Open System for Geniuses - by Chronostalker

After searching the net I realized that the movie has already been dealt with on the Peter Woit blog “Not Even Wrong” and also in an article in Popular Mechanics. Popular Mechanics quotes David Z. Albert:

One of the few legitimate academics in the film, David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, is outraged at the final product. He says that he spent four hours patiently explaining to the filmmakers why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality, only to see his statements edited and cut to the point where it appears as though he and the spirit warrior are speaking with one voice. “I was taken,” Albert admits. “I was really gullible, but I learned my lesson.”

I would not recommend Popular Mechanics to anyone who really wants to know the truth. David’s Albert statement that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness - if he really stated it this way - is his personal opinion that is questionable. It is enough to search arxiv.org for the term “mind” and you will find several papers by H. P. Stapp who is trying to make some progress in this area. Stapp’s papers are not very convincing, yet the fact is that quantum theory is not yet understood, there is a vivid discussion about its foundations, and there is no clear cut solution that would be accepted by all experts. Whether it has something to do with consciousness, what kind of consciousness, and what is consciousness anyway - these are all valid questions.

There are some comments about David Albert on another blog Preposterous Universe

David Albert is also known for being perhaps the sole respectable person to appear in the movie What the #$*! Do We Know?, a docu-drama about quantum mechanics and consciousness. (I haven’t actually seen the movie, but Peter Woit has. FYI, “#$*!” is usually pronounced as “bleep”, but more colorful renderings are allowed.) The movie was made by crackpots, who want to argue that consciousness and quantum mechanics are inextricably intertwined, to the extent that we can literally change reality by appropriately focusing our mental states. David was asked by the producers to sit for an extended interview about the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and he innocently agreed. After five hours of filming, in which he patiently explained to them that their views were completely crazy, they chopped up the footage into short sounds bites of quotes like “Yes, that’s an important question,” and interspersed them throughout the film. David is on record as saying that his views were dramatically misrepresented by the movie. Another lesson learned: if anyone wants to get you on film, you have to establish that you trust them not to twist your words against themselves.

Now, read the abstract of the paper by late Euan Squires “What are quantum theorists doing at a conference on consciousness?”

The reason why orthodox quantum theory necessarily invokes consciousness is explained. Several procedures whereby the Born probability rule can be introduced are discussed, and reasons are given for prefering one in which consciousness selects a unique realised world. Consciousness is something outside of the laws of physics (quantum mechanics), but it has a real effect upon the experienced world. Finally, orthodox quantum theory is shown to require that consciousness acts non-locally.

Or, even better, read the paper. Many of the statements of the film makers may have been crazy indeed, yet to negate the fact the same subject is being discussed by the physicists as an “open question” was not only a mistake, it was sending a distorted view of the real situation as seen by the scientists, Remember that David Z. Albert was promoting Bohmian mechanics - a theory that is seriously flawed and is itself being promoted by some physicists while hiding its serious flaws behing a fancy mathematical terminology.

Erich Joos, ends his 1999 paper “Elements of Environmental Decoherence” with the following sentence:

So it seems that both alternatives still have conceptual problems and
both are hard to test because of decoherence. We should not be surprised,
however, if it finally turned out that we do not know enough about consciousness
and its relation to the physical world to solve the quantum mystery.

Even if Joos’ paper itself can be criticised for several reasons, nevertheless - physicists are aware of the possible, perhaps even very important, connection between the consciousness and the message of quantum theory.

But, according to some theories, the observer is still more deeply involved in this quantum event, the determination of the location of a particle. Before the electron gets whacked with the other particle, it is said to be in a state of “superposition,” existing partially in all possible locations. It is at the moment of observation by a conscious mind that the electron “chooses” one of the possible locations to materialize in, collapsing it’s wave-packet and becoming a particle for the split second it takes to be hit by the other particle. David Albert, in the book “Quantum Mechanics and Experience,” says:

“perhaps the collapse occurs precisely at the last possible moment; perhaps it always occurs precisely at the level of consciousness, and perhaps, moreover, consciousness is always the agent that brings it about.”

Albert goes on to say,

“The brain of a sentient being may enter a state wherein states connected with various different conscious experiences are superposed; and at such moments the mind connected with that brain opens it’s inner eye and gazes on the brain, and that causes the entire system (brain, measuring instrument, measured system, everything) to collapse…”

Therefore, if this theory is true, consciousness is essential to the reality of things for it is consciousness that collapses the subatomic particles that make up everything from superposition into a definite position, changing the Universe from an aggregation of probability waves and superposed particles into the somewhat more definite reality that we know. And that, of course, is the meaning of the Participatory Anthropic Principle, that the Universe needs conscious observers to bring it from existing in all probabilities into one reality. We are not detached observers of a movie-reality playing before us that we are powerless to interact with. We are, in a certain sense, the cameramen.

The point is that we do not know what consciousness is - we have just a rough idea, but no clear cut understanding and no place in our formalism for it. What if it is the Universe itself that is conscious - in a sense - and “we”, human observers, are not as important as the inventors of the Participatory Anthropic Principle would like us to think that we are ….