Wavefunction Collapse and Dreams

[Ben Dhyan]

How would you consciously go about trying to flip electrons? Firstly, the space in which they are flipped is not one we can consciously access, as the nature of spin makes "spin" something of a misnomer. Secondly, the bigger issue is that, if somehow consciousness were capable of producing an effect that influences spin, then it has to do so (as in e.g., the paper you referred to) using some kind of field. That is, consciousness has to be capable of producing some kind of influence that can propagate in such a way as to influence spin. But, as even your source points out (if indirectly), spin is influenced by observations or experiments in a non-trivial manner. When one speaks of preparing an electron (or similar system) in a "spin-up" state one means in general that one has interfered with a system+apparatus configuration in such a way as to ensure that one will register upon measurement that the state corresponds with the effect of applying a particular operator to the representative element of spin space in such a way as to "project" onto the "projection" (which, as we know from even elementary linear algebra, simply means that when one has already acted on an element of a vector space with a linear operator that projects the element into a subspace of the vector space, then a repeated application will not change this).
More basically (and more simply but inaccurately), if one asserts that consciousness can flip the spin of a quantum system then one cannot be claiming that this is due to a conscious intent but rather to a property of consciousness. And if it were a property of consciousness that said consciousness causally interacts with spin systems such that consciousness can "flip" electron spin, then this would be a constant property of the conscious state, and anything that drastically, demonstrably, and completely alters the general orientation of spin systems within the consciousness-generating system itself would be seen to have an effect.
One cannot be conscious of electron spins. Nor does your source seem to claim that this is so. Rather, such sources claim that consciousness is capable of having an effect such that in experiments in which seemingly counterintuitive or even paradoxical results are encountered actually occur, one can ascribe consciousness to these results. That is, such sources claim that consciousness has a property unique or special to it such that it has the capacity to causally effect systems such as electrons in such a way as to change their spin space state. But this cannot be a result of concentration or conscious effort. Apart from anything else, the conscious effort any particular individual makes is different from that of any other, in a manner similar to the way in which personal conceptions of e.g., electron spins differ from individual to individual.
So the capacity of consciousness to "flip" electrons cannot be a matter of conscious control, as one cannot concentrate on an electron, let alone its abstract state in spin space. Therefore, if the causal effect were real, it must be due to a more general property of consciousness, in which consciousness affects (and its ability to affect is influenced by other affects) such systems. But if this were the case, drastically altering the spins of electrons in the brain and surrounding environment would have some measurable effect.
It doesn't.

In the paper I posted, it conjectured a conscious human waveform interacting with a Random Number Generator to alter a single digit? Then on to send morse code messages..

https://0201.nccdn.net/4_2/000/000/06b/a1b/Extended-Consciousness---Electron-Interaction.pdf

Here is another proposal.

Abstract
I consider the possibility that the electron, not a human observer, precipitates the collapse of the electron's wavefunction when it is detected. This would seem to endow the electronic wavefunction with an elementary consciousness. If so, then perhaps a human consciousness could interact with the electronic consciousness to flip its spin. I propose an experiment to test this possibility, namely one in which the electron is the single valence electron of a magnesium ion immersed in a 50-gauss magnetic field. A dye laser shines on the ion and is tuned to bring about laser induced fluorescence (LIF) at a wavelength of 280 nm. The LIF is so strong that if the ion were shining in the visible range, it could be seen with the naked eye. Instead it is shining in the near ultra-violet, and a photomultiplier is used to detect the light. If a person can now lower the electron's energy minutely, then this will flip the electron's spin and the LIF will cease. If the person can succeed in flipping the electron's spin once again by raising its energy, then LIF is restored. By initiating LIF for long and short periods, such a person could send a lengthy International Morse Code message which could be read by anyone observing the ion’s output. We would see if a person succeeding in this task could send a message from increasingly distant points. If so, then the person's control could not be mediated by any fields currently known to physicists: electromagnetic, weak, strong, and gravitational. We would hypothesize a new kind of controlling field which does not weaken with distance, nor be attenuated by obstructions. Such a field might mediate distant healing and remote viewing. It might be identified with Chinese qi. We hypothesize that this conjectured field propagates in higher dimensional space-time to avoid obstructions, and converges on the target to avoid weakening. In this space, the field might travel faster than light does in the lower four dimensions of space and time.

Conscious Control of an Electron | Bryan | Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research

Concerning your deeper questions on this subject of flipping of electrons, I certainly am not able to respond adequately, but I do intuitively respect the research by Dr Bryan. Unfortunately he died in 2018 and he was no slouch, here is a list of his credentials,

Dr. Ronald Bryan

• Ph.D. University of Rochester. 1961 Theoretical Nuclear Physics.
• Thesis Advisor: Prof. Robert E. Marshak
• Associate Professor of Physics, Texas A&M University, 1969-1973.
• Professor of Physics, Texas A&M University, 1973 to 2011.
• Professor Emeritus, Texas A&M University, 2011 to present.
• Fellow, American Physical Society. Awarded in 1973 for research in nuclear physics.
• Funding: Department of Energy, 1976-1984, “Intermediate Energy Nuclear Theory”
  Lifebridge Foundation. 1999-2002, “Interdimensional Research”
  Private Funding, 2012-present, “Electron PK Experiment”

Dr. Ronald Bryan – Consciousness Experiments

 

[Ostronomos]

Do you believe the wavefunction is also conscious?

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Do you believe the wavefunction is also conscious?

Yes.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

In the paper I posted, it conjectured a conscious human waveform interacting with a Random Number Generator to alter a single digit?

Where the author begins, in the abstract, with a glaring mistake by speaking of one of the most famous experimental idealizations in QM with the words "I recall how quantum mechanics cannot predict which wave packet created by a double slit will excite a detector..."
The problem is that these words, and the authors illustration/schematic, are utterly flawed. The point of speaking about wave interference in the typical introduction to the double-slit experiment is to introduce a simplification of the classical description of light. It is horribly and utterly wrong to ask "which wave packet created by a double slit..." Firstly, in this case it is very well known that the manner in which QM predicts the experimental outcome is by summing the amplitudes or the formal equivalent for the probability that a single "wave packet" or photon will pass through slit 1 and the probability that the same wave packet/photon will pass through slit 2. Classically, the experiment as described as far back as Young in 1801 and since is described in terms of a wave that is similar to the diagram in the document you linked to: The wave hits the screen with the slits and "splits" into two waves that interfere.
This description fails completely in QM. We don't have an issue predicting "which wave packet created by a double slit" in QM because the double slit doesn't create wave packets nor do we have any issue with prediction here. Instead, even when we send single photons at a double slit screen, we have to predict where the photon will end up using the probabilities derived from the amplitudes corresponding to the two paths possible, and as these are complex-valued, the result introduces an interference term.
This is introductory QM 101, and the mistakes are glaring. But they don't end here by any means.

The author also states that "If electrons have some kind of primitive conscious wavefunction, then presumably the other elementary particles do too."
But electrons have no such wavefunction. The details of some of the problems with the authors presentation are given in the section below I've hidden for brevity and ease of reading.

