30 minutes ago, swansont said:

You claimed it was an interpretation of QM in the thread title. But if it’s a theory, can you name another physics theory that doesn’t have math?

With respect, you do not seem to understand what the interpretations of QM actually are. All of them are, by definition, metaphysical. That is what makes them "interpretations". This new interpretation is a novel combination of three parts. One of these is Greg Capanda's QCT, which does involve some mathematics. The first of the other is Stapp's adaptation of von Neumann's, and von Neumann's is where the metaphysical status is most clear. These conciousness-causes-collapse (CCC) theories originated from the von Neumann's 1932 book The mathematical foundations of quantum theory. When he was formalising the mathematics of QM, there was no clear scientific definition of what "measurement" meant, which left him with a major problem: how can you model the mathematics if you don't know what you are modelling? He was therefore forced to say that the "collapse" could happen anywhere from the system being measured to the consciousness of the observer, and pointed out that the only "special" location in this chain was consciousness itself. So this interpretation was only created by removing wave function collapse from the mathematics. So that is the first theory I am naming which "doesn't have maths" and the reason it doesn't have it is because it isn't physics at all. It's philosophy. Similarly, when Hugh Everett invented MWI in 1957 he did not add any new mathematics -- he just made a conceptual tweak, by positing that the wavefunction may not collapse at all. So there is the second theory that doesn't have maths. It is a philosophical interpretation of what the maths actually means. My new theory is also just a conceptual shift -- I am combining MWI and CCC sequentially and using QCT as the mechanism which bridges them mathematically.

In this thread we are discussing the philosophical-conceptual framework in which physics and the rest of science operates, not just science. Physics doesn't operate in an intellectual vacuum. It is not a completed theory of everything. It needs philosophy, and the existing philosophy is not good enough. This is exactly why quantum mechanics still seems so strange exactly 100 years after its was discovered. I am saying that all of the existing philosophical interpretations of QM are incorrect, and explaining why the new one I am suggesting has major implications for both philosophy and science.

These implications include a recognition that many problems currently considered to be really difficult problems for physics, cognitive science and evolutionary biology aren't actually scientific problems at all, but the result of bad philosophy. Why can't we quantise gravity? If I am correct then it turns out it was a philosophical mistake to ever think gravity should be quantised. Is that science or philosophy? Answer: it redefines the boundary between them. Does it matter if there is no new maths? Not in the slightest.

30 minutes ago, swansont said:

Not being science (or being pop-sci) and being unscientific aren’t the same thing. What experiments did you run to determine the toxicity of the mushrooms?

In cases where that was in doubt I found them and ate them. Or at least I attempted to, and in most cases I succeeded. The book is the most comprehensive book on European fungi foraging ever published.

One specific example was the bracket fungus chicken of the woods. For decades there has been a myth going around that this species is poisonous if picked from yew. I tested this by eating as much yew-grown COTW as I could, and when I suffered no ill-effects I then held a dinner party for 20 people and served copious amounts of it to them too. Nobody suffered any ill effect. The book was published in 2016, and that myth has now been pretty much eradicated.

No maths involved.

EDIT: Note that it is not possible to determine that a fungus is safe to eat by running toxicology tests on it. Those can only determine whether the fungus contains any known mycotoxins. In many cases where toxicity is in doubt, nobody knows what the possible toxin is, so there is no way to test for it. This is why the only fungi which we can be sure are safe are ones that have been traditionally consumed for centuries. And even in those cases we can't be absolutely sure -- sometimes it turns out they are only toxic if you eat them for 40 years, or in certain specific growing conditions and you happen to have weak kidneys...

There is also one species that has only recently been discovered (Agrocybe rivulosa), but is already common on woodchip, and has good edible relatives. These I test-ate, a little at first, then more, until I became reasonably confident they weren't poisoning me. Since then other people have been experimenting with eating them. Is this science? Not really, but it it certainly qualifies as experimentation.

Also note that toxicology tests typically don't involve any maths...

Swansont.,..

Just to expand a bit more that last post. It is worth explaining why Greg changed his mind about my own theories. Greg set out to finally fix the measurement problem by coming up with a physical collapse theory that actually works, thereby getting rid of both CCC and MWI once and for all. And in fact I believe he has done something nobody else has previously done, which is provide a convincing physical explanation of why collapse needs to happen. His key insight is that this is not the result of physical causality as we normally understand it, but because the physical system has reached a critical informational threshold. The physical system effectively runs into the quantum equivalent of what is known as "the frame problem" in AI. In both cases we have an entity (a brain in the case of QCT, or a computational process in AI) which has to cope with an infinitely expanding set of calculations in order to make a decision about how to act. In the case of the AI, it just gets stuck or has to make a random guess when to stop computing and make a decision -- and frequently does it very badly. Humans have no such difficulty, but currently nobody understands why. QCT explains exactly why -- it says that consciousness only exists as a sort of cut-off point to stop that processing when it becomes unsustainable. QCT provides the mathematical theory to determine when that threshold is crossed, but does not explain how it is determined which of the possible outcomes actually occurs, and does not explain what is going on in the system to make this happen in the first place.

So...what Greg has done (I believe) is to finally come up with a physical theory to explain why collapse is necessary. Thus MWI is shown to be false, and the physics is completed -- there's no conceptual space left in physics to explain how the selection is made, or to say what collapses into what. It seems to involve brains, but doesn't mention consciousness. In other words, he's completed the physics but is left with fundamental questions which remain unanswered. It was when he realised this was the case that he finally gave up on materialism and accepted the need for my cosmology/ontology/metaphysics. The message he sent me on this realisation was "Holy blue balls Batman. YOU'RE RIGHT!"

It took him about three weeks to accept/understand all this.

Edited June 20Jun 20 by Geoff Dann

8 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

OK then, in that case use ChatGPT to prove that "there is no measurement problem."

Go on. Try it.

AIs will do their best to reply to any prompt you give them, and they will tend towards being sycophantic. It does not follow they will tell you whatever you want to hear.

"The Measurement Problem" is the biggest outstanding problem in QM, and has been so for the last 100 years.

