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
Comment on double slit
Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 months agoYeah, 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.
EvolvedTurtle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
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.
K0W4LSK1@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Ok but how do you actually remove consciousness from the experiment?
Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
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.
K0W4LSK1@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
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 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
Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
There’s no reason 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 for 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.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 8 months ago
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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
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.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 months ago
I’m totally in agreement that the observer effect is not caused by consciousness, but…
This is a claim unsupported by evidence. I submit to you that just as we can explain the observer effect without invoking consciousness, we can also explain cognition without it. We can’t even prove consciousness exists at all! I know I’m conscious because I directly experience it, but I can’t prove to another person that I experience anything, nor can I prove to myself that anyone else experiences anything.
I know my consciousness, memory, and the brain are intimately connected. I know that what people describe as a loss of consciousness on my part is strongly correlated with gaps in my memory. I know those gaps correspond to time periods when period tell me I’m unresponsive to stimuli. I even know other people become unresponsive in connection to same kinds of things that cause gaps in my memory, and they likewise describe similar experiences to mine when, say, they ingest substances that I’ve found to alter my behavior, and which feel like they alter the quality of my consciousness.
All of that is to say that we have very good reasons to suppose that consciousness (if it exists) interacts with the world of measurable phenomena all the time, and that other people experience consciousness. But what we can’t do is measure the difference between a conscious being and a p-zombie. There’s plenty of correlation, but correlation is famously not causation, and we don’t have a testable theory that would explain the causal link, or allow us to test whether, say, a cat, a tree, or an LLM is conscious.