Yupp, the Copenhagen interpretation is the most common one, but here arises the misconception of what an observation/measurement actually means in terms of quantum mechanics, and thus back to my first post in this thread. Here I tried to explain what an observation actually means and how conscious observers need not be directly involved in any collapse of the wavefunction into a definite state. Again, the conjecture of yours that it really is consciousness that determines the reality of the cosmos is without merit. Read for example this article http://web.archive.org/w...AFLB-311/aflb311m387.pdf

And I would like to again quote from PhD theoretical physicist Victor J. Stenger as I did earlier;

"The overwhelming weight of evidence, from seven decades of experimentation, shows not a hint of a violation of reductionist, local, discrete, nonsuperluminal, non-holistic relativity and quantum mechanics - with no fundamental involvement of human consciousness other than in our own subjective perception of whatever reality is out there. Of course our thinking processes have a strong influence on what we perceive. But to say that what we perceive therefore determines, or even controls, what is out there is without rational foundation. The world would be a far different place for all of us if it was just all in our heads - if we really could make our own reality as the New Agers believe. The fact that the world rarely is what we want it to be is the best evidence that we have little to say about it. The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world."

and Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman (the discoverer of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977, making major contributions to physics) describes all of this as "moo shoo physics".

I can give some of the other references again, if you wish to read them;

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/quantum_quackery
http://www.colorado.edu/...QuantumConsciousness.pdf
http://www.danko-nikolic...sness-Annalen-Physik.pdf

As for your question of proving, it is not me who has the burden of proof because I haven't made any incredible claims, but for the record I can't prove it directly, of course. In order to determine whether or not something is there, we have to perceive it somehow. However, my many examples used as questions to you earlier makes a pretty strong case for the fact that these events happen independently of us. The whole of science suggest this, as we study objective phenomena perceived by anyone. Just because we have to make measurements and observations doesn't automatically mean that consciousness determines the properties of the universe. I again refer you to the many questions I raised, for which I have still not received an answer, as well as previous posts and references posted here. The consequences of consciousness really creating reality would lead to absurd conclusions that run contrary to about everything we know; objective measurements wouldn't make any sense, evolution wouldn't make any sense, the history of the universe before consciousness came into the soup, the room example I gave, the very fact that we can't control anything with our minds wouldn't make sense and so on and so forth; Occams' razor cuts right through this pretty much, and would lead us to rationally think that this assumption is not a good one.

In short, there really is no rational reason, or anything to suggest, that consciousness truly begets matter and that the universe is dependent upon conscious observers in order to be there. It might be possible, sure, but likely? Not much. Just because we are perceivers and participators of our universe, it doesn't follow that we are the creators of it. And just because we can't prove that there aren't unicorns residing in every house, placed in such a way that we can't see them, it doesn't mean that it is rational to assume they actually do. The same goes for Santa Claus, gnomes in the shed, the tooth fairy or any other hypothesis of similar nature - as well as the need for conscious observers in the universe. The hypothesis that there is an objective universe is likely to be falsifiable as well; if we could, by conscious intent, move mountains with our minds, make everyone do what you think or something else that should be possible if consciousness creates reality, then this would be a clear shot at the hypothesis and show its falsehood. No such evidence exists, however.

Right. Furthermore, we ARE the creators of WHAT IS IN OUR HEADS. And that's a key point, and for me, the very basis of my interest in psychedelics and meditation.

But I see it as CRITICAL to investigate how realities compare and contrast regarding "external, objective realities" and realities that are created and exist only within our minds.

One thing I'm quite sure of, based on people having contrasting ideas: the ONLY place in the universe where the FALSE exists is in the minds of beings who can create concepts: such as humans. We create what is in our heads, and by DEFINITION it's at best only a REPRESENTATION of external realities.

