One of the books I’m currently reading is yesterday’s post at Cosmic Variance (a blog by astrophysicist/cosmologist Sean Carroll) which, in part, discusses the “measurement problem”, which is basically the quantum mechanic-specific version of the Observer’s Paradox. (Yesterday’s post also happens to contain a link to a very lucid description of non-destructive quantum interrogation, otherwise known as quantum computing. The best part is that he explicitly avoids any cat-killing metaphors.

In the description of the measurement problem, Carroll talks about the major different ways that QM has come to be interpreted: the Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, which states that wave function collapse indeed happens, but the non-measurable states have no real importance and may not even truly exist; the Many Worlds Interpretation, which basically says that every probable outcome results in a branching of the universe; and the hidden-variables interpretation, which states that while we can’t directly measure certain things, they do in fact exist.

I tried slogging through the comments, but what disturbed me was the recurrence of the misconception that consciousness collapses the wave function, when in fact is it physical measurement that collapses the wave function. (According to any of these major interpretations, there is no difference between me opening the box and seeing if the cat is dead or not, or if a robot were to open the box and detect whether the cat was dead or not. There is no need to invoke the anthropic principle here.)

The main issue I have is that we don’t even really know what Consciousness is. You can’t just wield it around like some magic wand.

Which leads me to yet another book I am reading: I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. So far, I’m getting an idea of what exactly he means by a strange loop. The easier part is simply the recursive nature of consciousness. In computer science terminology, it is a process that basically monitors itself. I haven’t gotten far enough into the book to know, but one of the thoughts that comes to mind is whether or not this process has some causal agency (does my consciousness necessarily allow free-will?) or whether it just happens to be a passenger attached to the actual causal processes that occur subconsciously and are the result of millions of years of evolutionary programming responding to external stimuli, thus giving us the illusion of free-will but never really straying from a deterministic system.

If we ever figure out what it actually means to be conscious, then we may have a chance at figuring out AI, and maybe even how to interpret QM, but until then, Consciousness in the context of QM has no relevance.

Which serendipitously leads me to yet another blog post that manages to encapsulate a lot of my thoughts: Gina Franco (author of reli{e}able signs) excerpts a passage from John Caputo’s description of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on faith.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 1 (December 2004): 6-9.”). Apparently one of the Jesuit priests who taught at my high school had also read Derrida. I will always remember that he told us that faith has nothing to do with certainty, and that certainty in fact eradicates the need for faith.

So we find ourselves perched between a scenario where the only things that are real are the things that you can sense, and a scenario where reality is just whatever you decide to make of it. But if QM and deconstructionism can teach us non-physicists and non-metaphysicists anything, it is the fact that reality typically eschews any black-and-white interpretations. Reality is always somewhere in between whatever we can describe.