Does consciousness change the rules of quantum mechanics?

[C C]

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/quantu...ciousness/

KEY POINTS:  In the past few years, scientists have shown that macroscopic objects can be subjected to quantum entanglement. Pondering the limits of quantum entanglement allows us to consider how quantum mechanics can be unified with physics on a larger scale. There might be something unique about our role as conscious observers of the world around us.

INTRO: This is the fourth article in a four-part series on quantum entanglement. In the first, we discussed the basics of quantum entanglement. We then discussed how quantum entanglement can be used practically in communications and sensing. In this article, we take a look at the limits of quantum entanglement, and how entanglement on the large scale might even challenge our very basis of reality... (MORE - details)

[Ostronomos]

Intruiging. As I have proven on a certain website I choose not to name, consciousness continues after death. And sciforums I did so as well.

[confused2]

From the OP

There might be something unique about our role as conscious observers of the world around us.

Most likely not.

[Magical Realist]

Things might change if we could perform an experiment where the observers were actual, conscious people. But then ask yourself: Why? Why would consciousness change the results of the experiment? What is so special about consciousness?

Per Chalmers, consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible property of existence. It is special in the same way that time or space or mass is special. We cannot conceive a reality that does not assume a conscious observer. There is always a perspective on every thing that happens. Consciousness is so meshed into the underlying working together of things that it is present to everything. And we are special in that we are carriers of this astonishing and mysterious property. It remains to be seen what it will evolve into given a few thousand years.

“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness. Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter. The International Dictionary of Psychology does not even try to give a straightforward characterization: Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. ”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

[Kornee]

How many times does it take to point out the idiocy of suggesting consciousness is somehow essential to reality, given the universe was incapable of supporting organic life - life as we know it - for the first few billion years!

PS - By 'consciousness' it's tacitly understood to apply to 'sentient creatures' as materialists/evolutionists commonly define it.
Restricted to 'blind evolutionary end product' creatures with sensory input organs and something conforming to a brain capable of awareness if not self-awareness of some sort.
Nothing to do with the concept of an overarching presumably eternal Creator entity(s) traditionally labelled God(s).

[C C]

In other words, our idea of reality — that there is a universal truth in observations, that we have freedom of choice, and that this choice cannot affect what happens in the past or at a distance — is not consistent with quantum mechanics.

So what did their experiment show? The number of correlations they saw was consistent with what quantum mechanics would predict.

The brain's presentation of and commonsense apprehension of reality (how it interprets information from various stimulated tissue types) SHOULD be inconsistent with or radically different from the non-biological source. Or at least if one is a strict materialist (of which anti-panpsychism should be an expected component -- i.e., the "universe is neither conscious nor constituted of psychological properties"). 

And yet most, if not all of us, seem to be implicit panpsychists -- and potentially become deniers of being such if/when we do become explicitly aware of the orientation and how it conflicts with a (strict) conventional conception of matter (yet we may still perversely find ourselves reflexively indulging panpsychism). 

For instance... Verbally you can at least get believers in strict materialism to agree that the elimination of consciousness resulting from death involves all the manifested appearances of vision, hearing, feeling, etc disappearing -- and the cognitive discriminations and language-mediated conceptions that grappled with those phenomenal presentations also ceasing as activity. IOW, that "not even blankness" is what matter normally is to itself.

But in practice even the materialists simply don't adhere to that, or their commitment to whatever matter metaphysics or scientific realism they supposedly adhere to with respect to a radically different, "independent of mental representations" world that exists outside their heads.

Because nothing can be done with such "absence of everything", so the "shown" objects and events of consciousness still subtly creep back into the portrayal of that non-conscious brand of existence. (Or as an alternative, its disciplinary treatment is formally populated with abstract symbols and technical nomenclature, which are even more artificial and deliberate products. Plus, those likewise have to be manifested in some mode in order to be verified and useful.)

Similar to a church member being reverent and shouting hosannas during Sunday attendance, an advocate of scientific realism or applicable metaphysical realism can abide by their anti-panpsychism at times. But when engaging in affairs of the everyday world, it's back to contradictorily slash reflexively regarding a representation-independent and mind-independent world as not only still "showing itself" after death (or minus any living things in the universe) -- but differentiating, conceiving, and understanding itself the same as in the private thought narratives of human consciousness.

While the old article by Jesse Bering below primarily concerns the issue of death... The implications for non-conscious matter in general can be extracted from it, as well as the wayward implicit panpsychism people seem naively born with. Which we either remain verbally ignorant of, deny if finally realizing and being confronted by, or in a few [or many?] cases even come to accept as a personal view (including contingently, paradoxically accepting its rival, too).  

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...r-say-die/

EXCERPT: The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist (emphases mine):

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness -- make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”) -- and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way...

[Kornee]

What does any of such pseudo intellectual gibberish have to do with Yobba rays as incontestably far and away the greatest rays of all - bar none!? If that absolute TRUTH is not instinctively reverentially and unreservedly praised, may the Universe have mercy on your pitiful soul!

