The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: sciborg2 on February 13, 2014, 07:07:48 pm
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Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement (https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d5d3dc850933)
This is an elegant and powerful idea. It suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon that comes about because of the nature of entanglement. And it exists only for observers inside the universe. Any god-like observer outside sees a static, unchanging universe, just as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.
Of course, without experimental verification, Page and Wootter’s ideas are little more than a philosophical curiosity. And since it is never possible to have an observer outside the universe, there seemed little chance of ever testing the idea.
Until now.
My notes:
If the universe is static from the outside, then it's like an object frozen? Like if someone is in another universe and could see ours? They'd see a giant (infinite?) black sphere?
Why is there a comprehensible past going into the present and then future if everything that happened already happened the instant the universe was made?
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Next Up: Non-Locality? WTF?
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How does the article deal with the emergence of living organisms (which would "cause" time to emerge, according to them) on the planet? I'm pretty sure the universe wasn't in a constant stasis before the earliest forms of life came around. (And how would they evolve, in an universe where time stands still and nothing happens?)
Interesting article, though. Reminds me of Ray Brassier (author of "Nihil Unbound") who argues that entropy is the ultimate fate of everything, and that time as we know it doesn't "really" exist at a quantum level, so in reality everything is dead already.
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Interesting article, though. Reminds me of Ray Brassier (author of "Nihil Unbound") who argues that entropy is the ultimate fate of everything, and that time as we know it doesn't "really" exist at a quantum level, so in reality everything is dead already.
That doesn't really make sense AFAIK. Did he talk to physicists before making that claim?
Seems to me that the universe being timeless is not the same thing as saying the universe has already experienced Heat Death. That feels forced to me.
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I like those kind of mind-games. On the other hand, they are also very frustrating... lol . As we can never hope to prove that an outside observer would see a static universe.
On the other hand, isn't it possible that it just "moves" so slowly for someone outside, that it seems static? I mean, and i know it is a very dumb example, flies see time much slower than we do...that is why you almost never get them ;) Maybe it is kind of that way...a subjective perception that has nothing to do with what is going on in reality (or at least not as much as those guys would like ;) and i do know that reality is also kind of a problematic term...at least on a Bakker-Geek-Forum like this ;D ).
Anyway...i guess i should have taken theoretical physics as my side-subject instead of geography...so many mindboggling topics.
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How does the article deal with the emergence of living organisms (which would "cause" time to emerge, according to them) on the planet? I'm pretty sure the universe wasn't in a constant stasis before the earliest forms of life came around. (And how would they evolve, in an universe where time stands still and nothing happens?)
This is the thing that bothers me. It just seems weird that life is so dependent on the past influencing present relationship.
If time is illusory to the outside observer, then it's like the universe came into being all at once. But why would such a 4-D(+?) universe have 3-D slices which follow each other coherently?
It's like a 2-D universe, with each moment of time stacked on the last to get a 3-D object. But if a 3-D block appears all at once, why would anyone expect horizontal slices to create cohesive a 2-D animation?
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An outside observer is really a bit of a oxymoron. If you note the experiment, the observer has only access to photons related to the other system. It is not actually able to perceive the system itself. So they are doing this via second order logic. The observer cannot, therefore, actually observe time within the system. Basically, it can only infer a the universe as existing in a quantum system. The photons provide the vector, I think.
I suggest you have a bit of a look at self organising systems, sci.
Auriga, I would suggest you look at some of the associated research I mentioned in the other thread.
The implication on 'life' (from associated theoretical research) is that it is merely one form of consciousness, which, in itself, is a requisite quantum function of collapsing probability fields in order to produce time. For example; without an observer, Schrodinger's cat will never resolve as live or dead.
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Why is there a comprehensible past going into the present and then future if everything that happened already happened the instant the universe was made?
I consider such notions BS for the time being. With A that make B happen that makes C happen, you cannot render B or C until you have rendered A. You can't figure out the latter part of an equation before you have figured the first part.
Therefore there is the the very edge of rendering in the universe where B was derived from A, then C derived from B. All one at a time, one after each other - the very fundiment of time.
Maybe such a rendering could happen for the outside observer at a far faster rate than it appears to us. But it still took time. Sequential events.
Otherwise how do you work out C before you've worked out B?
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How does the article deal with the emergence of living organisms (which would "cause" time to emerge, according to them) on the planet? I'm pretty sure the universe wasn't in a constant stasis before the earliest forms of life came around. (And how would they evolve, in an universe where time stands still and nothing happens?)
