In short
π = Electron if you look
= Electron if you don't look
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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It's really frustrating that people who don't understand this experiment have insanely taken into assume that a magic particle spell understands if a human being is watching or not.
Perhaps it would be better to explain why instead of attempting a mic drop based on your superior knowledge?
Itβs called the observer effect, and it happens because:
This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.
And particularly in the double-slit experiment:
Physicists have found that observation of quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the measured results of this experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
So for anyone who wants to have a surface understanding of the observer effect, the wiki does a fair job of the basic explanation.
I think the issue is that quantum mechanics is hard to popularize without leading people into wrong conclusions, pop science clickbaits make this worse.
I find it easier to understand if you say that observing necessarily means there's an interaction energy (for example a photon), otherwise no information can be retrieved, and however small that information retrieval energy is, quantum systems are so sensitive, that it is enough to modify their behavior.
I'd read a piece that even just having a camera present has the same effect.
It isn't "looking" that is meant by "observation". "Observation" is meant to convey the idea that something (not necessarily sentient) is in some way interacting with an object in question such that the state(s) of the object affects the state(s) of the "observer" (and vice versa).
The word is rather misleading in that it might give the impression of a unidirectional type of interaction when it really is the establishment of a bidirectional relationship. The reason one says "I observe the electron" rather than "I am observed by the electron" is that we don't typically attribute agency to electrons the way we do humans (for good reasons), but they are equally true.
Edit: a way of putting it is that the electron can only be said to be in a particular state if it matters in any way to the state of whomever says it. If I want to know what state an electon is in, it must appear to me in some state in order for me to get an answer. If I never interact with it, I can't possibly get such an answer and the electron then behaves as if it was actually in more than one state at once, and all those states interfere with each other, and that looks like wavelike patterns in certain measurements.
Edit 2: just to be clear, I used an electron as an example, but it's exactly the same for anything else we know of. Photons, bicycles, protons, and elephants are all like this, too. It's just that the more fundamental particles you involve and the more you already know about many of them, the fewer the possible answers are for any measurement you could make.
That's not really it. You need something that measures the state of the electron. Merely looking in the direction is not enough. It has to be something that interacts with the electron.
A camera alone isn't enough. But light (eg photons) with enough energy should be enough. But then that energy will manipulate the electron. If you had a completely dark room and pointed a camera at the experiment it wouldn't change anything.
It's kind of like having your cake and eating it too.
Yeah, it turns out that slapping the electron around like with a big stick or whatever causes it to change its behavior, go figure! :-P
So if we didn't need light to see it then it would continue doing whatever it does?
I wonder how the universe would look if we didn't need light to see π€
but light is seeing.
Maybe consciousness is fundamental and matter and spacetime are derived from it
edit: this comment is a bit controversial to people just want to say why not explore this idea we spent over 50 years on string theory where has that gotten us
Donald Hoffman Ted talk on consciousness
Please just take the time to learn more before you come at me lol
Consciousness has literally nothing to do with it. In fact, the experiment as demonstrated in this emem would not replicate the double slit results. What has to happen is something along the path has to interfere with the photon (aka observe, which has nothing to do with consciousness, rather just an interaction), which causes the waveform to collapse. Basically, if something needs to know the state, the state collapses into one result. It doesn't matter what that thing is.
Idk that would depend on what you believe is fundamental Fringe science baby!
Yeah, except we can do this experiment without ant consciousness aware of it even and it gets the same results. The only thing that matters is if the particle has to interact with something, because when it does it becomes a specific particle rather than a waveform. What that interaction is with does not effect the experiment in the slightest. A consciousness does not have any effect on the results of the experiment so there's no reason to expect that the universe cares about consciousness. To the universe, consciousness is yet just another series of interaction of things that behave the same as anything else, except it happens in a pattern that we think of as thought.
Ok but how do you actually remove consciousness from the experiment? Seriously curious because from my point of view no matter what a conscience agent has to check the results
Use a computer? I guess you could say it all collapses when an actual consciousness checks what state things are at, but that'd be a rediculous claim to make. This is where Occam's Razor is useful. Why introduce a concept of a consciousness being required when it would function identically but be significantly stranger and more complex?
What is consciousness to the universe anyway? It's nothing but a system of electrical impulses, and there no reason to think there's anything physically special about it. It's just an interesting phenomenon that happened, but fundamentally it isn't anything special.
