User:Sillybilly/scratchpad

This was meant for the talk:consciousness causes collapse page, but not finished yet, in too much disarray, written when unknowingly I must have been on something. Alas the page is gone, so here is the more coherent edit from the talkpage on there first, before I started writing this boloni here.

Collapse occurs at the very first conscious observer? Come on now..

As far as Wigner is concerned, his friend's consciousness is jut part of the big black box full of mysteries, with no grounds to arbitrarily distinguish from, or raise above the kitty's consciousness, or even the decaying atom's consciouness - after all the kitty and his friend are just simply a DNA molecule-consequence, a functioning system just like a decaying atom is a functioning system. To him his friend's state is still described by a wavefunction, at least until he himself looks at his friend, even though, as it appears to his friend, the wavefunction collapsed long time ago, when his friend looked. Each time a "looking" happens, the wavefunction collapses. Basically the wavefunction collapses at each and every conscious observer, not just the first one, which is the substance of Wigner's argument, that wavefunction collapse and consciousness are inseparable concepts, or experiencing reality and consciousness are inseparable.

Extra dissertation on this relativity of mental frames of reference:

You could say it's all dependent on the observer's frame of reference, and you can talk about relativity theory of wavefunction collapses, or relativity theory of consciousness, or what real is at all. The hindus say there is only mind, that's the only thing that's real, and everything else is maya, illusion. You cannot be certain about anything else around you, not even your friend's consciousness that resembles what you sense as your own conscisouness, but have you ever dreamed about other people, was their consciousness real, or was it just a figment of your imagination, something in your head, a dream? Your life could be just a dream just like Zhuangzi wonders about being a butterfly. Or, just like Descartes concluded, during his quest to cleanse his mind from all the superstitions and untruths it was filled with, to come up with a system of certainty about the world, to come up with a kind of rigorous Euclid's Elements for philosophy, he arrived to one truth "I think therefore I am" but he got no further. Rationalism could only get him so far, giving some kind of certainty that a mind exists, but nothing about anything else. In response to this rationalism attempt, David Hume came with the wrecking ball of empiricism stating that knowledge comes through the senses, and Descartes quest to know the world we live in just by looking inside his own mind was futile, he would forever get stuck at the "I think therefore I am" part, and get no further truths about the world. Basically, knowing the world is like knowing Zhuangzi's butterfly, knowing the dream, knowing the maya, and we only have the limited certainty that empiricism and trust placed into the easily tricked senses give, which is has a lower grade of credit rating/trust than Descartes' single truth, but it's all we got when dealing with the dream, we have nothing better. Lower grade of truth, because there is no ultimate certainty, in a sense Descartes' awareness of self could be just a dream too, the mind dreaming the dream could be itself unreal, just a dream, in a sense you could have dreams dreaming dreams, in a neverending progression, or consciousnesses aware of consciousnesses, in neverending progression, Wigner's consciouness becoming aware of his friend's consciousness becoming aware of the kitty's consciousness becoming aware of the decaying atoms consciousness or "thing" (for lack of a better word) becoming aware of the nucleon's "thing", existence... etc. When a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound, if nobody's there to hear it? Does the tree even exist without a consciousness? We are used to the world, to Nature existing independent of our awareness, as infant's become aware when a blue square is hidden behind a box, we still hold it in our mind, that it exists even if we can't see it, and reality hasn't failed us yet, because we keep seeing it reemerge. It's just how the dream is structured, and we become complacent in this mentality of independent existence, until we meet up with quantum mechanics and Schroedinger's kitten, and we cannot be certain which way it's true. Is there an independent reality or is everything just a part of your dream? Are we part of Nature, or is Nature just part of us? How about a compromise, a little bit of both? Basically I'm trying to present the one side by Wigner about wavefunction collapse and consciousness being inseparable in the best possible light, but just like you, I don't personally like this whole idea, I'd like to see the world in the usual, more comfortable, less paradoxical, existing "independent of us" way. Perhaps there is a way to describe it the comfy way too, just like there are ways of Taylor expansions or Fourier series for the exact same functions in mathematics, or, geometry can be viewed through Euclidian or non-Euclidian spectacles, reality yields to different views, different interpretations, we just need to find the familiar Taylor series expansion way of looking at quantum mechanics instead of the Fourier wave way of currently seeing things. Of course there is no arbitrary reason to say that either Fourier or Taylor series are better for a function, they are equivalent "in and of themselves", it's all relative, we just prefer using one or the other method depending on the situation, depending on how many terms we need to carry. Perhaps there is a way, keep your fingers crossed, otherwise we're stuck with this seemingly paradoxical (absurd means laughable in greek) way to describe reality, which isn't paradoxical, just like Fourier series are not paradoxical, they are just not something we're used to, so we laugh at it. Hope you found some good humor(absurdity) in all this, because what's life worth without good humor. This indifferent Nature finds many ways to entertain us, or in Einstein worldview, the not so indifferent Nature, or God, who doesn't play with dice, who's subtle, but not malicious, finds many ways to entertain us. These two views are, of course, equivalent ways of looking at the same thing, depending on what you feel comfortable with, ultimately neither is right, nor wrong, everything has two sides, everything has yin yang, just like the quantum wavefunction has many sides before you collapse it. When you collapse it, the wavefunction either just loses the other side after the collapse, or the other side progresses on as in the many worlds interpretation, the two interpretations, you guessed it, neither being right nor wrong, but equivalent. :) Sillybilly 04:55, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Quantum Immortality