Spoiler: The problems with the authors description of electron spins

The description above this line is difficult to read charitably (i.e., difficult to read under the assumption that the author understands the details he is trying to explicate and is simply not necessarily doing so particularly well). It reads more like someone who has yet to adequately grasp some very, very basic aspects of quantum mechanics, and failed even more to understand the nuances of interpretations of QM as well as even the bare-bones schematic understanding of experiments that were first conducted in the first half of the 20th century.
So, for example, instead of speaking about a wavefunction ψ of some system in a singlet state, the author writes what should be at the very least written in consistent notation (using the Dirac Bra-Ket notation the author uses in this very line) as simply "ψ=..." followed by a some "interesting" notational choices for describing a two-electron system singlet state. By "interesting" I don't mean the use of arrows, as that is quite common. I mean that the denotation used by the author is similar to that found elsewhere but explained in quite different ways that can radically change the entire point of the notation, the system in question, and the general physics of the entire schematized "experiment." The point of writing out the system (which should be denoted by a ket |ψ>, by the way) in this concise manner rather than in full is to emphasize that, even though the system describes two particles, they are anticorrelated in such a manner to allow for maximal entanglement or a singlet state. By writing out the system in the way the author does, what is actually indicated is that the tensor product of the composite Hilbert spin spaces contains more than is needed to write out the system in terms of the appropriate basis. In fact, the system cannot be so factorized as it cannot be written in terms of a product state.
More importantly, by expanding what should be written as |ψ> in the way the author does, he indicates that the system in question cannot be considered as a truly composite one (this is, put simply, the entire reason entanglement is supposed to be "weird"). So it is not the case that "denotes electron A with spin up and electron B with spin down, and [the other ket] denotes the opposite assignments." This is, after all, just |ψ> expanded in the (would-be) appropriate bases. So it is a single system that denotes the possible expansion in terms of the "spin" bases appropriate to the experimental set up such that after measurement the entire system will have "collapsed", rather than that there is some way of having the system described as two electrons with spin "assignments."
You could take the same system and write it in terms of other bases for the application of the operator corresponding to the appropriate experimental if the orientation of the measurement apparatus were different. This would be a waste of time practically speaking, but it is important because writing out the system's state in the manner done is a choice of expansion in terms of the basis states of the Hilbert space in question, not a description of the electrons spin. It cannot be, as the entire point of this thought experiment (which Bohm introduced in his 1951 textbook as a now practically universal way of simplifying the example used in the infamous 1935 EPR paper) is that by measuring the spin of one direction the entire state collapses, implying that the only in that moment is it meaningful to speak of the spin property of the other electron.
If the electrons had some form of consciousness, then surely the states after measurment would not depend upon the basis vectors we choose to expand the singlet state in terms of. That is, we can write the state in such a way as to independently determine (in advance) the results of measurements of both electrons independently. Simplistically, writing the state in terms of a different "orientation" turns the entire measurement into a preparation, but were the wavefunction somehow indicative of "primitive consciousness" then our writing out the state differently shouldn't effect how this "primitive consciousness" behaves.
But there is no such consciousness. And what we get after repeating this experiment is that the orientation of the individual electrons is random, regardless of which of the pair we measure, until we have measured one of them. In more sophisticated experiments, we can actually continuously change how we determine what properties the system is to have or determine after the experiment is finished which electron we wish to be the one to "force" the system to in its entirety to have a definite orientation.
Indeed, the force of Bell's theorem is largely in that it shows such states (states which violate the inequality) cannot be explained in terms of having an orientation prior to measurement that is somehow "hidden" (the situation is much more complicated, but for the sake of addressing the authors claim, this is enough).
I could go on, but the bottom line is that what should be an elementary part of introducing a basic, very well traversed part of one of the most discussed aspects of quantum theory in its more frequently presented manner, the author already confuses many basic points, ignores glaringly obvious and important distinctions, and in general reads like someone who has familiarity with some popular physics explanations and attempted to copy from an elementary text or online notes some of the formalism.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Continued from above:

The entire paper reads like someone who either never had the appropriate exposure to the relevant physics or is so used to teaching classes rather than working on actual research in a relevant field that whatever education and experience he had in the 60s and 70s is rendered useless. Of course, his supposed field of expertise was more on scattering experiments in outdated phenomenology of that that time, and at that time Bell was little known and EPR even less so. I suppose if I went 40+ years without working in the relevant fields or with other researchers who were or doing much besides teaching undergrads I might confuse oversimplifications with clarity and fail to make very basic distinctions too.

However, there are far more qualified individuals who can write papers using correct mathematics and descriptions but who are presenting results that are highly misleading. Forget for a moment that his presentation reads like something dreamt up by a layperson with limited exposure to anything other than popular physics. Pretend that it reads like something Richard Amoroso or Henry Stapp (or pretty much anybody whose published in NeuroQuantology and is actually informed as to their subject matter) wrote.
There is still no way around basic, glaring omissions and enormous but unjustified assumptions.
For example, Conway and Kochen wrote and then extended their work on a theorem that relates somewhat to the "primitive consciousness" referred to in your sources. Here, it is free will, and it is assumed to hold for the particles if it holds for the experimenters. It is problematic because this assumption is introduced without basis, whatever other issues (and there are several) that subsequent commentators have had with their work. And what they wrote did not have the glaring mistakes and child-like schematics in your linked document.

Meanwhile, and of great importance, is again the issue of the nature of whatever it is about consciousness that would make possible the "collapse" of the wavefunction in a manner that determines electron spin. Again, nothing in quantum formalisms nor in your source corresponds to any physical or mathematical descriptions that render this a possibility. Instead, we get some poor descriptions of elementary results and some handwaving along with problematic associations regarding observables and consciousness.
And again, we run into the problem that if consciousness could act as the author describes, then the basic tools we use in brain imaging would interfere with basic, fundamental aspects of this would-be consciousness field the author compares to Chinese qi. And again we run into the problem that the issue of observer-effects in basic QM stems operationally from the inability to treat fully the interaction of measuring apparatus with system without introducing something like the Heisenberg cut. It is theoretically possible to treat the measurement apparatus quantum mechanically, but at some point we run into the issue of the emergence of classicality as in e.g., observing the pointer readings. The quantum effects become to negligible to measure even in principle while the systems are too complex to describe quantum mechanically even if we could do so consistently while both maintaining unitary evolution and wave-function collapse.
We can't. Introducing consciousness into the picture doesn't make things clearer, particularly when it is done so merely be putting in a stick figure.

I consider the possibility that the electron, not a human observer, precipitates the collapse of the electron's wavefunction when it is detected. This would seem to endow the electronic wavefunction with an elementary consciousness. If so, then perhaps a human consciousness could interact with the electronic consciousness to flip its spin.

Perfect. So to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of measurement outcomes in QM, we posit that electrons have a property we can't formally define or render meaningful physically, and we do this in order to suggest that this physical property that can't be described in terms of physics interacts with a more complicated version of the same thing that humans possess, and this gets us...?

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Where the author begins, in the abstract, with a glaring mistake by speaking of one of the most famous experimental idealizations in QM with the words "I recall how quantum mechanics cannot predict which wave packet created by a double slit will excite a detector..."
The problem is that these words, and the authors illustration/schematic, are utterly flawed. The point of speaking about wave interference in the typical introduction to the double-slit experiment is to introduce a simplification of the classical description of light. It is horribly and utterly wrong to ask "which wave packet created by a double slit..." Firstly, in this case it is very well known that the manner in which QM predicts the experimental outcome is by summing the amplitudes or the formal equivalent for the probability that a single "wave packet" or photon will pass through slit 1 and the probability that the same wave packet/photon will pass through slit 2. Classically, the experiment as described as far back as Young in 1801 and since is described in terms of a wave that is similar to the diagram in the document you linked to: The wave hits the screen with the slits and "splits" into two waves that interfere.
This description fails completely in QM. We don't have an issue predicting "which wave packet created by a double slit" in QM because the double slit doesn't create wave packets nor do we have any issue with prediction here. Instead, even when we send single photons at a double slit screen, we have to predict where the photon will end up using the probabilities derived from the amplitudes corresponding to the two paths possible, and as these are complex-valued, the result introduces an interference term.
This is introductory QM 101, and the mistakes are glaring. But they don't end here by any means.

The author also states that "If electrons have some kind of primitive conscious wavefunction, then presumably the other elementary particles do too."
But electrons have no such wavefunction. The details of some of the problems with the authors presentation are given in the section below I've hidden for brevity and ease of reading.

