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[Kimawolf]

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...st-could-reveal-the-limits-of-the-human-mind/

The boundary between mind and matter could be tested using a new twist on a well-known experiment in quantum physics.

Over the past two decades, a type of experiment known as a Bell test has confirmed the weirdness of quantum mechanics – specifically the “spooky action at a distance” that so bothered Einstein.
Now, a theorist proposes a Bell test experiment using something unprecedented: human consciousness. If such an experiment showed deviations from quantum mechanics, it could provide the first hints that our minds are potentially immaterial.

The measurements are done for numerous entangled pairs. If quantum physics is correct and there is indeed spooky action at a distance, then the results of these measurements would be correlated to a far greater extent than if Einstein was correct. All such experiments so far have supported quantum physics.

However, some physicists have argued that even the random number generators may not be truly random. They could be governed by some underlying physics that we don’t yet understand, and this so-called “super-determinism” could explain the observed correlations.

To test this idea, Hardy proposed an experiment in which A and B are set 100 kilometres apart. At each end, about 100 humans are hooked up to EEG headsets that can read their brain activity. These signals are then used to switch the settings on the measuring device at each location.

[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can’t imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that,” Hardy says. “We’d want to debate as to what that meant.”

Such a finding would stir up debate about the existence of free will. It could be that even if physics dictated the material world, the human mind not being made of that same matter would mean that we could overcome physics with free will. “It wouldn’t settle the question, but it would certainly have a strong bearing on the issue of free will,” says Hardy.

Pretty interesting. To think we are at a point where we can even run this kind of test to see if our minds are immaterial. Mind you as he said, it’d not settle anything, but it’d definitely open a LOT of debate and more science experimentation.

And hey maybe it will even help Elon Musk and his man machine interface.

 

[Fat4all]

I already have trouble with the junior jumble

 

[The Elite]

I am interested. Hook me up.

 

[RSTEIN]

there is no spoon

 

[The Technomancer]

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest our minds are not immaterial, but the results of this should be interesting

 

[cirrhosis]

"Could"


It's gonna be nothing exciting

 

[Kyuur]

I love the phrase "spooky action at a distance".

 

[John Kowalski]

Godisreal.beyonce

 

[Reverend Funk]

not buying it

 

[The Technomancer]

Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in Switzerland thinks Hardy’s proposal makes “plenty of sense”, but he’s sceptical of using unstructured EEG signals to switch settings on devices. That’s akin to using the brain as a random number generator, says Gisin. He would rather see an experiment where the conscious intent of humans is used to perform the switching – but that would be experimentally more challenging.

Also this

 

[All Possible Ways]

Spoilers: The results will be fully consistent with quantum mechanics and have nothing whatsoever to say about consciousness.

 

[spock]

Hopefully, this and other experiments progress rapidly so we can finally move past the absurd notion that consciousness is purely a physical brain function. Then perhaps more real exploration and research in the most powerful of "spaces" can begin.

 

[crisdecuba]

Can someone provide a more dumbed down or accessible summary? Specifically why would this experiment open up debate re: whether we can overcome determinism with the free will of our minds?

 

[Imperfected]

I love the phrase "spooky action at a distance".

It's one of the best "physics terms used as pet names for your junk", though it's obviously eclipsed by supermassive black hole.

 

[All Possible Ways]

Hopefully, this and other experiments progress rapidly so we can finally move past the absurd notion that consciousness is not purely a physical brain function. Then perhaps more real exploration and research in the most powerful of "spaces" can begin.

fixed.

 

[ViviOggi]

Hopefully, this and other experiments progress rapidly so we can finally move past the absurd notion that consciousness is purely a physical brain function. Then perhaps more real exploration and research in the most powerful of "spaces" can begin.

 

[Alexlf]

I'm not sure this study actually makes any sense? So they are using some bizarre hash function on the eeg signals of 100 people on each end to generate a random number, and then using that to configure the devices that will read the entangled pairs of particles, right?

...So, why? What's this trying to prove? That human thought isn't random? That it is? I feel like I'm missing something here.


EDIT:

This really feels like some grand misinterpreting of an actual planned study by science PR again, but without actual direct information from the scientists behind everything it's impossible to figure anything out :/

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

fixed.

Quite the confidence.

 

[All Possible Ways]

Can someone provide a more dumbed down or accessible summary? Specifically why would this experiment open up debate re: whether we can overcome determinism with the free will of our minds?

I'll try.