It is not my job to educate you about the basics of quantum mechanics.

That is not the case. This interpretation resolves multiple long-standing problems, where "problems" includes "accounting for existing empirical data".

For example -- this interpretation makes the empirical prediction that the universe should be fine-tuned for the emergence of conscious life. None of the others do.

According to that logic, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection did not agree with the data, because it did not involve any maths, and therefore it is "just a narrative".

Which is, of course, total bullshit.

>>That’s quite vague and I don’t see the connection with QM

Then you either didn't read the opening post, or you failed to understand it.,

We've all had copious experience on this forum of nonsense emanating from LLMs, so I'm going to decline your suggestion.

But returning to your idea, it seems to me a basic difficulty with it is that nobody nowadays (apart from quantum woo specialists of the Deepak Chopra type) suggests wave function collapse is anything to do with consciousness on the part of an "observer". The language of QM used by its founders in the 1920s indeed spoke of "observables" and "observations", but that was to distinguish what could be determined about the system from any further assumptions that might classically be made about it having other properties. Even at the time they were at pains to explain they were not attributing any magical influence to consciousness on the part of the observer. For instance this is what Wiki has to say:

QUOTE

Role of the observer

Because they assert that the existence of an observed value depends upon the intercession of the observer, Copenhagen-type interpretations are sometimes called "subjective".^[51] All of the original Copenhagen protagonists considered the process of observation as mechanical and independent of the individuality of the observer.^[52] Wolfgang Pauli, for example, insisted that measurement results could be obtained and recorded by "objective registering apparatus".^{[40]: 117–123} As Heisenberg wrote,

Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being; but the registration, i.e., the transition from the "possible" to the "actual," is absolutely necessary here and cannot be omitted from the interpretation of quantum theory.^[20]: 137

UNQUOTE

What is thought of as as leading to wave function collapse (in those interpretations that make use of this concept) is interaction, i.e. with the inanimate measuring apparatus, nothing to do with whether a conscious experimenter is watching a dial or a screen.

So your idea, at least as I understand it, that QM should be interpreted differently before and after the advent of conscious beings, able to perceive the measurements, does not seem to be a fruitful approach.

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

I am also a recognised authority on fungi (and have written a 500+ page book on it). There is no maths in that either. Do you think that means it is unscientific?

I have avoided mentioning fungi up to now since the subject is really off topic for QM.

However there may be no maths in your book (well done for writing one by the way) but there is certainly much maths in the scientific study of fungi.

For example

I did not have to look further than the first real (non AI) entry in Google to finf this excellent blog on the subject.

the blog contains a good bibliography and history going back to the mid 20th cent.

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

I am afraid I cannot find your rules. If you've really got a rule which says nobody is allowed to suggest somebody else privately uses AI to do research then that is rather a silly rule, IMO. I am guessing the actual rule doesn't say that at all.

So you asked the guidance of a moderator ?

Or did you make up your own rules ?

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

OK. With the greatest respect I don't think there's much point in me continuing to discuss this with you. Have a nice day.

Again I point to the rules here.

2 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

With respect, you do not seem to understand what the interpretations of QM actually are

You keep jumping back and forth. I commented on interpretations and then you call it a theory. When I respond to that, you jump back to it being an interpretation.

My new theory is also just a conceptual shift -- I am combining MWI and CCC sequentially and using QCT as the mechanism which bridges them mathematically.

See? Here you’re back to calling it a theory, and claim there’s math

Let me ask this: is there any measurable difference in how a quantum system responds, depending on whether there is a conscious observer? (Like an electron changing state and emitting a photon) Some change in the interaction, or the laws governing it?

One specific example was the bracket fungus chicken of the woods. For decades there has been a myth going around that this species is poisonous if picked from yew. I tested this by eating as much yew-grown COTW as I could, and when I suffered no ill-effects I then held a dinner party for 20 people and served copious amounts of it to them too. Nobody suffered any ill effect. The book was published in 2016, and that myth has now been pretty much eradicated.

No maths involved.

I see the math, even if you don’t.

Apologies I seem to have missed the link out for the mathematical modelling of fungi

https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/Biog_01-13.htm

Of course there are plenty of others, fom respectable organisations like universities and tha government department of health.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

You keep jumping back and forth. I commented on interpretations and then you call it a theory. When I respond to that, you jump back to it being an interpretation.

That is an irrelevant semantic distinction. Nothing important rests on it. It is an argument about words, not substance. "Interpretation" in this case just means "metaphysics" -- it means it is a philosophical theory rather than a scientific theory. The difference between scientific and metaphysical is of crucial importance. The difference between "theory" and "interpretation" is irrelevant fluff.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

See? Here you’re back to calling it a theory, and claim there’s math

This is also irrelevant.

3 hours ago, swansont said:

Let me ask this: is there any measurable difference in how a quantum system responds, depending on whether there is a conscious observer? (Like an electron changing state and emitting a photon) Some change in the interaction, or the laws governing it?

None of the interpretations make any difference to that. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to explain how the maths is related to everything else we know. Especially their purpose is to explain what "measurement" means in quantum theory. This is about non-mathematical concepts. The differences between all of the existing interpretations is non-mathematical. The new one I'm proposing is no different.

This discussion isn't going very far. I came here to discuss this new theory, not to have a very basic discussion about what the interpretations of QM actually are (ie why they are metaphysical rather than scientific, and not maths-dependent). I don't mind doing that once, but there's really no point in me repeating the same boring point over and over again.

You aren't engaging with the substance of what I've posted. You are talking about stuff which does not matter.

Edited June 20Jun 20 by Geoff Dann

46 minutes ago, Geoff Dann said:

That is an irrelevant semantic distinction. Nothing important rests on it. It

In science “theory” has a particular meaning, quite distinct from the lay definition. A lot of important things (though perhaps not important to you) depend on it.

You aren't engaging with the substance of what I've posted. You are talking about stuff which does not matter.

Just trying to clarify the scope here, and from my perspective I could say the same thing. As I have no interest in the metaphysical aspects (as you say, it has no impact on the science) I’ll leave you to it.