Spoiler: The problems with the authors description of electron spins

The description above this line is difficult to read charitably (i.e., difficult to read under the assumption that the author understands the details he is trying to explicate and is simply not necessarily doing so particularly well). It reads more like someone who has yet to adequately grasp some very, very basic aspects of quantum mechanics, and failed even more to understand the nuances of interpretations of QM as well as even the bare-bones schematic understanding of experiments that were first conducted in the first half of the 20th century.
So, for example, instead of speaking about a wavefunction ψ of some system in a singlet state, the author writes what should be at the very least written in consistent notation (using the Dirac Bra-Ket notation the author uses in this very line) as simply "ψ=..." followed by a some "interesting" notational choices for describing a two-electron system singlet state. By "interesting" I don't mean the use of arrows, as that is quite common. I mean that the denotation used by the author is similar to that found elsewhere but explained in quite different ways that can radically change the entire point of the notation, the system in question, and the general physics of the entire schematized "experiment." The point of writing out the system (which should be denoted by a ket |ψ>, by the way) in this concise manner rather than in full is to emphasize that, even though the system describes two particles, they are anticorrelated in such a manner to allow for maximal entanglement or a singlet state. By writing out the system in the way the author does, what is actually indicated is that the tensor product of the composite Hilbert spin spaces contains more than is needed to write out the system in terms of the appropriate basis. In fact, the system cannot be so factorized as it cannot be written in terms of a product state.
More importantly, by expanding what should be written as |ψ> in the way the author does, he indicates that the system in question cannot be considered as a truly composite one (this is, put simply, the entire reason entanglement is supposed to be "weird"). So it is not the case that "denotes electron A with spin up and electron B with spin down, and [the other ket] denotes the opposite assignments." This is, after all, just |ψ> expanded in the (would-be) appropriate bases. So it is a single system that denotes the possible expansion in terms of the "spin" bases appropriate to the experimental set up such that after measurement the entire system will have "collapsed", rather than that there is some way of having the system described as two electrons with spin "assignments."
You could take the same system and write it in terms of other bases for the application of the operator corresponding to the appropriate experimental if the orientation of the measurement apparatus were different. This would be a waste of time practically speaking, but it is important because writing out the system's state in the manner done is a choice of expansion in terms of the basis states of the Hilbert space in question, not a description of the electrons spin. It cannot be, as the entire point of this thought experiment (which Bohm introduced in his 1951 textbook as a now practically universal way of simplifying the example used in the infamous 1935 EPR paper) is that by measuring the spin of one direction the entire state collapses, implying that the only in that moment is it meaningful to speak of the spin property of the other electron.
If the electrons had some form of consciousness, then surely the states after measurment would not depend upon the basis vectors we choose to expand the singlet state in terms of. That is, we can write the state in such a way as to independently determine (in advance) the results of measurements of both electrons independently. Simplistically, writing the state in terms of a different "orientation" turns the entire measurement into a preparation, but were the wavefunction somehow indicative of "primitive consciousness" then our writing out the state differently shouldn't effect how this "primitive consciousness" behaves.
But there is no such consciousness. And what we get after repeating this experiment is that the orientation of the individual electrons is random, regardless of which of the pair we measure, until we have measured one of them. In more sophisticated experiments, we can actually continuously change how we determine what properties the system is to have or determine after the experiment is finished which electron we wish to be the one to "force" the system to in its entirety to have a definite orientation.
Indeed, the force of Bell's theorem is largely in that it shows such states (states which violate the inequality) cannot be explained in terms of having an orientation prior to measurement that is somehow "hidden" (the situation is much more complicated, but for the sake of addressing the authors claim, this is enough).
I could go on, but the bottom line is that what should be an elementary part of introducing a basic, very well traversed part of one of the most discussed aspects of quantum theory in its more frequently presented manner, the author already confuses many basic points, ignores glaringly obvious and important distinctions, and in general reads like someone who has familiarity with some popular physics explanations and attempted to copy from an elementary text or online notes some of the formalism.

A lot of commentary but it is does not imho change the validity of the point being made by Dr Bryan.
You believe the electron has no conscious wavefunction, fine I have no argument.

Fwiw, I have experienced most ESP mystical type experiences and have spent a good part of my life learning to understand how it works. Dr Bryant's work imho is on the right path. If you have never experienced the mystical side of reality, then I understand why you can't imagine a universe that exhibits consciousness on an omnipresent scale. There is no superiority implied wrt mystical experiences, reality is just how it is.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Continued from above:

The entire paper reads like someone who either never had the appropriate exposure to the relevant physics or is so used to teaching classes rather than working on actual research in a relevant field that whatever education and experience he had in the 60s and 70s is rendered useless. Of course, his supposed field of expertise was more on scattering experiments in outdated phenomenology of that that time, and at that time Bell was little known and EPR even less so. I suppose if I went 40+ years without working in the relevant fields or with other researchers who were or doing much besides teaching undergrads I might confuse oversimplifications with clarity and fail to make very basic distinctions too.

However, there are far more qualified individuals who can write papers using correct mathematics and descriptions but who are presenting results that are highly misleading. Forget for a moment that his presentation reads like something dreamt up by a layperson with limited exposure to anything other than popular physics. Pretend that it reads like something Richard Amoroso or Henry Stapp (or pretty much anybody whose published in NeuroQuantology and is actually informed as to their subject matter) wrote.
There is still no way around basic, glaring omissions and enormous but unjustified assumptions.
For example, Conway and Kochen wrote and then extended their work on a theorem that relates somewhat to the "primitive consciousness" referred to in your sources. Here, it is free will, and it is assumed to hold for the particles if it holds for the experimenters. It is problematic because this assumption is introduced without basis, whatever other issues (and there are several) that subsequent commentators have had with their work. And what they wrote did not have the glaring mistakes and child-like schematics in your linked document.

Meanwhile, and of great importance, is again the issue of the nature of whatever it is about consciousness that would make possible the "collapse" of the wavefunction in a manner that determines electron spin. Again, nothing in quantum formalisms nor in your source corresponds to any physical or mathematical descriptions that render this a possibility. Instead, we get some poor descriptions of elementary results and some handwaving along with problematic associations regarding observables and consciousness.
And again, we run into the problem that if consciousness could act as the author describes, then the basic tools we use in brain imaging would interfere with basic, fundamental aspects of this would-be consciousness field the author compares to Chinese qi. And again we run into the problem that the issue of observer-effects in basic QM stems operationally from the inability to treat fully the interaction of measuring apparatus with system without introducing something like the Heisenberg cut. It is theoretically possible to treat the measurement apparatus quantum mechanically, but at some point we run into the issue of the emergence of classicality as in e.g., observing the pointer readings. The quantum effects become to negligible to measure even in principle while the systems are too complex to describe quantum mechanically even if we could do so consistently while both maintaining unitary evolution and wave-function collapse.
We can't. Introducing consciousness into the picture doesn't make things clearer, particularly when it is done so merely be putting in a stick figure.

Perfect. So to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of measurement outcomes in QM, we posit that electrons have a property we can't formally define or render meaningful physically, and we do this in order to suggest that this physical property that can't be described in terms of physics interacts with a more complicated version of the same thing that humans possess, and this gets us...?

^ See my post above. I would just add that because of our mind conditioning, ie. this life's experiences, we see reality through the filter of that conditioning. Your experiences can be satisfactorily explained through your classical scientific understanding, mine can't.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

A lot of commentary but it is does not imho change the validity of the point being made by Dr Bryan.

Suppose that consciousness effects fermionic spin. Suppose it does so in the manner you suggested earlier, i.e., that

the flipping of electrons by human consciousness would be under a person's conscious control, so the patient isn't going to be exercising any flipping of electrons for no reason.

As a side note I should point out that most of the individuals subjected to the kinds of imaging I referred to are not patients, and are not even most frequently taking part in clinical trials. So most of the time, participants in fMRI scans are tasked with concentrating on different cognitive/perceptual tasks, usually consciously.
We could rather easily put participants in a MRI machine and have them do exactly what you rule out here:

The fact may simply be that no one undergoing a scan is consciously trying to flip electrons during scans.

I'm not aware of any such studies, but I have worked as a consultant on a fair number of experiments involving parapsychology and with researchers publishing in journals like NeuroQuantology and wouldn't be suprised if this has actually been done. I know that certain experiments like it have been done, and also that the designs of such experiments as well as the manner in which participants were asked to carry out tasks as well as what was "measured" had to be altered somewhat in order to open the door to possibilities of what could be involved, rather than anything actually found.
Regardless, it would be fairly trivial to have a participant "consciously try to flip electrons" during an fMRI run. The first issue is that contrary to what you imagine from television and films, MRI machines (functional or no) are gigantic magnets that are always "on." Nor can you just turn them off. In cases of emergency, you have to press a special button that initializes an "emergency quench" to flood the magnets with something like liquid helium, possibly causing millions of dollars in damages and huge delays in the process. Simply shutting of the power doesn't shut off the field.
So from the moment you or participants step over whatever safety markings (e.g., red tape or paint or something similar) indicating where the danger zone (e.g., for anything metal) begins, you are subjected to a gigantic field generated MRI machine. What this field does is, among other things, orient anything with particular susceptibility such that bulk atoms and such are aligned w.r.t. spin (as a side note, it is exactly this bulk effect that makes NMR a difficult technology for quantum computing, where more precision is needed).
At any rate, during the entire scanning process the hydrogen atoms throughout the body, and in particular electron spins, are drastically altered due to the presence of this magnetic field. So, incidentally, are a the electrons in plenty of other substances (from solids to gases) in the area.
Now we can easily imagine that we have the participant under the imaging component of the MRI machine, and we ask them to do something like "consciously try to flip an electron" however we might imagine this is possible to do (e.g., by placing some object within their visual field, or an image on the screen, or use an old TV cathode ray tube or use an electron bound "as a spherically symmetric s-wave enclosing the closed-shell core of a 138Ba++ ion" confined in a "Paul trap in a volume of ~1cm^3", etc.).
Here's the general problem with the whole idea. Whatever it might be that consciousness is supposed to do to electron spins has been interfered with from the moment the participant entered the magnetic field generated by the MRI machine. So, not only is any kind of process or "consciousness field" that is supposed to somehow "flip electrons" already running into a measurable barrier far more powerful than the Stern-Gerlach design mentioned in your source, but whatever kind of relation brain functionality has on consciousness is also affected in that the spins of electrons in their brains and bodies have changed from being randomly oriented to being aligned.
But perhaps this is a good thing! After all, if consciousness were capable of influencing electron spin, then we could now register any changes that occur in the signal generation caused by the "consciousness field" influencing electron spin or attempting to do so. In other words, we could measure the interference caused by the participants conscious efforts to "flip electrons."
Of course, what we have been doing for years and years is drastically altering the way in which electrons and such are oriented in and around the participants while asking them to do what number now in the thousands and thousands and thousands of different tasks requiring a wide range of different sorts of conscious effort; Somehow we did all this and obtained the pretty scans of brain activity we do. And never has any sort of interference effect occured indicating that consciousness is capable of influencing and/or being influenced by something as minute as electron spin, even when the entire brain subjected to a strong field that actually does fundamentally alter electron spin.

