How we hear each other+off topic QM

Wilson has a very wide background and an amazing intellect.  If you obtain a copy of any of his books you can read the full quote but this is all I can find online.

http://www.hilaritaspress.com/portfolio-...sychology/


Does for Quantum Mechanics what Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet did for Relativity, but Wilson is funnier. – John Gribbin, physicist

“What great physicist hides behind the mask of Wilson?” – New Scientist


If you really think he knows nothing about QM, may I suggest reading his fictional "Schrödinger's Cat" trilogy or his semi-autobiographical "Cosmic Trigger Pt.1 - The Final Secret Of The Illuminati"  (A good idea to forget about his past as editor of Playboy)

It might illuminate you

I have found nothing in his educational background that gives me any confidence.

I have found nothing in his educational background that gives me any confidence.

I have found nothing in any of your posts that gives me confidence that you have any clue what you are talking about.  You're good at quoting cherry picked quotes and at blanket denial but not at qualifying such.   Here's a brief intro to QM the Wilson way.

I have found nothing in any of your posts that gives me confidence that you have any clue what you are talking about.  You're good at quoting cherry picked quotes and at blanket denial but not at qualifying such.   Here's a brief intro to QM the Wilson way.

While listening to this vid I knew immediately something was wrong, but couldn't put my finger on it, so I had to do a little sleuthing, this is what I found. What Wilson did was describe QM 101.
By Wilson's own admission:

Chapter Three opens with a shocker: “By the way, I have no academic qualifications to write about Quantum Mechanics at all, but this has not prevented me from discussing the subject quite cheerfully in four previous books.” https://jimrazinha.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/r-a-wilsons-quantum-psychology-a-critique

Here's a vid by PBS Spacetime titled: Does Consciousness Influence Reality.
https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q

So you tell me which one understands QM?

Wilson has a very wide background and an amazing intellect.  If you obtain a copy of any of his books you can read the full quote but this is all I can find online.

http://www.hilaritaspress.com/portfolio-...sychology/


Does for Quantum Mechanics what Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet did for Relativity, but Wilson is funnier. – John Gribbin, physicist

“What great physicist hides behind the mask of Wilson?” – New Scientist


If you really think he knows nothing about QM, may I suggest reading his fictional "Schrödinger's Cat" trilogy or his semi-autobiographical "Cosmic Trigger Pt.1 - The Final Secret Of The Illuminati"  (A good idea to forget about his past as editor of Playboy)

It might illuminate you

While Wilson himself wasn't a physicist, I could easily see him translating ideas from actual physicists into his work - possibly even serving as the "mask" aka public mouthpiece for someone else who is/was an actual physicist...some possible contenders in the field of physics I might suspect ->

1. The older authors of this article (Stapp and Kafatos, BK is a bit too young I suspect to be an influence on Wilson):

Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics

Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, Menas C. Kafatos

Some claim that the modern notion of “decoherence” rules out consciousness as the agency of measurement. According to this claim, when a quantum system in a superposition state is probed, information about the overlapping possibilities in the superposition “leaks out” and becomes dispersed in the surrounding environment. This allegedly explains in a fairly mechanical manner why the superposition becomes indiscernible after measurement.

The problem, however, is that decoherence cannot explain how the state of the surrounding environment becomes definite to begin with, so it doesn’t solve the measurement problem or rule out the role of consciousness. Indeed, as Wojciech Zurek—one of the fathers of decoherence—admitted,

…an exhaustive answer to [the question of why we perceive a definite world] would undoubtedly have to involve a model of ‘consciousness,’ since what we are really asking concerns our [observers’] impression that ‘we are conscious’ of just one of the alternatives.

As a matter of fact, peculiar statistical characteristics of the behavior of entangled quantum systems (namely, their experimentally confirmed violation of so-called “Bell’s and Leggett’s inequalities”) seem to rule out everything but consciousness as the agency of measurement. Some then claim that entanglement is observed only in microscopic systems and, therefore, its peculiarities are allegedly irrelevant to the world of tables and chairs.

But such a claim is untrue, as several recent studies (e.g. 2009, 2011 and 2015) have demonstrated entanglement for much larger systems. Last year, a paper reported entanglement even for “massive” objects. Moreover, quantum superposition has been observed in systems as varied as small metal paddles and living tissue. Clearly, the laws of QM apply at all scales and substrates.

What preserves a superposition is merely how well the quantum system—whatever its size—is isolated from the world of tables and chairs known to us through direct conscious apprehension. That a superposition does not survive exposure to this world suggests, if anything, a role for consciousness in the emergence of a definite physical reality.