Seconded. This is why science is so important in the quest for truth and knowledge, because it seeks to find results that are ultimately independent of what individual minds think about reality and how it ought to be, and instead uncovers the most honest and objective facts that we can conceive of. The progress of science constantly makes us converge towards how the universe actually is by always improving and/or refuting bad hypothesis, revising theories and making new and better observations. It can't get anymore open-minded, rational and intellectually honest than this imo.

Yet for all the mental circle jerking neither or you, nor any one else can show me anything that exists outside without a witness.

I side with the copenhagen interpretation because it is quite frankly the most obvious, simplest explanation.

I'm done with this thread... carry on my material reductionists...carry on.

Define witness

So what? This proves nothing, just as the fact that we can't prove there are no unicorns in every house, placed so that we can't see them, says nothing about the likelihood of this being the case. Is it rational to assume there are unicorns in every house just because we can't prove it isn't? No, absolutely not. Is it rational to assume something doesn't exist without observation just because we can't prove it does? No, absolutely not for reasons I have already presented.

Again, you have effectively switched the burden of proof to the side that have not made any incredible claims, but that have simply raised some important questions and arguments against your claims. At the same time the possibility of your conjectures have remained totally open to me, and I have not said it absolutely isn't the case, but it has been argued why it is extremely unlikely. Your conjectures have been criticized with great arguments and important questions have been raised. You have not answered any of it, but simply been switching the burden of proof as if that would make your case more solid, and used mild ad-hominems and poor debate techniques as you go along. It seems that you have nothing solid, no real foundation, to put your absolute claims on - at least you have not cared to present it. Thus you might as well have claimed that the universe was created by a waffle.

And yes, the copenhagen interpretation makes sense, but it doesn't mean that conscious observers actually collapses the wavefunction, stemming from the misconception of what an observation/measurement actually is. How many times must I argue that this is not the case? How many references do I need to show you? How many sound arguments do I have to present? You just ignore it all, refusing to comment on why the criticism from me and statements from real physicists are wrong, and then leave the discussion. All the while I have answered your questions, argued seriously against you, presented references, quotes and raised questions you have not confronted.

Calling us material reductionists in this context almost seem to be used as an insult, or something negative and close minded, and it doesn't make the overall impression any better.

Catch you on the flipside, joedirt. I hope we cross ways in a better context next time =)

Stay well.

Yes until you answer my question or show me PROOF I am not going to even entertain anything else your say.

This problem is as much a problem of philosophical interpretation as it is science.

I'll come right out and say it. I don't have PROOF and neither do you. However I still side with particle/wave duality because it has been shown time and time again to be correct...right down to things like 6-31* ab initio calculation. To me this is easily the Occams razor solution. Doesn't mean it's right. I'll concede that point as soon as there is a unified theory that explains everything in a materialists reductionist fashion...

Some of the countered to the copenhagen interpretation are even more absurd and invent things like parallel universes to get around the observer...which if true is EVEN more mystical. Honestly, unless there is a reason to invoke claims of faeries, unicorns or multiverses then I think it's just silly to do so. It may turn out to be right, but it could also be that God is a purple unicorn that sends us all to candy land when we die. It doesn't make sense to invent extremely obtuse theories when the simple explanation seems to be valid. Yes theoretical physicists get a by because it's what they do...but NONE of these theories have yet provided anything as paradigm shifting as particle wave duality.

The only reason I hammer the response the way I do is because their is at least some experimental data that suggests what I'm saying is a 'reasonable' interpretation. I'm not asking you to believe in purple unicorns. I'm simply stating that based on the experimental data the prevailing interpretation makes more sense than the others...to the majority of the people looking at the data. What more can I say than that? You say it's black, and I say it's white. We aren't going to agree.


Lastly, The reason you are getting so much resistance from me is because you have openly admitted that your AGENDA is to make people change their minds about spirituality. It pissed me off that you would dare be so arrogant. Someone still in their first year(s) of college going to go out of his way to convince everyone that he is right about literally the most complex problem known to man right now...and that we are all wrong. Yes you've rubbed me the wrong way with this.

