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“observing changes the result” doesn’t mean conciousness attempting to look at it changes the result, there is nothing special about conciousness (in quantum mechanics)
“observing changes the result” means we try to measure atoms and fields but unfortunately our measurement tools are also made out of atoms and fields which interact with the atoms and fields we are trying to measure, giving us a different result than if we don’t attempt to measure it
It does bring up interesting questions about what the “real” behavior of reality is tho, since anything we observe is technically different than what it would be if left alone. We can only ever know what a slightly altered state of reality is
Think of it like this:
You can use a tennis ball machine to measure how far away a house is by firing the tennis ball at a constant velocity, timing how long it takes the tennis ball to come back to you, multiplying that time by the velocity, and dividing by 2 (since you measured the distance for a round trip). This works pretty darn well for measuring the distance to houses.
But now try this same trick to measure the distance to another ball. When your measuring ball hits the ball you want to measure, it doesn’t stay resolutely planted in the ground like that nice friendly house. The energy from your measuring ball bounces the ball being measured off into the distance. Even if you could get your measuring ball to return, the ball you measured isn’t in the place you measured it.
Replace that tennis ball with a photon, and you have the basic picture. There’s no such thing as passive observation. Measuring something interacts with that thing. Conventional measurement is like in the case with the house, the thing being measured is so much bigger and more stable than the thing we’re measuring with that the effect is negligible. But once you start trying to measure something on the same scale as your measuring tool, the ensuing chaos makes it basically impossible to get useful measurements.
This analogy is really well thought out. It really helps my brain understand the weirdness that goes on with measurements on the quantum scale. Thanks for taking the time to type it out.
Every road leads to Plato’s cave
Not quite - observability in quantum mechanics is about the event producing an interaction that could potentially be measured, regardless of whether we actually attempt to measure it. By interacting with other things the superposition is collapsed and we can determine it’s current properties, but it’s still the “real” behaviour of things, because we can only determine things behaviours from their interactions with other things - not knowing what they do when left alone isn’t just about there not being a human around to interacts with them, but about there not being any other particles - no atoms, no electrons, no quarks - for them to interact with either.
just measure everything from the same side it’ll all get shifted in the same direction
What if you just measure the ambient particles
Then you are measuring something with matter still and it then affects it. Literally causing interactions to measure means altering it’s state even at a nonchalant glance.
hmm, I can get how that might cause the measured item to say, change its velocity, but not how that would cause a wave to collapse into a single point.
Right but how do you measure the things around what you are trying to measure and get any data from it unless you expect them to also interact with the things you are measuring.
You have to have an interaction to measure even if you are measuring the outcome and steps away from the original interaction.
It’s like measuring dark matter where the easiest way to prove it’s existence was to wait and capture the decay of it but not the particle itself. But that means the particle was already gone when we got the measurements to prove it was there.
It’s not a physical wave. A wavefunction describes how likely something is to have different values for one of its properties. For example, an electron might have a wavefunction describing how likely it is to be in different locations. By observing if it actually is in a certain location or not, you force the electron to decide where it is concretely, “collapsing” the probability function into one value (its newly decided location).
Measuring is a loaded misnomer. Interacting with a particle changes what the particle is doing. There is no such thing as nondestructive testing in quantum physics.
Measuring just happens to be something we do a lot which necessarily causes particle interactions.
How?
idk, I’m not a quantum physicist. I’m just asking theoretically
That doesn’t make any sense. Observation is alteration. You cannot see light without absorbing light.
So would a blind person would also alter the outcome if they were in the position to absorb the light? You can absorb the light without seeing it.
This always bugs me. Quantum Mechanics isn’t actually that difficult. It has some nasty maths, yes, but that’s mostly slog work, rather than an impossibility. 90% of it is the Schroedinger’s equation + boundary conditions.
The main issue is that you have to abandon the particle model of reality. This is deeply engrained into our brains. If you try and understand it as “Particles + extras”, you will fail. You have to think of it as “Waves + extras”. It then, suddenly makes logical sense.
It does have some interesting implications, however, about deeper reality however. E.g. what exactly IS decoherence, from a physical point of view. Also, what is physically happening, dimensionally, when a wave is complex, or even pure imaginary. These are beyond the scope of QM however.
