Schrödinger was not “rejecting” quantum mechanics, he was rejecting people treating things described in a superposition of states as literally existing in “two places at once.” And Schrödinger’s argument still holds up perfectly. What you are doing is equating a very dubious philosophical take on quantum mechanics with quantum mechanics itself, as if anyone who does not adhere to this dubious philosophical take is “denying quantum mechanics.” But this was not what Schrödinger was doing at all.

What you say here is a popular opinion, but it just doesn’t make any sense if you apply any scrutiny to it, which is what Schrödinger was trying to show. Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory where probability amplitudes are complex-valued, so things can have a -100% chance of occurring, or even a 100i% chance of occurring. This gives rise to interference effects which are unique to quantum mechanics. You interpret what these probabilities mean in physical reality based on how far they are away from zero (the further from zero, the more probable), but the negative signs allow for things to cancel out in ways that would not occur in normal probability theory, known as interference effects. Interference effects are the hallmark of quantum mechanics.

Because quantum probabilities have this difference, some people have wondered if maybe they are not probabilities at all but describe some sort of physical entity. If you believe this, then when you describe a particle as having a 50% probability of being here and a 50% probability of being there, then this is not just a statistical prediction but there must be some sort of “smeared out” entity that is both here and there simultaneously. Schrödinger showed that believing this leads to nonsense as you could trivially set up a chain reaction that scales up the effect of a single particle in a superposition of states to eventually affect a big system, forcing you to describe the big system, like a cat, in a superposition of states. If you believe particles really are “smeared out” here and there simultaneously, then you have to believe cats can be both “smeared out” here and there simultaneously.

Ironically, it was Schrödinger himself that spawned this way of thinking. Quantum mechanics was originally formulated without superposition in what is known as matrix mechanics. Matrix mechanics is complete, meaning, it fully makes all the same predictions as traditional quantum mechanics. It is a mathematically equivalent theory. Yet, what is different about it is that it does not include any sort of continuous evolution of a quantum state. It only describes discrete observables and how they change when they undergo discrete interactions.

Schrödinger did not like this on philosophical grounds due to the lack of continuity. There were discrete “gaps” between interactions. He criticized it saying that “I do not believe that the electron hops about like a flea” and came up with his famous wave equation as a replacement. This wave equation describes a list of probability amplitudes evolving like a wave in between interactions, and makes the same predictions as matrix mechanics. People then use the wave equation to argue that the particle literally becomes smeared out like a wave in between interactions.

However, Schrödinger later abandoned this point of view because it leads to nonsense. He pointed in one of his books that while his wave equation gets rid of the gaps in between interactions, it introduces a new gap in between the wave and the particle, as the moment you measure the wave it “jumps” into being a particle randomly, which is sometimes called the “collapse of the wave function.” This made even less sense because suddenly there is a special role for measurement. Take the cat example. Why doesn’t the cat’s observation of this wave not cause it to “collapse” but the person’s observation does? There is no special role for “measurement” in quantum mechanics, so it is unclear how to even answer this in the framework of quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger was thus arguing to go back to the position of treating quantum mechanics as a theory of discrete interactions. There are just “gaps” between interactions we cannot fill. The probability distribution does not represent a literal physical entity, it is just a predictive tool, a list of probabilities assigned to predict the outcome of an experiment. If we say a particle has a 50% chance of being here or a 50% chance of being there, it is just a prediction of where it will be if we were to measure it and shouldn’t be interpreted as the particle being literally smeared out between here and there at the same time.

There is no reason you have to actually believe particles can be smeared out between here and there at the same time. This is a philosophical interpretation which, if you believe it, it has an enormous amount of problems with it, such as what Schrödinger pointed out which ultimately gets to the heart of the measurement problem, but there are even larger problems. Wigner had also pointed out a paradox whereby two observers would assign different probability distributions to the same system. If it is merely probabilities, this isn’t a problem. If I flip a coin and look at the outcome and it’s heads, I would say it has a 100% chance of being heads because I saw it as heads, but if I asked you and covered it up so you did not see it, you would assign a 50% probability of it being heads or tails. If you believe the wave function represents a physical entity, then you could setup something similar in quantum mechanics whereby two different observers would describe two different waves, and so the physical shape of the wave would have to differ based on the observer.

There are a lot more problems as well. A probability distribution scales up in terms of its dimensions exponentially. With a single bit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. With two bits, there’s four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. With three bits, eight outcomes. With four bits, sixteen outcomes. If we assign a probability amplitude to each possible outcome, then the number of degrees of freedom grows exponentially the more bits we have under consideration.

This is also true in quantum mechanics for the wave function, since it is again basically a list of probability amplitudes. If we treat the wave function as representing a physical wave, then this wave would not exist in our four-dimensional spacetime, but instead in an infinitely dimensional space known as a Hilbert space. If you want to believe the universe actually physically made up of infinitely dimensional waves, have at ya. But personally, I find it much easier to just treat a probability distribution as, well, a probability distribution.