So instead of continuing this pointless dialog with you I'll simple post my statements as I have in this thread after every post I see you make on this subject. I just want to ensure that your OPINION is balanced with regards to this topic specifically. After all there are a few scientists that agree with me...me being one of them.

So flatly I don't agree with your view...or that of other Nobel laureate physicists. It's ok Im a big boy and I can disagree with them. They may or may not be right, but as it stands EVERYONE that picks a side on this issue is picking a side that jives with THEIR philosophical view.

Ta-Ta.

Firstly, there's a difference between a conscious observer and a measurement device. Also... if we're going by "logic" then really the conscious observers should never materialize unless itself is being consciously observed, right? I'm not so sure that the double split experiment had anything to do with conscious observations, but instead focused on the act of measurement (which doesn't have to involve a "witness" ) . And, from what I understand from "Quantum Reality" by Nick Herbert, even most of the observer created reality conclusions from quantum mechanics are still (usually) only applied to individual particles (photons, etc)... not moons, etc.

Either way, I highly recommend (for the third and last time) that you guys read Nick Herbert's book "Quantum Reality". He's a nuclear physicist who writes about the 8 or so different conclusions drawn from the same data from quantum mechanics. He discusses how they drew these conclusions from the data and what parts of the data they tend to... "disregard". Great book, definitely has a little more technical mathematics stuff in it, but definitely worth a read. (Might help this debate out a little bit).

Any reasonable interpretation will accord with experimental data. Why on earth would anyone take it seriously if it didn't? So when you say, "I'm simply stating that based on the experimental data the prevailing interpretation makes more sense than the others...to the majority of the people looking at the data," you are simply mistaken. Take a look at Bohmian mechanics, for one example (see the following intro: http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/Poster/post/postE.html ). Theories are underdetermined by data.

You talk about the Copenhagen interpretation being the "Occam's razor solution," but you're being terribly ambiguous about what this means. In virtue of what factors? A balancing act needs to be done here. A collapsing wavefunction is a huge theoretical posit relative to one that behaves less erratically, and those that do without it are certainly more theoretically economical in one respect, though they may come with more ontological bulk, as with Everett's many worlds. On more worlds, David Lewis (see _On the Plurality of Worlds_) would probably have responded that as long as there is only a quantitative increase in the theory (more of the same stuff, e.g. lots of new worlds) rather than a qualitative increase (a bunch of new stuff, e.g. alien properties), that it is relatively admissible. Being but one universe in a multiverse also gives us very good reasons behind understanding the so-called finely-tunedness of the physical constants conducive to life here, via anthropic reasoning (_Universe or Multiverse?_ is a great anthology on this matter edited by Bernard Carr).

We infer the existence of unobservables all the time in science (particles, the luminiferous ether), though that doesn't mean we're right. And even if we do observe them, they may be abstractions from a more fundamental ontology (if the world is only wavefunction, particles and any higher-level phenomena are abstractions from this level). Bohm was pretty radical in this regard (see _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_).

So, the geometry/ontology of space might be a good example of something we're pretty damn sure is there but can't observe (points are zero-dimensional, if one likes a pointy theory). Or: we also infer the existence of things beyond our Hubble volume due to the expansion of the universe, but we certainly can't observe so (it's beyond our Hubble volume!).

Also, not all materialists are reductive ones. There are non-reductive materialistic strategies. And even the reductive ones can come with more exotic ontologies that tend to blur the distinction between the two. Jaegwon Kim, for example, recognizes disjunctive and negated properties and infinitary boolean operations over them as physically acceptable supervenience bases for mental properties (see _Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation_ and "The Nonreductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation" ).

Anyways, I never really understood the frustration with materialism/physicalism. Matter does weird things, and we're still tapping its potential with, say, metamaterials, nanotechnology, and perhaps quantum computation, for a few quick examples. There are also panpsychist physicalist ontologies that see mental properties as fundamental -- this avoids a lot of causal problems between mind and matter at the "cost" of flipping the tables on what most typically find intuitive, namely the mental being realized from the physical rather than equivalent or vice versa (see, e.g., Galen Strawson's "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" ).