The big problem isn’t that the math is hard, or that’s often impossible to visualise. The problem is that a whole bunch of charlatans intentionally misinterpret was “observing” is in QM, to make money off of gullible victims.
To elaborate on this, the Schrödinger equation, which describes the dynamics of a single particle, is a wave equation and hence a lot of classical intuition from e.g. electrodynamics can be applied. It is many-body systems, i.e. systems composed of many interacting particles, which is not only mathematically complex but can also defy classical expectations due to emerging phenomena, etc.
You have to think of it as “Waves + extras”. It then, suddenly makes logical sense.
Unless you observe the double slit experiment, and then suddenly it’s particles again
The problem of quantum mechanic is that the physics it shows us is not intuitive, and it sometimes breaks other laws of physics.
Quantum intrication means that information travels faster than light for example. Counterfactuality also breaks causality.
It’s not the maths that are the problem, it’s that it doesn’t make physical sense in the world we currently understand. And the equations explain nothing. They merely describe a a world that doesn’t make sense.
Quantum mechanic is like having a machine from the future that does cool things, but you don’t understand how it works. It’s like people did chemistry before they understand what chemistry was. We do uber cool things with it, but it is a spotlight on our ignorance at the same time.
Actually, I think it’s time to reveal, that to some people QM is actually pretty intuitive.
It’s just that the masses and the news media don’t understand it, so they assume that nobody does. The particle worldview is deeply ingrained into many people’s brains, because it’s deeply useful to them on a day-to-day basis. If you loosen that requirement, then there’s literally nothing standing in your way to accept a wave-worldview.
What about the Copenhagen interpretation debate? What about the non-locality?
These are academic debates, not people ones. Saying that quantum mechanic is intuitive is arrogant at best. You may have a perfect understanding of the current theory and how to use it, and you maybe comfortable using it everyday, but then you should be aware of the limits shouldn’t you?
Otherwise it’s like alchemy.
Sean Carroll had a great take: everything is waves in fields and we know of five fields: Strong Weak Electric Gravity Higgs
Particle behavior arises from interacting waves. So anything that acts like a particle is actually waves interfering with each other.
God doesn’t play dice, he surfs, got it.
Consciousness has nothing to do with the “observations” in quantum mechanics. The wave function collapses when we entangle ourselves with the outcome. Whether or not we actually record those “observations” is irrelevant.
The term they should have used from the get-go is “measurement” instead of “observation”. Humans will always tack on mystical mumbo jumbo if given a chance, muddying up the waters for us laymen trying to learn, and “measurement” sounds much more neutral to me.
Having to explain to your parent that yes physics requires math and that yes being a physicist is a job that requires years of dedication to fully appreciate is wild. Also, physicists are just bad at naming things, so no your brain doesn’t change reality around it because it has eye holes attached to it
IMO, the perceived inscrutability of quantum mechanics is mostly the result of the dominance of the “shut up and calculate” approach to the question of interpretation.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why focusing on the math and ignoring the rest is a good approach to have when you’re actually doing practical scientific work in the field. But if you’re wanting quantum physics to “make sense”, then you’re asking about what it actually says about the underlying reality, and that’s a question that requires thinking about interpretations of QM.
Once you start thinking about it in terms of a particular interpretation (or category of interpretation), then QM makes as much sense as any other high level physical theory (certainly no worse than general relativity.)
The various interpretations help in processing the math, but isn’t the same as understanding - there are a bunch of fundamental facts about quantum mechanics that we just don’t understand, even though we know the elements exist, that they happen, and even how we can take advantage of them.
The difference between quantum mechanics and other high level theories like relativity is actually quite large, because the higher level interactions all derive from quantum level states and interactions. At the point where question marks really start popping up (weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, dark matter &/ energy) it’s almost always a matter of quantum mechanics getting involved and being weird.
My quantum mechanics professor started our first lecture with “if you think you understand quantum mechanics you do not understand quantum mechanics”, because there are still some really big question marks around our understanding of it. Especially what in the fuck spin actually is.
The various interpretations help in processing the math
In the same sense that the territory helps in processing the map, I suppose.
but isn’t the same as understanding - there are a bunch of fundamental facts about quantum mechanics that we just don’t understand, even though we know the elements exist, that they happen, and even how we can take advantage of them.