What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.

To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism.

What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. Every time there is an interaction, you apply a discrete change to the observables. You always get the right statistical predictions and yet you don’t need the wave function at all.

The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense, and it baffles me that it is so popular for people to do so.

This is why Hilbert space is infinitely dimensional. If I have a single qubit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. If I have two qubits, there are four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. If I have three qubits, there are eight possible outcomes, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. If I assigned a probability amplitude to each event occurring, then the degrees of freedom would grow exponentially as I include more qubits into my system. The number of degrees of freedom are unbounded.

This is exactly how Hilbert space works. Interpreting this as a physical infinitely dimensional space where waves really propagate through it just makes absolutely no sense!

It is weird that you start by criticizing our physical theories being descriptions of reality then end criticizing the Copenhagen interpretation, since this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that physics is not about describing nature but describing what we can say about nature. It doesn’t make claims about underlying ontological reality but specifically says we cannot make those claims from physics and thus treats the maths in a more utilitarian fashion.

The only interpretation of quantum mechanics that actually tries to interpret it at face value as a theory of the natural world is relational quantum mechanics which isn’t that popular as most people dislike the notion of reality being relative all the way down. Almost all philosophers in academia define objective reality in terms of something being absolute and point-of-view independent, and so most academics struggle to comprehend what it even means to say that reality is relative all the way down, and thus interpreting quantum mechanics as a theory of nature at face-value is actually very unpopular.

All other interpretations either: (1) treat quantum mechanics as incomplete and therefore something needs to be added to it in order to complete it, such as hidden variables in the case of pilot wave theory or superdeterminism, or a universal psi with some underlying mathematics from which to derive the Born rule in the Many Worlds Interpretation, or (2) avoid saying anything about physical reality at all, such as Copenhagen or QBism.

Since you talk about “free will,” I suppose you are talking about superdeterminism? Superdeterminism works by pointing out that at the Big Bang, everything was localized to a single place, and thus locally causally connected, so all apparent nonlocality could be explained if the correlations between things were all established at the Big Bang. The problem with this point of view, however, is that it only works if you know the initial configuration of all particles in the universe and a supercomputer powerful to trace them out to modern day.

Without it, you cannot actually predict any of these correlations ahead of time. You have to just assume that the particles “know” how to correlate to one another at a distance even though you cannot account for how this happens. Mathematically, this would be the same as a nonlocal hidden variable theory. While you might have a nice underlying philosophical story to go along with it as to how it isn’t truly nonlocal, the maths would still run into contradictions with special relativity. You would find it difficult to construe the maths in such a way that the hidden variables would be Lorentz invariant.

Superdeterministic models thus struggle to ever get off the ground. They only all exist as toy models. None of them can reproduce all the predictions of quantum field theory, which requires more than just accounting for quantum mechanics, but doing so in a way that is also compatible with special relativity.

i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background.

Personally, no offense, but I think this a contradiction in terms. If we cannot define “consciousness” then you cannot say we don’t understand it. Don’t understand what? If you have not defined it, then saying we don’t understand it is like saying we don’t understand akokasdo. There is nothing to understand about akokasdo because it doesn’t mean anything.

In my opinion, “consciousness” is largely a buzzword, so there is just nothing to understand about it. When we actually talk about meaningful things like intelligence, self-awareness, experience, etc, I can at least have an idea of what is being talked about. But when people talk about “consciousness” it just becomes entirely unclear what the conversation is even about, and in none of these cases is it ever an additional substance that needs some sort of special explanation.

I have never been convinced of panpsychism, IIT, idealism, dualism, or any of these philosophies or models because they seem to be solutions in search of a problem. They have to convince you there really is a problem in the first place, but they only do so by talking about consciousness vaguely so that you can’t pin down what it is, which makes people think we need some sort of special theory of consciousness, but if you can’t pin down what consciousness is then we don’t need a theory of it at all as there is simply nothing of meaning being discussed.

They cannot justify themselves in a vacuum. Take IIT for example. In a vacuum, you can say it gives a quantifiable prediction of consciousness, but “consciousness” would just be defined as whatever IIT is quantifying. The issue here is that IIT has not given me a reason to why I should care about them quantifying what they are quantifying. There is a reason, of course, it is implicit. The implicit reason is that what they are quantifying is the same as the “special” consciousness that supposedly needs some sort of “special” explanation (i.e. the “hard problem”), but this implicit reason requires you to not treat IIT in a vacuum.

Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.

You are starting from the premise that there is this thing out there called “consciousness” that needs some sort of unique “explanation.” You have to justify that premise. I do agree there is difficulty in figuring out the precise algorithms and physical mechanics that the brain uses to learn so efficiently, but somehow I don’t think this is what you mean by that.

