Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.
But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.
The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)
Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)
Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.
Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.
Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.
Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”
Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.
While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.
I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.
As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.
Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)
I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.
The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.
At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)
Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.
I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”
***
If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.
Coops
A thought that just occurred to me: what is the ‘The Universe is a simulation’ idea is true? Therefore, ‘reality’ has to be observed in order to exist, otherwise, the simulation is wasting massive amounts of computational power on modelling things that aren’t being observed.
j
I, for one, think that consciousness is a property of matter itself.
The word observation, however, is most often misunderstood. To observe means to take a measurement, and to take a measurement means to interact with whatever you are observing. Interaction obviously is not without an effect. All observation really means is the interaction part. It has nothing to do with consciousness, nor even with life itself.
To ovserve the pressure in a tire you need to put a gauge on it. Doing that, you release a small amount of air from the tire, changing the very pressure that you are measuring. Nothing to do with consciousness here. Two things interacted, and caused a change to each other. That’s all there is.
Paul
This stuff is fascinating. The act of “observation” or “measurement” does not need consciousness. In this case observation means the moment a waveform of probability meets or interacts with a structure sufficiently large, so as not to become entangled at the quantum level, which then causes it to collapse and so determines the place, mass, velocity etc of the particles involved.
Consciousness is too vague a thing to be able to have any affect on anything: what is it, what has it, where does it begin and so on. I take it as being simply a post hoc rationalisation of events that occur in our personal experience.
That’s simply my poorly informed take on something pretty much unknowable and I’m probably completely wrong.
Joe
I feel like this makes inherent sense to someone who isn’t a monotheist, especially someone who was never a monotheist is in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim sense.
To an animist, or even most polytheists, this is how the universe works. The kinds of observations made in the post are standard “secret knowledge” taught in mystery schools all throughout history.
Oakchair
experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made.
Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.
——
A different way to put it is that the neurological activity associated with what comes right before we become aware of our “decision” is all by itself a free will made decision.
Just because a brain has certain biological activity before a decision doesn’t mean that decision lacked free will.
—-
the science… doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views
—-
On of the best arguments against Darwinian evolution is the astronomically low chance of complex biological processes that require 10+ steps before reaching a result that provides any viable effect let alone beneficial effect. However, if we apply a quantum mechanics evolution model these seeming impossible occurrence can be explained.
To simplify J point, the observer IS the observed.
Feral Finster
“Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)”
I am yet to meet a cat that will sit quietly locked up in a box.
Eric F
Yes, the standard Quantum interpretation is strange. Yes, consciousness is pervasive.
But many people believe that consciousness does not require biological life. God, etc. That premise seems to me unproveable, and thus will remain an article of faith.
I agree with j and Paul above, that ‘measurement’ does not require consciousness.
I also believe that much of the standard Quantum interpretation is based on some kind of misunderstanding. But I’m ignorant, and I can’t articulate exactly why I believe that.
Except that this wave/particle duality is based on mental images from our naive macro reality. What if quantum objects are always both ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ and we only call them one or the other because of how we choose to detect them?
I think there are some people who entertain this possibility, but since we don’t have language for such a dual wave/particle structure, it’s really hard to talk about. A spherical standing wave that might have a charge and can travel?
Everyone understands particles = miniature bowling balls.
But what about waves? How do we describe waves? How can we explain a wave to a third grader without talking about tossing a pebble in a pool? But if we are going to have an intuitive understanding of waves, we need to understand them without resorting to the water in the pool. The water in the pool is the aether. Remember the aether? Solidly disproven more than 100 years ago.
ven
Does this really resolve the free will argument. After all, what we are now is a function of genetics and environment; our personality is shaped by the family we are born into, their relative prosperity, the schools we went to, and our experiences to date. And at each point in time, our personality at that point determines how we respond to external stimuli. Is that really free will or path-dependent personality?
As an aside, in Advaita philosophy, consciousness is primary; I and the world are both maya – a projection on consciousness. Enlightenment implies the end of the duality of ‘I’ and the world.
Purple Library Guy
No. This is a misconception. It’s based on poor communication by physics people, which has parlayed a bad choice of terminology into a vast edifice of misconception by large percentages of the public and even historically some physicists, although my impression is that latter has gotten much rarer lately.