Entanglement means correlation. Imagine you have a pair of gloves, you put each on a box at random. Then you give one box to a friend, send him to the Moon and keep the other box. You open your box and find you have a left-handed glove. Clearly, you already know that your friend on the Moon will find a right-handed glove when he opens his box, and no information has to be transmitted from you to your friend or from him to you for this, there is no mystery.

The situation in Quantum Mechanics is quite similar. Pairs of particles may be produced such that their initial state is correlated. This is called an entangled state. You may produce them then separate then by a large distance. Upon performing a measurement, if you find you particle is in a "left-handed" state, you will know for sure that the other will be "right-handed", just like the gloves. Clearly, they are correlated because of the initial state in which they were prepared, like the gloves, and no action a distance is needed.

The weirdness comes because unlike the gloves, where the left handed glove was always left handed, whether you looked in your box or not, in QM the state is only determined upon measurement, i.e., opening your box. This is quite analogous to the famous Schrödinger cat: the cat in not dead or alive until you perform a measurement to determine it. Since the state in determined at the moment of observation, you may then imagine that when you open your box and it comes out "left", your particle rushes to tell the other particle: "hey, I came left-handed, you must come out right-handed, or else!". However, no such signal may be transmitted if the separation between the particles is greater than the distance light would cover in the time between measurements, because transmitting information faster than light is impossible. Even worse, if the separation is that great, it is possible to find a frame of reference where your friend opened his box first, and so, his particle would be the one that influenced yours. Clearly it would be a contradiction, and what most people conclude from this is simply that the state is undetermined until the measurement, but the theory is still local, i.e., there is no faster than light signaling involved. You open your box when you want, your friend opens his, and there is nothing weird about it, because you can only tell each other what result you got if you compare notes, say, by phone, and that is always slower than light.

It turns out that the correlations from entanglement in QM are stronger in a sense than in classical physics, and allow for violation of something called Bell's Inequality. People have done all sorts of experiments trying to find loopholes, but in the end, the predictions always agree with QM. It is a well established theory.

One such loophole, called superdeterminism is that the theory is secretly deterministic, and that even though you think you have a choice about when and how to open your box, you don't, everything is already encoded in the initial conditions of the Universe. This amounts to a gigantic conspiracy, in which what somebody ate from breakfast on the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago is correlated to you opening your box now, because a signal from there is just now reaching us and could alter your experiment. It is simply an untestable and unscientific hypothesis.

What this person has proposed is to compound this ridiculous superdeterminism with the equally ridiculous idea that your mind is apart from the physical world. You see, they want to hook up an EEG machine to a person's head and use the electrical measurements from that to decide how to do the measurement on the entangled particle. The idea is that because the human mind is magical and mysterious, it may introduce a new element, apart from the giant conspiracy, and hence alter the results without the Universe being able to fix it fast enough I guess, leading to result in contradiction with the QM prediction and proving that people are really special and above the laws of physics, after all.

I hope you see that this is compounding a ridiculous and far fetched idea on top of another, and is doomed to fail.

 

[Osukaa]

I'll try.

Entanglement means correlation. Imagine you have a pair of gloves, you put each on a box at random. Then you give one box to a friend, send him to the Moon and keep the other box. You open your box and find you have a left-handed glove. Clearly, you already know that your friend on the Moon will find a right-handed glove when he opens his box, and no information has to be transmitted from you to your friend or from him to you for this, there is no mystery.

The situation in Quantum Mechanics is quite similar. Pairs of particles may be produced such that their initial state is correlated. This is called an entangled state. You may produce them then separate then by a large distance. Upon performing a measurement, if you find you particle is in a "left-handed" state, you will know for sure that the other will be "right-handed", just like the gloves. Clearly, they are correlated because of the initial state in which they were prepared, like the gloves, and no action a distance is needed.

The weirdness comes because unlike the gloves, where the left handed glove was always left handed, whether you looked in your box or not, in QM the state is only determined upon measurement, i.e., opening your box. This is quite analogous to the famous Schrödinger cat: the cat in not dead or alive until you perform a measurement to determine it. Since the state in determined at the moment of observation, you may then imagine that when you open your box and it comes out "left", your particle rushes to tell the other particle: "hey, I came left-handed, you must come out right-handed, or else!". However, no such signal may be transmitted if the separation between the particles is greater than the distance light would cover in the time between measurements, because transmitting information faster than light is impossible. Even worse, if the separation is that great, it is possible to find a frame of reference where your friend opened his box first, and so, his particle would be the one that influenced yours. Clearly it would be a contradiction, and what most people conclude from this is simply that the state is undetermined until the measurement, but the theory is still local, i.e., there is no faster than light signaling involved. You open your box when you want, your friend opens his, and there is nothing weird about it, because you can only tell each other what result you got if you compare notes, say, by phone, and that is always slower than light.

