skullhuman said:
Entropymancer said:
skullhuman said:
I thought that in order for the wave-form to collapse there actually had to be a conscious person using the instrument?
Nope.
Hm, so the interpretation I put forth is no longer valid? (what's it called, btw?) Can you guide me to a source that proves this?
That interpretation (consciousness causes collapse) cannot be explicitly disproven because we're all conscious, and we cannot observe the result of an experiment without our consciousness being involved. However computers can store the data, so we don't consciously involve ourselves until after all the data had been collected; I suppose you could then argue that the data doesn't resolve until its observed, but that doesn't seem terribly likely.
The whole concept of the observer was necessarily introduced because the state of things on a quantum level is indeterminate until an observation is made, and interacting with the electron (or whatever you're observing) cannot be done without the measurement causing a change in the state of the particle being measured.
Furthermore, if consciousness affected the manner in which the wavefunction collapses to particular eigenstates, this would necessarily have the potential to skew the results so that they are no longer 100% consistent with the probability distribution (the square of the wavefunction). So it's highly unlikely that consciousness has any role in the resolution of the wavefunction to particular eigenstates. Deepak Chopra and the folks who made the atrocious "documentary" called
What the bleep do we know are representative of the sort of people who hold to this interpretation.
skullhuman said:
Hm, but how meaningful is the difference though? It seems to me that whether it's 'observation' or 'interaction' that causes the collapse doesn't really matter because one thing is really the other. I mean, without observation can there be any interaction, and vice versa? Isn't observation the thing that's interacting?
No, observation is not the thing that's interacting. Matter and energy are.
Look at the double-slit experiment for example (the classical experiment demonstrating the observer effect). When you fire the electron towards the double-slits, it can pass through the slits but not through the wall between the slits. This interaction confines the electron to moving through the slits (and in the absence of an observer, it's happy to move through both at the same time), which results in the interference pattern as enough electrons are shot through to collect a representative data set. That interference pattern is a result of the electron interacting with the background wall (beyond the two slits); when it hits the wall, its position resolves to a single location. The role of the observer (an instrument that detects if it's travelling through a particular slot) is that by measuring whether or not the electron passed through that slot, it forces the electron's position to resolve earlier, confining it to one slot or another, as a result of which the electron can't pass through both and interfere with itself.
skullhuman said:
But that's the idea, maybe it isn't a consensual electron at all. Maybe the electron assumes a different place in time when observed from hyperspace than from the consensual world. In other words, perhaps the 'regular' observer and the hyperspace observer are causing two decidedly different patterns of sub-atomic collapse to emerge. You see, what I'm wondering here is if that world and this one literally exist as separate quantum dimensions to one another, each defined by their own unique states of particle collapse. Each world consists of electrons existing in different places at the same time.
You can't prove an idea by assuming its conclusion as a postulate. You seem to be assuming that hyperspace is a real world built on the same building blocks as consensual reality (i.e. that there are electrons in hyperspace that can be observed, and further that there are instruments there capable of measuring them). Until you can prove that there are electrons in hyperspace, the whole question of whether the wavefunction resolves differently is irrelevant. Hell, considering we don't know how the wavefunction resolves to particular eigenstates in consensual reality (only that its probability of resolving to particular eigenstates is given by the probability density obtained by squaring the wavefunction), the question seems pretty irrelevant regardless.
Unless I'm still misunderstanding what you're getting at?
