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+--- Thread: Dimming an unobserved candle in the past with your mind (/thread-21598.html)
Dimming an unobserved candle in the past with your mind - Magical Realist - Oct 16, 2026
https://noetic.org/blog/quantum-consciousness/
Interesting that the candle was unaffected by AI's observation of it. It's really consciousness afterall baby!
"When you combine the von Neumann-Wigner hypothesis with Wheeler’s delayed choice, a mind-bending question emerges: If collapse requires a conscious observer, and if the choice of measurement can happen after the fact, could a piece of recorded, unobserved data remain in a state of quantum limbo until someone finally looks at it?
The Candle Flame Experiment
To put this profound question to the test, the IONS team designed an optical interferometer experiment using an ultra-low-noise diode laser. They directed this highly stable laser through a transmission diffraction grating, a device that splits the single beam of light into distinct, separate spots. In this setup, sensors were placed at two of these diffraction spots to carefully record their brightness.
Here is where the experiment took a dramatic departure from traditional physics lab work: The data from these light sensors was recorded and securely stored on a hard drive for months. Crucially, no human being looked at this data. The raw numbers were gathered, encrypted, and left entirely unobserved.
Months later, the researchers launched an online interface designed as a minimalist adventure game. A total of 1,000 test sessions were run by human participants. On their screens, they were presented with an animated, glowing candle flame. Unbeknownst to the them, the flickering brightness of this digital candle flame was being directly driven by the prerecorded, unobserved data from one of the two laser spots recorded months prior.
The instructions for the participants were simple but demanding. During 30-second “intention” intervals, they were asked to focus deeply on the candle flame and mentally intend for it to become dimmer. During alternating “relax” intervals, they were allowed to withdraw their attention. To ensure that the participants were genuinely paying attention and not just letting their minds wander, a subtle, cloud-like shape next to the flame would coalesce into a discernable word when the flame dimmed, which the user had to identify.
The Ultimate Control: Artificial Intelligence
In any experiment of this nature, establishing a perfect control group is essential. If human consciousness is truly the active ingredient collapsing the wavefunction and altering the light’s brightness, what happens if an intelligent, non-conscious system performs exactly the same task?
To answer this, the researchers deployed an Artificial Intelligence observer. Using advanced language models with visual processing capabilities, the AI agent was programmed to simulate a human participant. It “looked” at the screen, monitored the brightness of the candle flame, extracted the hidden words from the clouds, and logged its sessions. The AI conducted 1,000 sessions, engaging with the same pool of prerecorded data, using the same browser interface, and analyzed through the same mathematical pipeline as the human group.
This created a perfect comparison. Because the laser data was recorded months in advance, there was no chance that the participants’ physical bodies could have influenced the physical laser equipment. And because the AI performed the same information-extraction task as the humans, the researchers could isolate the one remaining variable of interest: the subjective, conscious experience of human intention.
The Mind-Bending Results
When the data were analyzed, the results were striking.
The researchers looked at the trajectory of the laser’s brightness during the 30-second focused intention periods, each of which followed by a 30-second relax period. For the human participants, a statistically reliable pattern emerged. During periods when humans were actively intending for the flame to dim, the prerecorded data driving that flame showed a distinct, negative slope, meaning the light had become dimmer to a significant degree. When they were relaxing and not paying attention, the same slope was not significant. Even more remarkably, this dimming effect only occurred on the specific sensor that the humans were observing through the candle game. The second sensor, which was recording simultaneously in the lab months prior but was never shown to the human participants, showed no such effect.
Then came the data from the AI agents. Despite processing the same visual information, successfully identifying the hidden words, and completing the tasks identically to the humans, the AI sessions produced a null result. There was no dimming of the light. The AI’s interaction with the data had no effect on the recorded brightness.
Out of eight possible statistical outcomes across the two different sensors, human vs. AI groups, and intention vs. relax periods, only one specific combination showed a significant effect: Human consciousness, actively intending, interacting with the observed sensor data.
Rewriting the Past, or Collapsing the Present?
The implications suggest that the von Neumann-Wigner hypothesis deserves serious consideration. Information processing alone, the kind of complex data extraction performed by modern AI, was not enough to trigger the effect. It required the presence of a conscious human mind.
Second, and perhaps more radically, the experiment demonstrates a retrocausal signature. The humans in this study were intending to dim a candle flame whose behavior was dictated by photons that had completed their journey months earlier. How can a conscious intention today alter the distribution of light that hit a sensor in the past?
According to the frameworks proposed by some quantum theorists, the answer lies in understanding that a recorded piece of data, if entirely unobserved, may not yet be a fixed state. It may remain in a state of coexisting quantum alternatives. When the human observer finally views the data through the candle interface, that is the moment the collapse occurs. The conscious observation supplies the final condition that retroactively determines which quantum history is actualized. This is an extension of Wheeler’s delayed choice concept, scaled up from microscopic particles to macroscopic digital records.
A New Paradigm on the Horizon
While the measured effect was small in magnitude, as is typical when exploring the delicate boundary between the quantum realm and macroscopic reality, its statistical reliability and the rigorous, AI-controlled, prerecorded design make it incredibly difficult to dismiss as a mere artifact.
If human consciousness is genuinely entangled with the fundamental operations of physical reality, it implies that we are not just passive spectators living in a mechanical universe. Instead, conscious awareness might be an active, integral component of the cosmos, necessary for translating the infinite possibilities of quantum mechanics into the definite, lived experience of our everyday world.
These findings invite us to rethink the very nature of observation, time, and the role of the mind. Science progresses by continually questioning its foundational assumptions, and this experiment, which is based on a series of previously published studies, provides a compelling, empirical reason to inquire if the universe really does require minds to bring it into being."
RE: Dimming an unobserved candle in the past with your mind - Syne - Oct 16, 2026
Interesting.... if it can be replicated and verified.
RE: Dimming an unobserved candle in the past with your mind - confused2 - Oct 16, 2026
Some astronomy involves Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) (not least the Event Horizon Telescope which imaged a black hole)
AI Wrote:When widely spaced receivers observe the same celestial object in the microwave or radio bands, they don't need a physical cable connecting them to create interference patterns. Instead, the process relies on independent, high-precision recordings:
1. Coherent Data Recording
Because microwave signals have lower frequencies compared to visible light, the actual phase, amplitude, and instantaneous voltage of the incoming electromagnetic wave can be measured directly. Each telescope records this raw baseband signal voltage onto high-speed digital storage drives.
2. Time-Stamping with Atomic Clocks
To capture interference later, the data at each station must be perfectly synchronized. Every station uses an independent hydrogen maser atomic clock to overlay incredibly precise time stamps on the recorded data.
3. Post-Observation Cross-Correlation
The physical hard drives are shipped (or the data is streamed digitally via e-VLBI) to a central supercomputing facility called a correlator. The correlator replays the data streams simultaneously, introducing calculated time delays to account for the Earth's curvature and rotation. When the signals are mathematically multiplied and combined, interference fringes emerge computationally.
Interference effects are .. what they are (very quantum) .. I am inclined to doubt the dimming candle story.