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This is my first post here in lesswrong, so please be kind :)
I would like to submit a speculative synthesis on quantum mechanics and intuition as a small article. I've submitted it in my substack earlier, but maybe here I will find a deeper reasoning.
Introduction:
Humans are currently being underrated because of AI, but some physicists tend to disagree. Human cognition is increasingly framed as merely algorithmic, replaceable by binary computation, while the deeper questions raised by quantum foundations are treated as settled or irrelevant.
Quantum physics is fascinating and has more subtleties, studies, and possibilities regarding what we generally assume. Where we expected deterministic trajectories, we found superposition, non-locality, and temporal asymmetries that resist collapse into Newton’s pure mechanical laws.
Behold a breach of a new universe in which the laws of linear time, consciousness, future overlapping and collapse of state sustain reality, and how we are able to have plenty access to it, every time and every day, something that no binary machine (0-1) can ever achieve or come close to.
This thesis rests on three base pillars, each one bleeding into the next, ultimately culminating in a fourth: the question of what this entire framework implies for the nature of conscious access itself, come to the conclusion that, special states of consciousness could access information that normally remains distributed among inaccessible alternatives, a possibility that Mensky, M.B. (2007) formalized mathematically.
1. The role of consciousness as a determining factor in the choice and measurement of multiple possible quantum states.
Experiments such as Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend have been disclosing some entry-level quantum mechanics by adding the importance of consciousness and acknowledgment as a deterministic tool in multiple possible quantum states.
(I say here entry-level because this article will go much further than those experiments and theories)
John von Neumann, one of my favorites, is often described as a computer and mathematic genius, discovered and opened the gates for further research in quantum mechanics.
In Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, originally published in 1932, von Neumann distinguished between two types of evolution:
continuous, deterministic evolution governed by the Schrödinger equation;
2. discontinuous change associated with measurement, later termed projection or collapse.
Furthermore, he demonstrated that the measuring apparatus could also be treated as a quantum system. Consequently, the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain could likewise be included in the description. This gives rise to the so-called von Neumann chain:
system → apparatus → retina → brain → conscious experience.
The boundary between the "observed object" and the "observer" can be shifted along this chain without altering experimental predictions.
However, at some point, a definite result must emerge so that the theory can be compared with experiment. For nature to transition from a cloud of possibilities to a
concrete reality (an observable event), the system must undergo reduction or collapse. Yet, for nature to answer "yes" or "no" (via the Born Rule), a specific question must be put to the system.
Something is only observable and put in concrete reality if someone observes. You can’t have something observable and real with no observation at all.
This brings some questions:
• Imagine a universe containing only a single star. It explodes, no light, gravitational waves, or any other effect of that explosion will ever reach any other physical system. There is no observer, no detector, and no possibility of any record of this event existing, now or in the future.
• Did the explosion occur as a physical fact, or are we merely attributing reality to a story that, by definition, can never make a difference to absolutely anything and therefore its very existence can be assured?
• Imagine an event whose only possibility of becoming a physical fact is through a future measurement. Before that measurement, is there really a "fact" about the event, or merely a structure of possibilities?
• Imagine a pair of entangled particles. One of them is measured today on Earth, the other will only be measured a thousand years from now, in another galaxy. Before the second measurement takes place, does it make sense to say that the complete relationship between them was already a fact of the universe, or does that relationship only become part of the physical description once both boundary conditions are available?
These questions can look philosophical at first, but the next pillars will address them as quantum physics.
A glimpse of some physicists highlighting Neumann’s’ work as the core of quantum physics, mind and observation:
Vladimir Fock (1898-1974) explicitly formulated what he called the “principle of relativity with respect to the means of observation.” According to him, the quantum description cannot be separated from the physical arrangement used to prepare and observe the phenomenon. He even compared this dependence to relativity with respect to reference frames, although he considered it a deeper generalization.