Sure I agree it could be that as well but there is no actual way to prove that. Since we don't actually understand what it is or how it works we can't remove it, therefore with materialism at this point it's not provable either way. it's also another theory and why I started my original comment with maybe. It's better to explore that data in my opinion then outright deny it without any actual evidence proving it's not. Occams razor is a cop out here
There's no way to prove that any god(s) exist or not either. It doesn't mean we should waste our time with their explanations. The hand of God could be reaching down to set things up just in time for us to see them and that's exactly as reasonable of an explanation as the universe is aware we're conscious so sets things up just in time for us to see them. The explanation that requires adding the least number of new things is that interactions cause a collapse of the waveform and it happens then, not waiting for a "conscious" observer.
If the conscious observer thing were true, what would it decide is consciousness? Would it require sapience? Sentience? Does it happen for dolphins? Apes? Monkeys? Mice? Tardigrades? What level of synapse connections is it waiting for to decide that's enough? What about humans born without a brain? Can they not see anything? This hypothesis requires so many weird assumptions that it's less than useless. A god existing makes more sense.
Edit: Also, you can't explore this "data" because it's literally impossible to collect information on if you assume it exists. There's nothing to explore. I guess you can entertain the idea and ask what you'd do differently if you assume it's true, but I'm betting that's literally nothing. It's the same issue as the "universe is a simulation" hypothesis. It's unprovable and untestable, and the only thing to do with it is assume it isn't true and keep living life as if it's real.
Science requires testable and verifiable hypothesis. If they can't be falsified they aren't a part of science. They're a belief system. That's fine to have, but don't mix it with science. All you'll do is end up not accepting more data as we learn it because you're filtering it through faith.
If the conscious observer thing were true, what would it decide is consciousness? Would it require sapience? Sentience? Does it happen for dolphins? Apes? Monkeys? Mice? Tardigrades? What level of synapse connections is it waiting for to decide that's enough? What about humans born without a brain? Can they not see anything? This hypothesis requires so many weird assumptions that it's less than useless.
What's so weird about any of those questions/assumptions? A consciousness-based interpretation of quantum mechanics would need any conscious observer, that would include dolphins since we're pretty sure they're having conscious experiences.
that would include dolphins
This is literally the closest form of consciousness to our own - the easiest and most obvious case. They weren't actually asking if dolphins would count, they're asking at what point it counts as consciousness. The ones you need to answer are things like tardigrades, bacteria and viruses, or nonphysical forms of consciousness. After all, you're seriously claiming that the scientific definition of observation is observation by a conscious mind, not interaction with another aspect of the universe, so why don't we consider all the nonfalsifiables? Do ghosts collapse the quantum superposition?
I'm not sure where you're going with this really. Why do I need to analyze if every single thing in the universe is conscious or not? Physicalism also doesn't really have a general answer to the question "is this physical system conscious". Shouldn't you do the same work before declaring you know consciousness is fully physical?
A consciousness-based interpretation of quantum mechanics would need any conscious observer
If you're going to claim that consciousness is the influencing factor in quantum mechanics you need to define consciousness. You need to define the point at which consciousness starts. You saying "yes a dolphin is conscious" only tells me you think humans and dolphins are conscious, and nothing about what you think consciousness is, what things you think are conscious, or why consciousness would influence particles. So either you give a real answer to their question of what you think consciousness is or you start listing the things you think are conscious until smarter minds can work out what connects the dots.
So either you give a real answer to their question of what you think consciousness is or you start listing the things you think are conscious until smarter minds can work out what connects the dots.
You haven't given a real answer either though and neither has anybody else in the history of science, which is what I'm trying to say, nobody has a coherent answer but you're pretending as if you do. You're literally just asserting your claims without backing anything up.
No, you dumb fuck, I don't need to define consciousness for my explanation of observability in physics to make sense - my interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't mention consciousness at all. You have to define it because your interpretation of quantum superpositioning claims that it only collapses when a conscious mind observes it, so you have to define what conscioussness is.
No, you dumb fuck,
Thanks comrade, very nice of you.
You have to define it
No, everybody has to define it actually since it clearly exists and nobody really knows what it is. If you believe with certainty it doesn't have anything to do with quantum collapse then you also must have a good idea what it actually is, and you just plain don't.
Personally I'm agnostic about the whole thing and I don't think any particular idea needs to be dismissed a priori because of entrenched beliefs.
No, I don't have to define it, because I'm talking about observability in quantum mechanics, not some philosophical metaphysical bollocks about what consciousness is. My definition of observation does not in any way include consciousness, so defining consciousness adds nothing to my definition. Your definition of observation is being seen by something with consciousness, so you have to define what consciousness is. I have to define things like interactions and particles, I do not have to provide you with definitions so that your stupid ideas make sense.