Dr Bryant's work imho is on the right path.

It isn't work. It's taking experimental results that we've known about for decades and supposing that if somehow the results could be explained by whatever "primitive consciousness" might be for an electron, then it is possible for something like a person made out of "electrons and quarks" to likewise influence spin.
The problem is that any attempt to measure whether or not the spin of an electron will disturb it. That's the central reason people are still doing Bell-type tests and realizations of EPR many decades later: our experimental control has increased drastically as has our ability to realize what had previously been only thought experiments.
Now it may be that Wigner, Stapp, and others are right and consciousness if fundamental to QM, or rather that consciousness is an integral part of the correct interpretation of the theory. But if so (which neither I nor most others agree to be so), then this is already built into the theory itself by von Neumann's observables (just to start). The so-called "collapse" of the wavefunction in this case is the result of conscious observation (at least in some cases and in some way). Again, highly, highly contentious, but let's grant this for fun.
What your Dr. Bryan is essentially doing is throwing this Consciousness Causes Collapse (CCC) interpretation and anything like it out the door. He's instead taking something like a Bohmian view in the way he adopts an ontological interpretation of the wavefunction. So in this case, the wavefunction's properties correspond to observer-independent really existing external properties of an externally existing system.
But then he goes on to use the very kind of collapse postulate that can't happen under his own assumption in order to make use of the standard formalism of QM.
So, somehow electrons are supposed to possess the property of "primitive consciousness" that can somehow dictate pointer positions and the rest of the experimental basis of QM, yet these external, primitively conscious systems are also supposed to "cancel out" somehow upon measurement. So, for example, in the case of a singlet state the spins of the "primitively conscious" electrons are supposed to "choose" the spin orientation they have, but also according to your Dr. Bryan they don't have this choice or ability until we make a measurement on one subsystem of the singlet state in which case somehow the preexisting orientation of the other electron "cancels out" by the choice of....? What?
He isn't at all clear here, because he is naively using a formalism that brings the observer into the picture such that the electrons don't even have the properties described until they are observed during measurement, and in fact are described in a superposition state describing what would be four electrons in two pairs that "collapses" to the one pair with definite spin upon measurement and somehow becomes two electrons by the "primitive consciousness" of the four described by the singlet state?
The number of formal, conceptual, logical, and physical contradictions boggles the mind.

If you have never experienced the mystical side of reality, then I understand why you can't imagine a universe that exhibits consciousness on an omnipresent scale.

It's more a manner of defining what this means. Your Dr. Bryan doesn't do this, he just uses words, conflates to entirely contradictory families of interpretations of QM and confuses the formalisms employed too, hiding behind word choices and pictures and counting on the fact that it is easy to imagine how someone who doesn't know anything about physics (let alone QM) such as yourself will swallow whatever someone like him dishes out because you don't know any better and are not interested, apparently, in educating yourself.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Suppose that consciousness effects fermionic spin. Suppose it does so in the manner you suggested earlier, i.e., that

As a side note I should point out that most of the individuals subjected to the kinds of imaging I referred to are not patients, and are not even most frequently taking part in clinical trials. So most of the time, participants in fMRI scans are tasked with concentrating on different cognitive/perceptual tasks, usually consciously.
We could rather easily put participants in a MRI machine and have them do exactly what you rule out here:

I'm not aware of any such studies, but I have worked as a consultant on a fair number of experiments involving parapsychology and with researchers publishing in journals like NeuroQuantology and wouldn't be suprised if this has actually been done. I know that certain experiments like it have been done, and also that the designs of such experiments as well as the manner in which participants were asked to carry out tasks as well as what was "measured" had to be altered somewhat in order to open the door to possibilities of what could be involved, rather than anything actually found.
Regardless, it would be fairly trivial to have a participant "consciously try to flip electrons" during an fMRI run. The first issue is that contrary to what you imagine from television and films, MRI machines (functional or no) are gigantic magnets that are always "on." Nor can you just turn them off. In cases of emergency, you have to press a special button that initializes an "emergency quench" to flood the magnets with something like liquid helium, possibly causing millions of dollars in damages and huge delays in the process. Simply shutting of the power doesn't shut off the field.
So from the moment you or participants step over whatever safety markings (e.g., red tape or paint or something similar) indicating where the danger zone (e.g., for anything metal) begins, you are subjected to a gigantic field generated MRI machine. What this field does is, among other things, orient anything with particular susceptibility such that bulk atoms and such are aligned w.r.t. spin (as a side note, it is exactly this bulk effect that makes NMR a difficult technology for quantum computing, where more precision is needed).
At any rate, during the entire scanning process the hydrogen atoms throughout the body, and in particular electron spins, are drastically altered due to the presence of this magnetic field. So, incidentally, are a the electrons in plenty of other substances (from solids to gases) in the area.
Now we can easily imagine that we have the participant under the imaging component of the MRI machine, and we ask them to do something like "consciously try to flip an electron" however we might imagine this is possible to do (e.g., by placing some object within their visual field, or an image on the screen, or use an old TV cathode ray tube or use an electron bound "as a spherically symmetric s-wave enclosing the closed-shell core of a 138Ba++ ion" confined in a "Paul trap in a volume of ~1cm^3", etc.).
Here's the general problem with the whole idea. Whatever it might be that consciousness is supposed to do to electron spins has been interfered with from the moment the participant entered the magnetic field generated by the MRI machine. So, not only is any kind of process or "consciousness field" that is supposed to somehow "flip electrons" already running into a measurable barrier far more powerful than the Stern-Gerlach design mentioned in your source, but whatever kind of relation brain functionality has on consciousness is also affected in that the spins of electrons in their brains and bodies have changed from being randomly oriented to being aligned.
But perhaps this is a good thing! After all, if consciousness were capable of influencing electron spin, then we could now register any changes that occur in the signal generation caused by the "consciousness field" influencing electron spin or attempting to do so. In other words, we could measure the interference caused by the participants conscious efforts to "flip electrons."
Of course, what we have been doing for years and years is drastically altering the way in which electrons and such are oriented in and around the participants while asking them to do what number now in the thousands and thousands and thousands of different tasks requiring a wide range of different sorts of conscious effort; Somehow we did all this and obtained the pretty scans of brain activity we do. And never has any sort of interference effect occured indicating that consciousness is capable of influencing and/or being influenced by something as minute as electron spin, even when the entire brain subjected to a strong field that actually does fundamentally alter electron spin.


