Hmmm, TIL that xenon gas is an anesthetic!

I have a lot of thoughts on QM, many worlds, and the nature of consciousness.

Curious if anyone else reads this feed and will respond though?

Short version is that I think consciousness is emergent from the neural system, nothing directly quantum about it. I also believe in strong many worlds though, and think that one’s own life experience is one of an infinite number of possibilities in the fractal space of all reality. I don’t have an answer to why one’s consciousness is locked into a particular world track, maybe these experiments will provide clues?

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.