially, you only measure the state of the control photon after you have measured the experimental "system" photon passing through the interferometer. As far as you are concerned, the system photon is passing through an interferometer that is both open and closed; you don't know whether you are setting out to measure wave or particle behaviour (see diagram). So what do you measure?

This time, it took only a few months for the experimentalists to catch up with the theorists. But when three independent groups...performed different versions of the experiment last year, the results were unnerving - even to those who consider themselves inured to the weirdnesses of quantum physics (Nature Photonics, vol 6, p 600; Science, vol 338, p 634 and p 637).

The answer is, what you see depends on the control photon. If you look at the measurements of the system photons without ever checking the corresponding measurements of the control photons - so never knowing what measurement you made - you see a distribution of hits on the two detectors that is the signature neither of particles or waves, but some ambiguous mixture of the two. If particle is black and wave is white, this is some shade of grey.

Do the same, but this time looking at the control photon measurements as well, and it is like putting on a pair of magic specs. Grey separates clearly into black and white. You can pick out the system photons that passed through an open interferometer, and they are clearly particles. Those that passed through a closed interferometer look like waves. The photons reveal their colours in accordance with the kind of measurement the control photon said you made.

It gets yet stranger. Quantum mechanics allows you to put the control photon not just in an equal mix of two states, but in varying proportions. That is equivalent to an interferometer setting that is, say, open 70 per cent of the time and closed 30 per cent of the time. If we measure a bunch of system photons in this configuration, and look at the data before putting on our magic specs, we see an ambiguous signature once again - but this time, its shade of grey has shifted closer to particle black than wave white. Put on the specs, though, and we see system photons 70 per cent of which have seemingly - but clearly - behaved as particles, while the remaining 30 per cent acted as waves.

In one sense, the results leave Bohr's side of the argument about quantum reality stronger. There is a tight correlation between the state of the control photon, representing the nature of the measurement, and the system photon, representing the state of reality. Make for more of a particle measurement, and you'll measure something more like a particle, and vice versa. As in earlier experiments, a hidden-reality theory à la Einstein cannot explain the results.

But in another sense, we are left grappling for words. "Our experiment defies the conventional boundaries set by the complementarity principle," says Li. Ionicioiu agrees. "Complementarity shows only the two ends, black and white, of a spectrum between particle and wave," he says. "This experiment allows us to see the shades of grey in between."

....The complementarity principle is at the heart of the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics, named after Bohr's home city, which essentially argues that we see a conflict in such results only because our minds, attuned as they are to a macroscopic, classically functioning cosmos, are not equipped to deal with the quantum world. "The Copenhagen interpretation, from the very beginning, didn't demand any 'realistic' world view of the quantum system," says Kofler...

The outcomes of the latest experiments simply bear that out. "Particle" and "wave" are concepts we latch on to because they seem to correspond to guises of matter in our familiar, classical world. But attempting to describe true quantum reality with these or any other black-or-white concepts is an enterprise doomed to failure.

[sciborg2]

Interview with IQOQI's Zeilinger

What are the philosophical implications of your work?

The quantum state represents measurement results; it represents information about a concrete situation, and it allows me to make predictions about future measurement results. So it is information both about a situation that I know and information about the future. I often say that quantum theory is information theory, and that the separation between reality and information is an artificial one. You cannot think about reality without admitting that it’s information you are handling. So we need a new concept that encompasses the two. We are not there yet.

Have any philosophers picked up on the conceptual 
implications of your research?

I have a program where I invite philosophers to see what goes on in the lab, because it changes your intuition. A great majority of philosophers are realists, though sometimes naive realists. I often ask them, “Why are you so realistic? If you analyze your fundamental notions you might conclude that these things are more counterintuitive than you think.” Often the answer is, “Yes, but I want to describe reality.” And then I say, “I also want to describe reality, but why are you not satisfied with describing the reality of the observations? Why do you want a hidden reality that exists independent of the observation?” And I don’t get satisfactory answers.

The philosophers he mentions made me think of a Tolstoy quote posted @ Westeros:

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

[Royce]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNbDFT_FHRk

Robert Anton Wilson on QM.

[sciborg2]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNbDFT_FHRk

Robert Anton Wilson on QM.

Ha! Whatever the reality of QM turns out to be, glad it helped give us RAW's Maybe Logic.

The biologist Kauffman offers a very theoretical explanation for how consciousness might collapse the wave function in the way Bors suggests - the way that strikes philosophers with dread. ;-)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/04/to_be_is_to_be_perceived_the_q.html

    "Now let's put the above remarkable statement into our tentative theory that to perceive, the mind-brain system becomes more quantum coherent via a physical analogue of Shor's theorem, say like the antenna protein and chlorophyll. Then the conclusion is that the outside quantum environment becomes less coherent! That is, the increased coherence of the mind-brain system would acausally make the outside quantum world decohere! But this means that for the mind-brian quantum-cohering-decohering-recohering system to perceive, the world it is perceiving can or must acausally become more or entirely classical!

The perceiving observer and the observed system can possibly, (or must), become entangled by the Shor quantum error correction algorithm used together with the hypothesis that mind-brain is a quantum cohering-decohering-recohering system.

"To Be (classical) Is, (can be), To Be Perceived".

[sciborg2]

From John Wheeler himself:

INFORMATION ,PHYSICS, QUANTUM:THE SEARCH FOR LINKS

http://jawarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/informationquantumphysics.pdf

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence? No escape is evident from four conclusions:

(1)The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

(2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

(3) The familiar probability function or functional,and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive.

(4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy. Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

[sciborg2]

Kauffman gives us a possible theory for consciousness that depends on the "poised realm" between the quantum and classical:

What Is Consciousness? A Hypothesis

Quoting Malin again, "Heisenberg's interpretation implies that the collapse of a quantum state is not a process in time."

Heisenberg's view supports a "strong" version of Res Potentia and Res Extensa linked by Measurement, the former, bearing on the unitary propagation of the Schrodinger equation in Res Potentia, before measurement, and evading Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle, the latter, bearing on classical physics and entirely bound by the Law of the Excluded Middle. On the strong version of the dualism, Res Potentia and Res Extensia, we will NOT deduce measurement from within quantum mechanics. As Malin says, on Heisenberg, collapse is not a process in time.

I adopt Res Potentia and Res Extensia linked by Measurement, both ontologically real, as a working hypothesis, which may be true or false.

Then: What IS consciousness? The obvious hypothesis is that mind and consciousness participate in Res Potentia. Mind participates in an ontologically real Possible.