Henry Stapp (1928 – present) and his book Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007). Stapp has claimed that consciousness is fundamental to the universe, In this book he credits John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932) with providing an orthodox quantum mechanics demonstrating mathematically the essential role of quantum physics in the mind.
2. The intuitive separation between independent objects may not be a fundamental description of reality, as in the case of quantum entanglement and the famous case Einstein's "haunted" atoms.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two particles become linked in such a way that measuring one instantly determines the state of the other, no matter what the distance between them. Before measurement, neither particle has a fixed, definite property since both exist in a superposition of possibilities. Once you measure one particle, its partner's corresponding property becomes fixed too, instantaneously, even if it's light-years away. It's as if the two particles remain a single system, regardless of the space between them.
Even physical separation and the passage of time do not, by themselves, determine the state of a quantum system. Something must happen, an interaction, a measurement in the broadest physical sense, before definite facts emerge. This insight becomes even more compelling considering the work of Oppenheim and Wehner.
What had long been regarded as two distinct mysteries, quantum uncertainty and non-locality, turned out to be different expressions of the same underlying structure. The "spooky action at a distance" that troubled Einstein is not an unrestricted influence acting across the universe. Its strength is limited by the uncertainty principle itself, the more we learn about quantum theory, the less the world resembles a collection of independent objects carrying predetermined properties, and the more it resembles a network of relationships whose physical meaning only becomes complete through interaction.
This resists the simplistic response often used to undermine the double-slit experiment, in which photons colliding with a detector determine the state, not "observation" in any deeper sense.
The no-signaling theorem shows that measuring particle A produces no detectable physical effect on particle B in that instant, B's local statistics remain unchanged. What Bell proved is not that A physically disturbs B, but that the correlation between them cannot be explained by any theory of pre-existing, locally determined properties. The correlation is real, and it violates the statistical limits any local, realistic theory would impose, yet it only becomes a verifiable fact once the two measurement records are brought together and compared. Until that comparison happens, there is no local event at B one could point to as "the state becoming fixed."
This is the first hint of a pattern the following pillars will develop further: certain facts about a quantum system are not completed by local causes alone but depend on relationships that span across separated events.
It is also important to notice that non-locality ceased to be a theoretical paradox in 1964, when John Stewart Bell demonstrated that any local realistic theory must adhere to statistical limits that quantum mechanics violates. The experiments of Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, recipients of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, experimentally confirmed this violation, closing the main loopholes and establishing entanglement as a real physical resource.
Going further, the notion that an electron from an atom remains entangled with another after their separation in spacetime can simplify the idea that only the future can provide us with certain information, this is because the future had to reveal the relationship between them, meaning that only information from the future, and the observation of that information through conscious measurement, sufficed to determine the state from among several possibilities.
3. The complete state between two measurements cannot be described solely by the initial conditions. We simply do not detect this difference at present because it can only be revealed by experiments performed in the future.
• The researchers began by selecting a series of assumptions, all traditionally regarded as the core of quantum formalism. These include, for instance, the premise that an observer, in standard experimental situations, predicts the probabilities of future outcomes based on their previous experiments. These assumptions "compel" the probabilities to obey the laws of quantum mechanics, maintaining the coherence of the theoretical framework.
• In his radical reinterpretation of quantum mechanics, Aharonov argues that two seemingly identical particles behave differently under the same conditions because they are fundamentally different. We simply do not detect this difference in the present because it can only be revealed by experiments conducted in the future.
• Wheeler (a student of Bohr and colleague of Einstein) proposed in 1978 that if the choice of how to measure a photon is made after it has already passed through the double slit, the result acts retroactively. The actual experiment (Kim et al., 1999; replicated in 2023) demonstrates exactly this: the future choice to "erase" or "retain" path information determines the interference pattern in the past.
Two-State Vector Formalism (TSVF)
Imagine entangled photons: At time t₀:
A ---------------------- B
You know they are entangled but you still don't know what result will be obtained.
Now, years have passed.
At t1, you measure A.
