> The way I read it, those that cannot collapse the wave -- and the narrator
> discovers he's one of them -- are not fully consciously human. They lack
> souls, for lack of a better word. They are not as woven into the
> consciousness
> of the universe as others. They are extraneous, on a cosmic scale.
Ah, OK, that's a beautiful and plausible interpretation, but K has
been too subtle then.
Page 77: he acts as the potential detector, when he burns the
envelope. Page 78: if he can't collapse the wave, and knows it, then
his trick with drinking and the detector won't work and he should know
it won't work. But he thinks it will work. Worst, page 89: "I
looked at the results -- and in so doing, finally collapse the
probability wave of the experiment". So we need for him to not know
he can't collapse, and to be making factual claims that are wrong
(though we've crossed flashbacks and so it's a weird kind of false
statement to make -- he's narrating from after the discovery, but
describes it as a given fact).
But then the final sentence shows your interpretation is the most
plausible -- there's a wave pattern there, though he drank. I confess
I just didn't think it through, in large part because I'm very dubious
about the whole, I-can-conditionally-collapse-the-wave-by-making-
promises-to-myself supposition and the fact that he didn't open the
detector envelope results (what if he lost the detector results
envelope, for example? What if it burned in a fire? Etc.).
K should have been more clear -- a simple phrase on page 89 ("and so I
already knew there would be no interference pattern") would have been
enough. Or, better, have him open the detector results, and then say
something like that as he opens the results envelope.
cd
PS: BTW, and as a question not relevant to this story since I don't
care if he stretched the interpretation: can anyone point me to any
evidence that something called "consciousness" is required to collapse
the wave? I always thought it was just decoherence and that arose
from any causal interaction. I don't know the source of this idea
that consciousness, rather than simple interaction, is required to
collapse the wave. It seems like wishful thinking to me.
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