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[vonStirlitz]

What GAF needs to know is whether this leads to mind powers or zombies.

Everything else is immaterial.

 

[Zomba13]

Is this going to end up with some kid having to solve sudoku in an incinerator?

 

[Razorback]

Very interesting. I'm fascinated by the mind-body problem. Understanding how physical processes like the firing of neurons leads to subjective experience is easily in my top 3 biggest mysteries of the universe, (right behind why is there something rather than nothing?)

From what I understand this hard problem of consciousness is unlikely to ever be solved by experimentation. I know this test we're talking about isn't trying to answer the hard problem, but at least it narrows down the search space for possible answers.

I lean towards the mind being a byproduct of a physical brain, It'd be great to have some evidence supporting that.

Or if it turns out the other way and consciousness is a separate thing that physics doesn't understand yet, then that's fascinating as well.

Sidenote: Either way I think neither of these two possibilities says anything about free will. People act on their wants and desires, they don't choose their desires, they don't choose their thoughts. Free will is an incoherent concept, even the illusion of free will is an illusion. Let it go already, there's no such thing.

 

[Xe4]

The thing is, and I know it's already been said in this thread, observation has nothing to do with consciousness. Whatever is testing bells inequality will undoubtedly have to perturb the wavefunction, so it is that observation which will be confirmed, not anything to do with human consciousness. Anyone who tries to say that quantum physics is related to human consciousness in any sort of meaningful way don't really know much about it.

 

[Keikaku]

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 was an easy to understand explanation and, given that I have no real understanding of the issue, helped me frame the problem. Thanks!

 

[Air]

I'm always down for some weird science

 

[Kinitari]

So... Out of curiosity, what would be the difference between hooking these up to human minds, and hooking them up to slow roasting hams?

Or if not hams, something with mild electric charges going through them? I don't see the connection between the idea of consciousness being immaterial and this experiment whatsoever. I'm probably misunderstanding.

It sounds like they think that human minds might exhibit properties that ignore quantum effects - but an EEG just reads electric signals - do they have a control? Something else that reads electric signals?

 

[Majin Boo]

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.

Excellent explanation, thank you.

 

[Chronus]

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 the best explanation I've ever read on gaf, thanks! I was clueless after reading OP, but felt like i actually understood something about QM at the end. Plus, it all sounds pretty interesting.

 

[TheOMan]

I'll try.

Incredible - such a well thought out and clear explanation. Thank you! That, to me, is a true sign of having a complete grasp on a complex topic. Wow.

 

[archangelmorph]

How can they even square this superdeterminism idea with magic minds though?

Like if the human mind was magic and not bound by the fabric of matter it inhabited, then surely that would dictate that human thought (leading to inevitable human action) isn't in itself bound by the same proposed determinism that constrains the universe?

Which is inherently contradictory, because human action forms part of the causal history of the self-same universe, which would directly shoot down the idea of some super-macro scale determinism existing in the first place no?

 

[Chmpocalypse]

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.

Explain how that fact is absurd. Bonus points if you avoid the words "quantum" and "metaphysical".

 

[Hari Seldon]

How can they even square this superdeterminism idea with magic minds though?

Like if the human mind was magic and not bound by the fabric of matter it inhabited, then surely that would dictate that human thought (leading to inevitable human action) isn't in itself bound by the same proposed determinism that constrains the universe?

Which is inherently contradictory, because human action forms part of the causal history of the self-same universe, which would directly shoot down the idea of some super-macro scale determinism existing in the first place no?

Unless I read it wrong, super determinism being true would mean that our minds are not "magic" and therefore every thought is predetermined by the initial state of the universe.

 

[All Possible Ways]

So... Out of curiosity, what would be the difference between hooking these up to human minds, and hooking them up to slow roasting hams?

Or if not hams, something with mild electric charges going through them? I don't see the connection between the idea of consciousness being immaterial and this experiment whatsoever. I'm probably misunderstanding.

It sounds like they think that human minds might exhibit properties that ignore quantum effects - but an EEG just reads electric signals - do they have a control? Something else that reads electric signals?

Exactly, hams would do just fine, unless consciousness is magical, which sounds ridiculous.

How can they even square this superdeterminism idea with magic minds though?

Like if the human mind was magic and not bound by the fabric of matter it inhabited, then surely that would dictate that human thought (leading to inevitable human action) isn't in itself bound by the same proposed determinism that constrains the universe?

Which is inherently contradictory, because human action forms part of the causal history of the self-same universe, which would directly shoot down the idea of some super-macro scale determinism existing in the first place no?

Yes, this is why I think this whole premise is flawed and absurd.

On another note, I am very glad that people liked my explanation, it makes the effort worthwhile. Trying to convey these concepts in a non mathematical language can be quite challenging, but I personally think that it is part of our responsibility to society, you know, to try to give back what we learned. Plus, its fun!

 

[bsp]

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?

I don't understand what you are trying to describe with this. Determinism doesn't lock out investigations into a process that takes place within a physical universe. Constituent parts solely or emergent, I don't see a reason it can't be understood at some point with the usual (or hopefully expanded) tools of empiricism in the future.

 

[Xe4]

So... Out of curiosity, what would be the difference between hooking these up to human minds, and hooking them up to slow roasting hams?

Or if not hams, something with mild electric charges going through them? I don't see the connection between the idea of consciousness being immaterial and this experiment whatsoever. I'm probably misunderstanding.

It sounds like they think that human minds might exhibit properties that ignore quantum effects - but an EEG just reads electric signals - do they have a control? Something else that reads electric signals?

There is no difference, and you're right, it's likely the EEG or whatever is perturbing the wavefunction that is the cause, not a human consciousness.

Any half decent experiment would run it with a control, because if human consciousness was somehow important, that would be very weird, and go against everything we know in quantum mechanics.