We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains

There is no such thing as “wave function collapse.” The state vector is just a list of probability amplitudes and you reduce those list of probability amplitudes to a definite outcome because you observed what that outcome is. If I flip a coin and it has a 50% chance of being heads and a 50% chance of being tails, and it lands on tails, I reduce the probability distribution to 100% probability for tails. There is no “collapse” going on here. Objectifying the state vector is a popular trend when talking about quantum mechanics but has never made any sense at all.

So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?

Depends on whether or not he is enjoying himself. If he’s having fun, then it isn’t a waste.

It is only continuous because it is random, so prior to making a measurement, you describe it in terms of a probability distribution called the state vector. The bits 0 and 1 are discrete, but if I said it was random and asked you to describe it, you would assign it a probability between 0 and 1, and thus it suddenly becomes continuous. (Although, in quantum mechanics, probability amplitudes are complex-valued.) The continuous nature of it is really something epistemic and not ontological. We only observe qubits as either 0 or 1, with discrete values, never anything in between the two.

The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.

We can only assign an object to be what is “sensing” our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.

We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion (“I think therefore I am” is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what “we” are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.

Precisely what is “sensing your thoughts” is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is “behind” it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.

You don’t have to be sorry, that was stupid of me to write that.

Because the same functionality would be available as a cloud service (like AI now). This reduces costs and the need to carry liquid nitrogen around.

Okay, you are just misrepresenting my argument at this point.

Why are you isolating a single algorithm? There are tons of them that speed up various aspects of linear algebra and not just that single one, and many improvements to these algorithms since they were first introduced, there are a lot more in the literature than just in the popular consciousness.

The point is not that it will speed up every major calculation, but these are calculations that could be made use of, and there will likely even be more similar algorithms discovered if quantum computers are more commonplace. There is a whole branch of research called quantum machine learning that is centered solely around figuring out how to make use of these algorithms to provide performance benefits for machine learning algorithms.

If they would offer speed benefits, then why wouldn’t you want to have the chip that offers the speed benefits in your phone? Of course, in practical terms, we likely will not have this due to the difficulty and expense of quantum chips, and the fact they currently have to be cooled below to near zero degrees Kelvin. But your argument suggests that if somehow consumers could have access to technology in their phone that would offer performance benefits to their software that they wouldn’t want it.

That just makes no sense to me. The issue is not that quantum computers could not offer performance benefits in theory. The issue is more about whether or not the theory can be implemented in practical engineering terms, as well as a cost-to-performance ratio. The engineering would have to be good enough to both bring the price down and make the performance benefits high enough to make it worth it.

It is the same with GPUs. A GPU can only speed up certain problems, and it would thus be even more inefficient to try and force every calculation through the GPU. You have libraries that only call the GPU when it is needed for certain calculations. This ends up offering major performance benefits and if the price of the GPU is low enough and the performance benefits high enough to match what the consumers want, they will buy it. We also have separate AI chips now as well which are making their way into some phones. While there’s no reason at the current moment to believe we will see quantum technology shrunk small and cheap enough to show up in consumer phones, if hypothetically that was the case, I don’t see why consumers wouldn’t want it.

I am sure clever software developers would figure out how to make use of them if they were available like that. They likely will not be available like that any time in the near future, if ever, but assuming they are, there would probably be a lot of interesting use cases for them that have not even been thought of yet. They will likely remain something largely used by businesses but in my view it will be mostly because of practical concerns. The benefits of them won’t outweigh the cost anytime soon.

Uh… one of those algorithms in your list is literally for speeding up linear algebra. Do you think just because it sounds technical it’s “businessy”? All modern technology is technical, that’s what technology is. It would be like someone saying, “GPUs would be useless to regular people because all they mainly do is speed up matrix multiplication. Who cares about that except for businesses?” Many of these algorithms here offer potential speedup for linear algebra operations. That is the basis of both graphics and AI. One of those algorithms is even for machine learning in that list. There are various algorithms for potentially speeding up matrix multiplication in the linear. It’s huge for regular consumers… assuming the technology could ever progress to come to regular consumers.

A person who would state they fully understand quantum mechanics is the last person i would trust to have any understanding of it.

I find this sentiment can lead to devolving into quantum woo and mysticism. If you think anyone trying to tell you quantum mechanics can be made sense of rationally must be wrong, then you implicitly are suggesting that quantum mechanics is something that cannot be made sense of, and thus it logically follows that people who are speaking in a way that does not make sense and have no expertise in the subject so they do not even claim to make sense are the more reliable sources.

