DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - The Double Slit Experiment & Buddhism's Interpretation.

**Beerinkol** · 08-12-2012, 05:10 PM

natural laws do not give a fuck about us.

That's only your interpretation.

Consciousness is always involved in the very act of probing. And if we do not look at the computer for the results, how do we even know it has collapsed? We don't know, and the logical thing to do is to treat it as a mixed state.

Maybe you would like to elaborate on why Ken G is wrong.

G01: However, you are not making any scientific case whatsoever that consciousness must be involved or that it is better than any other possible explanation for a non unitary process.

Ken G: That is simply not true, I am making a logically bulletproof case that consciousness is involved. The reason is that without consciousness, it is perfectly clear that the non-unitary step is never needed. This even holds in the classical realm (since the step we refer to is after the measurement, so it survives the classical translation). Consider a deck of cards that is shuffled and dealt. There is absolutely no physical theory of those cards that will ever need to treat them in any way other than as a mixed state of statistical outcomes (a "density matrix", if you will) if the cards are never looked at by anyone. Do you dispute that? So there is nothing to explain if the cards are not looked at-- we have a mixed state, period.

When we deproject that mixed state into quantum observables, we find we have a perfectly good unitary evolution there. There just isn't anything nonunitary if no one looks at the cards, this is just demonstrably true-- that's what happens with decoherence and von Neumann's approach to measurement, you get a unitary state of couplings between macro pointers and quantum states, there's no correlations between the different pointings, but there's also nothing nonunitary there because you don't yet have a single pointer outcome.

Until you look at the outcome, then all of a sudden you have something nonunitary on your plate that you have to explain. The role of your consciousness in that story is inescapable, the problem simply never comes up without it.

08-12-2012, 05:10 PM	#5
Beerinkol Join Date Dec 2006 Posts 5,268 Senior Member	natural laws do not give a fuck about us. That's only your interpretation. Consciousness is always involved in the very act of probing. And if we do not look at the computer for the results, how do we even know it has collapsed? We don't know, and the logical thing to do is to treat it as a mixed state. Maybe you would like to elaborate on why Ken G is wrong. G01: However, you are not making any scientific case whatsoever that consciousness must be involved or that it is better than any other possible explanation for a non unitary process. Ken G: That is simply not true, I am making a logically bulletproof case that consciousness is involved. The reason is that without consciousness, it is perfectly clear that the non-unitary step is never needed. This even holds in the classical realm (since the step we refer to is after the measurement, so it survives the classical translation). Consider a deck of cards that is shuffled and dealt. There is absolutely no physical theory of those cards that will ever need to treat them in any way other than as a mixed state of statistical outcomes (a "density matrix", if you will) if the cards are never looked at by anyone. Do you dispute that? So there is nothing to explain if the cards are not looked at-- we have a mixed state, period. When we deproject that mixed state into quantum observables, we find we have a perfectly good unitary evolution there. There just isn't anything nonunitary if no one looks at the cards, this is just demonstrably true-- that's what happens with decoherence and von Neumann's approach to measurement, you get a unitary state of couplings between macro pointers and quantum states, there's no correlations between the different pointings, but there's also nothing nonunitary there because you don't yet have a single pointer outcome. Until you look at the outcome, then all of a sudden you have something nonunitary on your plate that you have to explain. The role of your consciousness in that story is inescapable, the problem simply never comes up without it.
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