March 9, 2009
- Decoherance -
Perhaps this is why, in Buddhist meditation, practitioners are required to Be Here Now, that is, be perfectly present and observe phenomena as they arise and pass away. My Zen instructor gave a talk about a certain Koan, a part of which was that the true dharma does not reveal itself to outsiders or demons. He emphasized “outsiders”. Those that stand outside cannot see the truth. They must be within it, and it within them.
You must be in it to understand it. There’s something there, I think. If quantum states collapse when they encounter our 3~4D world of Classical physics, then when we stand aside from it as observers, we can’t see the effect. But when we step fully into the world governed by Classical physics, when we become aware of the sensations in our body which arise and pass away (and everything is a sensation in the body, something I just realized coming home on the train today), perhaps we can begin to feel the effects of the collapse of possibilities.
This is not to say that we see the future in any kind of divinatory way. After all, both Einstein and Bohm said that the past and the future don’t exist. It’s all happening now, in a way that we just think we can’t see. But what we do see by being totally present is the telltale signs of past- and future-present. Signals, we just have to measure them out of the noise. This is how some people can “read” other people or situations. This might be how intuition works. Rupert Sheldrake’s “sense of being stared at…”
But we have to be open to feel them. Open, present, and aware. Not centered in our self (our true awareness has no center), but centered amidst everything else. Whether or not quantum physics is involved, this is the way to see possibilities as they coalesce around us. We do not create our own reality, but we do define it. And the way we define ourselves and our realities is the way we “measure” the “quantum states” of possibility. It’s how we collapse wave functions.
Oh, and before any one says anything about my desire to write down my thoughts (Pavel, I’m looking at you, buddy! ;) ) let me just say in my defense that there’s a reason I tag these kinds of posts “ramblings” and the longer ones as “writing”. These are just sort of notes for me to stumble over later, and for ya’ll to enjoy in the meantime.
Comment by Ian — March 9, 2009 @ 10:50 pm
I’ve always suspected that the pre-collapse state is the important one. The co-existence of opposites, the suspension of differentiation… pin the butterfly, and it stops being a butterfly. Coherence is the key.
I mean, back to the cat-in-the-box. In jargon: the cat has a ‘state-vector’ with two component states: Alive (100%) and Dead (0%). Close the box, and ‘state-vector evolution’ takes place; while you’re not looking, the cat can become 50% Alive and 50% Dead. Open the box, and /something/ forces the cat to have a classical existence. ‘State-vector reduction’ occurs, and it’s either 100% Alive or 100% Dead. Classicality cannot conceive of anything else. The best rule we have for working out which is to throw dice, which Einstein famously balked at.
But this is a deep riddle, and begs the question: what about the cat’s point of view? The point being, odd things can happen inside the box. States can be contemplated without becoming…. in fact, every possible state.
> when we step fully into the world governed by Classical physics
There’s something funny here… which world are we to step into again? The quantum world looks on the surface like a world of discrete particles, but that’s an illusion; the reality is a sea of waves. The classical world looks smooth; but that’s an illusion too! Classicality is the world of the definite, reduced state-vector…
I read this paper; I’ll dig out the link. Chaos theory says that some things move in a determined but /unpredictable/ way. A riddle in itself. But it turns out that chaos can’t exist in a closed quantum system, and motion always repeats in a determined manner. BUT in an open system, decoherence causes classical chaos and unpredictability to reappear… Work that one out, makes my head hurt.
Comment by speedbird — March 10, 2009 @ 4:36 am
Yeah. I keep coming back to what it’s like for the cat as well. Maybe, until our states are contemplated, we’re all in a state of becoming (rather than being)… Maybe there is no difference between the way things change and this “state vector evolution” you’re talking about.
Think about it, when was the last time you saw something change? Don’t we only ever experience reality as one momentary slice of time, and make assumptions based on that one measurement?