It isn't work. It's taking experimental results that we've known about for decades and supposing that if somehow the results could be explained by whatever "primitive consciousness" might be for an electron, then it is possible for something like a person made out of "electrons and quarks" to likewise influence spin.
The problem is that any attempt to measure whether or not the spin of an electron will disturb it. That's the central reason people are still doing Bell-type tests and realizations of EPR many decades later: our experimental control has increased drastically as has our ability to realize what had previously been only thought experiments.
Now it may be that Wigner, Stapp, and others are right and consciousness if fundamental to QM, or rather that consciousness is an integral part of the correct interpretation of the theory. But if so (which neither I nor most others agree to be so), then this is already built into the theory itself by von Neumann's observables (just to start). The so-called "collapse" of the wavefunction in this case is the result of conscious observation (at least in some cases and in some way). Again, highly, highly contentious, but let's grant this for fun.
What your Dr. Bryan is essentially doing is throwing this Consciousness Causes Collapse (CCC) interpretation and anything like it out the door. He's instead taking something like a Bohmian view in the way he adopts an ontological interpretation of the wavefunction. So in this case, the wavefunction's properties correspond to observer-independent really existing external properties of an externally existing system.
But then he goes on to use the very kind of collapse postulate that can't happen under his own assumption in order to make use of the standard formalism of QM.
So, somehow electrons are supposed to possess the property of "primitive consciousness" that can somehow dictate pointer positions and the rest of the experimental basis of QM, yet these external, primitively conscious systems are also supposed to "cancel out" somehow upon measurement. So, for example, in the case of a singlet state the spins of the "primitively conscious" electrons are supposed to "choose" the spin orientation they have, but also according to your Dr. Bryan they don't have this choice or ability until we make a measurement on one subsystem of the singlet state in which case somehow the preexisting orientation of the other electron "cancels out" by the choice of....? What?
He isn't at all clear here, because he is naively using a formalism that brings the observer into the picture such that the electrons don't even have the properties described until they are observed during measurement, and in fact are described in a superposition state describing what would be four electrons in two pairs that "collapses" to the one pair with definite spin upon measurement and somehow becomes two electrons by the "primitive consciousness" of the four described by the singlet state?
The number of formal, conceptual, logical, and physical contradictions boggles the mind.


It's more a manner of defining what this means. Your Dr. Bryan doesn't do this, he just uses words, conflates to entirely contradictory families of interpretations of QM and confuses the formalisms employed too, hiding behind word choices and pictures and counting on the fact that it is easy to imagine how someone who doesn't know anything about physics (let alone QM) such as yourself will swallow whatever someone like him dishes out because you don't know any better and are not interested, apparently, in educating yourself.

Well LegionOnomaMoi, you certainly appear to have an impressive background, and indeed present well as someone who really knows this subject. I see you are quite critical of the work Dr Byran has done on this subject, and I accept you must be qualified to make this judgement hence presume your credentials must be equally as impressive as his. So here are the credentials of Dr Bryan, please LegionOnomaMoi, do not be modest and provide us with a list of your own academic credentials so we can compare.

Ph.D. University of Rochester. 1961 Theoretical Nuclear Physics.
Thesis Advisor: Prof. Robert E. Marshal
Associate Professor of Physics, Texas A&M University, 1969-1973
Professor of Physics, Texas A&M University, 1973 to 2011.
Professor Emeritus, Texas A&M University, 2011 to present.
Fellow, American Physical Society. Awarded in 1973 for research in nuclear physics.

Dr Bryan apparently didn't do a lot of funded research, but the last two on the list are at least relevant to this subject. May I ask what funded research have you done in the past relevant to this subject and could you please provide a copy of the associated papers if any?.

Funding: Department of Energy, 1976-1984, “Intermediate Energy Nuclear Theory”
Lifebridge Foundation. 1999-2002, “Interdimensional Research”
Private Funding, 2012-present, “Electron PK Experiment”

Thank you for your help in understanding this subject more clearly LegionOnomaMoi.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Well LegionOnomaMoi, you certainly appear to have an impressive background, and indeed present well as someone who really knows this subject. I see you are quite critical of the work Dr Byran has done on this subject, and I accept you must be qualified to make this judgement hence presume your credentials must be equally as impressive as his. So here are the credentials of Dr Bryan, please LegionOnomaMoi, do not be modest and provide us with a list of your own academic credentials so we can compare.

I've a better idea that doesn't involve violating my privacy (not to mention contractual agreements and professional reputation) by providing something like my CV for you on a public forum. After all, I'm not a fan of the credentials game in general, so it didn't and doesn't matter to me that your Dr. Bryan didn't really have much in the way of relevant credentials anyway- his arguments fail under their own lack of merit. Nor does it matter if I were not involved in research or academia at all but were instead a nutritionist or veterinarian by trade. My arguments too stand or fall on their merit.

I used to pepper my posts here with references but all that typically resulted in was being accused of appealing to authority. So over the years I’ve tried to temper my academic instincts towards citations and instead provide explanations, arguments, and so forth independently of external sources and in my own words.

However, as you seem interested in the worst possible kind of fallacious appeal to authority by simultaneously linking to some cherry-picked papers from one particular author whose specialty is tangential here at best whilst now (apparently) attempting to bolster this lack of any substantive argument with an appeal to this single individual’s credentials, then I can do what I am more naturally inclined towards anyway. Since, by training and profession I make it my business to cite the literature whenever making claims, I am perfectly content to support any statement, claim, or assertion I’ve made about the nature of QM, neuroimaging, quantum formalisms, or anything else that could possibly be relevant to the argument here with references to the literature.

That way you will be able to match the rather poor credentials you seem to value so highly with some of the preeminent names in the relevant fields, from the founders of quantum theory to those working on quantum foundations today.

So, you tell me what I’ve said that you feel it necessary to here from a “credentialed” source, and I’ll even provide you with the relevant sources written by those with superior credentials since the credentials of your source seem so important to you. That way you don't have to take my word for it, you can get sources that have passed greater scrutiny by the general physics and scientific community than the cherry-picked paper you managed to find and you can have all the credentials you seem to find important in order to evaluate an argument or position that should rather be judged on merit as opposed to whose got the bigger PhD.

 

[Meow Mix]

But it's not that they behave differently when they are observed, of that I am 100% confident. Properties manifest themselves when the system interacts with something. That something may be a conscious observer, or it may be a passing molecule.

I suggest nobody can seriously think a QM system behaves differently when the experimenter goes off to get a cup of coffee. What would be supposed to happen if the experiment is "observed" by the laboratory cat? Or a passing wasp?

The "observer" in QM is no more than the "observer" in relativity. An entity, in a particular frame of reference or informational environment, that interacts with the phenomenon in question.

I gave out a few “winner” emojis or whatever they’re called, but this is the winniest of winners.

If I were to have a worst science woo pet peeve, it’d be quantum observer/consciousness woo.

(Wait, I do have a worst science woo pet peeve, and it is that! So thank you, seriously, for this post).

 

[Meow Mix]

Frankly, both Penrose and Hammerhoff seem to have gone off the deep end with these speculations. Microtubules operate at a MUCH larger level than the quantum, and much, much larger than that for quantum gravity.

From what I’ve seen, Penrose has backed off from this for the most part. Some of his early defenses seemed to me like a sort of sunk cost syndrome.

 

[Meow Mix]

@Polymath257

Quantum Entanglement Has Now Been Directly Observed at a Larger Macroscopic Scale

...just throwing this out there, I dunno.

The extreme controls on the environment here can’t be ignored; recall that the OP was about brains. Brains don’t exist in vacuums at a few Kelvin and etc. that was necessary to achieve this.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

I've a better idea that doesn't involve violating my privacy (not to mention contractual agreements and professional reputation) by providing something like my CV for you on a public forum. After all, I'm not a fan of the credentials game in general, so it didn't and doesn't matter to me that your Dr. Bryan didn't really have much in the way of relevant credentials anyway- his arguments fail under their own lack of merit. Nor does it matter if I were not involved in research or academia at all but were instead a nutritionist or veterinarian by trade. My arguments too stand or fall on their merit.

I used to pepper my posts here with references but all that typically resulted in was being accused of appealing to authority. So over the years I’ve tried to temper my academic instincts towards citations and instead provide explanations, arguments, and so forth independently of external sources and in my own words.

However, as you seem interested in the worst possible kind of fallacious appeal to authority by simultaneously linking to some cherry-picked papers from one particular author whose specialty is tangential here at best whilst now (apparently) attempting to bolster this lack of any substantive argument with an appeal to this single individual’s credentials, then I can do what I am more naturally inclined towards anyway. Since, by training and profession I make it my business to cite the literature whenever making claims, I am perfectly content to support any statement, claim, or assertion I’ve made about the nature of QM, neuroimaging, quantum formalisms, or anything else that could possibly be relevant to the argument here with references to the literature.

That way you will be able to match the rather poor credentials you seem to value so highly with some of the preeminent names in the relevant fields, from the founders of quantum theory to those working on quantum foundations today.