At t2, you measure B.
Only after comparing the records at t3, you verify the correlation.
Notice something curious:
The property "these two photons exhibited this specific correlation" simply did not exist as an experimental fact prior to t3. It depended on the subsequent comparison.
Between t0 and t3, the complete state can be described using:
• initial conditions;
• final conditions.
In other words,
Past ------->
Event
<-------- Future
In this formalism, the intermediate state already "carries" information from both endpoints.
Aharonov likes to say that the future plays a part in the description of the present.
A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the Universe has a definite destiny, and that this pre-determined destiny reaches back in time to influence the past or the present. Time would not be linear, but rather a state of interdependence among past, present, and future.
Even before the mathematical formalism of the TSVF, physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the delayed-choice experiment (1978), later conducted by Kim et al. (1999) and replicated with coherent photons in 2023. In these experiments, the decision on how to measure a photon is made after it has already traversed the apparatus, yet it determines the photon's prior behavior. Wheeler concluded that "the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present," anticipating the idea that future measurement conditions redefine the description of the intermediate state.
This theorem implies that one must either (1) propose a non-linear modification of the Born rule for two-time predictions, (2) sometimes prohibit the use of present information to predict the future, thereby reducing the predictive power of quantum theory, or (3) deny that unitary quantum mechanics makes valid predictions at a single moment for all observers.
Originally proposed by Yakir Aharonov, Albert Albert, and Lev Vaidman in 1988, weak measurements and the formulation of the Two-State Vector Formalism (TSVF) provide precisely a mathematical and experimental framework in which information "from the future" appears to affect the present.
Strong Measurement (Von Neumann): You send a photon or electron and place a heavy detector in its path. The interaction is violent and immediate: the system collapses instantly, destroying any superposition state and yielding a single eigenvalue a "yes" or "no," a "+1" or "-1." You lose all trace of the prior smooth quantum evolution.
Weak Measurement: Instead of colliding with the system with an intrusive detector, you couple the quantum system to a measuring device extremely gently (for example, using a light beam with high positional uncertainty). The interaction is so subtle that it does not cause the wavefunction to collapse.
• The price: The individual signal extracted from a single weak measurement is almost pure noise.
• The solution: If you repeat the experiment thousands of times and calculate the statistical average of these gentle measurements, a clear signal emerges without any of the individual systems undergoing a drastic collapse in the process.
In the Aharonov formalism (TSVF), the quantum description of a system at an intermediate time t is composed of two state vectors:
1.Time-evolving vector |Ψ⟩: Prepared in the past (t1).
2.Vector that moves backward in time⟨Φ|: Selected in the future (t2) via a final strong measurement (post-selection).
While Stapp appeals to volition and conscious attention within the brain to give "meaning" to the collapse, weak measurements offer something traditional quantum mechanics omitted: a way to probe the quantum state without destroying it.
By empirically demonstrating that a measurement event at time t2 (the future) constrains and shapes observable values at time t0 (the present), the weak measurement experiment reveals that the quantum universe possesses a degree of temporal interconnectedness forbidden by classical physics.
It is not that the observer is "traveling through time" or mentally anticipating the future, rather, the quantum state of a system depends on its entire history, its beginning AND its end.
Concluding, in other words, the observer is compelled to select a state from among several possible future states, or rather, the universe may not be a sequence of objective facts simply waiting to be discovered. It is perhaps better understood as a structure of relationships and information, in which certain facts only acquire full physical meaning when considering the entire network of correlations by encompassing the past, the present, and, in some formulations, future conditions as well.
4. Special states of consciousness could access information that normally remain distributed among inaccessible alternatives: intuition.
This statement comes from a postulate of Russian physicist Michael Mensky studies, and I endorse as the fourth pillar and the conclusion of this article.
It points to a capacity no binary architecture has been shown to replicate intuition, which I take to be consciousness's central function, not calculation, reasoning, or creativity alone, capacities that other cognitive systems, animals or artificial, can approximate to varying degrees.
