[Bill S]

Much appreciated! Hope to read your 2 cents sometime soon

Can't promise a whole 2 cents at current exchange rates, but there should be something

[demalk (OP)]

Then again, we introduce a lot of new ideas into this world. Like 'ethics' for example, could there be a entropy to ideas? Are we a ordered system of thoughts?

Even in a universe that is increasing in entropy, tiny blips of order may appear without significantly affecting the average entropy increase whatsoever. Humanity isn't even a blip on the radar of the universe. Let alone our seemingly new (how are we so sure they are new?) and ordered (that too can be debated) ideas like love and ethics and self-loathing.

Look at it this way. If we would remove one electron from a chair. Would the chair have changed significantly at all? All of biology on earth put together is about as significant to entropy as one electron is to a chair

[Bill S]

However, and this is where the distinction comes in: this so-called 'observer' effect does not occur naturally. Imagine a sunrise where the first beams of light are just reaching over from the other side of the horizon, and the light passes through 2 tiny openings in, say, a tree, and shines onto an otherwise dark surface behind it, say, a rock. This will always produce an interference pattern (i.e. no observer effect)

How could you be sure of that if it were not observed?

[Bill S]

Consciousness can alter the experiment, but simply changing the theory, used to bridge the invisible primary information with the more obvious secondary information we all can see.

I see that that changes our understanding, but fail to see how this changes the reality of the physical event that is being observed.

[demalk (OP)]

How could you be sure of that if it were not observed?

Before I answer your question, I should ask one first: what exactly do you mean by "observed"?

[Bill S]

Which makes sense according to Einstein, because they are travelling so fast that they don't experience any time at all. To them all events happen instantaneously. The entire universe, to a photon, is instantaneous.

I don’t think Einstein said that, but opinions are divided; quot sapientes, tot sententiae.

It is fascinating that one physicist can say categorically that photons don’t experience time, but another can say the opposite. The way I understand it goes something like this:

Special relativity provides for an inertial frame for everything that has mass, but it does not cover massless particles such as the photon. Talking of the photon having a frame of reference is, strictly speaking, not scientific. The photon must always be observed as travelling at “c”. It cannot be at rest relative to anything. Of course, one could argue that it must be at rest relative to itself, but that is not a very productive line of reasoning. Science has not actually produced definite proof that the photon cannot be assigned an inertial frame, but to maintain that it does have one is pure speculation, and maintaining that it does not have one seems to be the generally accepted position.

Taking the time dilation equation to its ultimate conclusion may seem a logical thing to do, but it is not supported by special relativity because of the lack of mass of the photon which puts it outside the remit of special relativity. It seems that the best we can say is that we have no way of knowing if photons experience time, or not. Nor do we have any scientifically accredited theory that covers this, nor any way to test the idea experimentally, as no massive object can reach the speed of light, and a clock cannot be fixed to a photon.

[Bill S]

Before I answer your question, I should ask one first: what exactly do you mean by "observed"?

Sorry, cross-over posting, there.

In order that a conscious being may say with any certainty that a particular event/effect has occurred in the physical world, she/he must be (consciously) aware of it.  So, in this specific instance, but not always, I refer to conscious observation.   

[Bill S]

Chris Baird’s blog may be a bit basic for this level of discussion, but I think he does a good job here.

http://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/07/30/what-did-schrodingers-cat-experiment-prove/

 “In summary, quantum state collapse is not driven just by conscious observers, and "Schrodinger's Cat" was just a teaching tool invented to try to make this fact more obvious by reducing the observer-driven notion to absurdity. Unfortunately, many popular science writers in our day continue to propagate the misconception that a quantum state (and therefore reality itself) is determined by conscious observers”.

[demalk (OP)]

“In summary, quantum state collapse is not driven just by conscious observers, and "Schrodinger's Cat" was just a teaching tool invented to try to make this fact more obvious by reducing the observer-driven notion to absurdity. Unfortunately, many popular science writers in our day continue to propagate the misconception that a quantum state (and therefore reality itself) is determined by conscious observers”.

Exactly!

[demalk (OP)]

I see that that changes our understanding, but fail to see how this changes the reality of the physical event that is being observed.

Exactly my point. 'Consciousness' doesn't alter anything. It doesn't exist in the same reality as matter or, according to the definition presently up for debate, information. Consciousness is just a word we use to describe our experience of the level of complexity of our brain in relation to the brain of each other and other animals. To a bird, you and I are completely not-conscious of the earth's magnetic field it uses to find the exact same spot across extreme distances. It would consider an animal that cannot do that, like you or me, significantly less conscious than birds.