User:Sillybilly/scratchpad —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sillybilly (talk • contribs) 04:50, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

   I propose that this section be deleted altogether, or else reformulated as a synopsis of an established viewpoint (with accompanying citations). It is needlessly speculative, not to mention incoherent. Vel 09:59, 2 October 2006 (UTC) 

Here comes the boloni thoughts about quantum immortality in disarray for your amusement: Recent post - Quantum immortality

"Thus, in the Schrodinger's cat experiment, although the outside observer may open the box to find a dead cat, the cat does not perceive himself as dead. Now lacking consciousness, presumably some subconscious aspect of his state lives on."

Warning: Long philosophical deliberation bs to follow: To reiterate, basically according to the current state of quantum physics, for anything to be "real"(whatever that word means) it has to be experienced by consciousness, thus causing the wavefunction to collapse and fully take on one of the many possibilities, and thus one of the many possibilities becomes "real" "after" the wavefunction has collapsed. That is, consciousness is a necessary ingredient for "reality" to exist at all. There is a separate realm where the wavefunctions live, and unless there is an "observation event" by a "consciousness agent" to draw the wavefunction into the "real world", the wavefunction lives on in time as a blend of possibilities, without collapsing to one of the real states. You could say the world of wavefunctions is a world devoid of any consciousness, because whenever consciousness interacts with wavefunctions it automatically draws them into the real world - or, is this statement correct, can you think of a counterexample, is there a way for consciouness to interact with wavefunctions without causing their collapse? Can consciousness be made aware of the existence of a wavefunction and its states/probabilties without forcing, without causing them to become reality? Also, what happens to the wavefunction after it's "observed"? Does the "many worlds" possibility live on, that is, does the wavefunction still live on anyway after being experienced and drawn into reality? I don't think so - here is a line of reasoning: I observe an electron by it emitting a photon that hits my photomultiplier tube generated signal on a screen emitting another bunch of photons that hits my retina generating an electrical signal in my brain that .. whatever happens there, as you transit from the lower layer world of physical happenings to the higher world of mind (chapter 1 of Neural Networks:A Tutorial by M. Chester ISBN 0133689034 has some stuff on this (my public library has it), and so does multiple realizability on how some higher structural entity, such as mind, is "independent" from the lower layer as far as definition goes.) So back to me observing the electron existing, disturbing it enough too due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but still, let's say I luck out (or look at many electrons so that I luck out sometimes) and have this very electron travel through the double slit, then hit a screen behind it. Basically the electron was in the real world when it interacted with me, then traveled as a wavefunction, then became real again when hitting the screen. Seems like the conservation of energy forbids the electron still existing as a wavefunction "after" it hit the screen, "after" it's been observed. Where is the fault in this reasoning, I feel like there are major holes because we're walking on some so unintuitive territory. But other than that, we can say that something exists either has a wavefunction, or as a "real thing", (either as a wave or as a partcile), it can be either in this world, or in the other world of wavefunctions, but the conservation of energy forbids to have things all over the place, to multiply and destruct. Basically a photon may turn into an electron-positron pair, back to photon, it can turn into an elephant and an antimatter elephant pair, but the conservation of energy law isn't violated, that is constant, so it's either a wavefunction or a real thing, it's either a wave energy, or a particle's kinetic+potential energy, but not twice or many times either one, each time a particle is observed, the wavefunction doesn't continue on its way because it requires energy to exist, and we already forced that energy to be present in the real world instead of the world of wavefunctions. Actually what's conserved is conservation of energy + Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, because dE.dt<hbar, and for a sufficiently short period of time(say an attosecond) there is a nonzero finite chance for a pair of elephant-antielephant pairs to momentarily apper and disappear, however small that chance might be. Quantum mechanics is silly like that, even human brain + antibrain both having their consciousness and anticonsciousness=consciousness? (does it have a sign, or is it always one kind, just multply realizable?) appear. Wittgenstein says all philosophy is basically people abusing the rules of language, and right now we've ended up way off the beaten track in saying "consciousness with a negative sign." What the heck is that? But it's fun..