So, you tell me what I’ve said that you feel it necessary to here from a “credentialed” source, and I’ll even provide you with the relevant sources written by those with superior credentials since the credentials of your source seem so important to you. That way you don't have to take my word for it, you can get sources that have passed greater scrutiny by the general physics and scientific community than the cherry-picked paper you managed to find and you can have all the credentials you seem to find important in order to evaluate an argument or position that should rather be judged on merit as opposed to whose got the bigger PhD.

Nice comeback LegionOnomaMoi. So consider me tenacious, I am still of the opinion that it is possible to change the spin of electrons, pure belief or faith if you like at this stage, but I intend to find out definitively if my life lasts long enough. Before we dispatch the ideas of Dr Bryan, I want to understand why you think his take on the Copenhagen School of the double slit experiment is in error. If you are prepared to come down to my level of understanding of Physics (limited math, but was military trained in radio, radar, electronics), could you tell me what light is composed of, particles, waves, or both? What is wrong with the interpretation of Dr Bryan, what was he saying or implying you consider wrong?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Nice comeback LegionOnomaMoi.

It's not a comeback. I really do despise the "credentials game" for many reasons. It is, for example, quite embarrassing to disparage philosophers' understanding of physics only to find out the individual you are addressing is a philosopher who knows more than you do about the theoretical structure and mathematics of quantum theory, or to find out just before embarrassing oneself in front of colleagues from around the world that an individual you had dismissed as some kind of cognitive scientist or similar psychologist whose focus on quantum theory was because "quantum-like" sound "sexy" turned out to be a mathematical physicist whose forgotten more about quantum probability than you will ever know. Early on in my career, I found myself in both situations. Couple that with numerous conferences in which the specialists presenting material relating to quantum foundations, neuroscience, machine learning, HCI, cosmology, HEP physics, etc., include philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, at least one English professor with a PhD in Comparative Literature (Arkady Plotnitsky), and you learn that credentials are often poor guideposts.

Before we dispatch the ideas of Dr Bryan, I want to understand why you think his take on the Copenhagen School of the double slit experiment is in error.

Firstly, in his paper "Conscious control of an electron" in which he states "Consider an electron's wavepacket passing through a double slit. It turns into an array of packets...If an array of detectors is placed to intercept the wavepackets, then only one detector will be activated. According to the Copenhagen School, an observer brings this about (e. g., Ref. 1)." The problem first problem here is that his example reference for the Copenhagen school is Wigner, who was (in)famously one of the initial dissenters to the Copenhagen interpretation (CI) and rejected the orthodox view in many regards (one of the most important being the need for irreducible representations as demanded by the von Neumann scheme). In other words, citing Wigner's work here is pushing to the extreme the notion that this is in any respect an example of the Copenhagen school.
In fact, in the orthodox/Copenhagen interpretation, it is quite wrong to speak of the electron's wavepacket as having done anything or possessing any property in the manner that Dr. Bryan does. Bohr emphasized, repeatedly, the fact that his entire approach and philosophy melded the contradictory classical observations with the quantum formalisms in a manner that was fundamentally contextual (one cannot consider measurement outcomes of quantum systems as yielding results that existed prior to measurements or as describing physical systems that existed independently of the experimental design).
Haag is instructive here:
"A 'measuring result' can not be interpreted as revealing a property of the system which existed (though unknown to us) prior to the act of measurement. Take the example of a position measurement on an electron. It would lead to a host of paradoxa if one wanted to assume that the electron has some position at a given time. 'Position' is just not an attribute of an electron, it is an attribute of the 'event' i.e. of the interaction process between the electron and an appropriately chosen measuring instrument" (p. 2)
Haag, R. (1992). Local Quantum Physics: Fields, Particles, Algebras (2nd Rev. Ed.) (Texts and Monographs in Physics). Springer.

Now, in other approaches (such as the Bohmian one), it is certainly the case that at all times something like an electron has a definite position (and the paradoxa referred to above are in some cases embraced and in other cases exchanged for more troubles). But in the Copenhagen school, this is a paradigmatic example of the manner in which it is simply wrong to think of an electron as having certain definite properties in the way that Dr. Bryan described independently of the experimental set up and apparatus used for state preparation and measurement.
The formalism two is suggestive. One gets the probabilities from the double-slit experiment via the amplitudes, as Feynman stressed (and was key in his path integral formalism development). There are other ways of deriving the probabilities than simply using the modulus squared, but they will be equivalent. So, what does this mean for Dr. Bryan's example?
Well, he ascribes the "choice" of path taken to the primitive consciousness of the quantum system under examination. But the problem in terms of the very formalism as well as the theory itself here is that
1) According to quantum theory, there is no path taken. Quantum trajectories don't exist in the Copenhagen or orthodox approach (a point emphasized especially by Bohmians), and it is simply not the case that we can say the electron passes through either slit. In fact, a central point is that it cannot have done so, because even if we send single electrons through they will not traverse paths that can be derived via any trajectories (I'm simplifying enormously here)
2) The electron cannot "choose" which path to take using primitive consciousness as suggested. This much we know empirically thanks to advances in quantum measurement and control technologies (and the corresponding theoretical developments). We can, for example, decide to switch back and forth between those aspects of the electron or similar quantum system's behavior that Dr. Bryan is ascribing to the quantum system in a manner that makes this impossible. Put simply and naively, we can determine after the electron has already interacted with the "slit screen" whether or not we want the electron to have the property of having a definite interaction with one of the slits or to have somehow no definite position until being registered in a manner consistent with the wave-like interference pattern. In really neat experiments, we can switch back and forth, changing how these wave-like and particle-like properties are exhibited.
But if it is the electron which in some way chooses a path, then it cannot be that we can decide whether or not there is even a path to take.
3) In the more modest experiment Dr. Bryan describes, in which the wavepackets traverse through the slits, what the Copenhagen school and in general what quantum theory describes is inconsistent with his take. This is in no small part due his very description. He quite readily admits that his interpretation differs from the Copenhagen school. But he misattributes the position of the "Copenhagen school" to one in which the observer chooses the path taken by intercepting the electron. This is misleading. In reality, the standard approach and formalism tells us that if we try to ascribe trajectories to electrons in this experiment and then test for them, the "wave" part of the wavefunction vanishes and we get a "classical" result. Dr. Bryan is willing to "speculate the electron wavefunction itself “chooses” which detector to activate."
But and this is the key point if the detector is placed in such a way as to determine "which path" the electron takes, then there is no wavefunction or interference pattern or anything that somehow corresponds to Dr. Bryan's schematic in which the wavepacket travels through both slits.

In short, Dr. Bryan has conflated the explanation for why we cannot use the standard wavefunction description of a system to determine which-path an electron takes (in which case we can't use the wavefunction as he would like) with the wavefunction for an electron that is registered "after" it has "passed" through the double-slit screen (without any attempt to determine or observe via which path it traversed).

If you are prepared to come down to my level of understanding of Physics (limited math, but was military trained in radio, radar, electronics), could you tell me what light is composed of, particles, waves, or both?

There are no such things as particles, and no such things as waves. These are approximation schemes we continue to use because they are easy to visualize and provide nice little mental models.

What is wrong with the interpretation of Dr Bryan, what was he saying or implying you consider wrong?