I’m not sure what you mean here; discussions of interpretation are literally about understanding these facts.
The difference between quantum mechanics and other high level theories like relativity is actually quite large, because the higher level interactions all derive from quantum level states and interactions. At the point where question marks really start popping up (weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, dark matter &/ energy) it’s almost always a matter of quantum mechanics getting involved and being weird.
Going to have to disagree with you here, relativity, both special and general, get just as weird without any need to invoke quantum physics. And they’re not the only one. The only difference is that we have a general consensus on how to interpret them, which we don’t with QM.
My quantum mechanics professor started our first lecture with “if you think you understand quantum mechanics you do not understand quantum mechanics”, because there are still some really big question marks around our understanding of it. Especially what in the fuck spin actually is.
I think this is equivocating a bit; there is a difference between the things we don’t understand about quantum physics, and the things we just straight up don’t know. I think it’s possible to understand quantum physics, with the caveat that understanding means recognizing that there are things about it that we simply do not know.
I think a degree of shut up and calculate is needed, at least in the beginning. Without a solid math based understanding of the fundamentals, trying to prognosticate on the ‘meaning’ of it is inevitably going to fall into pop-sci style stuff. You’ve gotta know what you’re dealing with a little.
I’m not so sure. I think a degree of shut up and calculate if you actually want to get a physicists level understanding, a large degree. But I strongly believe that it’s no harder to give a clever layman a working understanding of the underlying concepts, in purely conceptual terms. Honestly, I think the reason the quantum mechanics has been so prone to pop-sci charlatans is that legitimate science communicators keep trying to explain it in interpretation-agnostic terms, which makes it sound far more mystical and paradoxical than it is.
Have you seen the movies? The only sane person who messed with quantum stuff is the camera man, and he never speaks of anything.
I believe once we fully understand consciousness, we’ll understand the nature of reality. Of course, I could be wrong.
It always worked out in Alpha Centauri. Boom two free techs. gg
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone understands exactly what consciousness is for and why we have one, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
I hope that’s not true. Just a constant horse and carrot.
We’re never going to ‘understand consciousness’ because it comes to conclusions we don’t like, so it’s in our best interests to not understand it.
I wouldn’t call it weird, just unconventional.
Continental philosophy in a nutshell. Find some cool sciencey concept, and abstract it beyond anything that is reasonable.
What would oceanic philosophy be then? Dilute everything?
Continental philosophy is so named because the Brits referred to the philosophers in continental Europe thus. The opposing school is more generally known as analytical philosophy, and posits that rigorous logic can be applied to philosophy.
Continental philosophy: “love should be a dimension, just like time, that would be awesome.”
Analytical philosophy: “I’ll buy you a beer if you can prove to me that the electron exists.”
So, continental philosophy then simply introduces more variables to tackle the problem, while analytical philosophy tries to make actual progress?
Sort of. Continental philosophy is great if you’re a stoner, a hopeless romantic, have preconceived religious notions that your philosophy must have a carve out for, or if you write for Hollywood.
Sometimes you get all four. See for example, the “totally scientifically plausible movie, Interstellar!” which posits that love permits time travel… Which this meme format would work great for ;)
a hopeless romantic
so basically french, then
We have the many-worlds interpretation that makes perfect sense (as long as you accept that consciousness is just a function of the particles in your brain and not some spiritual essence detached from the laws of physics), but Niels Bohr had to convince everyone that Quantum Mechanics is not supposed to make any sense just so that he could win his argument against Albert Einstein, so now everyone think it’s just another interpretation on equal footing with the Copenhagen nonsense.
“Consciousness affects outcomes” is such a cringe take, it’s more like, you’re in a 3d slice of time and where you inhabit is based on what you do and you’re allowed to do anything within that as long as it’s self-consistent, with things self-correcting if they’re not.
Quantum mechanics makes no difference, just throw cheese at it, if it eats the cheese it’s cool and we can get along, if it doesn’t we need to shoot it.
Hey, that’s racist against asian people.
I wish conciousness had a role in it, because that would imply we had some kind of essence that effected the universe, something we could call a soul