Since consciousness is a matter of perspective and doesn't have an objective value, an objective threshold of what 'is' or 'isn't' conscious, it can never be a fundamental part of reality. It emerges from biology just like biology emerges from chemistry which emerges from quantum physics.

Interestingly, 'Consciousness' and 'time' don't exist, in exactly the same way. Time has no objective meaning either. That's why it cannot trump information in the double slit experiment. If it existed in the same ontological category as matter and energy, and information didn't, it would trump information in our experiments. We would be able to 'fool' the system by delaying our decision to store or not store the which path information. Since we cannot do that, since even in the future the information affects the results in the past, it is safe to say that time, like consciousness, only exists in the mind of and from the perspective of the entity that experiences it. Or shall we say, 'observes' it

[demalk (OP)]

In order that a conscious being may say with any certainty that a particular event/effect has occurred in the physical world, she/he must be (consciously) aware of it.  So, in this specific instance, but not always, I refer to conscious observation.

Right. So this is the type of observation by which we determine whether or not the experiment has led to an interference pattern. It is not the type of observation that is meant in reference to the altered pattern, which underlines my point: the two are distinct and therefore 'observer effect' is wrong. It implies consciousness which is a subjective construct.

When I say 'We know for sure it wasn't observed', I mean the other type of 'observation', the one that should be called 'information'.

So, given your definition, my answer to your question - "how do you know it wasn't observed?" - is: I'm sure it was observed. I'm sure there was some animal watching the light fall through the slits. That 'observation' has no effect on the pattern on the rock. Whether it was an ant or a human that saw it, whether that human understood what he or she was watching, whether life at this point in time had even developed at all (well, apart from the tree;)); these things will not alter the interference pattern.

[Bill S]

Thanks.

That seems to bring us to the point, which I think you were making elsewhere, that what makes the difference is whether or not the information is recorded. 

Is that right?

[jeffreyH]

The problem with any argument against an aspect of quantum mechanics is the lack of full understanding. Quantum mechanics is founded upon experimental observation and how to explain it. The fact that is doesn't fit with a classical viewpoint is not a flaw in quantum mechanics. I am currently studying a variety of aspects of QM. What I have learnt so far confirms this.

[Bill S]

The fact that is doesn't fit with a classical viewpoint is not a flaw in quantum mechanics.

That is something with which I would certainly not try to argue.  If something doesn't seem "right" it is probably because of our incomplete knowledge. 

What I'm particularly interested, here, is the possibility that information is something that exists in its own right. Or, is it something that emerges from "something", because it has to be information about something?

[jeffreyH]

The information about an object is not the object itself. All electrons are identical in principle. So they only convey information about their states. The state is not the object itself either. It is a property of the object. This is information. It cannot exist without the electron.

[demalk (OP)]

That seems to bring us to the point, which I think you were making elsewhere, that what makes the difference is whether or not the information is recorded.

[demalk (OP)]

The way I understand it goes something like this:

Special relativity provides for an inertial frame for everything that has mass, but it does not cover massless particles such as the photon. Talking of the photon having a frame of reference is, strictly speaking, not scientific. The photon must always be observed as travelling at “c”. It cannot be at rest relative to anything. Of course, one could argue that it must be at rest relative to itself, but that is not a very productive line of reasoning. Science has not actually produced definite proof that the photon cannot be assigned an inertial frame, but to maintain that it does have one is pure speculation, and maintaining that it does not have one seems to be the generally accepted position.

Taking the time dilation equation to its ultimate conclusion may seem a logical thing to do, but it is not supported by special relativity because of the lack of mass of the photon which puts it outside the remit of special relativity. It seems that the best we can say is that we have no way of knowing if photons experience time, or not. Nor do we have any scientifically accredited theory that covers this, nor any way to test the idea experimentally, as no massive object can reach the speed of light, and a clock cannot be fixed to a photon.

The way I see it the evidence is there – we are just interpreting it from the warped perspective of time-experiencing entities.

In the delayed choice experiment, the photon seems to violate causality. So clearly something is weird here. Our friends from Copenhagen maintain that the photon is what's weird. The world is what's weird. Then you need things like superposition to describe what's going on. And even then, as Feynman remarked in one of his famous lectures: "it is safe to say that nobody understands quantum mechanics". It allows us to predict, not understand. By definition. According to Copenhagen, that is the final answer.

To me, all you need to do to explain the apparent violation of causality, is flip the proposition and assume that we are what's weird here. That we are experiencing reality in a fragmented, diluted, distorted way, and the photon is what experiences it as it really is. It can incorporate into its present behaviour whether or not the which path information will exist in what we think is the future, because to it, there is no such temporal distinction. In reality, there is no such distinction.

