[SEQ RERUN] Where Philosophy Meets Science
Today’s post, Where Philosophy Meets Science was originally published on 12 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
In retrospect, supposing that quantum physics had anything to do with consciousness was a big mistake. Could philosophers have told the physicists so? But we don’t usually see philosophers sponsoring major advances in physics; why not?
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Distinct Configurations, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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This seems to be the consensus in the physics departments, though not in philosophy departments.
I’d say their biggest mistake was not realizing that if consciousness really was fundamental, they could make a test for it, then after realizing it couldn’t distinguish a human from a rock, realize that consciousness may not actually have anything to do with it.
If it is that easy, how come Penrose kept insisting on consciousness being involved in the collapse?
That’s not what Penrose thinks. He suggests spontaneous collapses happening according to some law of quantum gravity.
The basic error about the history of the interpretation debate, that people get from the sequences, is that it’s a choice between “the wavefunction is real and consciousness collapses it” and “the wavefunction is real and nothing collapses it”. The actual practice of QM involves using wavefunctions to predict the behavior of “observables” like position and momentum, and the standard view is that the observables are what’s real and that the wavefunctions are just constructs like probability distributions. Most physicists believe neither in many worlds nor in consciousness as a fundamental “force”.
Most? Got some numbers on that?
Wikipedia reports a few polls and estimates, but it’s sort of obvious, if you have any acquaintance with physicists and the physics literature, that neither consciousness nor Everett worlds feature in the vast majority of what goes on in the subject. The crucial idea is that “measurement”, not consciousness, collapses the wavefunction… I think a majority of physicists equivocate somewhat on whether wavefunctions are physical or epistemic, another large group explicitly consider that a meaningless question, and then finally there are those who have a thought-out personal philosophy of what QM means about reality. Anyone who believes in many worlds will be in that last group… along with the Bohmians, the “noncommutative probability” believers, and dozens of other eccentric minorities.
Have a look through a month’s worth of papers in the quant-ph section at arxiv to see what I’m talking about. Papers “finally explaining quantum mechanics” (or “the meaning of entanglement”, etc) are common—there are several each week—and a few of them are many-worlds papers, but only a few.
If by real you mean measurable (=observable), I agree, but then your statement becomes a tautology.
The usual argument from wishful thinking? Humans consistently have an opinion on dualism then seek to justify it with what they think they know, not the other way round.