Mensky starts from the Everett (1930-1982) (many-worlds) formalism, which is established mathematics: the quantum world is a superposition of alternative classical realities.
At first Everett was humiliated by Bohr and the academy by his approach and interpretation of quantum mechanics. Only later with the development of decoherence theory (Zurek, Zeh, 1970s–90s), which provided a plausible physical mechanism to explain why the branches cease to interfere with one another thereby resolving the major technical objection to the original proposal. Today, Many-Worlds is one of the interpretations taken seriously within the foundations-of-physics community, competing with Copenhagen, Bohmian mechanics, and others.
The part of Everett’s mathematics that is real and solid is this: the Schrödinger equation never collapses, it only evolves. When you measure a system, the apparatus and you become entangled with the system, and the result is a superposition of "branches", in each branch, there is a copy of you correlated with a different outcome. This is a direct proven deduction from mathematics.
The remaining question is: why do you experience only one branch, rather than the superposition of them all? The standard answer (via decoherence, a concept that emerged decades after Everett) is indexical and almost banal: you are one of the copies, and each copy has access only to the information within its own branch. There is no special choice or selection involved, it is like asking "why do I see only this one copy of a printed document" when multiple copies exist.
Mensky’s specific move is to take this fact ("you experience only one branch") and, instead of treating it as a trivial consequence of the mathematical structure, identify this separation with the very definition of consciousness, it is not a deduction, but an equivalence he chooses to postulate.
Sir Roger Penrose was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on general relativity.
Penrose’s conclusion: The human mind is not a Turing machine. Conscious thought performs non-computable processes that no AI or classical/quantum computer based purely on algorithms could ever replicate.
For Penrose, if the mind performs a non-computable function, it must be grounded in physics that is also non-computable. And the only physical phenomenon where he identifies this gap is the mechanism of wave function collapse.
Spontaneous Collapse: When this superposition reaches a critical threshold, the geometry of spacetime spontaneously "resolves" into a single state. The time
required for this collapse is determined by Penrose’s version of the uncertainty principle:
𝜏≈ℏ𝐸𝐺
This collapse is not random. Penrose argues that the collapse "chooses" a final state guided by non-computable geometric information imprinted at the Planck scale (10−35 m), the fundamental structure of the universe.
But Penrose lacked a biological mechanism capable of sustaining quantum superpositions large enough (𝐸𝐺 high) without undergoing thermal decoherence before time 𝜏. That is where Stuart Hameroff came in.
• Hameroff identified microtubules: cylindrical cytoskeletal structures composed of the protein tubulin as the ideal candidates:
• Networked Quantum Computing: Tubulins possess dipoles that could switch between quantum states in superposition, acting as biological qubits.
• Dendritic Orchestration: In neuronal dendrites and somas, microtubules are isolated and organized in a way that protects the quantum state from brain "noise."
The Orch-OR model suggests that consciousness is neither a mere biological "epiphenomenon" nor a "mystical property" that alters equations, but rather a direct bridge between complex biology and the discrete geometric structure of spacetime.
Upon collapse, the mind neither chooses randomly nor follows a computable algorithm: it accesses a pre-existing order of information within the fabric of the universe, explaining the human capacity to glimpse mathematical truths and experience flashes of direct intuition.
To fully ground this non-computable, integrative capacity of consciousness within relativistic physics, we must turn to the pioneering work of French theoretical physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard.
As early as the 1940s, Costa de Beauregard recognized that the fundamental equations of physics, from Maxwell to Dirac, are strictly time-symmetric (𝑡→−𝑡). He argued that the apparent unidirectionality of quantum collapse is an artifact of our classical perspective, proposing instead a retrocausal “zigzag” topology (𝑉-pathway) through spacetime.