Anyway, the cat's wavefunction may live on, but whatever the dead cat's wavefunction does after the cat's consciousness is drawn into the real world and ceases to exist, his own wavefunction's dealings will never be affected by his own consciousness. There is an issue here about consciousness experiencing consciousness, as in the cat experiencing someone else's consciousness - in fact all the cat experiences is object-world events - someone else dying is just a pile of flesh dying. You assume there is a consciousness present in that flesh because of the similarities you see between your own body (or what you assume your own body) and mental states, and the object of your attention in your dream, the kitty's brain/mind, and you extrapolate, you use induction (which is the major form of building knowledge, or forcing a system of understanding onto the world) to say that that figment of your imagination, that other being has consciousness too. Nothing guarantees that the induction has basis, and in fact nothing guarantees any knowledge that you have, any of your inductions, they just seem to fit and work well with the world around you, but as Wittgenstein said, "That the Sun will rise tomorrow that's just a hypothesis", and so is all the Laws of Nature, all of Newton's Principia, it's just something that can be tested over and over, and so far we haven't seen Nature disobey it, but nothing guarantees that, say, there isn't a Law of Nature that says every 15 billion years all gravity in the Universe ceases to function for 1 day, everything will float, then after the 1 day is over, everything gets back to normal. According to Hume and empiricism, you would have no way to "induct" such a law without experiencing it first. Ahh, you say a cat's consciousness dying is a nonsense statement, at least from the cat's point of view, because his mind can never experience its own nonexistence, because there is nothing to experience it. As Descartes says, one ultimate truth is that "I think therefore I am", but the reverse, "I am not, therefore I can't think" won't happen, because once my mind is, it can never go through the state of not being, and think that it is not, because there is nothing to think it, and if reality is only generated by consciousness, then consciousness can never generate its own nonexistence because there is nothing to generate the nonexistence in the first place. If "There is only Mind, one Mind" as the hindus say it, everything is maya, then this Mind is eternal as far as the internal dealings go, the mind cannot dream itself out of existence, and even if the dream ends, the Mind is still there - we basically equate all reality with Mind, and assume nothing "exists" outside the Mind. In case the Mind itself ceases to exist, the system ceases to exist, then we say reality ceases to exist, or existence ceases to exist, which is like saying we're just in a different domain, there is the world of existence, and there is something else (blah, note I keep using the words we're nonexistence, there is nonexistence which is faulty logic in the first place). Buf anyway, if there is only Mind, then in this view everything is one, we're all part of a single dream, there is only one Mind, you could say God's mind, and in fact everything else is maya then whatever you experience is just the only mind, and there aren't separate minds in the world, whatever you induct as other minds, such as kitty's are just figments of your dream, and not real. On the other hand if "there is not only mind, but other things too" then the above reasoning no longer stands. If you're living a dream and everything is maya, then everything is eternal, but if what you observe around you is real, and not illusion, then the induction of you being somewhat similar to kitties and other people and whatever happens to them happens to you, might have some basis. Therefore if everything is maya, then the mind is immortal, because only It can create or destroy, and if everything is not maya, not illusion, but real, object of the world, then the mind is mortal hinged on induction leap of faith. Just a thought: In the mortal mind world the cat's mind is equivalent substance to my, the observer's mind, or other people's mind are equivalent to my mind, so in the mortal world we can speak of affection and humanity towards each other, while in the immortal world, if we consider each other as maya, as dream objects, then any kind of object affection is a sort of fetishism, but not necessarily. How do you know which way it "really" is, whatever the world "real" and "existence" means anymore. You could still say that we all belong to one Mind, God's mind, and we are subparts of it, we can only experience some of it, but then if we're not the whole, then there is interaction and something else can think the subpart(you) out of existence, as opposed to if there is only one mind without subparts, then that mind cannot think itself out of existence. In this sense only God's mind is immortal, and every other mind is mortal, unless God decides not to let the subparts, the subminds, think each other out of existence, in the quantum immortality sense. Question is what happens to the wavefunction..

