Excellent question, Simon! And thanks for reading my essay!Simon Adams wrote: ↑Wed Jun 02, 2021 10:21 am It seems to me there is a fundamental question around an element of nature as an observer of itself, versus conscious/living observers. I keep seeing mixed versions of this, including in Adur’s comments in his recent QM post, and indeed from Bernardo.
Take his recent ‘Objections to Idealism’, around 47 mins in, on the question of cosmological history. Most of what he says is a clear refutation of a blatant misunderstanding of idealism. However he adds an additional point about there being no representation, indeed no “physical” reality at all, until there were ‘living’ observers;
This seems to me to be unnecessary and also potentially problematic. First off, what do we mean by physical properties? If two meteors hit each other in space, there is an impact. We know that this is just fields repelling each other, but equally this is something that would normally fall under the description of a physical event. The material properties play a critical role in determining the outcome of the collision. Is the suggestion that this event would be in any way different if it happened in a part of the universe that is further than 4 billion light years away from any planet that has life? If so, in what way would it be different?
If the suggestion is that nature in it’s raw form, the thing in itself if you like, always behaves in the same way, and by “physical” we purely mean how nature represents itself to the senses of biological organisms, then this problem goes away, but then many of the aspects of quantum mechanics used to support idealism by Bernardo and others become meaningless. What is ‘observation’ in this scenario? More than this, I think we have enough evidence from QM experiments to show that conscious observation is not necessary to cause “collapse” of the wave function. Adur tries to get around this by stating that there is an entanglement between the investigator and the instruments when they setup the experiment (even if they then place it in a ‘black box’, and the detectors self destruct/erase). However this seems to be invoking a kind of magic, as if the photons are interrogating the investigator’s mind to find out where they put the detectors. Why should the entanglement be any different when the investigator includes a detector when setting up the experiment, versus when they don’t? This just doesn’t seem feasible or likely to me.
If instead we say that nature is composed of substantial, mental, forms, and that when these interact in a meaningful way they represent to each other, these problems seem to me to go away. All interactions produce physical properties as part of the interaction. However you can’t then have a need for ‘living’ biological observation in order to have representation, as Bernardo, Adur and many others suggest as necessary.
Am I missing something?
To begin with, my version of idealism is very different from Bernardo's analytical idealism. Bernardo's view bypasses all Western science (I'm not an expert in analytical idealism, please those of you who are correct me if I'm wrong), by saying that the physical universe, with all its physical laws, is the extrinsic appearance of a mysterious "universal conscious inner life". From this perspective, QM doesn't add anything meaningful or new: quantum laws are just the extrinsic appearance of the activity of that universal consciousness, exactly like classical laws.
Bernardo endorses Carlo Rovelli's relational interpretation of QM, which denies the existence of an objective physical universe. He argues that analytical idealism provides an explanation for the consistency of the observations made by different observers. (In the relational interpretation, there are as many physical universes as observers, and there is no reason to assume that those different universes should be mutually consistent.)
I don't find Bernardo's view satisfying (I don't find Rovelli's relational interpretation convincing either). That's why I'm trying to develop my own version of idealism. I sometimes call it "nonlocal idealism", because it takes the fundamental nonlocality discovered by QM (proven by Bell's theorem) seriously.
Bernardo's analytical idealism is, as far as I can tell, a local theory. If I perceive a mountain, and that mountain is the extrinsic appearance of M@L's inner life, then M@L's inner life must be local. Because only from a particular location can that mountain be perceived. If I'm in Switzerland and you in Scotland, we won't see the same mountain. But if we are standing side by side at the same location in space, we can be pretty sure we will see the same mountain. Why does this consistent locality happen in our perceptions? I'm not aware of any explanation given by Bernardo, unless it is that spacetime is the extrinsic appearance of M@L's nonlocal inner life. But why should this hypothetical inner life appear consistently as local?
Another objection I have to Bernardo's analytic idealism is the consistency and regularity in the behaviour of the physical world. Let's take for example Newton's classical laws of motion. If planets and stars and billiard balls are the extrinsic appearance of M@L's inner life, why is this inner life so regular, mechanical and predictable? Our own inner life is in no way as predictable and mechanical as that.