8 hours ago, swansont said:

In science “theory” has a particular meaning, quite distinct from the lay definition. A lot of important things (though perhaps not important to you) depend on it.

I realise that. I have made it abundantly clear that in this thread we are not purely talking about science. This is not a scientific theory. Rather, it is a philosophical theory which has direct and very large implications for science.

8 hours ago, swansont said:

Just trying to clarify the scope here, and from my perspective I could say the same thing. As I have no interest in the metaphysical aspects (as you say, it has no impact on the science) I’ll leave you to it.

So if a philosophical argument has major implications for science, you have no interest?

I did not say "it has no impact on the science". It has massive implications for several areas of science, because if it is correct then it turns out our current understanding of the correct boundary between science and philosophy needs to change.

So if clarity is what we're aiming for then this needs to be properly understood. This theory (or hypothesis, or interpretation...the word doesn't matter) radically reframes the entire context in which mainstream science is understood. In effect it takes the whole whole corpus of scientific knowledge (not just physics but all of it) from its current philosophical foundation (materialism/physicalism) and puts it on a new one (non-panpsychist neutral monism). This does have an impact on certain very specific bits of science (most notably cosmology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science). Most of this impact involves changing what currently appear to be really intractable scientific problems/paradoxes and showing that when moved to the new foundation the problems cease to be problems and the paradoxes are resolved by revealing what set them up in the first place.

11 minutes ago, Geoff Dann said:

I realise that. I have made it abundantly clear that in this thread we are not purely talking about science. This is not a scientific theory. Rather, it is a philosophical theory which has direct and very large implications for science.

So if a philosophical argument has major implications for science, you have no interest?

I did not say "it has no impact on the science". It has massive implications for several areas of science, because if it is correct then it turns out our current understanding of the correct boundary between science and philosophy needs to change.

So if clarity is what we're aiming for then this needs to be properly understood. This theory (or hypothesis, or interpretation...the word doesn't matter) radically reframes the entire context in which mainstream science is understood. In effect it takes the whole whole corpus of scientific knowledge (not just physics but all of it) from its current philosophical foundation (materialism/physicalism) and puts it on a new one (non-panpsychist neutral monism). This does have an impact on certain very specific bits of science (most notably cosmology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science). Most of this impact involves changing what currently appear to be really intractable scientific problems/paradoxes and showing that when moved to the new foundation the problems cease to be problems and the paradoxes are resolved by revealing what set them up in the first place.

Yet your idea seems - to me at least - to be based on a misunderstanding about the role, or rather the lack of it, of the conscious observer in QM. I outlined this earlier, and you have yet to respond on this point. It would appear fairly crucial to resolve.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yet your idea seems - to me at least - to be based on a misunderstanding about the role, or rather the lack of it, of the conscious observer in QM. I outlined this earlier, and you have yet to respond on this point. It would appear fairly crucial to resolve.

It may well seem like that to you. If you mentioned this earlier and I did not respond to it then I must have missed it. Indeed I have just scrolled up and I missed your post entirely, for which I apologise. I will respond to it now.

QUOTE "But returning to your idea, it seems to me a basic difficulty with it is that nobody nowadays (apart from quantum woo specialists of the Deepak Chopra type) suggests wave function collapse is anything to do with consciousness on the part of an "observer". The language of QM used by its founders in the 1920s indeed spoke of "observables" and "observations", but that was to distinguish what could be determined about the system from any further assumptions that might classically be made about it having other properties. Even at the time they were at pains to explain they were not attributing any magical influence to consciousness on the part of the observer. "

This isn't true. My work is directly based on the work of quantum physicist Henry Stapp, especially his 2007 book called Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Stapp is not a mystic -- he's a well-respected physicist in the traditional of von Neumann, Heisenberg and Wigner. His book was largely met by silence though -- not many people were expecting it, or had much to say in response.

The whole issue of what "the observer" means, or what "measurement" means has never been resolved. That is why the Measurement Problem (MP) is still very much alive. Nobody welcomed this problem -- we've spent the last century (to the month) trying to resolve it, but no resolution has been forthcoming. Instead there has just been an ever-increasing proliferation of proposed solutions, and the more of them there are, the less it looks like there is a path to a consensus.

My own position starts by trying to get to grips with this range of proposed solutions to the MP, and I conclude that, at the top level, we're faced with a fundamental "trilemma".

(1) Most solutions try to solve it physically -- they propose some sort of physical mechanism to bridge the gap between uncollapsed "wave" of superpositions and observed "particle" (the singular world we actually experience). Until now all of them have been both arbitrary and empirically untestable. I call these "physical collapse" theories (PC).

(2) Von Neumann / Wigner / Stapp solve it by removing the agent of collapse from the physical system entirely, by saying consciousness (which they presume to require a non-physical observer of some sort) collapses it from outside. But this leads to the question "What collapsed the wave function before consciousness evolved?", to which there is either no answer (Stapp doesn't answer it) or the answer is usually "consciousness has always existed" (i.e. idealism or panpsychism), which implies consciousness can exist without brains (which is also a major problem, because it seems very clear that consciousness does indeed depend on brains, even if brains are not enough). I call these CCC (consciousness causes collapse). Stapp's theory uses the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) as the metaphysical end of the explanation of how selection actually occurs, but doesn't provide the physical end of the mechanism -- he just assumes there must be one.

(3) MWI denies collapse needs to happen at all, but as a result it has to claim what our minds are continually splitting into different timelines (which makes no more intuitive sense than CCC).

There are a few others (weak values, QBism, Bohm) which seem to avoid the trilemma, but if your drill down into the details they are all incomplete or incoherent as a result. The trilemma seems like a logical inevitability, because either collapse happens or it doesn't, and if it does happen then the cause must either be inside the quantum/physical system, or outside it.