And seems that along the way back there I've confused the terms wavefunction collapse particle/wave duality with reality=particle, other world=wave, which isn't necessarily something logical, is it? What's a wave anyway, if not a bunch of particles moving a certain way, and what's a particle, if not a bunch of waves interacting momentarly?

Back to criticizing one of the sentences above: "Seems like the conservation of energy forbids the electron still existing as a wavefunction "after" it hit the screen, "after" it's been observed." Actually, every time, after being observed, the electrong goes back to being a wavefunction, and it only spends very little time in this world, each time it's observed. So the electron spends most of its life as a wavefunction, and only a little bit being observed, if that makes sense. You could say the electron is always a wave, and observation doesn't take up any time at all, it just affects the wavefunction's life in the other world. So anything that exists, is ultimately a bunch of wavefunctions anyway, and there is no "real" realm, just wavefunction realm, and what we call wavefunction-interaction is reality, or observation. In this sense, if mind exist as a distinct thing, (such as society exists as a collection of people, and body exists as collection of cells, and mind exists as a collection of synaptic firings (is that even a good definition, probably not)) it must have a composite wavefunction. As far as energy goes, it's indestructible, but as far as collections go, as far as say that energy being an electron positron pair, or being an elephant-antielephant pair goes, they are freely destructible and recreatable, just like information is, the states of energy are variable, so society is destroyed if its members don't interact they way they used, a body is destroyed if it's cells no longer interact and function, mind is destroyed if the synaptic firings no longer happen, what remains though is that nothing in reality is destroyed, the energy lives on in other forms. You can look at this thing in a happy/unhappy way. As far as energy goes, everything real is connected and freely transformable into each other, you are made of dust, and you shall become dust again, but as far as negentropy and syntropy goes, the negentropically formed brain and mind that are higher level and therefore destructible entities than the very lowest level of indestructible particles doesn't want to be destroyed because of negentropy effects, so that's an unhappy way of looking at it. But back to this later (we're not talking about My Mind, we're talking about other minds within the dream, such as the kitty's mind, that seemingly destruct and break down within the dream, and the induction that similar things may happen to "this mind" may or may not stand. There may only be one mind after all, and everything else illusion, including kitties, or wavefunctions, or energy even.

Criticising the statement up there: "Therefore if everything is maya, then the mind is immortal, because only It can create or destroy" Well, anything "ising" is a feature of the mind, but what about the whole system going down, going out of context - you could say anything "real" inside a running computer is just a figment of the computer's imagination, and anything existing or not existing in this system is dependent on the computer creating or destroying it;but what about the computer going down, then you can just say asking whether something 'is' or 'is not' inside the computer is a nonsense question, out of context, because the corresponding bit is neither flipped to 0 or 1, but it's just out of context, nonsense. Can the "mind" go out of context like that, all reality stop existing, and therefore not be immortal? Is the computer "thinking" generating it's own existence, or there always some higher existence generating a lower existence, computer running a simulation of a computer that's running a simulation of a computer, each having a field of existence that always requires a higher system to exist? Godel's incompleteness theorem seems to be a related topic here to me. If any system were complete, than you could say all there is, all entities, features, artifacts, phenomena and objects are in context, included. But systems are incomplete. Then there is only mind? Maybe not, there is always a loophole when there is always something that doesn't fit, outside of the game, requiring a higher level system to bring it into the game, but that higher level system would have it's own similar problems, requiring even higher level systems. If there cannot be a system without a higher system, then there is no highest system? We're way off the everyday common sense beaten path kind of language now.