It turns out that the correlations from entanglement in QM are stronger in a sense than in classical physics, and allow for violation of something called Bell's Inequality. People have done all sorts of experiments trying to find loopholes, but in the end, the predictions always agree with QM. It is a well established theory.

One such loophole, called superdeterminism is that the theory is secretly deterministic, and that even though you think you have a choice about when and how to open your box, you don't, everything is already encoded in the initial conditions of the Universe. This amounts to a gigantic conspiracy, in which what somebody ate from breakfast on the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago is correlated to you opening your box now, because a signal from there is just now reaching us and could alter your experiment. It is simply an untestable and unscientific hypothesis.

What this person is proposed is to compound this ridiculous superdeterminism with the equally ridiculous idea that your mind is apart from the physical world. You see, they want to hook up an EEG machine to a person's head and use the electrical measurements from that to decide how to do the measurement on the entangled particle. The idea is that because the human mind is magical and mysterious, it may introduce a new element, apart from the giant conspiracy, and hence alter the results without the Universe being able to fix it fast enough I guess, resulting in a violation of Bell's Inequality.

I hope you see that this is compounding a ridiculous and far fetched idea on top of another, and is doomed to fail.

LOL Your explanation Confused me even more!!!

I have failed you science GAF -_-
Im confused and hungry now... I'm about to get all quantum physics on this damn burrito in front of me.

Spoiler

I have no idea what im saying...

 

[Zweizer]

To test this idea, Hardy proposed an experiment in which A and B are set 100 kilometres apart. At each end, about 100 humans are hooked up to EEG headsets that can read their brain activity. These signals are then used to switch the settings on the measuring device at each location.

Funyarinpa?

 

[Alexlf]

I'll try...

Ahh, thank you for this, it makes sense now.

Spoiler

My mushy human brain still sees no reasonable explanation aside from "super-determinism"

 

[All Possible Ways]

Ahh, thank you for this, it makes sense now.

Spoiler

My mushy human brain still sees no reasonable explanation aside from "super-determinism"

You may take solace in the fact that superdeterminism in its full glory is utterly impossible to disprove, like the existence of God or if we are living in the Matrix.

 

[ibyea]

I don't understand why they think any of this experiment shows anything regarding free will existing or that the human mind is separate from the body even if there is an off chance that it does not violate bell's inequality.

 

[Khaz]

One such loophole, called superdeterminism is that the theory is secretly deterministic, and that even though you think you have a choice about when and how to open your box, you don't, everything is already encoded in the initial conditions of the Universe. This amounts to a gigantic conspiracy, in which what somebody ate from breakfast on the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago is correlated to you opening your box now, because a signal from there is just now reaching us and could alter your experiment. It is simply an untestable and unscientific hypothesis.

Well it is kind of testable. Like, if I take entangled particles, move them far away from each other, have two observers open the box and meet to compare the notes. If the results are consistent regardless of distance, then the particles must have had heir state determined unbeknownst to us. They still behave undeterministically except for a secret ticker we have yet to understand.

 

[Alexlf]

Well it is kind of testable. Like, if I take entangled particles, move them far away from each other, have two observers open the box and meet to compare the notes. If the results are consistent regardless of distance, then the particles must have had heir state superdetermined unbeknownst to us. They still behave undeterministically except for a secret ticker we have yet to understand.

That's the point of the Bell Theorem though, the only way for there to be a hidden ticker is by violating the principles of locality, aka ftl or other bizarre things.

 

[EloquentM]

QM FML

 

[Cyan]

Spoilers: The results will be fully consistent with quantum mechanics and have nothing whatsoever to say about consciousness.

And New Age people talking about how quantum mechanics proves that our consciousness influences the world around us and whoa isn't that crazy and magical will be undeterred.

 

[Trojita]

Such a finding would stir up debate about the existence of free will. It could be that even if physics dictated the material world, the human mind not being made of that same matter would mean that we could overcome physics with free will. “It wouldn’t settle the question, but it would certainly have a strong bearing on the issue of free will,” says Hardy.

So we are getting magic?

You're a wizard Hardy.

 

[All Possible Ways]

Well it is kind of testable. Like, if I take entangled particles, move them far away from each other, have two observers open the box and meet to compare the notes. If the results are consistent regardless of distance, then the particles must have had heir state determined unbeknownst to us. They still behave undeterministically except for a secret ticker we have yet to understand.