My new proposal is revolutionary because instead of forcing a choice between these three options, it combines them. I am saying that we can get rid of the major drawbacks of both CCC and MWI by joining them together sequentially (in terms of cosmic history) and as phenomenal and noumenal worlds in phase 2 (our reality now). And I use a new version of PC (Greg's QCT) as the mathematical means of connecting them -- this is a PC theory which explains in a non-arbitrary and testable way why collapse is mathematically necessary, but doesn't provide an ontological context. So QCT fits perfectly with Henry Stapp's QZE -- you need both of them to provide a complete explanation of how collapse works.

Heisenberg's personal views don't change any of this. That was 100 years ago.

QUOTE: "So your idea, at least as I understand it, that QM should be interpreted differently before and after the advent of conscious beings, able to perceive the measurements, does not seem to be a fruitful approach."

This approach provides an integrated, novel solution to fifteen major outstanding problems in physics and philosophy. If that's correct then it is easily the most "fruitful" theoretical advance since the 1920s. Among these is an explanation for the evolution of consciousness which builds on Thomas Nagel's suggestions in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Nagel argued that materialism cannot account for consciousness, and if we accept this then the only remaining rational naturalistic explanation for the evolution of consciousness was that it was somehow teleological -- destined to happen. Nagel says we therefore need to look for teleological laws, but my proposal makes that unnecessary, because it provides a structural explanation for the apparent teleology (once consciousness appears in one branch of the phase 1 MWI multiverse it collapses the primordial wavefunction and selects that branch as reality, getting rid of all the others).

And in fact I am not actually saying QM should be interpreted differently before and after the emergence of consciousness (I call this "psychegenesis"). My new interpretation applies consistently -- it says consciousness is required to collapse the wavefunction, but because it also rejects panpsychism and idealism (because it accepts that brains are necessary for consciousness) it must also say that before psychegenesis there was no collapse, because the thing required for collapse doesn't exist yet.

Do you understand what I am proposing now?
If so, do you understand how it provides one radical new answer to 15+ major problems? I can explain if you like.

18 hours ago, exchemist said:

So your idea, at least as I understand it, that QM should be interpreted differently before and after the advent of conscious beings, able to perceive the measurements, does not seem to be a fruitful approach.

Regarding fruitfulness, see this for example. (link to AI material removed) And before you dismiss it without reading it, read the prompt -- because it is directly related to everything I described in the post above.

Just now, exchemist said:

Yet your idea seems - to me at least - to be based on a misunderstanding about the role, or rather the lack of it, of the conscious observer in QM. I outlined this earlier, and you have yet to respond on this point. It would appear fairly crucial to resolve.

The nonsense about conscious observers is easy to dispel for those who understand the HUP.

A simple philosophical point, not metaphysical or mystic or woo, will tell those folks that not only can we not not physically observe the values of certain quantities beyond a certain accuracy, we cannot even know them.

This is obvious because once you have a formula the experiment itself does not actually have be performed or the apparatus actually exist for the limitation to be expressed.

Of course you need to know enough maths (and I'm sure you do) to understand this.

Talking of formulae and maths, I'm also sure you understand that even more basic to QM than collapse, measurement, observation, interaction, interpretation etc is the question

What is a wave function and under what conditions does it exist ?

The answer to this lies in the mathematics and supplies a remarkable refutation of the many worlds interpretation if extended to the universal wave function a la Sean Carroll.

I am sure you understand this because you must have done a great deal of spectroscopy, professionally.

4 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

Regarding fruitfulness, see this for example. And before you dismiss it without reading it, read the prompt -- because it is directly related to everything I described in the post above.

Moderator Note

You were explicitly told not to include AI content in the discussion. Link removed.

2 hours ago, studiot said:

The nonsense about conscious observers is easy to dispel for those who understand the HUP.

A simple philosophical point, not metaphysical or mystic or woo, will tell those folks that not only can we not not physically observe the values of certain quantities beyond a certain accuracy, we cannot even know them.

This is obvious because once you have a formula the experiment itself does not actually have be performed or the apparatus actually exist for the limitation to be expressed.

Of course you need to know enough maths (and I'm sure you do) to understand this.

Talking of formulae and maths, I'm also sure you understand that even more basic to QM than collapse, measurement, observation, interaction, interpretation etc is the question

What is a wave function and under what conditions does it exist ?

The answer to this lies in the mathematics and supplies a remarkable refutation of the many worlds interpretation if extended to the universal wave function a la Sean Carroll.

I am sure you understand this because you must have done a great deal of spectroscopy, professionally.

Actually I think the HUP is a different issue from the wave function collapse one. The former is to do with pairs of conjugate variables being Fourier transforms of each other, whereas wave function collapse is the replacement of probability ranges of potential values of properties being replaced by actual ones when an interaction occurs. My understanding is HUP relates to simultaneous definition of pairs of properties, whereas collapse may pertain to a single property alone.

Edited June 21Jun 21 by exchemist

Just now, exchemist said:

Actually I think the HUP is a different issue from the wave function collapse one. The former is to do with pairs of conjugate variables being Fourier transforms of each other, whereas wave function collapse is the replacement of probability ranges of potential values of properties being replaced by actual ones when an interaction occurs. My understanding is HUP relates to simultaneous definition of pairs of properties, whereas collapse may pertain to a single property alone.

In some ways it is yes I agree.

However the stated aim of this thread is

19 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

In this thread we are discussing the philosophical-conceptual framework in which physics and the rest of science operates, not just science. Physics doesn't operate in an intellectual vacuum. It is not a completed theory of everything. It needs philosophy, and the existing philosophy is not good enough. This is exactly why quantum mechanics still seems so strange exactly 100 years after its was discovered. I am saying that all of the existing philosophical interpretations of QM are incorrect, and explaining why the new one I am suggesting has major implications for both philosophy and science.

So we should be discussing QM at the most fundamental level.

To me the most fundamental level is the question

What is being quantised ?

The second question which follows close in the heels of the first is

How do we go about studying or determining the quantisation ?

In studying the second question we come across a third one.

Having decided what we are quantising, what else or other physical agent do we need to be acting ?

Having set these up we can plunge into details such as Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and uncle Tom Cobbly.

Unfortunately the OP is refusing to answer these most basic questions, and further appears to want to work without any maths whatsoever.

