Enough of this quantum consciousness woo. Can we maybe understand this in terms of science?
Schrodinger's wave equation gives an exact solution. For systems that contain observers, the solution is that the observer observes particles. The observers do not have full knowledge of the system that contains them, and so their observations are probabilistic from their viewpoint. Recall that probability is a prediction, a mathematical model of belief, not a description of a system's state. An observer does not need to be conscious. An observer is any measuring device with at least one bit of memory. Writing into memory is a statistically time-irreversible process in a device that obeys the time-reversible laws of physics. In practice, we use the Copenhagen interpretation (wave collapse) as an approximation to a full wave equation solution because the computation time is exponential in the number of variables (and thus intractable for modeling observers) on a non quantum computer. The approximation only works in the absence of other information. It doesn't work in the case of entanglement, or once the particle is observed. What you call consciousness is what thinking feels like. Thinking and feeling are neural processes. They require no additional physics to model in neurons or transistors. The feeling that there is some process outside your brain that goes to heaven is wishful thinking motivated by your evolved fear of dying. -- Matt Mahoney, mattmahone...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T51eb63417278f283-M8ad269f3fe93815249db1d02 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