He ascribes certain terms in a statistical framework involving the probabilities of measurement outcomes to a "primitive consciousness" of the system under investigation. The problems here are manifold. Firstly, it is generally not regarded to be at all legitimate or consistent with empirical findings that the system exists independently of the experimental scheme. Secondly, whatever this primitive consciousness might be that can "choose" which "detector to activate" (according to Dr. Bryan), it must do so in a way that renders his entire use of quantum theory essentially, fundamentally problematic. The properties he ascribes to an electron do not exist objectively, externally, and independently in a manner such that this any consciousness, no matter how primitive could explain the behavior. Instead, this behavior is determined by the manner of experimental arrangement and corresponding specifications of the system under investigation in terms both of preparation and subsequent measurement.
In short, anything we would ascribe to the electron's primitive consciousness is erased the moment we wish to use quantum theory to describe things like electrons. The wavefunction encodes the probabilities corresponding to the statistical propensities for particular experimental results given particular experimental arrangements of systems of specified kinds. Thus, were things like the path an electron takes through a particular slit in the double-slit experiment the result of a primitive consciousness, then the placement of a device to register which-path is taken shouldn't destroy the dynamics of the wavefunction as it does. Nor should we be able to manipulate the probabilities described by the wavefunction for a particular electron's measurement by changing e.g., the emission source or (even better) via something as simple as changing the orientation we ascribe to the system mathematically.
Even more shortly, all Dr. Bryan really does is take the fact that quantum mechanics is irreducibly statistical (yielding only probabilities for particular experimental outcomes in general) to mean that the statistical nature of the systems described by the formalism is "primitive consciousness." But by this same logic, the outcome of a coin toss is due to the coin's primitive consciousness, rather than to the way in you flip it, the atmospheric conditions, the coin's asymmetries, etc.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

It's not a comeback. I really do despise the "credentials game" for many reasons. It is, for example, quite embarrassing to disparage philosophers' understanding of physics only to find out the individual you are addressing is a philosopher who knows more than you do about the theoretical structure and mathematics of quantum theory, or to find out just before embarrassing oneself in front of colleagues from around the world that an individual you had dismissed as some kind of cognitive scientist or similar psychologist whose focus on quantum theory was because "quantum-like" sound "sexy" turned out to be a mathematical physicist whose forgotten more about quantum probability than you will ever know. Early on in my career, I found myself in both situations. Couple that with numerous conferences in which the specialists presenting material relating to quantum foundations, neuroscience, machine learning, HCI, cosmology, HEP physics, etc., include philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, at least one English professor with a PhD in Comparative Literature (Arkady Plotnitsky), and you learn that credentials are often poor guideposts.


Firstly, in his paper "Conscious control of an electron" in which he states "Consider an electron's wavepacket passing through a double slit. It turns into an array of packets...If an array of detectors is placed to intercept the wavepackets, then only one detector will be activated. According to the Copenhagen School, an observer brings this about (e. g., Ref. 1)." The problem first problem here is that his example reference for the Copenhagen school is Wigner, who was (in)famously one of the initial dissenters to the Copenhagen interpretation (CI) and rejected the orthodox view in many regards (one of the most important being the need for irreducible representations as demanded by the von Neumann scheme). In other words, citing Wigner's work here is pushing to the extreme the notion that this is in any respect an example of the Copenhagen school.
In fact, in the orthodox/Copenhagen interpretation, it is quite wrong to speak of the electron's wavepacket as having done anything or possessing any property in the manner that Dr. Bryan does. Bohr emphasized, repeatedly, the fact that his entire approach and philosophy melded the contradictory classical observations with the quantum formalisms in a manner that was fundamentally contextual (one cannot consider measurement outcomes of quantum systems as yielding results that existed prior to measurements or as describing physical systems that existed independently of the experimental design).
Haag is instructive here:
"A 'measuring result' can not be interpreted as revealing a property of the system which existed (though unknown to us) prior to the act of measurement. Take the example of a position measurement on an electron. It would lead to a host of paradoxa if one wanted to assume that the electron has some position at a given time. 'Position' is just not an attribute of an electron, it is an attribute of the 'event' i.e. of the interaction process between the electron and an appropriately chosen measuring instrument" (p. 2)
Haag, R. (1992). Local Quantum Physics: Fields, Particles, Algebras (2nd Rev. Ed.) (Texts and Monographs in Physics). Springer.

Now, in other approaches (such as the Bohmian one), it is certainly the case that at all times something like an electron has a definite position (and the paradoxa referred to above are in some cases embraced and in other cases exchanged for more troubles). But in the Copenhagen school, this is a paradigmatic example of the manner in which it is simply wrong to think of an electron as having certain definite properties in the way that Dr. Bryan described independently of the experimental set up and apparatus used for state preparation and measurement.
The formalism two is suggestive. One gets the probabilities from the double-slit experiment via the amplitudes, as Feynman stressed (and was key in his path integral formalism development). There are other ways of deriving the probabilities than simply using the modulus squared, but they will be equivalent. So, what does this mean for Dr. Bryan's example?
Well, he ascribes the "choice" of path taken to the primitive consciousness of the quantum system under examination. But the problem in terms of the very formalism as well as the theory itself here is that
1) According to quantum theory, there is no path taken. Quantum trajectories don't exist in the Copenhagen or orthodox approach (a point emphasized especially by Bohmians), and it is simply not the case that we can say the electron passes through either slit. In fact, a central point is that it cannot have done so, because even if we send single electrons through they will not traverse paths that can be derived via any trajectories (I'm simplifying enormously here)
2) The electron cannot "choose" which path to take using primitive consciousness as suggested. This much we know empirically thanks to advances in quantum measurement and control technologies (and the corresponding theoretical developments). We can, for example, decide to switch back and forth between those aspects of the electron or similar quantum system's behavior that Dr. Bryan is ascribing to the quantum system in a manner that makes this impossible. Put simply and naively, we can determine after the electron has already interacted with the "slit screen" whether or not we want the electron to have the property of having a definite interaction with one of the slits or to have somehow no definite position until being registered in a manner consistent with the wave-like interference pattern. In really neat experiments, we can switch back and forth, changing how these wave-like and particle-like properties are exhibited.
But if it is the electron which in some way chooses a path, then it cannot be that we can decide whether or not there is even a path to take.
3) In the more modest experiment Dr. Bryan describes, in which the wavepackets traverse through the slits, what the Copenhagen school and in general what quantum theory describes is inconsistent with his take. This is in no small part due his very description. He quite readily admits that his interpretation differs from the Copenhagen school. But he misattributes the position of the "Copenhagen school" to one in which the observer chooses the path taken by intercepting the electron. This is misleading. In reality, the standard approach and formalism tells us that if we try to ascribe trajectories to electrons in this experiment and then test for them, the "wave" part of the wavefunction vanishes and we get a "classical" result. Dr. Bryan is willing to "speculate the electron wavefunction itself “chooses” which detector to activate."
But and this is the key point if the detector is placed in such a way as to determine "which path" the electron takes, then there is no wavefunction or interference pattern or anything that somehow corresponds to Dr. Bryan's schematic in which the wavepacket travels through both slits.

In short, Dr. Bryan has conflated the explanation for why we cannot use the standard wavefunction description of a system to determine which-path an electron takes (in which case we can't use the wavefunction as he would like) with the wavefunction for an electron that is registered "after" it has "passed" through the double-slit screen (without any attempt to determine or observe via which path it traversed).


There are no such things as particles, and no such things as waves. These are approximation schemes we continue to use because they are easy to visualize and provide nice little mental models.

He ascribes certain terms in a statistical framework involving the probabilities of measurement outcomes to a "primitive consciousness" of the system under investigation. The problems here are manifold. Firstly, it is generally not regarded to be at all legitimate or consistent with empirical findings that the system exists independently of the experimental scheme. Secondly, whatever this primitive consciousness might be that can "choose" which "detector to activate" (according to Dr. Bryan), it must do so in a way that renders his entire use of quantum theory essentially, fundamentally problematic. The properties he ascribes to an electron do not exist objectively, externally, and independently in a manner such that this any consciousness, no matter how primitive could explain the behavior. Instead, this behavior is determined by the manner of experimental arrangement and corresponding specifications of the system under investigation in terms both of preparation and subsequent measurement.
In short, anything we would ascribe to the electron's primitive consciousness is erased the moment we wish to use quantum theory to describe things like electrons. The wavefunction encodes the probabilities corresponding to the statistical propensities for particular experimental results given particular experimental arrangements of systems of specified kinds. Thus, were things like the path an electron takes through a particular slit in the double-slit experiment the result of a primitive consciousness, then the placement of a device to register which-path is taken shouldn't destroy the dynamics of the wavefunction as it does. Nor should we be able to manipulate the probabilities described by the wavefunction for a particular electron's measurement by changing e.g., the emission source or (even better) via something as simple as changing the orientation we ascribe to the system mathematically.
Even more shortly, all Dr. Bryan really does is take the fact that quantum mechanics is irreducibly statistical (yielding only probabilities for particular experimental outcomes in general) to mean that the statistical nature of the systems described by the formalism is "primitive consciousness." But by this same logic, the outcome of a coin toss is due to the coin's primitive consciousness, rather than to the way in you flip it, the atmospheric conditions, the coin's asymmetries, etc.