The notion that something doesn't exist until our sense of causality/time has caught up with it, seems to be refuted by delayed choice. That’s where we get a glimpse of the simultaneous existence of the present and the future. That’s where we manage to break free from the confines of our temporal illusion and directly observe the absence of time at work.

[jeffreyH]

Well you can understand quantum mechanics. Quite easily. Just as you can understand relativity.

[demalk (OP)]

The problem with any argument against an aspect of quantum mechanics is the lack of full understanding.

Agreed.

Quantum mechanics is founded upon experimental observation and how to explain it. The fact that is doesn't fit with a classical viewpoint is not a flaw in quantum mechanics. I am currently studying a variety of aspects of QM. What I have learnt so far confirms this.

That is incorrect in several ways. First of all nobody is arguing against any aspect of QM. The equations are accurate, obviously. Nobody is saying that they need to be changed. We didn't have to change Newton's equations when we discovered a more fundamental reality underlying them either.

The question here is: are QM's equations fundamental or are they partially describing something even more fundamental and to answer that question, you cannot expect to just dig into the equations of QM itself and figure it out. Just like a pure study of Newton's equations could never have revealed the underlying world of QM, the pure study of QM can never reveal the reality underlying it, if such a thing exists. One thing is for sure: if we all just shut up and accept Copenhagen, we will never find out.

QM describes and thereby predicts. It does so more accurately than anything we've ever encountered. But it doesn't explain. Nobody can claim that it does. And nobody does actually claim that. It is just claimed that it is fundamentally inexplicable, and that is something I will never accept regardless of how unimaginably smart the claiming party, or how Scandinavian their city of origin, may be. To me, at that point science has reached equal terms with religion: both god and the universe work in mysterious ways. Great. Praise the universe.

What often strikes me about people who have actually dug into the mathematical details of QM, is that on the one hand they exclaim with great ease that quantum is just different from classical and you can never reason about quantum in classical terms. But when asked to take that step another time, and imagine how different terms would be needed to talk about QM's underlying reality just like different terms were needed to talk about the underlying reality of classical physics, they completely shut down and start reciting Copenhagen on you. Why? Just take the same step again. Assume just for argument's sake that there IS an underlying reality. Is it so hard to see that the relationship between it and QM would be similar to that between QM and classical in the sense that you cannot use the same terms to describe both?

The way I see it, there has to be an underlying reality to QM just like QM underlies classical physics. And if we look close enough we can catch glimpses of it just like we were eventually able to catch glimpses of QM when we were looking at our classical experiments closely enough. We didn't prove Newton wrong, we just proved him incomplete. That there is something deeper. The same will happen for QM, eventually. And if not, at least we died trying

[demalk (OP)]

What I'm particularly interested, here, is the possibility that information is something that exists in its own right. Or, is it something that emerges from "something", because it has to be information about something?

Right on! So the idea up for discussion in this thread is that everything emerges from information, not the other way around. It all has the same informational building blocks. Shoes, light, gold, Google Docs, geckos, 'which path' information, teddy bears, Mark Cuban; it all emerges from the same fundamental informational reality. This is not to say of course that there is some sort of universal concept of 'teddy bear'. The teddy bear is just a specific arrangement of  a certain type of molecules shaped to represent a symbolic meaning for the software of the brains of our fellow humans to decode and go: "awww, a teddy bear", even though it would not have been a recognisable bear to any other animal species on this planet. A shoe is just something that fits around our foot. At the fundamental level there is no such thing as 'foot' or 'shoe' or 'teddy bear' or even 'bear' or even 'b'. But all the subatomic particles and/or processes comprising the bear, and those comprising the atmospheric particles that allow the 'b' wave to travel from your mouth to my ears, are all phenomena emerging from the same informational fundamental reality.

In that reality, time doesn't exist. All the information is already there. Like the information on an SSD. Time is just a filter, an emerging phenomenon through which massive networks upon massive networks of information (matter) process the equally emerging massive networks of information around them. We are held back by the weight of our own informational complexity so much, that we can no longer experience the instantness of the information around us. We need to experience causality in order to experience anything at all. Had we been as light as a photon, we would experience all the information at once just like the photons evidently do in our experiments. The fact that we are lagging behind, and therefore only see a probabilistic quantum world, isn't the universe's fault. It is our incomplete experience, our observational deficiency (and by 'our' I mean everything that has mass) that is at fault.

There are thousands of jokes about Chuck Norris and his legendary strength. My favourite one is: "when Chuck Norris jumps into the water, he doesn't get wet. The water gets Chuck Norrissed." In the same light (pun intended), light isn't travelling at light speed. We are travelling at matter speed. We are impaired. We are weird. The photon is what really sees the universe as it is: one gigantic timeless network of informational subsystems.