To answer your question about two meteors colliding far away from any planet with life... I don't believe in the objective existence of meteors, or of planets, unless they are being measured by living organisms (and therefore, observed by Nature). Many physical events occuring light years away from us (like planetary collisions or whatever) can be measured by scientists. Therefore, they exist objectively. But anything that can't be measured doesn't exist in the physical sense. The physical universe is the measured universe.
In my own version of idealism, there is a crucial difference between QM and classical physics. In my view, it is impossible to justify the classical laws of physics from an idealistic perspective. If billiard balls are fundamentally mental, why should they obey mechanical laws? On the other hand, QM shows precisely that the classical laws of physics are only approximations: they are not real laws. The laws of classical physics are an illusion created by the consistency and regularity of our measurements (perceptions).
The great scientific revolution of QM opens up a new era for idealism: classical physics was a great obstacle for idealism. QM has removed that obstacle. For materialists, classical mechanics seems reasonable and QM seems weird. For idealists, it's the opposite: classical mechanics seems weird (impossible to explain, in fact), but QM is perfectly reasonable.
I tried to explain that in my essay: QM removes all notion of cause and effect. We can no longer think of the physical universe as made up of objects colliding with each other. All there is is probabilities of measurement, and entanglement. Entanglement explains by itself all the consistencies we see in the physical universe. No other laws are needed.
My "observational interpretation" does invoke a kind of magic, but the magic is not in the photons: photons don't actually exist, unless they are observed by Nature. And Nature can only observe photons if the probabilites of finding those photons in certain states are entangled with the probabilities of finding the sensory system of some living organism (in the case of an experiment carried out by human physicists, the sensory system of those physicists) in corresponding states. I know this isn't easy to grasp. It has taken me about two years to get a clear mental picture of what I mean. But I think it works.
The idea here is that Nature never never never gives us an experimental result outside the predicted probabilities of measurement. Nature has "freedom to choose" between different possible outcomes (maybe that choice is completely random, maybe it follows some mysterious "will"), but that freedom is limited by the probabilities described by the wave function. That means, from an idealistic perspective (which in my view doesn't allow mechanical explanations), that Nature somehow "knows" the probabilites of measurement at all locations in spacetime. And Nature "knows" this nonlocally, at every instant.
From this I conclude that Nature "knows" at every point in spacetime the probabilities of finding the sensory systems of all living organisms in any particular states. That necessarily means that, when it is possible for a living organism to measure a particular property of a quantum system, for example the location of a photon (in other words, when there is a correlation between the probabilities of finding the photon at certain locations and the probabilities of finding the sensory system of that living organism in certain corresponding states), Nature instantly observes that photon at a particular location, thus collapsing the wave function. Why? Because the moment the location of that photon gets entangled with the sensory system of a living organism, that photon becomes part of the observed world, the actual world.
Unobserved photons (or any microscopic particles) exist only in the invisible, virtual realm of probabilities. Nature is constanly and directly observing the sensory systems of all living organisms. Only via these sensory systems is Nature able to observe, indirectly, microscopic entities like photons.
The conscious mind of the experimenter plays no role in this. It is the configuration of the experimenter's physical body (sensory system) what determines the result of the experiment (by determining the entanglement). As for why introducing a mesurement device, like a detector, in an experimental setup would change the entanglement... I'm talking of the entanglement between a quantum system (a mildly radioactive substance, say, or a laser gun shooting single photons) and the sensory system of the human experimenter. Human beings can't perceive directly radioactive subatomic particles, or the location of single photons. Therefore, without the detector there is no entanglement between the quantum system and the sensory system of the experimenter. Introducing the detector means introducing a chain of entanglement (between the quantum system and the detector, and between the detector and the sensory system of the experimenter).
I hope this helps. If it doesn't, I would be happy to clarify further what I'm trying to say.
I don't understand what you mean by "nature is composed of substantial, mental, forms, and (...) when these interact in a meaningful way they represent to each other." Would you like to explain that for me?
