Lorraine Ford
Re Markovian/ non-Markovian models, and whether consciousness causes “collapse”:
Although theoreticians and researchers might represent the on-the-spot state of the real-world system as a collection of categories (like relative position and mass) and associated numbers, an unstructured or improperly structured collection of categories and numbers cannot represent the systems’ knowledge of itself. And no one could claim that the real-world system could operate without, at least at some level, knowing its own categories and numbers.
The systems’ knowledge of itself (or more feasibly, the knowledge of the small parts of the system like particles and atoms) can seemingly only be represented as something like: (category1=number1 IS TRUE) AND (category2=number2 IS TRUE). There are no meaningless zeroes and ones here, there is only genuine real-world knowledge/ information.
Numbers without associated categories are not knowledge/ information. Numbers and associated categories, without being collated (“AND”) with any other on-the-spot numbers and associated categories, can only represent incomplete knowledge/ information of a situation. “IS TRUE” symbolises that this is true, point-of-view collated knowledge of an on-the-spot situation, knowledge that is possessed by the system itself, at that particular “point” in the system.
This knowledge that the system has of itself has no particular necessary outcome because, as is shown by the structure of the knowledge, consciousness/ knowledge itself cannot create outcomes; consciousness/ knowledge cannot move the system. Consciousness/ knowledge cannot cause “collapse”.
Clearly, what moves the system is a separate, though related, IF…THEN… aspect of the world, that moves the system in response to the knowledge of the situation.
But any observer of the system can only predict or guess at how the small parts of a system might move in response to a situation. While computer programs can specify how a computer system is to symbolically respond to a particular symbolic situation, there is no computer program controlling the world telling the small parts of the world how to respond to particular situations.