The problem is the term “observation”. No, quantum stuff moving “from wave to particle status” does not require a consciousness to see it or even measure it. A better term would be “interaction”. If a quantum thing impinges on other bits of the world in some way, decoherence happens. It has nothing to do with consciousness or actual observation. Observation/measurement by a consciousness WILL always cause decoherence, BECAUSE they require some kind of interaction. But interactions that do not involve observation or measurement ALSO cause decoherence; the presence of consciousness makes no difference. So “observation” as a term of art in quantum physics is deeply misleading; it does NOT mean “observation” in the way normal people think of it AT ALL.
As a result, all the mystical speculations that make use of this supposed feature of quantum physics are built on sand. They have no actual basis. If people want to be mystical that’s fine, but they should not try to get scientific support for the mysticism by dragging in quantum physics, because what they think is being said is just an artifact of bad terminology.
AJ
Related, for those interested in more science-informed speculation on the topic: https://youtu.be/pdXkBLlQxPg?si=XUSHzRnb7qjrWGtI
Purple Library Guy
As to biological machines and the supposed brain-making-decisions-before-you-realize-it’s-happening schtick . . . people are always talking about this, and I always figured that experiment had to be a bit suspect. But today I looked into it, and yeah. I mean, not really the experimenters’ fault–they did an experiment, it had some results, and those results are not bogus and are kind of interesting. But they don’t say what everyone says they say, and they don’t seem to have even said what the experimenters thought they said.
So first of all, this is experiments about people doing things like flexing their wrist. And I mean, really? This is what we’re going to build our theories of intention and decision-making and will about? I’m a fiddler. I make physical motions without consciously thinking about them, let alone making conscious decisions about them, ALL THE TIME. Twirling pens, selecting text with my mouse, tapping fingers, patterned tapping fingers, all kinds of stuff. Even people who aren’t fiddlers will routinely shift their physical position without consciously deciding to or even noticing it. On top of that there’s robust evidence that long-practiced physical movements are often done with very minimal brain involvement–signals go up the spine, hit the brainstem and back down and that’s it. So for instance, if you’ve practiced the piano forever, doing scales won’t require a lot of brain involvement. Or if you’ve practiced a martial art for ages, and you’re sparring and there’s that moment for a counterpunch, you won’t think about it and make a decision. The decision making happened months ago when you decided to practice that move that you now pull off before you realize it. I don’t think that means people don’t make decisions.
But there are problems with the experiment itself and what it does and doesn’t imply. The experimenters found that certain brain activity happened, that started shortly before people reported having consciously decided to flex that wrist. They could predict the action . . . more than half the time, but not always, which raises some questions. But, other experiments have found interesting things related to the significance of that. I’ll quote an article I just read:
(article is here https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/ )
“In a modified version of Libet’s experiment (in which participants were asked to press one of two buttons in response to images on a computer screen), participants showed “readiness potential” even before the images came up on the screen, suggesting that it was not related to deciding which button to press.
Still others have suggested that the area of the brain where the “readiness potential” occurs—the supplementary motor area, or SMA—is usually associated with imagining movements rather than actually performing them. The experience of willing is usually associated with other areas of the brain (the parietal areas). And finally, in another modified version of Libet’s experiment, participants showed readiness potential even when they made a decision not to move, which again casts doubt on the assumption that the readiness potential is actually registering the brain’s “decision” to move.”
So overall, I don’t think the experiment actually says that “our brains” subconsciously “decide” to do things before we realize we’re deciding. The most we can say is that a piece of our brains sometimes starts sort of prepping to think about something before we consciously start to think about it. Or at least, before we really notice we’ve started thinking about it. That’s an interesting result, but it has no real implications in terms of free will or questions of physicality of the mind. And as a result, there is no need to invoke spurious ideas about quantum physics to try to defeat any such implications, because they aren’t there.
Don’t get me wrong, I personally don’t believe in souls. I think minds are an emergent property of brains. Just as you can’t say all that much useful about ecology by talking about physics, you can’t say all that much useful about minds by talking about brains . . . but ecologies operate within the physical universe and the laws of physics, just as minds are things that happen in at least some brains. Realizing this can tell you useful things–thermodynamics, for instance, has ecological implications–but still, an emergent property of something has its own rules that are not really predictable from the level below. However, I believe this quite independent of the Libet experiment, which does not particularly strengthen this idea.