It’s really a sentiment I am not a fan of. When we encounter difficult problems that seem mysterious to us, we should treat the mystery as an opportunity to learn. It is very enjoyable, in my view, to read all the different views people put forward to try and make sense of quantum mechanics, to understand it, and then to contemplate on what they have to offer. To me, the joy of a mystery is not to revel in the mystery, but to search for solutions for it, and I will say the academic literature is filled with pretty good accounts of QM these days. It’s been around for a century, a lot of ideas are very developed.

I also would not take the game Outer Wilds that seriously. It plays into the myth that quantum effects depend upon whether or not you are “looking,” which is simply not the case and largely a myth. You end up with very bizarre and misleading results from this, for example, in the part where you land on the quantum moon and have to look at the picture of it for it to not disappear because your vision is obscured by fog. This makes no sense in light of real physics because the fog is still part of the moon and your ship is still interacting with the fog, so there is no reason it should hop to somewhere else.

Now quantum science isn’t exactly philosophy, ive always been interested in philosophy but its by studying quantum mechanics, inspired by that game that i learned about the mechanic of emerging properties. I think on a video about the dual slit experiment.

The double-slit experiment is a great example of something often misunderstood as somehow evidence observation plays some fundamental role in quantum mechanics. Yes, if you observe the path the two particles take through the slits, the interference pattern disappears. Yet, you can also trivially prove in a few line of calculation that if the particle interacts with a single other particle when it passes through the two slits then it would also lead to a destruction of the interference effects.

You model this by computing what is called a density matrix for both the particle going through the two slits and the particle it interacts with, and then you do what is called a partial trace whereby you “trace out” the particle it interacts with giving you a reduced density matrix of only the particle that passes through the two slits, and you find as a result of interacting with another particle its coherence terms would reduce to zero, i.e. it would decohere and thus lose the ability to interfere with itself.

If a single particle interaction can do this, then it is not surprising it interacting with a whole measuring device can do this. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it.

At that point i did not yet know that emergence was already a known topic in philosophy just quantum science, because i still tried to avoid external influences but it really was the breakthrough I needed and i have gained many new insights from this knowledge since.

Eh, you should be reading books and papers in the literature if you are serious about this topic. I agree that a lot of philosophy out there is bad so sometimes external influences can be negative, but the solution to that shouldn’t be to entirely avoid reading anything at all, but to dig through the trash to find the hidden gems.

My views when it comes to philosophy are pretty fringe as most academics believe the human brain can transcend reality and I reject this notion, and I find most philosophy falls right into place if you reject this notion. However, because my views are a bit fringe, I do find most philosophical literature out there unhelpful, but I don’t entirely not engage with it. I have found plenty of philosophers and physicists who have significantly helped develop my views, such as Jocelyn Benoist, Carlo Rovelli, Francois-Igor Pris, and Alexander Bogdanov.

Understanding the nature of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science. Some scientists have suggested that quantum mechanics, and in particular quantum entanglement, is the key to unraveling the phenomenon.

The argument for this has never been convincing. People like Roger Penrose have argued that because people can believe things without proof, therefore consciousness is “special” in the sense that it can do something uncomputable, so it must not be reducible to classical physics. This argument is just bizarre, humans believe things without proof because they they don’t operate on proof but on confidence levels. They believe things that seem right to them based on their past experiences. Even AI operates on confidence levels and can say things that are false.

I have never seen a convincing argument that there really is something unique about human cognition that requires introducing anything quantum or even anything supernatural as it is popular for many philosophers in academia to argue these days.

Entanglement means the two-photon state is not a classical combination of two photon states. Instead, measuring or interacting with one of the photons instantly affects the same property of the second photon, no matter how far away it is.

This is just patently false. Entanglement is just a statistical correlation but one over quantum probabilities rather than classical probabilities (these can be distinguished by doing a trace over a density matrix). If you have two entangled particles, let’s say they are two electrons with a 50% chance of both being spin up or down, so the only possibilities are ⇑⇑ or ⇓⇓ with no other possibilities. That means they are statistically correlated as measuring one tells you the value of the other.

Now, let’s say, while they are still entangled, you flip the second one. If it’s supposedly true that altering one would instantly affect the other, then this should not alter the outcome. If the first was going to be ⇑ and the second was going to be ⇑, and you flip the second prior to measuring it, then it would affect the first one so they would both become ⇓⇓.

Yet, this is not what happens in practice. In practice, if you flip the second one prior to measuring it, you find the statistical correlation changes to two possibilities of ⇑⇓ and ⇓⇑. This is exactly what you would even expect classically. If I give you two envelopes where inside of them there is a card facing up and the other there is a card facing down, and I guarantee that they are random but correlated such that both envelopes have the card facing the same direction, if you flip over one of the cards before opening it, then you would expect then to then be the opposite directions rather than the same.

There is no actual evidence measuring a particle in an entangled pair affects the other particle. These affects only exist if you make certain metaphysical assumptions that go beyond quantum mechanics. If you presume objective collapse or hidden variables, for example, then you have to posit such affects. But traditional quantum mechanics is not an objective collapse theory or a hidden variable theory.