Whilst you can pose and answer my three questions without any maths, you will struggle to proceed much further.

Some progress can be made with a little amount of maths, as Prof Jordan says in his book

And we can also show the answers to the OP issues over observers, conscious or not, wave functions, collapse, and so forth.

I repeat: this has got absolutely nothing to do with mathematics.

If it was possible to find a solution to measurement problem with mathematics then John von Neumann would probably have found it in 1932, and if he had somehow failed (and he never failed at anything that was possible) then mathematicians would have converged on an answer. This has conspicuously not happened. What has happened is an ever-increasing proliferation of different attempts to solve the MP, none of which (so far) have shown any sign of commanding a consensus.

The problem is not mathematical. It is logical, but no mathematics is required. By that I mean that, assuming reality is intelligible then there must be an intelligible solution to the MP. Until now, nobody has proposed one.

I have proposed one. In the three weeks since I went public with it, nobody has raised a serious objection. And no, "where's the maths?" is not a serious objection. The only maths required is to explain how to bridge MWI and CCC (or phase 1 and phase 2), and Greg Capanda has provided that with QCT.

I hope that everybody reading this knows who von Neumann was. He was, without question, the most talented and influential mathematician of the 20th century. And it was he who originally suggested that the "collapse event" be associated with consciousness, precisely because he couldn't find a way to describe it mathematically!

Edited June 21Jun 21 by Geoff Dann

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

I repeat: this has got absolutely nothing to do with mathematics.

If it was possible to find a solution to measurement problem with mathematics then John von Neumann would probably have found it in 1932, and if he had somehow failed (and he never failed at anything that was possible) then mathematicians would have converged on an answer. This has conspicuously not happened. What has happened is an ever-increasing proliferation of different attempts to solve the MP, none of which (so far) have shown any sign of commanding a consensus.

The problem is not mathematical. It is logical, but no mathematics is required. By that I mean that, assuming reality is intelligible then there must be an intelligible solution to the MP. Until now, nobody has proposed one.

I have proposed one. In the three weeks since I went public with it, nobody has raised a serious objection. And no, "where's the maths?" is not a serious objection. The only maths required is to explain how to bridge MWI and CCC (or phase 1 and phase 2), and Greg Capanda has provided that with QCT.

Still not answering the most basic question then

What is being quantised ?

1 minute ago, studiot said:

Still not answering the most basic question then

What is being quantised ?

The question is meaningless.

According to the interpretation I'm proposing, reality "as it is in itself" (i.e. free from our observations or experiences of it) is purely informational. If it is "made of" anything at all then it is made of mathematics. It is a realm of pure mathematical information which exists without time, space, decisions or memory, the foundation of which is a the paradoxical ground of reality I refer to as 0|∞. You can think of it as the whole of mathematics, but with zero placed with something with is a paradoxical combination of absolute nothingness and pure infinity.

This doesn't need to "be quantised", because it is already "quantised". In other words, it is "digital" rather than "analog". It is neither physical nor mental, which is why this is ultimately a form of neutral monism.

The above is "phase 1" reality, both in terms of cosmic history and in terms of the uncollapsed wavefunction (reality as it is in itself) during phase 2. Phase 2 reality contains both consciousness and classical spacetime. So we could say that the noumenal neutral-mathematical realm "collapses into" the phenomenal realm of consciousness and space-time.

BTW this is why Greg's theory fits so cleanly with my own. When he met me he believed and claimed to be a materialist, but his own theory is neutral monist -- he actually thinks of reality (as it is in itself) as being made of pure information, not matter.

Note: I am using the Kantian term "noumenal" to mean something slightly different to Kant himself. For Kant, "noumemon" is reality as it is in itself, but he claimed it was completely unknowable. I am saying it is knowable, but only in the way we can know what is inside Schrodinger's sealed box. It is in a superposition, but it is not an unimaginable mystery.

Edited June 21Jun 21 by Geoff Dann

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

The question is meaningless.

According to the interpretation I'm proposing, reality "as it is in itself" (i.e. free from our observations or experiences of it) is purely informational. If it is "made of" anything at all then it is made of mathematics. It is a realm of pure mathematical information which exists without time, space, decisions or memory, the foundation of which is a the paradoxical ground of reality I refer to as 0|∞. You can think of it as the whole of mathematics, but with zero placed with something with is a paradoxical combination of absolute nothingness and pure infinity.

This doesn't need to "be quantised", because it is already "quantised". In other words, it is "digital" rather than "analog". It is neither physical nor mental, which is why this is ultimately a form of neutral monism.

The above is "phase 1" reality, both in terms of cosmic history and in terms of the uncollapsed wavefunction (reality as it is in itself) during phase 2. Phase 2 reality contains both consciousness and classical spacetime. So we could say that the neutral-mathematical realm "collapses into" the phenomenal realm of consciousness and space-time.

BTW this is why Greg's theory fits so cleanly with my own. When he met me he believed and claimed to be a materialist, but his own theory is neutral monist -- he actually thinks of reality (as it is in itself) as being made of pure information, not matter.

You really are floundering.

Just now, studiot said:

You really are floundering.

Really? In which case, how come I can post a clear, detailed explanation of my position while you are reduced to "You are really floundering"?

You asked me a question. I answered it. What didn't you understand about the answer?

I have already suggested we stop discussing this, because your posts were increasingly contentless. I am now going to suggest it again.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

wave function collapse is the replacement of probability ranges of potential values of properties being replaced by actual ones when an interaction occurs

The problem is explaining what, exactly, "interaction" means. Or "observation" or "measurement".... Somehow we have to get from a range of probable but unmanifested outcomes, to a single manifested outcome. The problem is that neither scientists nor philosophers are able to agree on the answer.

Edited June 21Jun 21 by Geoff Dann

Just now, Geoff Dann said:

You asked me a question. I answered it. What didn't you understand about the answer?

I didn't understand how the most basic question you can ask about quantum mechanics is meaningless in a thread all about quantum mechanics.

Edited June 21Jun 21 by studiot
spelling

21 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

It may well seem like that to you. If you mentioned this earlier and I did not respond to it then I must have missed it. Indeed I have just scrolled up and I missed your post entirely, for which I apologise. I will respond to it now.