I do not have to provide you with definitions so that your stupid ideas make sense.
Damn you're a feisty one.
In fact you do have to provide definitions, an "observation" in the context of quantum mechanics does not have a consensus definition and the definition heavily relies on your particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. One of these interpretations also includes consciousness, and if you want to be completely certain this particular interpretation is false you need your own coherent definition of consciousness that doesn't call upon quantum mechanics. You don't have such a thing, nobody does.
You're locked in a belief system and you don't even realize it.
Look spacey, I need you to understand that it's offensive that you consider yourself intelligent enough to have this conversation. To butt in and spew your completely baseless hypotheticals around as if they hold any scientific weight.
If you knew enough to have this conversation, you'd already know from the language we've used around superpositioning and observation that we're discussing the copenhagen interpretation - even if you weren't certain, you'd at least know it's overwhelmingly the most popular theory (like you better have some fucking great evidence if you want to dispute it), and that consciouness based theories are the fringest of the fringe. You're not going to find anyone actually employed in quantum theory or research espousing it.
If you knew enough to have this conversation, you would have at least attempted to define consciousness. You'd have some sort of working definition that you could share and we could analyse, but you haven't because you don't. You have no idea what consciousness is, you don't even know that there's a debate about whether consciousness even exists - you think, therefore you have accepted that there exists a nebulous, undefineable set of aspects that makes something conscious. Despite not being able to articulate a single aspect of it, you deeply, truly believe both that it exists and that everyone else believes it exists.
If you knew enough to have this conversation you'd know that I've haven't actually discussed quantum physics at all - the only thing in each of my comments is an attempt to get you to confront your own lack of knowledge - to admit that you can't define consciousness. I have been playing softball with you this entire time trying to lead you to your own logical conclusions, instead of pointing out that the most basic possible demonstration of quantum interaction - the double slit experiment - inherently proves that consciousness is not required, because otherwise the observation media - gold foil or a modern detector - wouldn't be able to record the results.
Lastly, you'd know that there isn't a "consensus definition" because it was defined by Heisenburg and Bohr when they created the copenhagen interpretation. Here are some quotes from them:
Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being; but the registration, i.e., the transition from the "possible" to the "actual," is absolutely necessary here and cannot be omitted from the interpretation of quantum theory.
all unambiguous information concerning atomic objects is derived from the permanent marks such as a spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions. Far from involving any special intricacy, the irreversible amplification effects on which the recording of the presence of atomic objects rests rather remind us of the essential irreversibility inherent in the very concept of observation. The description of atomic phenomena has in these respects a perfectly objective character, in the sense that no explicit reference is made to any individual observer and that therefore, with proper regard to relativistic exigencies, no ambiguity is involved in the communication of information.
Of course, I'm sure you can find some sort of peer reviewed data or study that provides literally any evidence at all for your totally sensible and informed idea that isn't otherwise pushed by con artists and new age mystics, instead of demanding I work to both define and disprove your idea.
Don't you fucking dare try to lecture me about belief when you have literally nothing but. You believe so strongly you refuse to even engage with questions about your beliefs, because deep down you know they're baseless.
Damn you're a complete grating asshole, I'm not reading all of that shit but I do know at least this is wrong:
You're not going to find anyone actually employed in quantum theory or research espousing it.
Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Roger Penrose, Brian Josephson, Henry Stapp, Erwin SchrΓΆdinger (debatable, but he was questioning physicalism).
Stop trying to copy the first thing you find on google you dumb fuck, Wigner dropped his and Neumann's interpretation because of its flaws, Penrose postulated that consciousness arose from quantum interactions not that they collapse them, and Stapp and Schrodinger were exactly the type of panpsychic new-age mystics I was talking about.
On top of that, literally not a single one is still working in quantum theory or research. Neumann died 70 years ago. In fact, none of their research is even from this century, where the majority of progress has been made. I used the present tense. Contemporary opinions, not the wild theories of the earliest days.
Now stop being a redditbrained contradictory little shit and read my comment. It contains actual information about quantum theory.
Now stop being a redditbrained contradictory little shit and read my comment.
No, you wrote it all for nothing.
Hey, notice how that's the only part you responded to? Not the part where I laid out exactly how you don't know shit about the subject. It's because you don't have a response; like the big comment explains, you're in completely over your head.