You see, all your setup does is test QM itself. If the results agree with QM, you may either:
1) Accept QM
2) propose a superdeterministic or non-local explanation that agrees with QM by design.

There is no end to it. All it does is give some measure of mental comfort, that "deep down" everything is really deterministic. Meanwhile, nothing observable changes.

 

[Kayhan]

How do I train my quantum brain to get telepathic and telekinetic powers?

 

[GaimeGuy]

LOL Your explanation Confused me even more!!!

I have failed you science GAF -_-
Im confused and hungry now... I'm about to get all quantum physics on this damn burrito in front of me.

Spoiler

I have no idea what im saying...

To put it another way....
Either you have a left handed glove and the other person has a right handed glove, or vice versa.

In QM, it's not when the gloves are placed in the box that determines this. It's at a later point, most easily defined as when a box is opened. That can have some weird implications
The crazy thing about QM is it works at small enough scales. What's more, since time and space are intertwined, it might not even be the first box opening that determines this, but the second.

 

[Khaz]

There is no end to it. All it does is give some measure of mental comfort, that "deep down" everything is really deterministic. Meanwhile, nothing observable changes.

Whether the Universe is ultimately deterministic or truly random is unprovable. Physics won't change if it's one way or the other, as both idea would end up explaining the current QM, while the experiments wouldn't change.

However it's always interesting to ask whether one is more likely than the other when stumbling on a "buggy" experiment. Quantum Indeterminacy skewed most physicists towards the idea that the Universe may be truly random, and Quantum entanglement makes a few of them toy with the idea that there may be determination at some point. Is observable entanglement a result of quantum randomness, or is apparent indeterminacy a result of unknown determination?

Apologies if I'm blunt, but your response "Meanwhile, nothing observable changes." sounds like an engineer arguing with a theoretical physicist. Who cares what the underlying mechanism is, it won't make my satellite fall at a different speed!

 

[Khaz]

What's more, since time and space are intertwined, it might not even be the first box opening that determines this, but the second.

(This is where my lack of physics education will be exposed)

What's the status of actual entanglement experimentation? Like, do we have a test to check if the particle if still in an undetermined state that we could run on the other box after the first has been observed?

 

[All Possible Ways]

Whether the Universe is ultimately deterministic or truly random is unprovable. Physics won't change if it's one way or the other, as both idea would end up explaining the current QM, while the experiments wouldn't change.

I completely agree.

Apologies if I'm blunt, but your response "Meanwhile, nothing observable changes." sounds like an engineer arguing with a theoretical physicist. Who cares what the underlying mechanism is, it won't make my satellite fall at a different speed!

Well, as it turns out, I am a theoretical physicist. Your concern may indeed be interesting, but it is a philosophical one, not physics!

(This is where my lack of physics education will be exposed)

What's the status of actual entanglement experimentation? Like, do we have a test to check if the particle if still in an undetermined state that we could run on the other box after the first has been observed?

Here's a start.

 

[cakely]

QM experiments are awesome.

I like to think there's only one real observer in the universe, and it's you (QBism).

And yeah, like the existence of God or if the entire universe is a simulation, there's no way to prove it. It's fun to talk about, though.

Edit: All Possible Ways, I just realized what your avatar is: it's the path of a photon, right?

 

[Khaz]

Well, as it turns out, I am a theoretical physicist. Your concern may indeed be interesting, but it is a philosophical one, not physics!

And I love you for that. I'm like a third grade student trying to understand Quantum Mechanics with only sticks of various sizes.

 

[All Possible Ways]

And I love you for that. I'm like a third grade student trying to understand Quantum Mechanics with only sticks of various sizes.

Hey, stick to it. I fully believe that what one person can understand, another can.

Just to say a bit more about the "utilitarian aspect of it", as it turns out, almost any area of physics, not only QM, allows for many different mathematical formulations. As long as they are all experimentally equivalent, whichever you choose is a matter of convenience.

Edit: All Possible Ways, I just realized what your avatar is: it's the path of a photon, right?

Yeah, it's a representation of many possible paths, as in the Path Integral formulation of QM. It's not just for photons, electrons or anything else also obey the same laws.

 

[bsp]

Quite the confidence.

When was the last time something ended up actually being magic?

 

[kyser73]

Hopefully, this and other experiments progress rapidly so we can finally move past the absurd notion that consciousness is purely a physical brain function. Then perhaps more real exploration and research in the most powerful of "spaces" can begin.

Ah, you're one of them.

What will you do if the conclusion goes against your belief? Accept it?