Entanglement has been demonstrated for a system whose members are over 1,000 km apart. Nothing like it exists in classical physics; it is purely a quantum phenomenon. Here entanglement would raise the possibility of much faster signaling along the sections of myelin that encase segments of the axon’s length.

No. There is literally theorem called the No-signaling Theorem in quantum mechanics which proves such a thing is impossible.

Quantum mechanics explains a range of phenomena that cannot be understood using the intuitions formed by everyday experience. Recall the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, in which a cat exists in a superposition of states, both dead and alive. In our daily lives there seems to be no such uncertainty—a cat is either dead or alive. But the equations of quantum mechanics tell us that at any moment the world is composed of many such coexisting states, a tension that has long troubled physicists.

No, this is a specific philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics. It requires treating the wave function as a literal autonomous entity that actually describes the object. This is a philosophical choice and is not demanded by the theory itself.

The idea that two fundamental scientific mysteries—the origin of consciousness and the collapse of what is called the wave function in quantum mechanics—are related, triggered enormous excitement.

The “origin of consciousness” is not a “scientific mystery.” Indeed, how the brain works is a scientific mystery, but “consciousness” is just something philosophers cooked up that apparently everything we perceive is an illusion (called “consciousness”) created by the mammalian brain that is opposed to some “true reality” that is entirely invisible and beyond the veil of this illusion and has no possibility of ever being observed.

People like David Chalmers rightfully pointed out that if you believe this, then it seems like a mystery as to how this invisible “true reality” can “give rise to” the reality we actually experience and are immersed in every day. But these philosophers have simply failed to provide a compelling argument as to why the reality we perceive is an illusion created by the brain in the first place.

Chalmers doesn’t even bother to justify it, he just cites Thomas Nagel who says that experience is “conscious” and “subjective” because true reality is absolute (point-of-view independent) and the reality we experience is relative (point-of-view dependent), and therefore it cannot be objective reality as it exists but must be a product of the mammalian brain. Yet, if the modern sciences has shown us anything, it is that reality is absolutely not absolute but is relative to its core.

Penrose’s argument is even more bizarre, he claims that because we can believe things that cannot be mathematically proven, our brains can do things which are not computable, and thus there must be some relationship between the brain and the outcome of measurements in quantum mechanics in which no computation can predict them beforehand. Yet, it is just a bizarre argument. Humans can believe things that can’t be proven because humans only operate on confidence levels. If you see enough examples to be reasonably confident the next will follow the same pattern, you can believe it. This is just called induction and nothing is preventing you from putting it into a computer.

According to Penrose, when this system collapses into either 0 or 1, a flicker of conscious experience is created, described by a single classical bit.

Penrose, like most philosophers never convincingly justifies that experience is “conscious”.

However, per Penrose’s proposal, qubits participating in an entangled state share a conscious experience. When one of them assumes a definite state, we could use this to establish a communication channel capable of transmitting information faster than the speed of light, a violation of special relativity.

Here he completely goes off the rails and proposes something that goes against the scientific consensus for no clear reason. Why does his “theory” even need faster-than-light communication? How does proposing superluminal signaling help explain “consciousness”? All it does is make the theory trivially false since it cannot reproduce the predictions of experiments.

In our view, the entanglement of hundreds of qubits, if not thousands or more, is essential to adequately describe the phenomenal richness of any one subjective experience: the colors, motions, textures, smells, sounds, bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, shards of memories and so on that constitute the feeling of life itself.

Now the author themselves is claiming experience is “subjective” yet does not justify it, like all sophists on this topic, they just always begin from the premise that we do not perceive reality as it is but some subjective illusion and rarely try to even justify it. That aside, they are also abusing terminology. Colors, motions, textures, smells, etc, these are not experiences but abstract categories. We can talk about the experience of the color red, but we can also talk about the experience of a rainbow, or an amusement park. Are amusement parks “subjective experiences”? No, it’s an abstract category.

Abstract categories are normative constructs used to identify something within an experience, but are they not experiences themselves. You have an experience, and then you interpret that experience to be something. This process of interpretation and identification is not the same as the experience itself. Reality just is what it is. It is not blue or red, it is not a rainbow or an amusement park, it just is. These are socially constructed labels we apply to it.

Sophists love to demarcate the objects of “qualia,” like red or green or whatever, as somehow “special” over any other category of objects, such as trees, rocks, rainbows, amusement parks, atoms, Higgs bosons, etc. Yet, they can never tell you why. They just insist they are special… somehow. All abstract categories are socially constructed norms used to identify aspects of reality. They are all shared concepts precisely because they are socially constructed: we are all taught to identify them in the same way. We are all shown something red and told “this is red.” Two people may be physically different and thus this “red” has different impacts on them, no matter how different it is, they both learn to associate their real experience with the same word, and thus it becomes shared.