In this framework, information does not merely flow linearly from past to future, a measurement or intentional act at time 𝑡2 sends a backward-propagating wave that conditions the state at 𝑡1. By framing retrocausality as an intrinsic property of quantum non-locality, Costa de Beauregard provided the time-symmetric architecture that allows future boundary conditions to actively participate in shaping present reality.
Integrating Costa de Beauregard’s retrocausal negentropy into our framework completes the physical basis for intuition as the defining function of consciousness.
Conclusion:
If Mensky demonstrates where alternative classical realities reside (in the superposed Everettian branches), and Penrose identifies what guides their selection (non-computable geometry at the Planck scale), Costa de Beauregard supplies the temporal mechanism: how the mind accesses this distributed information. Intuition, under this unified synthesis, is neither an algorithmic extrapolation of past data nor a random guess. It is a non-local, retrocausal sampling, a moment where the conscious mind taps into information distributed across inaccessible quantum alternatives and future boundary conditions, collapsing them into a coherent, direct insight that no forward-calculating binary system could ever compute.
Some interesting articles also debating this topic:
Can a Future Choice Affect a Past Measurement's Outcome? Yakir Aharonov, Eliahu Cohen* Avshalom C. Elitzur https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6224
This is my first post here in lesswrong, so please be kind :)
I would like to submit a speculative synthesis on quantum mechanics and intuition as a small article. I've submitted it in my substack earlier, but maybe here I will find a deeper reasoning.
Introduction:
Humans are currently being underrated because of AI, but some physicists tend to disagree. Human cognition is increasingly framed as merely algorithmic, replaceable by binary computation, while the deeper questions raised by quantum foundations are treated as settled or irrelevant.
Quantum physics is fascinating and has more subtleties, studies, and possibilities regarding what we generally assume. Where we expected deterministic trajectories, we found superposition, non-locality, and temporal asymmetries that resist collapse into Newton’s pure mechanical laws.
Behold a breach of a new universe in which the laws of linear time, consciousness, future overlapping and collapse of state sustain reality, and how we are able to have plenty access to it, every time and every day, something that no binary machine (0-1) can ever achieve or come close to.
This thesis rests on three base pillars, each one bleeding into the next, ultimately culminating in a fourth: the question of what this entire framework implies for the nature of conscious access itself, come to the conclusion that, special states of consciousness could access information that normally remains distributed among inaccessible alternatives, a possibility that Mensky, M.B. (2007) formalized mathematically.
1. The role of consciousness as a determining factor in the choice and measurement of multiple possible quantum states.
Experiments such as Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend have been disclosing some entry-level quantum mechanics by adding the importance of consciousness and acknowledgment as a deterministic tool in multiple possible quantum states.
(I say here entry-level because this article will go much further than those experiments and theories)
John von Neumann, one of my favorites, is often described as a computer and mathematic genius, discovered and opened the gates for further research in quantum mechanics.
In Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, originally published in 1932, von Neumann distinguished between two types of evolution:
2. discontinuous change associated with measurement, later termed projection or collapse.
Furthermore, he demonstrated that the measuring apparatus could also be treated as a quantum system. Consequently, the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain could likewise be included in the description. This gives rise to the so-called von Neumann chain:
system → apparatus → retina → brain → conscious experience.
The boundary between the "observed object" and the "observer" can be shifted along this chain without altering experimental predictions.
However, at some point, a definite result must emerge so that the theory can be compared with experiment. For nature to transition from a cloud of possibilities to a
concrete reality (an observable event), the system must undergo reduction or collapse. Yet, for nature to answer "yes" or "no" (via the Born Rule), a specific question must be put to the system.
Something is only observable and put in concrete reality if someone observes. You can’t have something observable and real with no observation at all.
This brings some questions:
• Imagine a universe containing only a single star. It explodes, no light, gravitational waves, or any other effect of that explosion will ever reach any other physical system. There is no observer, no detector, and no possibility of any record of this event existing, now or in the future.
• Did the explosion occur as a physical fact, or are we merely attributing reality to a story that, by definition, can never make a difference to absolutely anything and therefore its very existence can be assured?