QUOTE "But returning to your idea, it seems to me a basic difficulty with it is that nobody nowadays (apart from quantum woo specialists of the Deepak Chopra type) suggests wave function collapse is anything to do with consciousness on the part of an "observer". The language of QM used by its founders in the 1920s indeed spoke of "observables" and "observations", but that was to distinguish what could be determined about the system from any further assumptions that might classically be made about it having other properties. Even at the time they were at pains to explain they were not attributing any magical influence to consciousness on the part of the observer. "

This isn't true. My work is directly based on the work of quantum physicist Henry Stapp, especially his 2007 book called Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Stapp is not a mystic -- he's a well-respected physicist in the traditional of von Neumann, Heisenberg and Wigner. His book was largely met by silence though -- not many people were expecting it, or had much to say in response.

The whole issue of what "the observer" means, or what "measurement" means has never been resolved. That is why the Measurement Problem (MP) is still very much alive. Nobody welcomed this problem -- we've spent the last century (to the month) trying to resolve it, but no resolution has been forthcoming. Instead there has just been an ever-increasing proliferation of proposed solutions, and the more of them there are, the less it looks like there is a path to a consensus.

My own position starts by trying to get to grips with this range of proposed solutions to the MP, and I conclude that, at the top level, we're faced with a fundamental "trilemma".

(1) Most solutions try to solve it physically -- they propose some sort of physical mechanism to bridge the gap between uncollapsed "wave" of superpositions and observed "particle" (the singular world we actually experience). Until now all of them have been both arbitrary and empirically untestable. I call these "physical collapse" theories (PC).

(2) Von Neumann / Wigner / Stapp solve it by removing the agent of collapse from the physical system entirely, by saying consciousness (which they presume to require a non-physical observer of some sort) collapses it from outside. But this leads to the question "What collapsed the wave function before consciousness evolved?", to which there is either no answer (Stapp doesn't answer it) or the answer is usually "consciousness has always existed" (i.e. idealism or panpsychism), which implies consciousness can exist without brains (which is also a major problem, because it seems very clear that consciousness does indeed depend on brains, even if brains are not enough). I call these CCC (consciousness causes collapse). Stapp's theory uses the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) as the metaphysical end of the explanation of how selection actually occurs, but doesn't provide the physical end of the mechanism -- he just assumes there must be one.

(3) MWI denies collapse needs to happen at all, but as a result it has to claim what our minds are continually splitting into different timelines (which makes no more intuitive sense than CCC).

There are a few others (weak values, QBism, Bohm) which seem to avoid the trilemma, but if your drill down into the details they are all incomplete or incoherent as a result. The trilemma seems like a logical inevitability, because either collapse happens or it doesn't, and if it does happen then the cause must either be inside the quantum/physical system, or outside it.

My new proposal is revolutionary because instead of forcing a choice between these three options, it combines them. I am saying that we can get rid of the major drawbacks of both CCC and MWI by joining them together sequentially (in terms of cosmic history) and as phenomenal and noumenal worlds in phase 2 (our reality now). And I use a new version of PC (Greg's QCT) as the mathematical means of connecting them -- this is a PC theory which explains in a non-arbitrary and testable way why collapse is mathematically necessary, but doesn't provide an ontological context. So QCT fits perfectly with Henry Stapp's QZE -- you need both of them to provide a complete explanation of how collapse works.

Heisenberg's personal views don't change any of this. That was 100 years ago.

QUOTE: "So your idea, at least as I understand it, that QM should be interpreted differently before and after the advent of conscious beings, able to perceive the measurements, does not seem to be a fruitful approach."

This approach provides an integrated, novel solution to fifteen major outstanding problems in physics and philosophy. If that's correct then it is easily the most "fruitful" theoretical advance since the 1920s. Among these is an explanation for the evolution of consciousness which builds on Thomas Nagel's suggestions in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Nagel argued that materialism cannot account for consciousness, and if we accept this then the only remaining rational naturalistic explanation for the evolution of consciousness was that it was somehow teleological -- destined to happen. Nagel says we therefore need to look for teleological laws, but my proposal makes that unnecessary, because it provides a structural explanation for the apparent teleology (once consciousness appears in one branch of the phase 1 MWI multiverse it collapses the primordial wavefunction and selects that branch as reality, getting rid of all the others).

And in fact I am not actually saying QM should be interpreted differently before and after the emergence of consciousness (I call this "psychegenesis"). My new interpretation applies consistently -- it says consciousness is required to collapse the wavefunction, but because it also rejects panpsychism and idealism (because it accepts that brains are necessary for consciousness) it must also say that before psychegenesis there was no collapse, because the thing required for collapse doesn't exist yet.

Do you understand what I am proposing now?
If so, do you understand how it provides one radical new answer to 15+ major problems? I can explain if you like.

Regarding fruitfulness, see this for example. (link to AI material removed) And before you dismiss it without reading it, read the prompt -- because it is directly related to everything I described in the post above.

Interesting. I looked up Henry Stapp, of whom I had never heard. He seems to be an eccentric whose ideas about wave function collapse are dismissed by mainstream interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse.

He further seems to embrace Cartesian duality, treating "the mind" as an entity distinct from the brain, or indeed the physical world more generally. This a very dubious notion. While not exactly woo, it seems to be indeed a mystical view, perhaps like some of Wigner's early ideas, which he later repudiated.

I don't think you will get much support for ideas based on consciousness in the science community. Personally, I am attracted by Rovelli's relational interpretation of QM, in which there is no single, definitive, wave function for a system, but one that depends on the informational "frame of reference", as it were, for the observer. (There is an analogy here with relativity, the ideas of which were, according to Rovelli, the original inspiration for Heisenberg's approach to QM.) Thus, for instance, Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead to the world outside the box , with a wave function that describes that condition, but to the world inside the box the cat is definitely one or the other, with a wave function appropriate to whichever definite state applies.