This is true for everything. Red, dogs, trees, cats, atoms, etc. There is no demarcation between them.

In an article published in the open-access journal Entropy, we and our colleagues turned the Penrose hypothesis on its head, suggesting that an experience is created whenever a system goes into a quantum superposition rather than when it collapses. According to our proposal, any system entering a state with one or more entangled superimposed qubits will experience a moment of consciousness.

This is what passes for “science” these days. Metaphysical realism has really poisoned people’s minds.

The definitiveness of any conscious experience naturally arises within the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Another piece of sophistry that originates from some physicists simply disliking the Born rule, declaring it mathematically ugly, so they try to invent some underlying story from which it can be derived that would be more mathematically beautiful. However, this underlying story is not derived from anything we can observe, so there is no possible way to agree upon what it even is. There are dozens of proposals and no way to choose between them. There simply is not “the” many-worlds interpretation. There is many many-worlds interpretations.

To make these esoteric ideas concrete, we propose three experiments that would increasingly shape our thinking on these matters.

All the experiments proposed deal with observing the behavior of living organisms, which is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

This is why many philosophers came to criticize metaphysical logic in the 1800s, viewing it as dealing with absolutes when reality does not actually exist in absolutes, stating that we need some other logical system which could deal with the “fuzziness” of reality more accurately. That was the origin of the notion of dialectical logic from philosophers like Hegel and Engels, which caught on with some popularity in the east but then was mostly forgotten in the west outside of some fringe sections of academia. Even long prior to Bell’s theorem, the physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, who adhered to this dialectical materialist mode of thought, wrote a whole book on quantum mechanics where the first part he discusses the need to abandon the false illusion of the rigidity and concreteness of reality and shows how this is an illusion even in the classical sciences where everything has uncertainty, all predictions eventually break down, nothing is never possible to actually fully separate something from its environment. These kinds of views heavily influenced the contemporary physicist Carlo Rovelli as well.

And as any modern physicist will tell you: most of reality is indeed invisible to us. Most of the universe is seemingly comprised of an unknown substance, and filled with an unknown energy.

How can we possibly know this unless it was made through an observation?

Most of the universe that we can see more directly follows rules that are unintuitive and uses processes we can’t see. Not only can’t we see them, our own physics tells is it is literally impossible to measure all of them consistently.

That’s a hidden variable theory, presuming that systems really have all these values and we just can’t measure them all consistently due to some sort of practical limitation but still believing that they’re there. Hidden variable theories aren’t compatible with the known laws of physics. The values of the observables which become indefinite simply cease to have existence at all, not that they are there but we can’t observe them.

But subjective consciousness and qualia fit nowhere in our modern model of physics.

How so? What is “consciousness”? Why do you think objects of qualia are special over any other kind of object?

I don’t think it’s impossible to explain consciousness.

You haven’t even established what it is you’re trying to explain or why you think there is some difficulty to explain it.

We don’t even fully understand what the question is really asking. It sidesteps our current model of physics.

So, you don’t even know what you’re asking but you’re sure that it’s not compatible with the currently known laws of physics?

I don’t subscribe to Nagel’s belief that it is impossible to solve, but I do understand how the points he raises are legitimate points that illustrate how consciousness does not fit into our current scientific model of the universe.

But how?! You are just repeating the claim over and over again when the point of my comment is that the claim itself is not justified. You have not established why there is a “hard problem” at all but just continually repeat that there is.

If I had to choose anyone I’d say my thoughts on the subject are closest to Roger Penrose’s line of thinking, with a dash of David Chalmers.

Meaningless.

I think if anyone doesn’t see why consciousness is “hard” then there are two possibilities: 1) they haven’t understood the question and its scientific ramifications 2) they’re not conscious.

You literally do not understand the topic at hand based on your own words. Not only can you not actually explain why you think there is a “hard problem” at all, but you said yourself you don’t even know what question you’re asking with this problem. Turning around and then claiming everyone who doesn’t agree with you is just some ignoramus who doesn’t understand then is comically ridiculous, and also further implying people who don’t agree with you may not even be conscious.

Seriously, that’s just f’d up. What the hell is wrong with you? Maybe you are so convinced of this bizarre notion you can’t even explain yourself because you dehumanize everyone who disagrees with you and never take into consideration other ideas.

Reading books on natural philosophy. By that I mean, not mathematics of the physics itself, but what do the mathematics actually tell us about the natural world, how to interpret it and think about it, on a more philosophical level. Not a topic I really talk to many people irl on because most people don’t even know what the philosophical problems around this topic. I mean, I’d need a whole whiteboard just to walk someone through Bell’s theorem to even give them an explanation to why it is interesting in the first place. There is too much of a barrier of entry for casual conversation.