Stapp has written a lot about the role of Consciousness in quantum mechanics, including a few books.

Kafatos as well has authored a few books, including The Conscious Universe.

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2. Fred Wolf, author of Shamanic Physics



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3. Nobel physicist Brian Josephson ->

Biological Utilisation of Quantum NonLocality

"...The explanation proposed here involves the issue of exactly what kind of randomness is being presupposed when one performs such statistical averaging. An answer to this question in general terms is provided by causal (non-statistical) models of the phenomena of the quantum realm such as that of Bohm(9). This kind of interpretation assumes the relevance of particular probability distributions in an appropriate phase space. The possibility that one needs in general to deal with coexisting multiple representations of reality (complementarity) is then considered, the implication being that different kinds of probability distributions to those relevant to quantum mechanical predictions may be appropriate in cases such as those involving biosystems.

From the point of view of a biosystem itself, this possibility translates into one that biosystems can have more discriminative knowledge of nature than is obtainable by quantum measurement. As a result of this higher degree of discrimination, the evolutionary and developmental processes characteristic of biosystems can, given suitable initial conditions, lead to focussed probability distributions that make possible the kind of human abilities (i.e. psi functioning) to which reference has been previously made..."

THE PARANORMAL: THE EVIDENCE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSCIOUSNESS by Jessica Utts and Brian D. Josephson

(Jessica Utts served as the President of the American Statistical Association for the 2016 term)

This idea perhaps makes sense in the light of theories that presuppose that quantum theory is not the ultimate theory of nature, but involves (in ways that in some versions of the idea can be made mathematically precise) the manifestations of a deeper "subquantum domain". In just the same way that a surf rider can make use of random waves to travel effortlessly along, a psychic may be able to direct random energy at the subquantum level for her own purposes. Some accounts of the subquantum level involve action at a distance, which fits in well with some purported psychic abilities.

These proposals are extremely speculative. What needs to be done, in any event, is to integrate mental phenomena more thoroughly into the framework of science (including the quantum level) than is presently the case. The research of Lawrence LeShan (as described in his book The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist), where interviews with psychics disclosed that they were aware of a "hierarchy of meaningful interconnections", perhaps provides a hint of what might be involved. Science has a poor handle on ideas such as meaningful interconnections since they are alien to its usual ways of thinking. Perhaps it will need to overcome its current abhorrence of such concepts in order to arrive at the truth.

Biological Observer-Participation and Wheeler's 'Law without Law'

In Wheeler’s article the gap between acts of observer-participancy and physical reality was not filled in, an insufficiency that we attribute to the absence of an appropriate theory of observation. In the following we discuss a biologically oriented scheme where observation plays a central role, and show how it can lead to the emergence of physical laws. The structure of this scheme can be summarised as primordial reality → circular mechanics → semiotics and structure → technological development → regulatory mechanisms → emergent laws.

Here ‘circular mechanics’ is a reference to a generic scheme of biological organisation proposed by Yardley[3], encompassing among its aspects sign processes in accord with the semiosis concepts of Peirce[4], which in turn underlie processes of a technological character, among which we hypothesise are the capacity to form systems such as our universe, to which laws of a mathematical kind are applicable. In this way, we are able to link life, viewed from a generic point of view, to the origin of universes.

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3. Nuclear Physicist Ian Thompson ->

He's the author of Beginning Theistic Science, which can be read for free here.

He's also the site creator/admin for New Dualism.

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4. Richard Conn Henry ->

The Mental Universe

"The mental Universe The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."


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5. Bernard Haisch -> IS THE UNIVERSE A VAST, CONSCIOUSNESS CREATED VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATION?

(Guy is a physicist who helped start the Digital Universe Foundation)


http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/jo...le/408/672

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6. Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who wrote The Quantum Enigma (review by aforementioned Richard Henry)

A case in point is the book Quantum Enigma. This book is a result of a course for non-science majors (at the University of California, Santa Cruz) on the meaning of quantum mechanics, and in particular the authors seek the role, if any, of consciousness. The authors bring out, in pretty good fashion, the experimental facts that show the Universe to be drastically different in its nature than almost anyone thinks (usually, even after they have studied quantum mechanics in detail). And they do note, and quite correctly, that quantum mechanics easily accounts for every single one of these bizarre facts, and that it does so completely. And yet, are our two authors able to come to an actual conclusion? No, they are NOT⎯here is their concluding thought: “Does quantum theory suggest that, in some mysterious sense, we are a cosmic center?” The question is left hanging.