Does this apparent 'outburst' appear to be somehow irrelevant and strange - in your limited, inherently warped opinion? Too bad then - for YOU and like 'minded' ilk!

There is a chance - just a chance - someone is having a light hearted dig at pretentious pretentiousness. Or not or similar or something along those lines....

[Magical Realist]

In other words, our idea of reality — that there is a universal truth in observations, that we have freedom of choice, and that this choice cannot affect what happens in the past or at a distance — is not consistent with quantum mechanics.

So what did their experiment show? The number of correlations they saw was consistent with what quantum mechanics would predict.

The brain's presentation of and commonsense apprehension of reality (how it interprets information from various stimulated tissue types) SHOULD be inconsistent with or radically different from the non-biological source. Or at least if one is a strict materialist (of which anti-panpsychism should be an expected component -- i.e., the "universe is neither conscious nor constituted of psychological properties"). 

And yet most, if not all of us, seem to be implicit panpsychists -- and potentially become deniers of being such if/when we do become explicitly aware of the orientation and how it conflicts with a (strict) conventional conception of matter (yet we may still perversely find ourselves reflexively indulging panpsychism). 

For instance... Verbally you can at least get believers in strict materialism to agree that the elimination of consciousness resulting from death involves all the manifested appearances of vision, hearing, feeling, etc disappearing -- and the cognitive discriminations and language-mediated conceptions that grappled with those phenomenal presentations also ceasing as activity. IOW, that "not even blankness" is what matter normally is to itself.

But in practice even the materialists simply don't adhere to that, or their commitment to whatever matter metaphysics or scientific realism they supposedly adhere to with respect to a radically different, "independent of mental representations" world that exists outside their heads.

Because nothing can be done with such "absence of everything", so the "shown" objects and events of consciousness still subtly creep back into the portrayal of that non-conscious brand of existence. (Or as an alternative, its disciplinary treatment is formally populated with abstract symbols and technical nomenclature, which are even more artificial and deliberate products. Plus, those likewise have to be manifested in some mode in order to be verified and useful.)

Similar to a church member being reverent and shouting hosannas during Sunday attendance, an advocate of scientific realism or applicable metaphysical realism can abide by their anti-panpsychism at times. But when engaging in affairs of the everyday world, it's back to contradictorily slash reflexively regarding a representation-independent and mind-independent world as not only still "showing itself" after death (or minus any living things in the universe) -- but differentiating, conceiving, and understanding itself the same as in the private thought narratives of human consciousness.

While the old article by Jesse Bering below primarily concerns the issue of death... The implications for non-conscious matter in general can be extracted from it, as well as the wayward implicit panpsychism people seem naively born with. Which we either remain verbally ignorant of, deny if finally realizing and being confronted by, or in a few [or many?] cases even come to accept as a personal view (including contingently, paradoxically accepting its rival, too).  

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...r-say-die/

EXCERPT: The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist (emphases mine):

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness -- make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”) -- and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way...

That's what gets me. The materialist/extinctivist freely admits the utter nothingness of death. When we die, the world ceases to exist for us. But why would everything cease to be in death if everything wasn't somehow already dependent on us for its existence? Suddenly the materialist's world is split in two--one state being the world as if existing without consciousness, and the other state being the state of being unconscious itself. And that sort of suggests a kind of dualism between existence and this reified nothingness awaiting us in death.

[C C]

That's what gets me. The materialist/extinctivist freely admits the utter nothingness of death. When we die, the world ceases to exist for us. But why would everything cease to be in death if everything wasn't somehow already dependent on us for its existence? Suddenly the materialist's world is split in two--one state being the world as if existing without consciousness, and the other state being the state of being unconscious itself. And that sort of suggests a kind of dualism between existence and this reified nothingness awaiting us in death.

Bertrand Russell: We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stone are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.

So for those who aren't naive realists -- those believers of strict materialism or scientific realism, etc (which can collectively be subsumed by indirect realism), it's only the brain's version of the world that disappears. The one "painted" and manifested by the psychological properties given to it. Similar to how when you send a computer into sleep the representation on the screen ceases, but not the very different nature of the software data and hardware responsible for it.

However, should they shift from their common idea that the properties of consciousness brutely arise (magical-like) from neural processes, to being fundamental or "out there" rather than purely associated with the brain... Then then that becomes categorizable as part of direct realism or panpsychism. (The latter where psychological properties or less complex precursors of them are ubiquitous, and what the brain recruits to constitute its representational affairs.)

This goes back to most people being born implicit naive or direct realists, panpsychists, etc  -- including lightweight believers in materialism slash scientific realism who don't realize what such entails when it comes to death and non-consciousness. Like the "non-theists" Bering referred to, that contradictorily conceive experiences and interpretations of them occurring after their demise. Panpsychism, naive realism, etc is so natively engrained in them that they can't truly dispense with such even after assuming philosophical stances that are against it.

[Ostronomos]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/q5Fo3DHFJpY