You would think since natural philosophy involves physics that it would not be niche because there are a lot of physicists, but most don’t care about the topic either. If you can plug in the numbers and get the right predictions, then surely that’s sufficient, right? Who cares about what the mathematics actually means? It’s a fair mindset to have, perfectly understandable and valid, but not part of my niche interests, so I just read tons and tons and tons of books and papers regarding a topic which hardly anyone cares. It is very interesting to read like the Einstein-Bohr debates, or Schrodinger for example trying to salvage continuity viewing a loss of continuity as a breakdown in classical notion of causality, or some of the contemporary discussions on the subject such as Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics or Francois-Igor Pris’ contextual realist interpretation. Things like that.

It doesn’t even seem to be that popular of a topic among philosophers, because most don’t want to take the time to learn the math behind something like Bell’s theorem (it’s honestly not that hard, just a bit of linear algebra). So as a topic it’s pretty niche but I have a weird autistic obsession over it for some reason. Reading books and papers on these debates contributes nothing at all practically beneficial to my life and there isn’t a single person I know outside of online contacts who even knows wtf I’m talking about but I still find it fascinating for some reason.

Why do you think consciousness remains known as the “hard problem”, and still a considered contentious mystery to modern science, if your simplistic ideas can so easily explain it?

You people really need to stop pretending like because one guy published a paper calling it the “hard problem” that it’s somehow a deep impossible to solve scientific question. It’s just intellectual dishonesty, trying to paint it as if it’s equivalent to solving the problem of making nuclear fusion work or something.

It’s not. And yes, philosophy is full of idiots who never justify any of their premises. David Chalmers in his paper where he calls it the “hard problem” quotes Thomas Nagel’s paper as “proof” that experience is something subjective, and then just goes forward with his argument as if it’s “proven,” but Nagel’s paper is complete garbage, and so nothing Chalmers argues beyond that holds any water, but is just something a lot of philosophers blindly accept even though it is nonsensical.

Nagel claims that the physical sciences don’t incorporate point-of-view, and that therefore point-of-view must be a unique property of mammals, and that experience is point-of-view dependent, so experience too must come from mammals, and therefore science has to explain the origin of experience.

But his paper was wildly outdated when he wrote it. By then, we already had general relativity for decades, which is a heavily point-of-view dependent theory as there is no absolute space or time but its properties depend upon your point of view. Relational quantum mechanics also interprets quantum mechanics in a way that gets rid of all the weirdness and makes it incredibly intuitive and simple just with the singular assumption that the properties of particles depends upon point-of-view not that much different than general relativity with the nature of space and time, and so there is no absolute state of a system anymore.

Both general relativity and relational quantum mechanics not only treat reality as point-of-view dependent but tie itself back directly to experience: they tell you what you actually expect to observe in measurements. In quantum mechanics they are literally called observables, entities identifiable by their experiential properties.

Nagel is just an example of am armchair philosopher who does not engage with the sciences so he thinks they are all still Newtonian with some sort of absolute world independent of point-of-view. If the natural world is point-of-view dependent all the way down, then none of Nagel’s arguments follow. There is no reason to believe point-of-view is unique to mammals, and then there is further no reason to think the point-of-view dependence of experience makes it inherently mammalian, and thus there is no reason to call experience “subjective.”

Although I prefer the term “context” rather than “point-of-view” as it is more clear what it means, but it means the same thing. The physical world is just point-of-view dependent all the way down, or that is to say, context-dependent. We just so happen to be objects and thus like any other, exist in a particular context, and thus experience reality from that context. Our experiences are not created by our brains, experience is just objective reality from the context we occupy. What our brain does is think about and reflect upon experience (reality). It formulates experience into concepts like “red,” “tree,” “atom,” etc. But it does not create experience.

The entire “hard” problem is based on a faulty premise based on science that was outdated when it was written.

If experience just is reality from a particular context then it makes no sense to ask to “derive” it as Chalmers and Nagel have done. You cannot derive reality, you describe it. Reality just is what it is, it just exists. Humans describe reality with their scientific theories, but their theories cannot create reality. That doesn’t even make sense. All modern “theories of consciousness” are just nonsense as they all are based on the false premise that experience is not reality but some illusion created by the mammalian brain and that “true” reality is some invisible metaphysical entity that lies beyond all possible experience, and thus they demand we somehow need a scientific theory to show how this invisible reality gives rise to the visible realm of experience. The premise is just silly. Reality is not invisible. That is the nonsensical point of view.

You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).

The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.

“Observation” is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or “zeroing” your coordinate system, and isn’t “collapsing” anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.

There 100% are…

If you choose to believe so, like I said I don’t really care. Is a quantum computer conscious? I think it’s a bit irrelevant whether or not they exist. I will concede they do for the sake of discussion.

Penrose thinks they’re responsible for consciousness.