As to free will . . . I think it’s almost pointless to talk about for much the same reason it doesn’t tell us much that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. What I’m getting at is, I don’t think anyone really understands what free will IS or what it would mean to have it, or not have it, or what the difference might be between HAVING free will and having AN ILLUSION of free will. So you get tons of people talking as though quantum randomness would make it more plausible to have free will . . . but how does that follow? If you think about it for two seconds, it’s obvious acting randomly isn’t free will. How can I have free will if I’m not making decisions based in who I am? And, what can it really mean to BELIEVE I have free will, but not actually have it? How would it look different to have it for real? And if we can’t come up with an account of what having free will that wasn’t an illusion of it would BE, on what basis can we claim that an illusion of it isn’t the real thing? And I’m really not clear that some sort of immaterial soul-ish something-or-other would make me any more free-will-esque.
I tend to believe I have free will. I have ideas and beliefs, I think about them, I draw conclusions and I act on them according to what I believe and how I think. Is there something else that free will could be that would be meaningful? And yes, I think that stuff is based in the brain, but I don’t think that invalidates it in any way. Sure, people can end up unable to do some of that stuff because of physical impacts on the brain of one sort or another, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it normally. It’s like saying you can’t REALLY walk, because some people are in wheelchairs and others are so hungry they’re too weak to walk, and REAL walking wouldn’t depend on your body being intact.
GramSci
I’ve grappled a bit with quantum mechanics as applied to subatomic particles. I’m sure it works in that realm — as in, duh! there now *are* atom bombs — but I was never motivated to dig too deeply into the mathematics. Quantum mechanics *does* however make a great deal of sense to me when the concepts are applied to the nervous system, especially human neocortex.
I have an old, still somewhat primitive slideshow online that I’ve been working to resuscitate. Perhaps by the end of it some readers might even catch my drift if I refer to the “gated dipole” as the neural “particle” of “free will”.
https://www.thoughtandlanguage.com/public/how/neural_mechanics__slides_.htl
mago
It’s interesting how these scientific discoveries corroborate ancient Mahayana Buddhism’s basic principles. Not this, not that, not both, not neither. That’s called the splinter argument, which I’ll make no attempt to explain.
(I actually find Madhyamaka teachings rather tedious, however factual.)
I’m probably dropping wtf’s this guy talking about stuff here. But I’ll go further with the five skandhas: form, feeling, perception, formation and consciousness. There’s form followed by a feeling about that form then the perception of that form, then bundling it up to consciousness. The process occurs beyond light speed.
I told myself to not even begin with this description of mind perception and consciousness and won’t be offended if it goes unposted.
Anyway, having started I’ll go further and quote from the Heart Sutra. “Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form, therefore Shariputra in emptiness there is no form no feeling no perception no formation no consciousness. . . “
There have been enough commentaries on the Heart Sutra alone to fill libraries.
Anyway, glad to see the scientific studies and discussions hit the mainstream.
Oakchair
But many people believe that consciousness does not require biological life.
That premise seems to me unproveable,
—–
I don’t think it’s provable because consciousness is a meta-physical term.
——
What if quantum objects are always both ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ and we only call them one or the other because of how we choose to detect them?
—–
A particle is shot through a slit. When the particle is not “observed” at the slit it behave as a wave. When it is “observed” it behaves as a particle. The “observation” can occur afterwards as long as the measurement is potentially “observable”. The quantum objects can be made to behave like a particle and afterwards reverted to behaving as a wave by destroying the recording of the measurement.
To me saying they are always both a particle and a wave sounds like one acceptable way to describe it.
Really we don’t know what’s going and it’s possibly impossible to describe it without sounding as if you’re channeling some Eastern Mystic. Physicists who talked with or read Jiddu krishnamurti would comment how much he sounded like he was talking about quantum mechanics.
Ian Welsh
You’re very positive PLG, but I’m not sure you’re correct. The selection effect (what outcome is chosen) remains unexplained. But I’m not physicist. Berman is though.
j
Don’t know much about Berman, but if he’s going around telling conciousness is a requirement for the observation in the quantum physics sense, he’s no more a physicist than Hancook is an archaeologist. Caveat emptor.
Decisions made before being aware of them… don’t see how that’s a problem for free will. First, does anyone actually expect the brain to process things at instant speed? We basically have movement detector circuitry at the bottom of the eyes, because the time needed for big brain to detect movement is enough to get us eaten by whatever just jumped out of the bush. Of course some parts of the brain will light up before than the others. And consciousness is not really high up on the notification list of most decisions either. Every repeated decision/action pair trains it’s own specialized circuitry, whose whole purpose is to handle it’s job without conscious involvement. And that is a good thing.
