Mind over matter

[IanMacdonald]

I'm posting these here but maybe I'm doing the author an injustice, after all he doesn't sound like your typical magnet motor inventor. In fact the science he does seems quite meticulous. 



Do you think there is any basis to it? If so, might try a few experiments just for the hell of it. 

[Nominal Animal]

In Quantum mechanics, we describe each particle or a system of particles as a quantum state, where each measurable property is described using a wave function.

The underlying mathematical models work.  If you rely only on the equations defined by the quantum mechanical models, you can model a hydrogen atom in an analytical form, and more complex molecules and interactions using numerical methods.

It is our interpretations of what these mathematical models mean that is in dispute.  (This is what I tried to assert recently in another thread here, without success apparently.)

When a measurement is done, the measurement apparatus (including all intermediaries through to the human observer of the results) must be treated as such a single system.  There is no way to do a measurement without including the measurement apparatus in the quantum mechanical system.  The underlying mathematical models only work if the system is sufficiently isolated; i.e., we model all the significant interactions.  The more of the interactions we ignore, the more the model diverges from observed results.

The video is all about Von Neumann - Wigner interpretation, where instead of a single system, the situation is thought to consist of a chain of separate systems, with an extraphysical "consciousness" causing the entire chain to resolve to a single observation by the consciousness.

In my opinion (and one that I believe most physicists share), consciousness is just an "ordinary" physical phenomena; a very complex and interesting one, but nothing extraphysical or paranormal.   There is no difference between a conscious observer and an electronic sensor (whose output is never read by a human, the output never affecting anything observed by any consciousness).  In the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, the wavefunction collapses as soon as the sensor reading affects anything outside the box, regardless of whether that reading itself affects anything.  Obviously, this is difficult to verify experimentally; it's like trying to prove that something does not exist anywhere in the universe.

If by "human consciousness" we refer to all the processes that occur in human beings, the above does not exclude the possibility of "human observation" affecting a measurement; it only excludes the necessity of consciousness being extraphysical phenomena.  We already know that the human mind (brain, specifically) is very much affected by electromagnetic fields, and we don't really know the lower limit of that sensitivity, so interaction is not limited to just our senses dedicated for observation: we are intricately intertwined with the world we observe, so much so that it is basically impossible to define a strict demarcation where a specific human being ends and the rest of the universe begins.

Even more intriguing is the possibility of "communication" between entangled pairs of particles (or, rather, entangled systems of particles).  Thus far everything we know seems to exclude such communication being faster than light; not that they cannot be used for communication per se.  Transmitting information at effectively the speed of light without having it travel through the intervening distance might very well be possible (and has been experimented with, for example using the quantum Zeno effect; see here).  Perhaps one day we'll have devices or even implants capable of lightspeed communication that cannot be interfered with (except at the endpoints); perhaps their biological equivalents already exist.

Possibly related, even more intriguing is emergent phenomena when complex systems interact in a "weak" fashion; the "weak" referring to weak measurement, not one of the four fundamental forces.  I believe that things in fringe science and parapsychology like morphic resonance, if ever experimentally confirmed, are exactly such emergent phenomena.  Note: That does not mean I believe they exist.  I think they are very unlikely to exist (and extremely rare if anything like that exists); it's just that they are not completely ruled out yet.

The universe is easily overwhelmingly complex, strange, and surprising, even without elevating humans or consciousness to an extraphysical, supernatural phenomena.