Edited June 22Jun 22 by exchemist

15 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

Really? In which case, how come I can post a clear, detailed explanation of my position while you are reduced to "You are really floundering"?

You asked me a question. I answered it. What didn't you understand about the answer?

I have already suggested we stop discussing this, because your posts were increasingly contentless. I am now going to suggest it again.

The problem is explaining what, exactly, "interaction" means. Or "observation" or "measurement".... Somehow we have to get from a range of probable but unmanifested outcomes, to a single manifested outcome. The problem is that neither scientists nor philosophers are able to agree on the answer.

If I've understood him correctly, Rovelli would say we have to give up the implicit assumption that entities have a concrete existence in between interactions. They have potential existence only, described by the wave function, until the next interaction makes them concrete once more.

Edited June 22Jun 22 by exchemist

Just now, exchemist said:

  10 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

Really? In which case, how come I can post a clear, detailed explanation of my position while you are reduced to "You are really floundering"?

You asked me a question. I answered it. What didn't you understand about the answer?

I have already suggested we stop discussing this, because your posts were increasingly contentless. I am now going to suggest it again.

The problem is explaining what, exactly, "interaction" means. Or "observation" or "measurement".... Somehow we have to get from a range of probable but unmanifested outcomes, to a single manifested outcome. The problem is that neither scientists nor philosophers are able to agree on the answer.

If I've understood him correctly, Rovelli would say we have to give up the implicit assumption that entities have a concrete existence in between interactions. They have potential existence only, described by the wave function, until the next interaction makes them concrete once more.

Just now, exchemist said:

If I've understood him correctly, Rovelli would say we have to give up the implicit assumption that entities have a concrete existence in between interactions. They have potential existence only, described by the wave function, until the next interaction makes them concrete once more.

There are many wave equations.
Furthermore they are partial differential equations.

A wave function is a mathematical solution to a particular wave equation.

Solutions to partial ordinary equations involve the correct selection of an arbitrary constant but
solutions to partial differential equations involve the correct selection of an arbitrary function.

As a resilt of this there is a whole infinity of solutions to such equations.

Normally when presenting applications to other disciplines, mathematicians choose 'convenient' arbitrary constants or functions and they are then forgotton about, by the users.
But all the solutions are always there and available to the mathematics.

So questions about wave functions have a mathematical resolution, not a philosophical one.

Quantum mechanics is about energy.

Bohr's original insight was the quantisation of that energy.

Schrodinger's later equation is also about energy.

Quantisation of the wave functions, which as noted are solutions to this equation, are about the zeros of the wave functions not directly the energies.
Wave functions do not have the physical (MLT) dimensions of energy, they have a rather peculiar dimension which depend upon the number of spatial dimensions they occur in.

Bohr's and later theories of quantisation are about quantisation of energy not necessarily the zeros of the wave function.
The quantised energy is never zero.

Achieving the harmonisation of the zeros of the wave function and the energy function requires an agent eg a potential field or some reference point for KE to be referred to (all velocity is relative)

This type of reasoning is what I would call 'the philosophy of quantum mechanics'

5 hours ago, exchemist said:

Interesting. I looked up Henry Stapp, of whom I had never heard. He seems to be an eccentric whose ideas about wave function collapse are dismissed by mainstream interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse.

That is an attempted reverse argument from authority. We are talking about a major paradigm shift here -- of course this is dismissed by the mainstream. That is how paradigm shifts work. But if scientists always reject things that aren't mainstream then paradigm shifts would not happen at all. What is needed (and what always does happen) is that a small number of deep thinkers are the first to realise the new paradigm is correct, and eventually everybody else catches up (though usually there is a lot of resistance first).

The point is that what you were saying isn't true. Consciousness causes collapse remains one of a large number of interpretations which are still defended by at least some physicists and philosophers. It therefore cannot simply be dismissed for no other reason than it isn't mainstream -- not when we're talking about the biggest unsolved mystery in quantum theory. There is no agreed mainstream answer -- all the answers are fringe. Maybe that's because they're all wrong?

5 hours ago, exchemist said:

He further seems to embrace Cartesian duality, treating "the mind" as an entity distinct from the brain, or indeed the physical world more generally. This a very dubious notion. While not exactly woo, it seems to be indeed a mystical view, perhaps like some of Wigner's early ideas, which he later repudiated.

I don't think you will get much support for ideas based on consciousness in the science community.

You think the scientific community is so stupid and closed-minded that nobody within it is capable of understanding why a new proposal which solves 15+ major foundational problems with one solution should be taken seriously?

I don't. I think maybe 95% of them fall into this category -- that's how powerful the materialistic dogma is. But I also believe there must be academics out there who have seen this paper in the last 3 weeks and do understand its importance. [edit: I might add that I was a true believer in materialism myself until the age of 33. I was an atheist evangeliser, and Richard Dawkins' forum administrator, when I came to the conclusion that materialism is incoherent. That did not go down well in that community. I understand the nature of the resistance all too well.]

In that whole time -- during which the paper has had 600 views and downloads -- not one single person has found anything wrong with it. I either get no response, or I get excuses for not properly engaging ("it isn't peer reviewed", "it looks like AI generated it", "you're not an academic", "it's too radical", etc....) Maybe 10 or 15 people have actually attempted to understand it, and every single one of them thinks it is of major importance. I am therefore not remotely worried about the initial reaction of the bulk of the scientific community. All I care about is the ones who are smart enough to think for themselves and realise that this is, in fact, a long overdue paradigm shift of world-changing importance. I only need a handful of them to "get it" and the snowball will start rolling.

Rovelli's interpretation is interesting, but does it provide an integrated solution to 15 other problems as well as the MP? No. Why would anybody who understands my system continue to believe in something which only solves one problem when an alternative is available which solves 15?

You do understand why it solves 15 of them, right?

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

If I've understood him correctly, Rovelli would say we have to give up the implicit assumption that entities have a concrete existence in between interactions. They have potential existence only, described by the wave function, until the next interaction makes them concrete once more.