Yeah, and as I said, Penrose was wrong, not because the measurement problem isn’t the cause for consciousness, but that there is no measurement problem nor a “hard problem.” Penrose plays on the same logical fallacies I pointed out to come to believe there are two problems where none actually exist and then, because both problems originate from the same logical fallacies. He then notices they are similar and thinks “solving” one is necessary for “solving” the other, when neither problems actually existed in the first place.

Because we also don’t know what makes anesthesia stop consciousness. And anesthesia stops consciousness and stops the quantum process.

You’d need to define what you mean more specifically about “consciousness” and “quantum process.” We don’t remember things that occur when we’re under anesthesia, so are we saying memory is consciousness?

Now, the math isn’t clean. I forget which way it leans, but I think it’s that consciousness kicks out a little before the quantum action is fully inhibited? It’s been a minute, and this shit isn’t simple.

Sure, it’s not simple, because the notion of “consciousness” as used in philosophy is a very vague and slippery word with hundreds of different meanings depending on the context, and this makes it seem “mysterious” as its meaning is slippery and can change from context to context, making it difficult to pin down what is even being talked about.

Yet, if you pin it down, if you are actually specific about what you mean, then you don’t run into any confusion. The “hard problem of consciousness” is not even a “problem” as a “problem” implies you want to solve it, and most philosophers who advocate for it like David Chalmers, well, advocate for it. They spend their whole career arguing in favor of its existence and then using it as a basis for their own dualistic philosophy. It is thus a hard axiom of consciousness and not a hard problem. I simply disagree with the axioms.

Penrose is an odd case because he accepts the axioms and then carries that same thinking into QM where the same contradiction re-emerges but actually thinks it is somehow solvable. What is a “measurement” if not an “observation,” and what is an “observation” if not an “experience”? The same “measurement problem” is just a reflection of the very same “hard problem” about the supposed “phenomenality” of experience and the explanatory gap between what we actually experience and what supposedly exists beyond it.

It’s the quantum wave function collapse that’s important.

Why should I believe there is a physical collapse? This requires you to, again, posit that there physically exists something that lies beyond all possibilities of us ever observing it (paralleling Kant’s “noumenon”) which suddenly transforms itself into something we can actually observe the moment we try to look at it (paralleling Kant’s “phenomenon”). This clearly introduces an explanatory gap as to how this process occurs, which is the basis of the measurement problem in the first place.

There is no reason to posit a physical “collapse” or even that there exists at all a realm of waves floating about in Hilbert space. These are unnecessary metaphysical assumptions that are purely philosophical and contribute nothing but confusion to an understanding of the mathematics of the theory. Again, just like Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem,” Penrose is inventing a problem to solve which we have no reason to believe is even a problem in the first place: nothing about quantum theory demands that you believe particles really turn into invisible waves in Hilbert space when you aren’t looking at them and suddenly turn back into visible particles in spacetime when you do look at them.

That’s entirely metaphysical and arbitrary to believe in.

There’s no spinning out where multiple things happen, there is only one thing. After wave collapse, is when you look in the box and see if the cats dead. In a sense it’s the literal “observer effect” happening our head. And that is probably what consciousness is.

There is only an “observer effect” if you believe the cat literally did turn into a wave and you perturbed that wave by looking at it and caused it to “collapse” like a house of cards. What did the cat see in its perspective? How did it feel for the cat to turn into a wave? The whole point of Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment was that Schrodinger was trying to argue against believing particles really turn into waves because then you’d have to believe unreasonable things like cats turning into waves.

All of this is entirely metaphysical, there is no observations that can confirm this interpretation. You can only justify the claim that cats literally turn into waves when you don’t look at them and there is a physical collapse of that wave when you do look at them on purely philosophical grounds. It is not demanded by the theory at all. You choose to believe it purely on philosophical grounds which then leads you to think there is some “problem” with the theory that needs to be “solved,” but it is purely metaphysical.

There is no actual contradiction between theory and evidence/observation, only contradiction between people’s metaphysical assumptions that they refuse to question for some reason and what they a priori think the theory should be, rather than just rethinking their assumptions.

That’s how science works. Most won’t know who Penrose is till he’s dead.

I’d hardly consider what Penrose is doing to be “science” at all. All these physical “theories of consciousness” that purport not to just be explaining intelligence or self-awareness or things like that, but more specifically claim to be solving Chalmers’ hard axiom of consciousness (that humans possess some immaterial invisible substance that is somehow attached to the brain but is not the brain itself), are all pseudoscience, because they are beginning with an unreasonable axiom which we have no scientific reason at all to take seriously and then trying to use science to “solve” it.

It is no different then claiming to use science to try and answer the question as to why humans have souls. Any “scientific” approach you use to try and answer that question is inherently pseudoscience because the axiomatic premise itself is flawed: it would be trying to solve a problem it never established is even a problem to be solved in the first place.