• Imagine an event whose only possibility of becoming a physical fact is through a future measurement. Before that measurement, is there really a "fact" about the event, or merely a structure of possibilities?
• Imagine a pair of entangled particles. One of them is measured today on Earth, the other will only be measured a thousand years from now, in another galaxy. Before the second measurement takes place, does it make sense to say that the complete relationship between them was already a fact of the universe, or does that relationship only become part of the physical description once both boundary conditions are available?
These questions can look philosophical at first, but the next pillars will address them as quantum physics.
A glimpse of some physicists highlighting Neumann’s’ work as the core of quantum physics, mind and observation:
Vladimir Fock (1898-1974) explicitly formulated what he called the “principle of relativity with respect to the means of observation.” According to him, the quantum description cannot be separated from the physical arrangement used to prepare and observe the phenomenon. He even compared this dependence to relativity with respect to reference frames, although he considered it a deeper generalization.
Henry Stapp (1928 – present) and his book Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007). Stapp has claimed that consciousness is fundamental to the universe, In this book he credits John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932) with providing an orthodox quantum mechanics demonstrating mathematically the essential role of quantum physics in the mind.
2. The intuitive separation between independent objects may not be a fundamental description of reality, as in the case of quantum entanglement and the famous case Einstein's "haunted" atoms.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two particles become linked in such a way that measuring one instantly determines the state of the other, no matter what the distance between them. Before measurement, neither particle has a fixed, definite property since both exist in a superposition of possibilities. Once you measure one particle, its partner's corresponding property becomes fixed too, instantaneously, even if it's light-years away. It's as if the two particles remain a single system, regardless of the space between them.
Even physical separation and the passage of time do not, by themselves, determine the state of a quantum system. Something must happen, an interaction, a measurement in the broadest physical sense, before definite facts emerge. This insight becomes even more compelling considering the work of Oppenheim and Wehner.
What had long been regarded as two distinct mysteries, quantum uncertainty and non-locality, turned out to be different expressions of the same underlying structure. The "spooky action at a distance" that troubled Einstein is not an unrestricted influence acting across the universe. Its strength is limited by the uncertainty principle itself, the more we learn about quantum theory, the less the world resembles a collection of independent objects carrying predetermined properties, and the more it resembles a network of relationships whose physical meaning only becomes complete through interaction.
This resists the simplistic response often used to undermine the double-slit experiment, in which photons colliding with a detector determine the state, not "observation" in any deeper sense.
The no-signaling theorem shows that measuring particle A produces no detectable physical effect on particle B in that instant, B's local statistics remain unchanged. What Bell proved is not that A physically disturbs B, but that the correlation between them cannot be explained by any theory of pre-existing, locally determined properties. The correlation is real, and it violates the statistical limits any local, realistic theory would impose, yet it only becomes a verifiable fact once the two measurement records are brought together and compared. Until that comparison happens, there is no local event at B one could point to as "the state becoming fixed."
This is the first hint of a pattern the following pillars will develop further: certain facts about a quantum system are not completed by local causes alone but depend on relationships that span across separated events.
It is also important to notice that non-locality ceased to be a theoretical paradox in 1964, when John Stewart Bell demonstrated that any local realistic theory must adhere to statistical limits that quantum mechanics violates. The experiments of Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, recipients of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, experimentally confirmed this violation, closing the main loopholes and establishing entanglement as a real physical resource.
Going further, the notion that an electron from an atom remains entangled with another after their separation in spacetime can simplify the idea that only the future can provide us with certain information, this is because the future had to reveal the relationship between them, meaning that only information from the future, and the observation of that information through conscious measurement, sufficed to determine the state from among several possibilities.
3. The complete state between two measurements cannot be described solely by the initial conditions. We simply do not detect this difference at present because it can only be revealed by experiments performed in the future.