You know cartoon flip books. How on each page the character is static, yet when you flip through them it moves?
That's how a universe can both move and be still at the same time.
You might be looking at the top most layers of the flip book, but the bottom ones remain static and still. Or vise versa, the bottom moves and the top remaining still until flipped.
Organisms don't cause time to emerge - it's just that the later pages are deterministically related to the former pages.
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Otherwise how do you work out C before you've worked out B?
That is second order logic. If A>B and B>C then A>C.
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You know cartoon flip books. How on each page the character is static, yet when you flip through them it moves?
That's how a universe can both move and be still at the same time.
But the thing is that flip book has to exist all at once as 3-D block, where the 2-D pages are really slices. Why would [you] expect to find a flip book in the block?
I don't think there's an easy way to get around the weirdness of static vs non-static being dependent on external or internal observation.
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Otherwise how do you work out C before you've worked out B?
That is second order logic. If A>B and B>C then A>C.
I don't understand? That's not giving a result, as I read it, it's just saying A is somewhere above C - it could be 0.00001 above or 100000 above. Things seem a bit more rendered than that in this universe?
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You know cartoon flip books. How on each page the character is static, yet when you flip through them it moves?
That's how a universe can both move and be still at the same time.
But the thing is that flip book has to exist all at once as 3-D block, where the 2-D pages are really slices. Why would [you] expect to find a flip book in the block?
I kept up with you up to the thin slices (though I disagree - no, those pages are 3D objects. Universes parked next to each other). I don't understand the flip book IN the block part - you seem to have put the flip book inside the concept, instead of being the encompassing concept? Does blocks parked next to each other help answer your question (atleast answer it as in making clear what the idea behind my speculation is)?
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You can read the '>' signs anyway you like Callan, they serve only to indicate that there is a relationship between the variables. The variables themselves don't need values to have a logical relationship. You should delve further into formal logic, it is very handy for programming.
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Barring the use of random number generators, programming is all about logical relationships.
Understanding the general spectrum of inputs or outputs you might get is part of it - but if they've called that 'formal' logic, they are flattering themselves (or when they say formal they don't mean as formal as I'm hearing - they didn't say emperic logic, after all, I guess). More like kludge logic.
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I've not heard of emperic logic, but I think I kind of get your gripe. Like I said, I think it's a pretty bad analogy.
You can probably blame Aristotle for formal logic though.
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@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? :o
;)
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Non-locality & Entanglement:
Wikipage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality)
An excerpt from Peat on Bohm has a good overview of history. -> EPR paradox, Aspect's experiment. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnwEQtOm9xk)
So the perhaps obvious question is can you use this send messages at superluminal speeds? Kaku (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QErwOK3S5IE) 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. (http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/05/physicists-create-quantum-link-between-photons-dont-exist-same-time)
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Julian Barbour on Does Time Exist? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5rExaKLEoU)
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.
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Julian Barbour talks more on time being illusory in this video, A New Kind of Causality (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ogiQ2E6n0U). 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."
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Thanks for the links, I will endevour to check them out. Strapped for time lately.
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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 (http://realitysandwich.com/217334/is-quantum-physics-a-sort-of-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 ;D ->
Here's something (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419590/quantum-entanglement-holds-dna-together-say-physicists/) about how quantum entanglement plays a role in holding DNA together.
Here's something (http://io9.com/new-evidence-that-plants-get-their-energy-using-quantum-1498695627) on the role quantum entanglement may play in photosynthesis.
Migration via quantum mechanics? (http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/pia-entanglement.cfm)
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Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature? (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21150047)
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.
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Quantum Entanglement Benefits Exist after Links Are Broken (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-entanglement/)
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.
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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.)
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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 (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728971.600-quantum-shadows-the-mystery-of-matter-deepens.html?full=true#.UzWJ_F60Zw8)
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.
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Interview with IQOQI's Zeilinger (http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jul-aug/14-anton-zeilinger-teleports-photons-taught-the-dalai-lama)
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."
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNbDFT_FHRk
Robert Anton Wilson on QM.
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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".
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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.
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Kauffman gives us a possible theory for consciousness that depends on the "poised realm" between the quantum and classical:
What Is Consciousness? A Hypothesis (http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/01/29/133318986/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.
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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.
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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!
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Shan Gao's paper is now on my reading list:
A quantum physical argument for panpsychism (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9572/1/Shan_Gao_-_A_quantum_argument_for_panpsychism_2013.pdf)
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.
