Wigner’s Friend likes Digital Consciousness

Wigner’s Friend likes Digital Consciousness

Jim Elvidge

Of course, I live for this stuff, because it simply adds one more piece of supporting evidence to my theory, Digital Consciousness. And it adds yet another nail in the coffin of that ancient scientific religion, materialism.

How does it work?

Digital Consciousness asserts that consciousness is primary; hence, all that we can truly know is what we each experience subjectively.  This experiment doesn’t necessarily prove that the fundamental construct of reality is information, but it is a lot more plausible that individual experiences based on virtual simulations are at the root of this paradox rather than, say, a complex violation of Hilbert space, allowing parallel realities based on traditional physical fields to intermingle.  As an analogy, imagine that you are playing an MMORPG (video game with many other simultaneous players) – it isn’t difficult to see how each individual could be having a slightly different experience, based perhaps on their skill level or something.  As information is the carrier of the experience, the information entering the consciousness of one player could easily be slightly different than the information entering the consciousness of another player. This is by far the simplest explanation, and by Occam’s Razor, supports my theory.

Too bad Wigner isn’t alive to see this experiment, or to ponder Digital Consciousness theory. But I’m sure his consciousness is having a good laugh.

I’m not sure about “digital consciousness”, but it seems that if the conundrum of Wigner’s Friend is a fact, then we may need more than mere chance to keep things together. Because, if both of those conflicting realities are equally valid, what exactly is preventing one from overtaking the other?

I’m not sure about “digital consciousness”, but it seems that if the conundrum of Wigner’s Friend is a fact, then we may need more than mere chance to keep things together. Because, if both of those conflicting realities are equally valid, what exactly is preventing one from overtaking the other?

Bernardo had some thoughts about this:

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality

One of the weirdest theoretical implications of quantum mechanics is that different observers can give different—though equally valid—accounts of the same sequence of events. As highlighted by physicist Carlo Rovelli in his relational quantum mechanics (RQM), this means that there should be no absolute, observer-independent physical quantities. All physical quantities—the whole physical universe—must be relative to the observer. The notion that we all share the same physical environment must, therefore, be an illusion.

Such a counterintuitive prediction—which seems to flirt dangerously with solipsism—has been clamoring for experimental verification for decades. But only recently has technology advanced far enough to allow for it. So now, at last, Massimiliano Proietti and collaborators at Heriot-Watt University, in the U.K., seem to have confirmed RQM; as predicted by quantum mechanics, there may well be no objective physical world.

Yet, our perceptions of the world beyond ourselves are quite consistent across observers: if you were to sit next to me right now, we would describe my study in very similar, mutually consistent ways. Clearly, observers must share an environment of some sort, even if such an environment is not physical—i.e., not describable by physical quantities.

Possible solutions to this dilemma have been proposed. For instance, writing for this magazine last year, I maintained that physical quantities describe merely our perceptions and are, therefore, relative to each of us as observers. What is really out there, underlying our perceptions, is constituted not by physical but by transpersonal mental states instead. Perceived physicality is merely a representation of that surrounding mental environment, brought into being by an act of observation.