Free will, mostly, is a pointless philosophical argument. Like many others, this one also can be solved by observing the real world, something a philosopher will never do. There seems to be a rule of thumb – people who believe in free will tend to be the ones who achieve something in life; people who don’t, stay where they are, miserable. You can of course try to explain or argue this problem away with additional metaphysics, but not so without going against the Occam’s razor.
Every time philosophy stumbles on something that is actually useful, it becomes it’s own science. Everything that remains in philosophy, is pointless navel gazing that has no value in the real world.
That being said, I do like to sometimes gaze the navel pointlessly. For me, free will lies in our ability to do the right thing. We have all sorts of things stacked against us in that. Our genetics, upbringing, environment and peer pressure, our moods and character traits, all of these are pushing us to just go with the flow and take the easy way out. But when you step up against that and do the right thing, only because it’s the right thing, expecting nothing out of it in return… That is when you excercise your free will.
Flaser
Bringing consciousness into quantum mechanics is incorrect.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what “observation” entails in experiments: in order to measure phenomenon, we must interact with it. Said interaction usually shows the particle nature of whatever we measure.
A consciousness observer isn’t necessary.
Neither do quantum phenomenon “change” being a wave or a particle’ they’re always both at the same time, hence why they’re called dual natured.
It’s only that in certain interactions either the wave or the particle nature dominates.
(This could also be a facet of our models that rely on either nature to explain our observations)
samm
I must preface my comment with I do not know the author and have not read the book, but I find it rather solipsistic to think consciousness plays any role in the fundamentals of physics. The fact that the quantum physics have a different set of rules than the macro world only means our limited senses and limited brains cannot sense the true nature of the universe. We are like those blind men and the elephant.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe the universe really did invent consciousness in order to collapse its wave function, and it really is just a formless soup until its measured. But I don’t think there is any avoiding that such thinking is simply mysticism. I think consciousness, another slippery concept we feeble yet egotistical and self-important humans cannot fully grasp, is just a canard.
elkern
I’m with PLG, j, and Flaser. ‘Interaction’ is a better word for it than ‘observation’.
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a ‘sound’? Some of the energy will surely dissipate as vibrations through the air, but I suppose people could claim that doesn’t count as a ‘sound’ unless someone with ears (and ‘consciousness’, or maybe ‘language’?) ‘hears’ it.
Soredemos
This one is super simple: the answer is a resounding no. ‘Observed’ in this context just means interacted with for the purposes of a test. This is just repackaged Deepak Chopra ‘the moon doesn’t exist until someone looks at it’ type shit.
Joan
I live with a quantum mechanic so I asked him these questions. A photon goes in two directions until measured, and the measurement or interaction is the point at which you lose the potential of both paths so it’s advantageous to leave it unmeasured .
On a decision in the present changing the past, he thought it was more that once it’s measured and the signal reports it, that of course puts the incident in the past. That’s the version that reflects standard quantum mechanics and thus doesn’t violate causality or the linear nature of time. (And of course his longer explanation is getting filtered through me, so grain of salt.)
Oakchair
I think it is important to understand the major tests because the results of them render the stated objections obsolete.
1- They set up two slits and shoot a photon (or even a particle with mass) at it. When the slits are not measured the photon behaves like a wave. When a measurement is taken at the slit the photon behaves like a particle.
2- They do the same experiment only record the measurement and then deleted the measurement before a human views it. In this case the measurement does NOT cause the photon to behave like a particle.
3- They do the second experiment only instead of deleting the measurement a human looks at it later. In the case the photon seemingly is caused to behave like a particle by a future observer.
The measurement is NOT responsible for the wave collapse.
Jorge
@Feral Finster: I am yet to meet a cat that will sit quietly locked up in a box.
Build the box with a one-way mirror facing outward, and you’ve got cat heaven.
Jorge
As QM has not been correlated with astrophysics, I must stick with the objection that QM & astrophysics are not the deepest, most final explanation and these philosophical ramblings are mostly pointless.
Flaser
@Oakchair that’s not how the two slit experiment works.
To begin with, that experiment doesn’t show the collapse of the wave function, but that even a single photon can act like a wave and produce an interference with itself.
Also, what measurement destroys is quantum entanglement, not the wave function.
As I keep stressing, photos and electrons don’t have an identity crisis, “switching” between being a wave or a particle’. They’re both at all times.