I give you full marks for a comprehensive and persuasive reply LegionOnomaMoi, thank you. I accept your superior scientific understanding of the issues involved and now find there is much more to it than the popular understanding of physics provides. I am somehow relieved to hear that there are no such things as particles, and no such things as waves, that these concepts are merely approximate schemes for the conveyance of easy to grasp simple visual and mental models of what is a much more complex state or reality, for I have intuitively felt that particles in particular (no pun intended) were like spherical 'clouds' of apparently smaller particle clouds, and that these smaller clouds...and so on ad infinitum.

It strikes me that given the fluidity of energy vibrating at the infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations, and the forms it takes such as spherical clouds, etc., it is far from being fully understood at this time. So if there is any possibility of human consciousness interacting with the more primitive states of cosmic elementary self ordering principles, this is an area that could be worth considering.

 

[exchemist]

I give you full marks for a comprehensive and persuasive reply LegionOnomaMoi, thank you. I accept your superior scientific understanding of the issues involved and now find there is much more to it than the popular understanding of physics provides. I am somehow relieved to hear that there are no such things as particles, and no such things as waves, that these concepts are merely approximate schemes for the conveyance of easy to grasp simple visual and mental models of what is a much more complex state or reality, for I have intuitively felt that particles in particular (no pun intended) were like spherical 'clouds' of apparently smaller particle clouds, and that these smaller clouds...and so on ad infinitum.

It strikes me that given the fluidity of energy vibrating at the infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations, and the forms it takes such as spherical clouds, etc., it is far from being fully understood at this time. So if there is any possibility of human consciousness interacting with the more primitive states of cosmic elementary self ordering principles, this is an area that could be worth considering.

It is meaningless to speak of energy vibrating. Energy is a property of a system. How can a property vibrate? The "infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations" also seems meaningless. What on earth do you mean? So yes you are right this is not understood at this time, but that would be because it doesn't seem to make any sense.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

It is meaningless to speak of energy vibrating. Energy is a property of a system. How can a property vibrate? The "infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations" also seems meaningless. What on earth do you mean? So yes you are right this is not understood at this time, but that would be because it doesn't seem to make any sense.

In order to conceive what space is constituted of, it is necessary to use concepts to describe the model. For example it is common to describe certain energy in space as vibrating electro magnetic waves, here the concept of waves is accepted. But if we take the frequency of vibration of waves to their minimum wavelength, how short do they get in reality, this is what I meant by the "infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's 'spectrum of' vibrations". I understand that energy is a property of a 'system', math is a handy way of conceptualizing the properties of space, but that does not imho exclude the conceptualizing of properties in a descriptive visual way, such a vibrations, frequency, clouds, etc..

I get it that certain concepts I am using at this point of the discussion may not be appropriate to the actual reality that exists, so please feel free to offer alternative conceptual models. For example, what is the essence of the actual energy that vibrates/resonates in the form of electro magnetic waves? Is this essence the same as that existing as particulate 'clouds' that we called subatomic particles? I am really interested in getting some idea of the essence of the empty space of the quantum vacuum, say space at some infinitesimal amount above absolute zero temperature? Whilst the emptiness of space in the sense of absence of energy activity may be directly proportional to the temperature, what is that essence that is producing the temperature and in what form does it take to create the temperature, eg. vibrations, etc?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

It strikes me that given the fluidity of energy vibrating at the infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations, and the forms it takes such as spherical clouds, etc., it is far from being fully understood at this time.

Well, sure. As exchemist pointed out, this description doesn't make much sense. Putting aside for the moment the very real issues with energy in physical systems exchemist has already pointed out, I'm not sure what it means to speak of the "infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's vibrations."
It is true that our understanding of the vacuum state(s) in its various incarnations in relativistic physics is still a matter of some debate. Operationally, when one wishes to construct a quantum theory that obeys the relevant transformations demanded by any relativistic theory, one immediately runs into several issues. To some extent, these issues are "resolved" in modern physics using a combination of different phenomenological, mathematical, metaphysical, operational, and empirical approaches (EFTs alone combine not only different interpretations of the phenomenology of HEP physics but also the meaning(s) underlying the regularization and renormalization required for finite results in relativistic QFT).
But "infinitesimal" and "quantum" have some degree of inherent contradictions embedded in them. Infinitesimals are usually referenced with respect to the continuum, understanding continuity here in the sense of the usual topology of e.g., the real number line (in contrast, one can define infinitesimals in terms of the epsilon-delta approach to limits and so forth from elementary calculus, but this definition can be defined for the rational numbers without embedding them in the reals; the result is a mess in which most of the very basic theorems of calculus vanish because the rationals are not (Cauchy) complete).
Putting aside also the discreteness inherent in many aspects of quantum theory vs. the continuity implied by infinitesimals, we run immediately into another problem.
The vacuum state in quantum theory is typically the result of the transition from the domain of quantum mechanics to that of relativistic quantum theory and in particular (relativistic) quantum field theory. For various reasons, in this approach one no longer treats space (or spatial coordinates via position) using the methods from non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM). This is because relativity demands some degree of equal treatment for spatial coordinates and time, whereas in NRQM time is generally a parameter and space an operator.
The way in which this equal footing for space and time is achieved is by demoting the position operator and treating what would have been or were operators in NRQM as the "particles" or physical systems acting on the vacuum. So, returning to the discussion of electrons, in the NRQM described by Dr. Bryan the (information about) the electron is encapsulated in the corresponding wavefunction and one obtains information about e.g., its spatial coordinates via the position operator, whereas in quantum field theory the "electron" is itself an operator that itself acts on the vacuum state |0>.
In none of this do we get something like "the quantum vacuum's vibrations, and the forms it takes such as spherical clouds" in any sensical manner. Raising and lowering operators are not really akin to "vibrations" in any intuitive sense one may have unless one has studied harmonic oscillator in classical and quantum theory.

So if there is any possibility of human consciousness interacting with the more primitive states of cosmic elementary self ordering principles, this is an area that could be worth considering.

I disagree. In fact, it is in our limited understanding of the vacuums state and of quantum field theory more generally (beyond operational understanding) that we run into obstacles here. If we can't really understand the manner in which to interpret what should have been basic, fundamental physical properties that instead must become running constants in some renormalization scheme in order to yield finite results, we can hardly look here to understand how to combine this knowledge gap with another we are trying to fill.
More importantly, we should instead take the results of quantum theory and the evolution/history of our understanding of it as a guide here, and note how far we pushed the limits of classical physics and its corresponding classical atomism, reductionism, and theoretical structure when we banished from any possible role the very mechanisms that enable physics to begin with. For Newton and contemporaries, as well as for many of those who came later but were instrumental in contributing to modern physics (e.g., Maupertuis, Euler, etc.) the external picture painted by a dynamical cosmos evolving from initial conditions was literally a God's eye view. We could understand the universe (or, more importantly, God) by seeking out those laws which the Creator imbued his creation with. To do so, each experiment (realized or in thought) corresponded to a kind of miniuniverse in which we imagined a perfectly isolated combination of system+environment so as to exclude our roles as observers as well as render negligible any possible other external influences.
Quantum theory, whatever else it has done, forced us to realize that this idealization cannot be fundamental, nor can it be extrapolated universally. We have long since dispensed with the need to invoke a creator or any similar Cause underlying the "laws" of modern physics. But we can no longer seriously consider how we have excluded ourselves from the structure of physical theories while extrapolating the governing equations, laws, dynamics, etc., in these theories to hold universally.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

this is what I meant by the "infinitesimal end of the quantum vacuum's 'spectrum of' vibrations".

An important mathematical aside.
Consider a value ε that is greater than 0 but smaller than any non-zero number you wish. That is, ε is some non-negative number. It is "infinitesimal" in that the difference between 0 and ε (or between any number and ε) can be made arbitrarily small or as small as you wish.
Is this enough? That is, is this enough to formulate physics or even basic mathematics such that we can obtain the results we do?
No. Imagine, for a moment, that we are dealing with a number line that has only rational numbers. It is certainly true that between any two rational numbers, there exist infinitely many more rational numbers. So it is possible and indeed trivial to apply the usual definitions from elementary calculus involving limits (or their infinitesimal equivalents) to the rational numbers. We can, after all, consider the infinitesimal variation from any point in the number line in terms only of rational numbers, demand that this variation be less than any positive value we desire, and never leave the rationals.
Yet almost all real numbers are irrational. In order to actually use infinitesimals or make sense of them in a manner that would be of any use, we must introduce the real number line. We must accept that the geometric interpretation of infinitesimals fails utterly, because we can shrink an interval as small as we would like and never recover the important fact that in any interval there exist infinitely more irrational numbers than rationals.