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Closer to Truth: Quantum Physics of Consciousness
http://www.closertotruth.com/series/quantum-physics-consciousness
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?
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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
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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."
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Is quantum mechanics relevant to the philosophy of mind (and the other way around)? (http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/is-quantum-mechanics-relevant-to-the-philosophy-of-mind-and-the-other-way-around/)
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.
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The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Scientists separate a particle from its properties (http://blogs.chapman.edu/press-room/2014/07/23/the-quantum-cheshire-cat-can-a-particle-be-separated-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.
“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.
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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.
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I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM. Absolutely priapic.
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I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM. Absolutely priapic.
Sarcasm?
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David Bohm: A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/bohm_mind_matter_1990.pdf)
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.
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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.
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The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/11/04/the-wholeness-of-quantum-reality-an-interview-with-physicist-basil-hiley/)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 (http://phys.org/news/2014-09-weak-values-quantum-dont.html)
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.
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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.
Couldn't you say the same about neuroscience? Seems like philosophers in general need to go back and read before opening their mouths, yet I do believe Chalmers discussed his ideas with some physicists.
Meanwhile AFAIK there's only one actual neuroscientist-philosopher out there, Raymond Tallis, and a gaggle of people who either fail to understand philosophy or neuroscience. That seems worse than worrying about QM to me.
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Living in a Quantum World (http://phy.ntnu.edu.tw/~chchang/Notes10b/0611038.pdf)
For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales.
Yet this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth.
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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.
I try, sometimes poorly, to respect the value of philosophers and their modern development in the light of scientific understanding. But understanding doesn't always correlate to total literacy - in the perspective of the utterly nonintuitive mathematics of QM, the only way towards understanding is a hideous slog of slogs towards the literacy (only on this board could I make this comparison in saying that QM is the gnosis to a Newtonian and intuitive anagnosis).
And that's not to speak poorly on any philosophy. Some things are simply alien, through and through.
Couldn't you say the same about neuroscience?
I think neuroscience is the gate and gatekeeper and key between objective and subjective realities. You poke the brain and get subjective experiences, you have subjective experiences and get objective signals. And that means that any well-considered subjective experience can enlighten us, should we analyze it carefully enough.
QM might exist almost entirely outside of that. The objective reality of the very small is so beyond our intuition and perspective that it is only by the tenuously logical proofs of a bizarre mathematics that we come to any remote understanding of it.
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But the question is - is there an objective reality at all?! If there isn't (as some theories seem to implicate), there can be no gatekeeper/key to it ;)
Oh and there is no such thing as bizarre mathematics. It's just mathematics :P ;D
And tenuosly logical proofs?! No, just no.
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I have to also express confusion as to what tenuously logical means.
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You’re powered by quantum mechanics. No, really… (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/26/youre-powered-by-quantum-mechanics-biology)
"For years biologists have been wary of applying the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be in two places at once or connected over huge distances, to their own field. But it can help to explain some amazing natural phenomena we take for granted."
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Oh, but there most likely is an objective reality. You just have to tweak your brain with some special chemicals and it will show itself in all of its splendor. Bizarre mathematics is not such a bad word to describe it really.
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Oh, but there most likely is an objective reality. You just have to tweak your brain with some special chemicals and it will show itself in all of its splendor. Bizarre mathematics is not such a bad word to describe it really.
There's a clip from Renegade you should check out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-TBNKFRNpg)
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Life is quantum (http://aeon.co/magazine/science/quantum-biology-the-uncanny-order-of-life/)
Navigation and smell are important, no doubt, but perhaps they don’t seem very central to the business of life on Earth. So let’s go after something bigger.
Take enzymes. These are the workhorses of the living world, speeding up chemical reactions so that processes that would otherwise take thousands of years happen inside living cells in seconds. How they achieve this speed-up – often more than a trillion-fold – has long been an enigma. But now, research by Judith Klinman at the University of California, Berkeley and Nigel Scrutton at the University of Manchester (among others) has shown that enzymes can employ a weird quantum trick called tunnelling. Simply put, the enzyme encourages a process whereby electrons and protons vanish from one position in a biochemical and instantly rematerialise in another, without visiting any of the in-between places – a kind of teleportation.
This is pretty fundamental stuff. Enzymes made every single biomolecule in every cell of every living creature on the planet. They are, more than any other component (even DNA, given that some cells get by without it) the essential ingredient of life. And they dip into the quantum world to help keep us alive.