I read this stuff once in a while. It beats watching crap TV I'm not so much experiment-obsessed like Bohr was. I like fundamentality.

But that's just sophistry; a tautology. Sure, I can't "show" you anything that I don't already know about, i.e., haven't already observed. But that's MUCH different from saying nothing CAN be shown until it HAS been shown. You seem to be inventing that from thin air.

If you want to keep on insisting on this, you have to be prepared to expand on it, and explain how to make sense of it in terms with our normal experience of life. Citta has given numerous examples, which you haven't commented on.

And primarily, I need a specific answer about exactly who these OBSERVERS are: humans? intelligent beings? mere sentient beings? Anything living? What?

The answer to that then determines how to answer the question about the phenomenology we experience, and how it's typically thought that things exist independently of any interaction with other things.

My Avatar.

Look just below it, you'll see what I mean

a freebie from Scientific American magazine discussing quantum entanglement, with a fascinating 9-minute video.
The links in the article go to further discussion by physicists Vedral and Kaiser.
(sorry, couldn't get the D-N linking thing working for this)


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/01/30/george-and-johns-excellent-adventures-in-quantum-entanglement-video/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20120203

How about the entire history of the universe before life began? Or were stars and nebula clouds "observing" each other before we started to?

I have asked this question several times, no answer has been given. But the only way to get around this argument is to still say that we would know none of these things without awareness and observation. This is true, but then I say so what? The ultimate conclusion about consciousness creating reality, nothing existing without observation etc would be that we in fact create reality instantenously several billion years back in the past, that we created evolution and all the processes leading up to our very existence.

This is quite the thought cross, because before we had the slightest idea and understanding of this world, we hadn't yet observed any of these processes, we hadn't yet observed evolution happening in labs or the evidence for it around the world. Then how the hell could we have existed in ignorance at all, if nothing exists without observation and the underlying processes in the past leading up to the present were not yet observed or even conceived of? It would mean then that evolution didn't exist, far galaxies and stars didn't exist and so on - and thus we wouldn't be able to exist neither. Somewhere along these lines is actually the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from these ideas, and it is outright ridiculous and should be a powerful antidote against them.

The only rational and simple explanation for the history of our universe, all objective measurements of light from stars that used billions of years to come here, for objective measurements of evolution, objective measurements in general, the age of the earth and so on is that these things do not come into being when we observe them, that stars in distant places are not popping into existence billions of years ago when we look at the sky, but that these things were before us, and thus that there actually is a world able to exist without human beings observing it - the very world that is responsible for us sitting here now. If this is not the case, then proponents of ideas to the contrary have a huge explanatory problem in light of this, and I am very interested in hearing how it can be explained.

Citta wrote:
..who is arguing along these lines? this is a misunderstanding of some of the philosophy involved..

the 'material' vs. 'consciousness' argument cannot be proven either way..

when a particle is not being observed, it has a probability of giving a certain reading, but it has not been verified/actualized..it cannot be proven that the particle exists, not simply a 'probability wave', which is not the same as existing in the usual sense..

the measuring instruments which conduct these scientific observations are a direct extension of conscious beings, as are all tools..they do not exist without conscious beings to construct them..there is no way to prove what happens without consciously verified observation..

unless a sentient 'witness' (= self aware) sees an object (via eyes, or by reading the output of the measuring instrument) nothing can be said with any certainty to have occurred..only probably or possibly has it 'occurred'..

this debate goes far beyond the OP topic, and leads to questions such as the definitions of 'exists' and 'probability'..there isn't really space for this debate here, but certainly the 'materialists' should not claim any kind of victory..