In his Gifford lectures, very shortly after the 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics, Arthur Stanley Eddington (who immediately quantum mechanics was discovered realized that this meant that the universe was purely mental, and that indeed there was no such thing as “physical”) said “it is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”

Despite the fact that I am heavily criticizing this book, above all for its timidity, I do highly recommend it, if only because, except for Nick Herbert’s excellent “Quantum Reality,” it is about the only available book that clearly brings out the amazing, the astounding, the utterly unbelievable simple facts. Although quantum cryptography and quantum computing are gradually forcing people to stop averting their eyes, there is still an amazing amount of ignorance about these unbelievable experimentally established facts.

“That’s crazy” a physicist said to me just the other day, when I described the quantum Zeno effect. Yet this physicist has worked lifelong in quantum-intensive research!

All I had mentioned was that, if you observe a quantum system with a short half life, it will not make the transition to the lower state. Your simply observing it (not interacting with it in any way) causes it to remain in its higher-energy state. (Just Google on “quantum Zeno effect,” should it happen that you don’t believe me!)

“Quantum Enigma” only mentions the quantum Zeno effect in passing, which surprises me. Despite their timidity, it is quite clear that our shivering authors know darned well that mind is central⎯and nothing shows the truth of that more clearly than does the quantum Zeno effect.

6. Bohm. I had not appreciated that for Bohm “there is no physical world ‘out there’ separate from the observer.” The authors bring out that Bohm did consider a role for consciousness. There is a “quantum potential” that has no role other than to allow this interpretation in which there is “a physically real, completely deterministic world.”

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7. Bohm, or one of his colleagues/successors like F. David Peat or Basil Hiley

David Bohm: A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter

The relationship of mind and matter is approached in a new way in this article. This approach is based on the causal interpretation of the quantum theory, in which an electron, for example, is regarded as an inseparable union of a particle and afield. This field has, however, some new properties that can be seen to be the main sources of the differences between the quantum theory and the classical (Newtonian) theory. These new properties suggest that the field may be regarded as containing objective and active information, and that the activity of this information is similar in certain key ways to the activity of information in our ordinary subjective experience. The analogy between mind and matter is thus fairly close.

This analogy leads to the proposal of the general outlines of a new theory of mind, matter, and their relationship, in which the basic notion is participation rather than interaction. Although the theory can be developed mathematically in more detail, the main emphasis here is to show qualitatively how it provides a way of thinking that does not divide mind from matter, and thus leads to a more coherent understanding of such questions than is possible in the common dualistic and reductionistic approaches. These ideas may be relevant to connectionist theories and might perhaps suggest new directions for their development.

"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...." (David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order)

The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley

GM: It seems ironic that Bohr and some of his people reacted strongly against Bohm’s theory.

BH: Yeah, but don’t forget, if you just do the simple Bohm theory, you don’t see any of this. I’m now telling you we see the Bohm theory in the light of this deeper process. I used to give the lectures on the Bohm theory, because you cannot ignore it. It’s there whether you like it or not. But then people believed that’s what I really thought nature was. But to me, that’s a Mickey Mouse model. It’s not the driving force of what David and I were doing. This would just be a certain level of abstraction.

So I am not a Bohmian in the Bohmian mechanics sense. Chris Fuchs came down to me once after a lecture and says, “How nice it is to meet a Bohmian.” And I said: “I beg your pardon? Where?” I’m not a Bohmian. What we are discussing is not mechanics. Bohm says in his quantum-theory book, the original one, quantum mechanics is a misnomer. It should be called quantum non-mechanics.

GM: Because you shouldn’t think of it in terms of a mechanistic motion of particles?

BH: Yes, it’s nothing like that. It’s not mechanism. It organicism. It’s organic. Nature is more organic than we think it is. And then you can understand why life arose, because if nature is organic, it has the possibility of life in it.

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8. Anton Zeilinger ->

Physicists bid farewell to reality?

Like Bell's, Zeilinger's equality proved false. This doesn't rule out all possible non-local realistic models, but it does exclude an important subset of them. Specifically, it shows that if you have a group of photons that all have independent polarizations, then you can't ascribe specific polarizations to each. It's rather like saying that you know there are particular numbers of blue, white and silver cars in a car park — but it is meaningless even to imagine saying which ones are which.

Truly weird

If the quantum world is not realistic in this sense, then how does it behave? Zeilinger says that some of the alternative non-realist possibilities are truly weird. For example, it may make no sense to imagine what would happen if we had made a different measurement from the one we chose to make. "We do this all the time in daily life," says Zeilinger — for example, imagining what would have happened if you had tried to cross the road when a truck was coming. If the world around us behaved in the same way as a quantum system, then it would be meaningless even to imagine that alternative situation, because there would be no way of defining what you mean by the road, the truck, or even you.
Another possibility is that in a non-realistic quantum world present actions can affect the past, as though choosing to read a letter or not could determine what it says.