• The researchers began by selecting a series of assumptions, all traditionally regarded as the core of quantum formalism. These include, for instance, the premise that an observer, in standard experimental situations, predicts the probabilities of future outcomes based on their previous experiments. These assumptions "compel" the probabilities to obey the laws of quantum mechanics, maintaining the coherence of the theoretical framework.
• In his radical reinterpretation of quantum mechanics, Aharonov argues that two seemingly identical particles behave differently under the same conditions because they are fundamentally different. We simply do not detect this difference in the present because it can only be revealed by experiments conducted in the future.
• Wheeler (a student of Bohr and colleague of Einstein) proposed in 1978 that if the choice of how to measure a photon is made after it has already passed through the double slit, the result acts retroactively. The actual experiment (Kim et al., 1999; replicated in 2023) demonstrates exactly this: the future choice to "erase" or "retain" path information determines the interference pattern in the past.
Two-State Vector Formalism (TSVF)
Imagine entangled photons: At time t₀:
A ---------------------- B
You know they are entangled but you still don't know what result will be obtained.
Now, years have passed.
At t1, you measure A.
At t2, you measure B.
Only after comparing the records at t3, you verify the correlation.
Notice something curious:
The property "these two photons exhibited this specific correlation" simply did not exist as an experimental fact prior to t3. It depended on the subsequent comparison.
Between t0 and t3, the complete state can be described using:
• initial conditions;
• final conditions.
In other words,
Past ------->
Event
<-------- Future
In this formalism, the intermediate state already "carries" information from both endpoints.
Aharonov likes to say that the future plays a part in the description of the present.
A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the Universe has a definite destiny, and that this pre-determined destiny reaches back in time to influence the past or the present. Time would not be linear, but rather a state of interdependence among past, present, and future.
Even before the mathematical formalism of the TSVF, physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the delayed-choice experiment (1978), later conducted by Kim et al. (1999) and replicated with coherent photons in 2023. In these experiments, the decision on how to measure a photon is made after it has already traversed the apparatus, yet it determines the photon's prior behavior. Wheeler concluded that "the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present," anticipating the idea that future measurement conditions redefine the description of the intermediate state.
This theorem implies that one must either (1) propose a non-linear modification of the Born rule for two-time predictions, (2) sometimes prohibit the use of present information to predict the future, thereby reducing the predictive power of quantum theory, or (3) deny that unitary quantum mechanics makes valid predictions at a single moment for all observers.
Originally proposed by Yakir Aharonov, Albert Albert, and Lev Vaidman in 1988, weak measurements and the formulation of the Two-State Vector Formalism (TSVF) provide precisely a mathematical and experimental framework in which information "from the future" appears to affect the present.
Strong Measurement (Von Neumann): You send a photon or electron and place a heavy detector in its path. The interaction is violent and immediate: the system collapses instantly, destroying any superposition state and yielding a single eigenvalue a "yes" or "no," a "+1" or "-1." You lose all trace of the prior smooth quantum evolution.
Weak Measurement: Instead of colliding with the system with an intrusive detector, you couple the quantum system to a measuring device extremely gently (for example, using a light beam with high positional uncertainty). The interaction is so subtle that it does not cause the wavefunction to collapse.
• The price: The individual signal extracted from a single weak measurement is almost pure noise.
• The solution: If you repeat the experiment thousands of times and calculate the statistical average of these gentle measurements, a clear signal emerges without any of the individual systems undergoing a drastic collapse in the process.
In the Aharonov formalism (TSVF), the quantum description of a system at an intermediate time t is composed of two state vectors:
1.Time-evolving vector |Ψ⟩: Prepared in the past (t1).
2.Vector that moves backward in time⟨Φ|: Selected in the future (t2) via a final strong measurement (post-selection).
While Stapp appeals to volition and conscious attention within the brain to give "meaning" to the collapse, weak measurements offer something traditional quantum mechanics omitted: a way to probe the quantum state without destroying it.
