Experiments Suggest Humans Can Directly Observe the Quantum

Experiments Suggest Humans Can Directly Observe the Quantum

Maureen Seaberg

It is important to note that this new understanding of the unexpected scale, accuracy, and precision of human vision, its capacity to directly access light at the level of single photons, and quite possibly also to determine the very quantum nature of light, has been developing within a larger context in the fields of biophysics and psychophysics, as well as in physics itself. This context, which also has not moved much into the realm of popular culture, nor even much into the overall scientific community itself, includes radical and revolutionary findings on not only vision, but on the other senses as well.

Describing the recent research in his lab and others into human hearing, biophysicist A.J. Hudspeth of Rockefeller University reports (cited in Bushell 2018, link forthcoming), "Statistics concerning the human ear are astounding. The healthy human cochlea is so sensitive that it can detect vibration with amplitude less than the diameter of an atom, and it can resolve time intervals down to 10µs [i.e., microseconds, or millionths of a second]. It has been calculated that the human ear detects energy levels 10- fold lower than the energy of a single photon in the green wavelength...” Regarding human tactile and related senses (haptic, proprioceptive), it has recently been determined that “human tactile discrimination extends to the nanoscale [ie, within billionths of a meter],” this research having been published in the journal, Scientific Reports (Skedung et al 2013).

Research into the human olfactory system has also recently been undergoing revolutionary progress, as it now appears to be part of a larger, organism-wide chemo-receptor system containing cells distributed throughout the body. The system appears likely to function via the mechanism of quantum tunneling of electrons within these olfactory/chemo-receptors (among other related mechanisms), and it has recently also been shown that the human olfactory sense is capable of discriminating over one trillion olfactory stimuli, as reported in the journal Science in 2014; the previous estimate was that the human olfactory sense could discriminate up to 10,000 different stimuli. (We will bring you more on this in much greater detail in a future post.)

There's an interesting argument lacking adequate reasoning in one of the articles mentioned:

There is, of course, an elephant in the room: human consciousness. Could conscious perception ultimately cause the collapse of the quantum state, making the photon show up on one or the other side? Prevedel doubts consciousness has anything whatsoever to do with measurement and collapse.

“Consciousness…arises in our brain as the combined effect of millions, if not billions, of cells and neurons. If there is a role of consciousness in the detection of quantum superposition, it’d involve a really macroscopic object on the level of the entire brain, i.e. a huge ensemble of atoms and electrons that make up the biological cells,” Prevedel says. “From all that we know, this kind of macroscopic object would not be able to sustain quantum [superposition].”

So if it can be shown the eye is not a measurement device, that seems to actually open up [at least] two [interesting] possibilities:


1) Theories of wave-function collapse that make a space for measurement by observers are in error. (Observer here doesn't need to be a conscious entitiy.)

2) Consciousness causes collapse.

Given the experiments should be reporting their results soon, this could be a very big deal...or leave us with the same questions we already have...

1) Theories of wave-function collapse that make a space for measurement by observers are in error. (Observer here doesn't need to be a conscious entitiy.)

I suspect that fitting anything involving retroactively changing the measurement -i.e. the delayed choice quantum eraser- in there would be difficult. The thing is, if the eye isn't a measurement device, neither are the sensors used in any of these experiments.

I suspect that fitting anything involving retroactively changing the measurement -i.e. the delayed choice quantum eraser- in there would be difficult. The thing is, if the eye isn't a measurement device, neither are the sensors used in any of these experiments.

Yeah I will be very curious to see the responses if the experiment shows a deviation from expectation. It seems a lot of things in QM would possibly be affected, though we do have Objective Collapse theories - even Orch OR turns on an "objective collapse" as opposed to a "measurment collapse" from what I understand...

Yeah I will be very curious to see the responses if the experiment shows a deviation from expectation. It seems a lot of things in QM would possibly be affected, though we do have Objective Collapse theories - even Orch OR turns on an "objective collapse" as opposed to a "measurment collapse" from what I understand...

Yeah, but I would not bet on them. I'm fairly sure that if local realism is blown, which may happen sooner than not when someone figures how to close all the loopholes at once, our view of reality will move towards something more abstract.

I was never convinced by Orch OR, but to its credit Penrose/Hammeroff did predict quantum weirdness in neuron micro tubules.

Yeah, but I would not bet on them. I'm fairly sure that if local realism is blown, which may happen sooner than not when someone figures how to close all the loopholes at once, our view of reality will move towards something more abstract.

I was never convinced by Orch OR, but to its credit Penrose/Hammeroff did predict quantum weirdness in neuron micro tubules.

I doubt Orch OR in its particulars but i suspect it will prove, for a time, to be prescient in certain brain/mind matters.

Admittedly Penrose's apparent belief in Platonic Math / Aesthetic / Value + Non-Computational Mind matches my own thinking, so I am drawn to those aspects of the theory. It's a theory I wouldn't mind being true, but the particulars seem to depend too much on a physics-as-primary panpsychism/platonism and so it feels fragile.

The ideal would be Hammeroff finds some genuine treatment options through the quantum biology of microtubules, it pushes things away from materialism, and if the theory falls apart after the door is too open for the materialist fundamentalists too close.