Steve Dufourny I am separately mentioning here also the book "The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality" that I co-authored with Robert Lanza, just in case that this will be deleted if as a violation of the forum rules. There you will find a detailed description related to your point "...and an observer's presence could influence the selection of one history over another. I am not sure about this , maybe we need a concrete begining and deeper physical and philosophical parameters."
MMatej Pavsic
- Nov 30, 2024
- Joined Oct 26, 2024
Steve Dufourny Thank you for listening my YouTube video. I am glad that you liked it. At the beginning of that interview I said that different interpretation of quantum mechanics might not exclude each other, but each reveals a part of the true nature of quantum mechanics. Something similar you said in your first reply. As I explained, Everett's many worlds and the Copenhagen collapse are compatible, if one distinguishes between the first person and the third person view, and takes into account the hierarchy of representations. Another person's brain activity is just a representation (a picture) in (my) consciousness. That representation can be very detailed if I am measuring the brain processes in a scientific experiment, or it can be superficial, if I only speak to the person. But it remains only a representation. Consciousness is my (first person) experience, it is associated with the wave function determining the world of my experience. I briefly explained in the previous post why this is not solipsism. I also explained it in more technical terms in the Foundations of Physics paper, and less technically in the last part of my book "The Landscape of Theoretical Physics".
Steve Dufourny You raised important points. Some of them are attempted to be clarified in the video "Biocentrism: A Physics Perspective" My talk offers an impartial and unbiased analysis of the implications of quantum mechanics. It has roots in the last part of my book The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View (Kluwer Academic, 2001), since 2005 available, by permission of the publisher, at https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0610061. A more technical discussions is in Sec. 4 of the scientific paper https://www.academia.edu/43640633/The_Embedding_Models_of_Induced_Gravity_with_Bosonic_Sources, published in Foundations of Physics in 1994. I also intend to discuss and try to clarify all this here, but I think that looking at the works mentioned above could help understanding my points and facilitate further discussion.
I am a theoretical physicist, interested, among others, in foundations of quantum mechanics and its relation to consciousness. I think that "the hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible." Consciousness is fundamental, one cannot explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity, because the brain as a physical object is already being experienced in consciousness. Trying to explain (my) consciousness as an activity of my brain is like a serpent eating its own tail. Trying to explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity of other people is mixing two different levels of representation: other people's brain activity (if I observe it by means of suitable equipment) is just a representation in (my) consciousness, a picture within a picture, a story within a story... (see "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter for further insight). But such a view faces the problem of solipsism.
There is a way to avoid solipsism as follows. Wave function is a representation of a quantum state which in my interpretation is consciousness.There are many possible wave functions/quantum states. One is such that I experience myself being a person A, experiencing the world that includes a person B as a picture in (my) consciousness. Another wave function (quantum state) is such that I experience myself being the person B, experiencing the world that includes the person A. There is a common cross-section world of both persons (and all other persons) that they interpret as an objective world. In both cases there is the "I", first person's experience, "me feeling". Consciousness is fundamental, the "external" world is a part of consciousness, and yet in this setup there is no solipsism. Objective reality is the Hilbert space of all quantum states, which are the states of different possible streams of consciousness.