..it is interesting to me that one of the areas least understood or described adequately by Quantum physics or Relativity, i.e Time, seems directly correlated to requiring a sequenced, self-aware point-of-view..from a hyperdimensional POV there is no requirement for ordinary cause and effect..time, to me, seems only logical to a 'self-informing' structure (mind)

the Anthropic Principle, incidentally, suggests matter begat consciousness..why?..one theory is that intelligent consciousness is the only means by which the universe can escape it's entropic fate and keep surviving..bit like the 'life' principle on a cosmic scale..

my final philosophical question is: "What is the origin of form? Mind or Matter?"
.

This question might be a false dilemma. "Matter" might, on the fundamental level, have/be mental properties or proto-mental properties (since they are probably unlike our own as h. sapiens) =) (see "On the supposed limits of physicalist theories of mind"). Views like this intrigue me more and more lately in view of how hard the "hard problem of consciousness" is.

..very interesting, thanks zip..yeah, personally i'm for unification..

This thread has progressed without contributions from my side.

But I thought I might have something to say.
I'm into philosophy of physics, finishing my master as we speak.

On the double slit experiment: there are indeed multiple interpertations. The Copenhagen interpretation states that the system's particle-wave-duality are linked to the position momentum duality. When we know the position of a particle it cannot manifest its wavelike-properties.

I myself favour the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation in which all particles have position. There are, through the slits, multiple trajectories of particles possible. Only one is actual. Over the ensemble of possible particles there is a probability density, it is like a field influencing the particles moving through. Therefore the interference bonds arise as a result of the field that is influenced by the probabilities. rephrased: the particles are guided by a field which form depends on the positions of all particles (including non-manifested trajectories).

On measurement/observation: Somewhere between the quantum realm and where we observe reality, there is a change. In the quantum realm, systems are described by the wavefunction which not necessarily corresponds to a classical analogon. Often it looks like multiple possible outcomes with a certain probability measrue. Where this change of objects is, the so-called Heisenberg cut, is flexible. We can regard anything outside of our conscious minds as superposed and only our personal view of things involving classical objects, which would lead us to questions about why we can communicate so well. e.g. when talking to people there seems to be no misunderstanding on objects that have collapsed differently for different people. This is similar to Wigner's friend paradox.

On the boundaries of human knowledge: In my own approach I take into account the limits of human knowledge. Seeing that there are a lot of different interpretations while being empirically equivalent, I look at what the views have in common. Because interpretations are human things, the base of the interpretations is the formalism. This is a structure we can express and attached to the observable world (on which we also agree), it yields the right outcomes (on which we agree as well). I claim that this structure is (iso)morphic to the world's structure, explaining why we get true outcomes. Only claiming that there is a worldly structure and any interpretation of that structure gives us the possibility to interact with it.

In each interpretation there is either a non-local influence, or a non-separable conclusion. These follow from Bell's inequality, see SEP-entry on this. Entangled systems either influence each other non-locally, or are not describable as seperable states, making the influence of the parts on eachother be happening within the same thing. When we attribute this to the worldly structure, it's possible to see the world as one structured whole, or a structure that exists of a lot of objects that exist interdependently. Both beautiful world views, if you ask me .

This is a bit off topic, but I hope that you can see that measurement and observability is not the same as creating your own reality, the choice is not (provably) yours to make. We can have our own reality by haveing a different interpretation of the worldly structure. The world Bohm sketches is different of Bohr's. They have chosen differently, not creating different worlds, but different world views.

Edit: pic is Bohmian solution for the double slit experiment

What is time? Well one thing it is is relative.

Expand your minds guy's. Science should broaden your view not shrink it down.

BTW. Two charged particles in a vacuum are very clearly aware of each other.


Peace

My main problem with the notion that our observation is responsible for existence is that time and time again the universe has let us know that we are not the center of attention. How many times have we got this wrong? The universe doesn't revolve around our planet, solar system, galaxy. We aren't the only intelligent species. We really, really want to believe we're special, but from my perspective history has taught us that this is nothing more than hubris.