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

When was the last time something ended up actually being magic?

Who is proposing magic, as opposed to the idea consciousness may not be solely the byproduct of physical determinism and thus have some measure of free will not discernible by examination of the constituent parts?

 

[TheRealTalker]

I'll try.

Entanglement means correlation. Imagine you have a pair of gloves, you put each on a box at random. Then you give one box to a friend, send him to the Moon and keep the other box. You open your box and find you have a left-handed glove. Clearly, you already know that your friend on the Moon will find a right-handed glove when he opens his box, and no information has to be transmitted from you to your friend or from him to you for this, there is no mystery.

The situation in Quantum Mechanics is quite similar. Pairs of particles may be produced such that their initial state is correlated. This is called an entangled state. You may produce them then separate then by a large distance. Upon performing a measurement, if you find you particle is in a "left-handed" state, you will know for sure that the other will be "right-handed", just like the gloves. Clearly, they are correlated because of the initial state in which they were prepared, like the gloves, and no action a distance is needed.

The weirdness comes because unlike the gloves, where the left handed glove was always left handed, whether you looked in your box or not, in QM the state is only determined upon measurement, i.e., opening your box. This is quite analogous to the famous Schrödinger cat: the cat in not dead or alive until you perform a measurement to determine it. Since the state in determined at the moment of observation, you may then imagine that when you open your box and it comes out "left", your particle rushes to tell the other particle: "hey, I came left-handed, you must come out right-handed, or else!". However, no such signal may be transmitted if the separation between the particles is greater than the distance light would cover in the time between measurements, because transmitting information faster than light is impossible. Even worse, if the separation is that great, it is possible to find a frame of reference where your friend opened his box first, and so, his particle would be the one that influenced yours. Clearly it would be a contradiction, and what most people conclude from this is simply that the state is undetermined until the measurement, but the theory is still local, i.e., there is no faster than light signaling involved. You open your box when you want, your friend opens his, and there is nothing weird about it, because you can only tell each other what result you got if you compare notes, say, by phone, and that is always slower than light.

It turns out that the correlations from entanglement in QM are stronger in a sense than in classical physics, and allow for violation of something called Bell's Inequality. People have done all sorts of experiments trying to find loopholes, but in the end, the predictions always agree with QM. It is a well established theory.

One such loophole, called superdeterminism is that the theory is secretly deterministic, and that even though you think you have a choice about when and how to open your box, you don't, everything is already encoded in the initial conditions of the Universe. This amounts to a gigantic conspiracy, in which what somebody ate from breakfast on the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago is correlated to you opening your box now, because a signal from there is just now reaching us and could alter your experiment. It is simply an untestable and unscientific hypothesis.

What this person has proposed is to compound this ridiculous superdeterminism with the equally ridiculous idea that your mind is apart from the physical world. You see, they want to hook up an EEG machine to a person's head and use the electrical measurements from that to decide how to do the measurement on the entangled particle. The idea is that because the human mind is magical and mysterious, it may introduce a new element, apart from the giant conspiracy, and hence alter the results without the Universe being able to fix it fast enough I guess, leading to result in contradiction with the QM prediction and proving that people are really special and above the laws of physics, after all.

I hope you see that this is compounding a ridiculous and far fetched idea on top of another, and is doomed to fail.

this is actually a well done explanation

your use of the glove box scenario actually helped me out sooooo much

thanks

 

[slider]

Well, as it turns out, I am a theoretical physicist.

I'd be very surprised if no one picked up on that!

 

[Funyarinpa]

Funyarinpa?

You called?

 

[akira28]

no limit warrior.

 

[Alcotholic]

You may take solace in the fact that superdeterminism in its full glory is utterly impossible to disprove, like the existence of God or if we are living in the Matrix.

They were all high when they came up with these theories.

 

[farmerboy]

Maybe I'm a little tired but I understood NOTHING in the OP.

 

[Orbis Tabula]

Whenever I read about this stuff, it makes me wish I understand QM better. I'm not bad. I can talk about the basics quite confidently, explain some significant experiments and such. I've just never really been able to find something to read or study it more that really spoke to me. I need to stop looking for it, buckle down, and just read through a textbook or something, even if it means going through the stuff I already know. I think I've got a shoddy foundation.

Anyway, I have almost no expectations that this experiment will end up with any particularly revelatory outcome, but good on them for trying to find a way to plumb these depths.

 

[televator]

This sounds like a truck load of BS.

 

[Muskieratboi]

the human mind not being made of that same matter would mean that we could overcome physics with free will.

So... we're Orks?

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH