I’ve been debating the validity of reductionism with a friend for a while, and today he presented me with an article (won’t link it, it’s a waste of your time) arguing that the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation of QM proves that consciousness is ontologically fundamental/epiphenomenal/ect..
To which I responded: “Yeah, but consciousness-causes-collapse is wrong.”
And then realized that the reasons I have rejected it are all reductionist in nature. So he pointed out, fairly, that I was begging the question. And unfortunately, I’m not sufficiently familiar with the literature on QM to point him to an explanation.
Does anyone know an explanation of reasons to reject consciousness-causes-collapse that isn’t explicitly predicated on reductionism?
From the perspective of the Copenhagen interpretation, this is like a debate about whether ‘consciousness updates the prior’, in which ‘the prior’ is treated as a physical entity which exists independently of observers and their ignorance.
In the Copenhagen interpretation—at least as originally intended! - a wavefunction is not a physical state. It is instead like a probability distribution.
From this perspective, the mystery of quantum mechanics is not, why do wavefunctions collapse? It is, why do wavefunctions work, and what is the physical reality behind them?
The reification of wavefunctions has apparently become an invisible background assumption to a lot of people. But in the Copenhagen interpretation, wavefunctions do not exist, only “observables” exist: the quantities whose behavior the wavefunction helps you to predict.
Examples of observables are: the position of an electron; the rate of change of a field; the spin of a photon. In the Copenhagen interpretation, these are what exists.
Some examples of things which are not observables and which do not exist: An electron wavefunction with a peak here and a peak there; a photon in a superposition of spin states; in fact, any superposition.
Because quantum mechanics does not offer a nonprobabilistic deeper level of description, it is very easy for people to speak and think as if the wavefunctions are the physical realities, but that is not how Copenhagen is supposed to work.
To reiterate: “consciousness collapses the wavefunction” in exactly the same sense that “consciousness updates the prior”. You are free to invent subquantum physical theories in which wavefunctions are real, in an attempt to explain why quantum mechanics works, and maybe in those theories you want to have something “collapsing” wavefunctions, but you probably wouldn’t want that to be “consciousness”.
Perhaps that extremely simple systems, that no one would consider conscious, can also “cause collapse”? It doesn’t take much: just entangle the superposed state with another particle—then when you measure, canceling can’t occur and you perceive a randomly collapsed wavefunction. The important thing is the entangling, not the fact that you’re conscious: measuring a superposed state (i.e. entangling your mind with it) will do the trick, but it’s entirely unnecessary.
I used to believe the consciousness-causes-collapse idea, and it was quite a relief when I realized it doesn’t work like that.
Some of the consciousness causes collapse people would claim that you intended to cause that entanglement. (If you are thinking this sounds like an attempt to make their claims not falsifiable, I’d be inclined to agree.)
I can intentionally do lots of things, some of which cause entanglement and “collapse”, and some of which don’t. I’d say to them that it still seems like the conscious intent isn’t what’s important.
If you’d like to substitute a better picture for the layperson, I’d go with “disturbing the system causes collapse”. (Where “disturb” is really just a nontechnical way of saying “entangle with the environment.”) Then it’s clear that conscious observation (which involves disturbing the system somehow to get your measurement) will cause (apparent) collapse, but doesn’t do so in a special depends-on-consciousness way. And if they want a precise definition of “disturb”, you can get into the not-too-difficult math of superposition and entanglement.
And if they want a precise definition of “disturb”, you can get into the not-too-difficult math of superposition and entanglement.
I’m a math grad student and I consider the math of entanglement and the like to be not easy. There are two types of consciousness-causes-collapse proponents. The first type who doesn’t know much physics will find entanglement to be pretty difficult (they need to already understand complex numbers and basic linear algebra to get the structure of what is going on). Even a genuinely curious individual will likely have trouble following that unless they are a mathematically inclined individual. The second, much smaller group of people, are people who already understand entanglement but still buy into consciousness-causes collapse.They seem to have developed very complicated and sometimes subtle notions of what it means for things to be conscious or to have intent (almost akin to theologians). So in either case this avenue of attack seems unlikely to be successful.
If one is more concerned with convincing bystanders (as is often more relevant on the internet. People might not change their minds often. But people reading might), then this could actually do a good job when encountering the first category by making it clear that one knows a lot more about the subject than they do. This seems to empirically work in real life also as one can see in various discussions. See for example the cases Deepak Chopra has try to invoke a connection between QM and consciousness and he gets shot down pretty bluntly when there’s anyone with a bit of math or physics background.
You’re right; maybe I’m overestimating my ability to explain things so that laypeople will understand. But there are some concessions you can make to get the idea across without the full background of complex linear algebra—often I use polarizers as an example, because most people have some experience with them (from sunglasses or 3D movies), and from there it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to entangled photons.
I do try to explain so that people feel like the explanation is totally natural, but then I often run into the problem of people trying to reason about quantum mechanics “in English”, so to speak, instead of going to the underlying math to learn more. Any suggestions?
It seems to me that it is easier to get people to realize just that they can’t use their regular language to understand what is going on than to actually explain it. People seem to have issues with understanding this primarily because of Dunning-Kruger and because of the large number of popularizations of difficult science that just uses vague analogies.
I’d ask “ok. This is going to take some math. Did you ever take linear algebra?” If yes, then I just explain things. When they answer no (vast majority of the time)I then say “ok do you remember how matrix multiplication works?” They will generally not or have only a vague memory. At that point I then tell them that I could spending a few hours or so developing the necessary tools but that they really don’t have the background without a lot of work. This generally results in annoyance and blustering on their part. At this point one tells them the story of Oresme and how he came up with the idea of gravity in the 1300s but since he didn’t have a mathematical framework it was absolutely useless. This gets the point across sometimes.
Edit: Your idea of using polarization as an example is an interesting one and I may try that in the future.
I wouldn’t call occam’s razor an explicit part of reductionism. It’s basically equivalent to saying you can’t just make up information.
I don’t think so. This may be the case when your hypotheses are something like “A” and “A v B” but if your hypotheses you are comparing are “A” and “C ^ D ^ E” this sort of summary of Occam’s razor seems to be insufficient.
If both hypotheses explain some set of data, I’ve usually been able to make a direct comparison even in what look like tough cases by following the information in the data—what sort of process generates it, etc. Keeping things in terms of the “language” of the data is in fact also justified by the idea that pulling information from nowhere is bad.
This sort of reliance on our observations is certainly an empiricist assumption, but I don’t think a reductionist one.
Consider the following problem. You know that there is some some property that some integers have and others don’t and you are trying to figure out what the property is. After testing every integer under 10^4, you find that there are 1229 integers under 10^4 that work. You have two hypotheses that describe these. One is that they are every prime number. The other is a given by a 1228 degree polynomial where P(n) gives the nth number in your set. One of these is clearly simpler. This isn’t just a language issue- if I tried to right these out in any reasonable equivalent of a Turing machine or programming language one of them will be a much shorter program. The distinction here however is not just one of one of them making up information. One is genuinely shorter.
If one wants we can give similar historical examples. In 1620 you could make a Copernican model of the solar system that would rival Kepler’s model in accuracy. But you would need a massive number of epicycles. The problem here doesn’t seem to be pulling information from nowhere. The problem seems to be that one of the hypotheses is simpler in a different way.
Both of these examples do have something in common which is that in both of the complicated examples there are a lot of parameters that are observationally dependent whereas the other has many fewer of those. But that seems to be a distinct issue (although it is possibly a good very rough way of measuring complexity of hypotheses).
I’ve been debating the validity of reductionism with a friend for a while [...] Does anyone know an explanation of reasons to reject consciousness-causes-collapse that isn’t explicitly predicated on reductionism?
This quite possibly can’t be done. If you handicap yourself by refusing to use an idea while examining its merits, you may well draw inferior conclusions about it, and modify it in a way that makes it worse. You should use your whole mind to reflect on itself (unless you conclude some of its parts are not to be trusted). See these posts in particular:
First, it assumes that consciousness exists as an ontological unit. This isn’t just a problem with reductionism but is a problem with Occam’s razor. What precisely one means by reductionism can be complicated and subtle with some versions more definite or plausible than others. But regardless, there’s no good evidence that consciousness is an irreducible.
Second, it raises serious questions about what things were like before there were conscious entities. If no collapse occurred prior to conscious entities what does that say about the early universe and how it functioned? Note that this actually raises potentially testable claims if one can use telescopes to look back before the dawn of life. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen any consciousness causes collapse proponent either explain why this doesn’t lead to any observable difference or make any plausible claim about what differences one would observe.
Third, it violates a general metapattern of history. As things have progressed the pattern has consistently been that minds don’t interact with the laws of physics in any fundamental way and that more and more ideas about how minds might interact have been thrown out (ETA: There are a few notable exceptions such as some of the stuff involving the placebo effect.). We’ve spent much of the last few hundred years establishing stronger and stronger versions of this claim. Thus, as a simple matter of induction, one would expect that trend if anything to continue. (I don’t know how much inducting on the pattern of discoveries is justified.)
Fourth, it is ill-defined. What constitutes a conscious mind? Presumably people are conscious. Are severely mentally challenged people conscious? Are the non-human great apes conscious? Are ravens and other corvids conscious? Are dogs or cats conscious? Are mice conscious? Etc. down to single celled organisms and viruses.
Fifth, consciousness causes collapse is a hypothesis that is easily supported by standard human biases. This raises two issues one of which is not that relevant but is worth mentioning and the other which is very relevant. The first, less relevant issue, is that this means we should probably assume that we are likely to overestimate our chance that the hypothesis is correct. This is not however an argument against the hypothesis. But there’s a similar claim that is a sort of meta-argument against the hypothesis. Since this hypothesis is one which is supported by human biases one would expect a lot of motivated cognition for evidence and arguments for the hypothesis. So if there are any really good arguments one should consider it more likely that they would have been hit on. The fact that they have not suggests that there really aren’t any good arguments for it.
I’ve been debating the validity of reductionism with a friend for a while, and today he presented me with an article (won’t link it, it’s a waste of your time) arguing that the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation of QM proves that consciousness is ontologically fundamental/epiphenomenal/ect..
To which I responded: “Yeah, but consciousness-causes-collapse is wrong.”
And then realized that the reasons I have rejected it are all reductionist in nature. So he pointed out, fairly, that I was begging the question. And unfortunately, I’m not sufficiently familiar with the literature on QM to point him to an explanation. Does anyone know an explanation of reasons to reject consciousness-causes-collapse that isn’t explicitly predicated on reductionism?
You don’t need to reject CCC without reductionism to defeat his argument. His argument is “If CCC is true, reductionism is false”
That’s not a reason to reject reductionism, unless you have better reason to hold to CCC than to reductionism.
From the perspective of the Copenhagen interpretation, this is like a debate about whether ‘consciousness updates the prior’, in which ‘the prior’ is treated as a physical entity which exists independently of observers and their ignorance.
In the Copenhagen interpretation—at least as originally intended! - a wavefunction is not a physical state. It is instead like a probability distribution.
From this perspective, the mystery of quantum mechanics is not, why do wavefunctions collapse? It is, why do wavefunctions work, and what is the physical reality behind them?
The reification of wavefunctions has apparently become an invisible background assumption to a lot of people. But in the Copenhagen interpretation, wavefunctions do not exist, only “observables” exist: the quantities whose behavior the wavefunction helps you to predict.
Examples of observables are: the position of an electron; the rate of change of a field; the spin of a photon. In the Copenhagen interpretation, these are what exists.
Some examples of things which are not observables and which do not exist: An electron wavefunction with a peak here and a peak there; a photon in a superposition of spin states; in fact, any superposition.
Because quantum mechanics does not offer a nonprobabilistic deeper level of description, it is very easy for people to speak and think as if the wavefunctions are the physical realities, but that is not how Copenhagen is supposed to work.
To reiterate: “consciousness collapses the wavefunction” in exactly the same sense that “consciousness updates the prior”. You are free to invent subquantum physical theories in which wavefunctions are real, in an attempt to explain why quantum mechanics works, and maybe in those theories you want to have something “collapsing” wavefunctions, but you probably wouldn’t want that to be “consciousness”.
Perhaps that extremely simple systems, that no one would consider conscious, can also “cause collapse”? It doesn’t take much: just entangle the superposed state with another particle—then when you measure, canceling can’t occur and you perceive a randomly collapsed wavefunction. The important thing is the entangling, not the fact that you’re conscious: measuring a superposed state (i.e. entangling your mind with it) will do the trick, but it’s entirely unnecessary.
I used to believe the consciousness-causes-collapse idea, and it was quite a relief when I realized it doesn’t work like that.
Some of the consciousness causes collapse people would claim that you intended to cause that entanglement. (If you are thinking this sounds like an attempt to make their claims not falsifiable, I’d be inclined to agree.)
I can intentionally do lots of things, some of which cause entanglement and “collapse”, and some of which don’t. I’d say to them that it still seems like the conscious intent isn’t what’s important.
If you’d like to substitute a better picture for the layperson, I’d go with “disturbing the system causes collapse”. (Where “disturb” is really just a nontechnical way of saying “entangle with the environment.”) Then it’s clear that conscious observation (which involves disturbing the system somehow to get your measurement) will cause (apparent) collapse, but doesn’t do so in a special depends-on-consciousness way. And if they want a precise definition of “disturb”, you can get into the not-too-difficult math of superposition and entanglement.
I’m a math grad student and I consider the math of entanglement and the like to be not easy. There are two types of consciousness-causes-collapse proponents. The first type who doesn’t know much physics will find entanglement to be pretty difficult (they need to already understand complex numbers and basic linear algebra to get the structure of what is going on). Even a genuinely curious individual will likely have trouble following that unless they are a mathematically inclined individual. The second, much smaller group of people, are people who already understand entanglement but still buy into consciousness-causes collapse.They seem to have developed very complicated and sometimes subtle notions of what it means for things to be conscious or to have intent (almost akin to theologians). So in either case this avenue of attack seems unlikely to be successful.
If one is more concerned with convincing bystanders (as is often more relevant on the internet. People might not change their minds often. But people reading might), then this could actually do a good job when encountering the first category by making it clear that one knows a lot more about the subject than they do. This seems to empirically work in real life also as one can see in various discussions. See for example the cases Deepak Chopra has try to invoke a connection between QM and consciousness and he gets shot down pretty bluntly when there’s anyone with a bit of math or physics background.
You’re right; maybe I’m overestimating my ability to explain things so that laypeople will understand. But there are some concessions you can make to get the idea across without the full background of complex linear algebra—often I use polarizers as an example, because most people have some experience with them (from sunglasses or 3D movies), and from there it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to entangled photons.
I do try to explain so that people feel like the explanation is totally natural, but then I often run into the problem of people trying to reason about quantum mechanics “in English”, so to speak, instead of going to the underlying math to learn more. Any suggestions?
It seems to me that it is easier to get people to realize just that they can’t use their regular language to understand what is going on than to actually explain it. People seem to have issues with understanding this primarily because of Dunning-Kruger and because of the large number of popularizations of difficult science that just uses vague analogies.
I’d ask “ok. This is going to take some math. Did you ever take linear algebra?” If yes, then I just explain things. When they answer no (vast majority of the time)I then say “ok do you remember how matrix multiplication works?” They will generally not or have only a vague memory. At that point I then tell them that I could spending a few hours or so developing the necessary tools but that they really don’t have the background without a lot of work. This generally results in annoyance and blustering on their part. At this point one tells them the story of Oresme and how he came up with the idea of gravity in the 1300s but since he didn’t have a mathematical framework it was absolutely useless. This gets the point across sometimes.
Edit: Your idea of using polarization as an example is an interesting one and I may try that in the future.
Upvoted; thanks for providing the name “Dunning-Kruger” and the Oresme example!
I wouldn’t call occam’s razor an explicit part of reductionism. It’s basically equivalent to saying you can’t just make up information.
I don’t think so. This may be the case when your hypotheses are something like “A” and “A v B” but if your hypotheses you are comparing are “A” and “C ^ D ^ E” this sort of summary of Occam’s razor seems to be insufficient.
If both hypotheses explain some set of data, I’ve usually been able to make a direct comparison even in what look like tough cases by following the information in the data—what sort of process generates it, etc. Keeping things in terms of the “language” of the data is in fact also justified by the idea that pulling information from nowhere is bad.
This sort of reliance on our observations is certainly an empiricist assumption, but I don’t think a reductionist one.
Consider the following problem. You know that there is some some property that some integers have and others don’t and you are trying to figure out what the property is. After testing every integer under 10^4, you find that there are 1229 integers under 10^4 that work. You have two hypotheses that describe these. One is that they are every prime number. The other is a given by a 1228 degree polynomial where P(n) gives the nth number in your set. One of these is clearly simpler. This isn’t just a language issue- if I tried to right these out in any reasonable equivalent of a Turing machine or programming language one of them will be a much shorter program. The distinction here however is not just one of one of them making up information. One is genuinely shorter.
If one wants we can give similar historical examples. In 1620 you could make a Copernican model of the solar system that would rival Kepler’s model in accuracy. But you would need a massive number of epicycles. The problem here doesn’t seem to be pulling information from nowhere. The problem seems to be that one of the hypotheses is simpler in a different way.
Both of these examples do have something in common which is that in both of the complicated examples there are a lot of parameters that are observationally dependent whereas the other has many fewer of those. But that seems to be a distinct issue (although it is possibly a good very rough way of measuring complexity of hypotheses).
This quite possibly can’t be done. If you handicap yourself by refusing to use an idea while examining its merits, you may well draw inferior conclusions about it, and modify it in a way that makes it worse. You should use your whole mind to reflect on itself (unless you conclude some of its parts are not to be trusted). See these posts in particular:
The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
Occam’s Razor
A Priori
Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
Which Parts Are “Me”?
There are a variety of different issues.
First, it assumes that consciousness exists as an ontological unit. This isn’t just a problem with reductionism but is a problem with Occam’s razor. What precisely one means by reductionism can be complicated and subtle with some versions more definite or plausible than others. But regardless, there’s no good evidence that consciousness is an irreducible.
Second, it raises serious questions about what things were like before there were conscious entities. If no collapse occurred prior to conscious entities what does that say about the early universe and how it functioned? Note that this actually raises potentially testable claims if one can use telescopes to look back before the dawn of life. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen any consciousness causes collapse proponent either explain why this doesn’t lead to any observable difference or make any plausible claim about what differences one would observe.
Third, it violates a general metapattern of history. As things have progressed the pattern has consistently been that minds don’t interact with the laws of physics in any fundamental way and that more and more ideas about how minds might interact have been thrown out (ETA: There are a few notable exceptions such as some of the stuff involving the placebo effect.). We’ve spent much of the last few hundred years establishing stronger and stronger versions of this claim. Thus, as a simple matter of induction, one would expect that trend if anything to continue. (I don’t know how much inducting on the pattern of discoveries is justified.)
Fourth, it is ill-defined. What constitutes a conscious mind? Presumably people are conscious. Are severely mentally challenged people conscious? Are the non-human great apes conscious? Are ravens and other corvids conscious? Are dogs or cats conscious? Are mice conscious? Etc. down to single celled organisms and viruses.
Fifth, consciousness causes collapse is a hypothesis that is easily supported by standard human biases. This raises two issues one of which is not that relevant but is worth mentioning and the other which is very relevant. The first, less relevant issue, is that this means we should probably assume that we are likely to overestimate our chance that the hypothesis is correct. This is not however an argument against the hypothesis. But there’s a similar claim that is a sort of meta-argument against the hypothesis. Since this hypothesis is one which is supported by human biases one would expect a lot of motivated cognition for evidence and arguments for the hypothesis. So if there are any really good arguments one should consider it more likely that they would have been hit on. The fact that they have not suggests that there really aren’t any good arguments for it.