I think the key is to find where these two “realities” of quantum and classical meet. They can both exist if we can find some common ground. Perhaps it is in the subjective experience…
Anyway, if you do find that paper, I would much appreciate the link. Trying to wrap my head around that just makes it explode. It does the same things to me that trying to wrap my head around heavier Buddhist concepts does. Quantum physics is the mystical version of science, if anything is.
Comment by Ian — March 10, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
And then there’s this article on physorg, which is a bit over my head (will try to dig into it later), but the first comment for which is:
Still, WHY is it that an ‘instant of consciousness occurs’ when the wave function collapses? Why does that mean consciousness would occur?
“Consciousness” occurs when the wave function collapses? Hmm…
Comment by ian — March 10, 2009 @ 3:54 pm
> when was the last time you saw something change?
Arrp… /good/ one… lemme get back to you on that…
Comment by speedbird — March 10, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/the_papers/berry337.pdf
This is not particularly easy stuff, but some of the wordy bits are nothing short of fascinating:
“So the claim sometimes made, that chaos amplifies quantum uncertainty, is misleading. The situation is more subtle: chaos magnifies /any/ uncertainty, but in the quantum case [the size of quanta] has a smoothing effect, which would suppress chaos if this suppression were not itself suppressed by externally-induced decoherence, that restores classicality …’
8-0
Comment by speedbird — March 10, 2009 @ 5:05 pm
> Why does that mean consciousness would occur?
It’s just a theory of consciousness… I first read it in Penrose’s ‘The Emperor’s New Mind’.
Comment by speedbird — March 10, 2009 @ 5:08 pm
THANK you speedbird. All very cool stuff. Will definitely try to find time to get through that paper later. But that Emporer’s New Mind books looks good too (and my Amazon wish list grows by three or four books..)
The reason I find that comment from physorg interesting is that it draws a connection between quantum states, through consciousness, to classical physics…
In Buddhism, they consider the mind (and thoughts) as a sixth sense. That is, pretty much just the same as and eye or ear, something you use to pick up on stuff outside yourself. Thoughts might be a way of sensing quantum states.
Gurdjieff also said that man ate “impressions” to build his higher “Kesdjan” body. As always with Gudjieff, it seems like he took some really good ideas and made them sound as weird as possible. Maybe a fault of translation, but I doubt it.
If consciousness grows when wave functions are collapsed into classical physics, then we are basically information processing organs of the universe, pulling stuff from the quantum ether and bringing it into being here in lower reality. The mind senses them, pulls them in, digests them, and we are left with physical reality (hence the idea that all reality is an illusion or dream, since we create it with our thoughts in this sense). By collapsing these wave functions, we digest meaning out potentiality.
Of course, this assumes we’re trying to bring our thoughts in touch with reality. If we’re not, then our thoughts drift through quantum space and we drift through “real” life, feeling lost.
Like you said before, “Information is the shit left over after the soup has been digested.” The soup and the poop. Maybe the brown stuff will connect with the fan AND we’ll get universal enlightenment… no need to be picky if we can have both, right?
But if quantum computers do this same thing, only much faster, than Kurzweil’s Singularity (link for those following along) might actually be something to worry about. And I’m not a big fan of giving the nerds their techno rapture. ;)
Comment by Ian — March 10, 2009 @ 8:46 pm
> when was the last time you saw something change?
OK, round two, seconds out, ding ding.
That floored me a bit first time out! But yes, I’m sure I have seen things change… but they’ve all been somewhat transcendental experiences. Much to think about here. Almost koan-like…
Actually Kurzweil doesn’t worry me quite so much these days, because a ‘quantum computer’ quite simply won’t be a machine in any sense… like the ‘wireless telegraph’ wasn’t a telegraph in the end, but a radio. The machinists will no doubt attempt to incorporate these quantum objects in their devices, however… not sure what that’ll mean. A return to a kind of slavery, perhaps.
Comment by speedbird — March 11, 2009 @ 4:24 am