Yes. But as described above, Rovelli's idea only solves the measurement problem. That isn't enough to make it stand out from the 30+ other proposed solutions to the MP, which is exactly why it does not represent a major paradigm shift and cannot command a consensus. My proposal is very different to this. I'm not just solving one problem. I'm not even just offering an integrated, coherent set of 15 solutions to 15 problems. I am offering ONE new answer (2PC+QCT) to FIFTEEN massive unanswered questions, each one of which is almost as significant as the MP on its own. If it is correct, then describing it as the most important theoretical advance since the discovery of QM itself might actually be an understatement. It's even bigger than that.

I find it quite astonishing how few people are capable of processing this, cognitively. I've had several people reject the idea on the grounds that "it solves too much" -- they actually told me it cannot possibly be correct, because we should be trying to solve one problem at a time and not fifteen in one go.

The biggest problem is the widespread failure in the scientific community to understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness. That's exactly why Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos was so viciously attacked. But Nagel is right. Materialism really is incoherent, and once that has been accepted then my new theory becomes a very strong contender for the biggest paradigm shift for a century.

Think of it like this -- do you really believe there is another way to fit all these problems together -- to make this jigsaw fit together? Could there be another single solution to all 15 of these problems? I personally would say the probability of this is tending towards zero. Why should I have anything but total confidence that it is correct given that nobody can I actually find anything wrong with it? It is being rejected out of incredulity: people cannot believe what their own eyes are telling them. It's "too good to be true".

Edited June 22Jun 22 by Geoff Dann

6 hours ago, Geoff Dann said:

That is an attempted reverse argument from authority. We are talking about a major paradigm shift here -- of course this is dismissed by the mainstream. That is how paradigm shifts work. But if scientists always reject things that aren't mainstream then paradigm shifts would not happen at all. What is needed (and what always does happen) is that a small number of deep thinkers are the first to realise the new paradigm is correct, and eventually everybody else catches up (though usually there is a lot of resistance first).

The point is that what you were saying isn't true. Consciousness causes collapse remains one of a large number of interpretations which are still defended by at least some physicists and philosophers. It therefore cannot simply be dismissed for no other reason than it isn't mainstream -- not when we're talking about the biggest unsolved mystery in quantum theory. There is no agreed mainstream answer -- all the answers are fringe. Maybe that's because they're all wrong?

You think the scientific community is so stupid and closed-minded that nobody within it is capable of understanding why a new proposal which solves 15+ major foundational problems with one solution should be taken seriously?

I don't. I think maybe 95% of them fall into this category -- that's how powerful the materialistic dogma is. But I also believe there must be academics out there who have seen this paper in the last 3 weeks and do understand its importance. [edit: I might add that I was a true believer in materialism myself until the age of 33. I was an atheist evangeliser, and Richard Dawkins' forum administrator, when I came to the conclusion that materialism is incoherent. That did not go down well in that community. I understand the nature of the resistance all too well.]

In that whole time -- during which the paper has had 600 views and downloads -- not one single person has found anything wrong with it. I either get no response, or I get excuses for not properly engaging ("it isn't peer reviewed", "it looks like AI generated it", "you're not an academic", "it's too radical", etc....) Maybe 10 or 15 people have actually attempted to understand it, and every single one of them thinks it is of major importance. I am therefore not remotely worried about the initial reaction of the bulk of the scientific community. All I care about is the ones who are smart enough to think for themselves and realise that this is, in fact, a long overdue paradigm shift of world-changing importance. I only need a handful of them to "get it" and the snowball will start rolling.

Rovelli's interpretation is interesting, but does it provide an integrated solution to 15 other problems as well as the MP? No. Why would anybody who understands my system continue to believe in something which only solves one problem when an alternative is available which solves 15?

You do understand why it solves 15 of them, right?

Yes. But as described above, Rovelli's idea only solves the measurement problem. That isn't enough to make it stand out from the 30+ other proposed solutions to the MP, which is exactly why it does not represent a major paradigm shift and cannot command a consensus. My proposal is very different to this. I'm not just solving one problem. I'm not even just offering an integrated, coherent set of 15 solutions to 15 problems. I am offering ONE new answer (2PC+QCT) to FIFTEEN massive unanswered questions, each one of which is almost as significant as the MP on its own. If it is correct, then describing it as the most important theoretical advance since the discovery of QM itself might actually be an understatement. It's even bigger than that.

I find it quite astonishing how few people are capable of processing this, cognitively. I've had several people reject the idea on the grounds that "it solves too much" -- they actually told me it cannot possibly be correct, because we should be trying to solve one problem at a time and not fifteen in one go.

The biggest problem is the widespread failure in the scientific community to understand the Hard Problem of Consciousness. That's exactly why Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos was so viciously attacked. But Nagel is right. Materialism really is incoherent, and once that has been accepted then my new theory becomes a very strong contender for the biggest paradigm shift for a century.

Think of it like this -- do you really believe there is another way to fit all these problems together -- to make this jigsaw fit together? Could there be another single solution to all 15 of these problems? I personally would say the probability of this is tending towards zero. Why should I have anything but total confidence that it is correct given that nobody can I actually find anything wrong with it? It is being rejected out of incredulity: people cannot believe what their own eyes are telling them. It's "too good to be true".

Hmm, I have little time for Nagel on the issue of consciousness, I'm afraid. I'm with Massimo Pigliucci: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem

And I do not see that there is huge problem to solve with QM. But then, my training is in natural science. QM is a model that works extraordinarily well. It has never been faulted in its predictions. I find it preposterous to build an interpretation of QM that elevates the activity of the conscious brain to some mystical entity, able to affect how nature works. I think confusing an activity with an entity is a category error.

(As a chemist, I am used to distinguishing between "reality" and the models of reality we use in science to predict how nature will behave. In chemistry we quite commonly have more than one model for a given scenario and choose the one appropriate to the task, without troubling ourselves unduly about what is "really" going on. That's because chemistry is complex and messy, so if we got hung up on such pedantry we would never accomplish anything. We use QM all the time in chemistry and it works just fine. I suppose what I'm saying amounts to a "shut up and calculate" approach to the question. 🙂 )

Edited June 22Jun 22 by exchemist