You literally called one of the trailblazers of the entire field a "new age mystic". I don't really plan on taking you seriously anymore, thanks for all the kind words tho, take care.
I guess you could say it all collapses when an actual consciousness checks what state things are at, but that'd be a rediculous claim to make.
Would it? We now know with the recent experiments with Bell's inequality that quantum mechanics can't be reduced to a local hidden-variable theory, doesn't that at least in theory leave space for consciousness? Sure you could go with superdeterminism but currently that seems equally unfalsifiable as a consciousness-based theory.
Sure, it leaves space for anything. It leaves space for (any) God. It doesn't make it useful to consider it though. There are literally an infinite number of things we could make up to explain it, but that doesn't make them equally likely. The most likely is the one that doesn't require strange assumptions, like the universe caring about consciousness, or that particles are conscious like another person said, or the hand of God literally reaching in to set the states exactly himself. Some hypotheses shouldn't be entertained because they require so many strange assumptions they're essentially useless and just a waste of time.
Perhaps the particle is simply moving so fast that it appears as a wave but once it smacks into something it slows down enough to be observed
Btw I do not know any significances about this subject
Nope. That isn't it. My understanding is it essentially has to do with the position being required for an interaction to happen. It exists as a waveform until some interaction (any interaction) requires the position to be finite for the interaction to take place. That collapses the waveform (aka, the likelihood for all possible positions collapses into just one possibility) and the interaction happens. It has nothing to do with speed, only the need of the position to be known to perform an interaction.
Consciousness is not part of the observer effect (which is itself named in the most infuriating way possible, specifically because it makes people think that the universe is somehow aware of when something sentient is looking at it). "Observing" a particle requires interacting with it in such a way that you meaningfully affect its current state of being, whether that be deflecting it in a different direction than it was going or changing its velocity, and therefore it is impossible at a quantum level to be a passive observer that does not influence the outcome.
In the case of the double slit experiment, if unobserved light will act as a wave with interference and if observed then it acts like a particle. The reason for this is both complicated and simple: light behaves as a wave due to probability. There's no way of observing a photon without influencing it, so therefore the best we can do is say it has a certain probability of being in this collection of spaces, which in the case of photons is a wave (because it can travel in any of a number of directions outwards from the photon emitter in the experiment, but all going away from the emitter and towards the wall the slits are cut into). For the purposes of this probability wave, the start position is the emitter and the end position is the wall behind the slits, so averaging out a large number of photons will recreate the interference pattern on the wall.
However, if you observe the photons at the slits to try and figure out which slits they're going through you have influenced the photons and thus collapsed that probability wave into a particle, and in the process created a new probability wave from that moment onwards which has the same end position as the original wave, but now starts at the individual slit. From its perspective, there is no second slit, so now the wave acts as if it is in the single slit setup because from its perspective it is, hence the loss of interference.
Nothing here has anything to do with consciousness. You can recreate this experiment with no one in the room and it will behave exactly the same, and has a sound (if very confusing conventionally) mathematical cause.
On a side note, string theory is effectively unfalsifiable and therefore completely useless as a scientific theory.
You need to qualify that statement somehow, or maybe give a citation or source that supports such an idea
Sure firstly id like to say these are theories just as anything in science starts as. I am not saying this is fact by any means and could be totally wrong. here are some sources:
Both these figures are embarrassingly bad.
Hoffman confuses function for perception and constantly uses arguments demonstrating things can interpret reality incorrectly (which is purely a question of function) in order to argue they cannot perceive reality "as it is.," which is a huge non-sequitur. He keeps going around promoting his "theorem" which supposedly "proves" this yet if you read his book where he explains his theorem it is again clearly about function as his theorem only shows that limitations in cognitive and sensory capabilities can lead something to interpret reality incorrectly yet he draws a wild conclusion which he never justifies that this means they do not perceive reality "as it is" at all.
Kastrup is also just incredibly boring because he never reads books so he is convinced the only two philosophical schools in the universe are his personal idealism and metaphysical realism, which the latter he constantly incorrectly calls "materialism" when not all materialist schools of thought are even metaphysically realist. Unless you are yourself a metaphysical realist, nothing Kastrup has ever written is interesting at all, because he just pretends you don't exist.
Metaphysical realism is just a popular worldview in the west that most Laymen tend to naturally take on unwittingly. If you're a person who has ever read books in your life, then you'd quickly notice that attacking metaphysical realism doesn't get you to idealism, at best it gets you to metaphysical realism being not a coherent worldview... which that is the only thing I agree with Kastrup with.