Zeilinger hopes that his work will stimulate others to test such possibilities. "Our paper is not the end of the road," he says. "But we have a little more evidence that the world is really strange."

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9. John Wheeler ->

Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?

"Eminent physicist John Wheeler says he has only enough time left to work on one idea: that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well"

John Wheeler’s Participatory Universe

In the final decades of his life, the question that intrigued Wheeler most was: “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or are they central to it?” He suggested that the nature of reality was revealed by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics. According to the quantum theory, before the observation is made, a subatomic particle exists in several states, called a superposition (or, as Wheeler called it, a ‘smoky dragon’). Once the particle is observed, it instantaneously collapses into a single position.

Wheeler suggested that reality is created by observers and that: “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” He coined the term “Participatory Anthropic Principle” (PAP) from the Greek “anthropos”, or human. He went further to suggest that “we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.” [Reference: Radio Interview With Martin Redfern

Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality

Wheeler has condensed these ideas into a phrase that resembles a Zen koan: “the it from bit.” In one of his free-form essays, Wheeler unpacked the phrase as follows: “...every it--every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself--derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.”

Inspired by Wheeler, physicists and other researchers began probing the links between information theory and physics in the late 1980s. String theorists tried to use strings to knit together quantum field theory, black holes and information theory. Wheeler acknowledged that these ideas were still raw, not yet ready for rigorous testing. He and his fellow explorers were still “trying to get the lay of the land" and "learning how to express things that we already know” in the language of information theory. The effort may lead to a dead end, Wheeler said, or to a powerful new vision of reality, “the whole show.”

For more on Wheeler's intellectual legacy and its influence on present day physicist see this essay by Chris Fuchs ->

On Participatory Realism

In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, " 'I' is not the name of a person, nor 'here' of a place, .... But they are connected with names. ... [And] it is characteristic of physics not to use these words." This statement expresses the dominant way of thinking in physics: Physics is about the impersonal laws of nature; the "I" never makes an appearance in it. Since the advent of quantum theory, however, there has always been a nagging pressure to insert a first-person perspective into the heart of physics. In incarnations of lesser or greater strength, one may consider the "Copenhagen" views of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli, the observer-participator view of John Wheeler, the informational interpretation of Anton Zeilinger and Caslav Brukner, the relational interpretation of Carlo Rovelli, and, most radically, the QBism of N. David Mermin, Ruediger Schack, and the present author, as acceding to the pressure. These views have lately been termed "participatory realism" to emphasize that rather than relinquishing the idea of reality (as they are often accused of), they are saying that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. Thus, far from instances of instrumentalism or antirealism, these views of quantum theory should be regarded as attempts to make a deep statement about the nature of reality. This paper explicates the idea for the case of QBism. As well, it highlights the influence of John Wheeler's "law without law" on QBism's formulation.

I posted a link to a random sentence creator designed to emulate Deepak Chopra.  It was just a bit of fun but maybe it was badly named.  Sciborg posted a real Deepak Chopra quote in that thread ( https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-t...-simulator )  that shows the difference between the real thing and an algorithm.  The program was badly named; the real Chopra often makes a lot of sense, so why do so many on the internet mock him and refer to his quotes as pseudo profound BS?  He understands what he means and I think a lot of other people do too.  Are the accusers just the mocking school bully types who haven't grown up yet or do they really not understand anything more profound than sex, beer, football and mockery?  OK I had a bit of a dig there but the principle is worthy of discussion.  When we talk about unusual things that we ourselves understand, how do other people hear us?  Do we sound like that bizarre algorithm to them?

I actually saw the quote in a completely unrelated article on Psychology Today, and thought it was interesting it came up right around when you had made the thread.

Regarding "bizarre algorithms", this makes me think of the programmer and one of the arguable "fathers" of VR Jaron Lanier on his own dealings with people who think we could upload our minds onto a Turing Machine ->

You Can't Argue with a Zombie - Jaron Lanier

I actually saw the quote in a completely unrelated article on Psychology Today, and thought it was interesting it came up right around when you had made the thread.

Regarding "bizarre algorithms", this makes me think of the programmer and one of the arguable "fathers" of VR Jaron Lanier on his own dealings with people who think we could upload our minds onto a Turing Machine ->

You Can't Argue with a Zombie - Jaron Lanier

Reading this is the most fun I have had in a while.  I'll finish reading it now ...   see you soon.