By empirically demonstrating that a measurement event at time t2 (the future) constrains and shapes observable values at time t0 (the present), the weak measurement experiment reveals that the quantum universe possesses a degree of temporal interconnectedness forbidden by classical physics.
It is not that the observer is "traveling through time" or mentally anticipating the future, rather, the quantum state of a system depends on its entire history, its beginning AND its end.
Concluding, in other words, the observer is compelled to select a state from among several possible future states, or rather, the universe may not be a sequence of objective facts simply waiting to be discovered. It is perhaps better understood as a structure of relationships and information, in which certain facts only acquire full physical meaning when considering the entire network of correlations by encompassing the past, the present, and, in some formulations, future conditions as well.
4. Special states of consciousness could access information that normally remain distributed among inaccessible alternatives: intuition.
This statement comes from a postulate of Russian physicist Michael Mensky studies, and I endorse as the fourth pillar and the conclusion of this article.
It points to a capacity no binary architecture has been shown to replicate intuition, which I take to be consciousness's central function, not calculation, reasoning, or creativity alone, capacities that other cognitive systems, animals or artificial, can approximate to varying degrees.
Mensky starts from the Everett (1930-1982) (many-worlds) formalism, which is established mathematics: the quantum world is a superposition of alternative classical realities.
At first Everett was humiliated by Bohr and the academy by his approach and interpretation of quantum mechanics. Only later with the development of decoherence theory (Zurek, Zeh, 1970s–90s), which provided a plausible physical mechanism to explain why the branches cease to interfere with one another thereby resolving the major technical objection to the original proposal. Today, Many-Worlds is one of the interpretations taken seriously within the foundations-of-physics community, competing with Copenhagen, Bohmian mechanics, and others.
The part of Everett’s mathematics that is real and solid is this: the Schrödinger equation never collapses, it only evolves. When you measure a system, the apparatus and you become entangled with the system, and the result is a superposition of "branches", in each branch, there is a copy of you correlated with a different outcome. This is a direct proven deduction from mathematics.
The remaining question is: why do you experience only one branch, rather than the superposition of them all? The standard answer (via decoherence, a concept that emerged decades after Everett) is indexical and almost banal: you are one of the copies, and each copy has access only to the information within its own branch. There is no special choice or selection involved, it is like asking "why do I see only this one copy of a printed document" when multiple copies exist.
Mensky’s specific move is to take this fact ("you experience only one branch") and, instead of treating it as a trivial consequence of the mathematical structure, identify this separation with the very definition of consciousness, it is not a deduction, but an equivalence he chooses to postulate.
Sir Roger Penrose was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on general relativity.
Penrose’s conclusion: The human mind is not a Turing machine. Conscious thought performs non-computable processes that no AI or classical/quantum computer based purely on algorithms could ever replicate.
For Penrose, if the mind performs a non-computable function, it must be grounded in physics that is also non-computable. And the only physical phenomenon where he identifies this gap is the mechanism of wave function collapse.
Spontaneous Collapse: When this superposition reaches a critical threshold, the geometry of spacetime spontaneously "resolves" into a single state. The time
required for this collapse is determined by Penrose’s version of the uncertainty principle:
𝜏≈ℏ𝐸𝐺
This collapse is not random. Penrose argues that the collapse "chooses" a final state guided by non-computable geometric information imprinted at the Planck scale (10−35 m), the fundamental structure of the universe.
But Penrose lacked a biological mechanism capable of sustaining quantum superpositions large enough (𝐸𝐺 high) without undergoing thermal decoherence before time 𝜏. That is where Stuart Hameroff came in.
• Hameroff identified microtubules: cylindrical cytoskeletal structures composed of the protein tubulin as the ideal candidates:
• Networked Quantum Computing: Tubulins possess dipoles that could switch between quantum states in superposition, acting as biological qubits.
• Dendritic Orchestration: In neuronal dendrites and somas, microtubules are isolated and organized in a way that protects the quantum state from brain "noise."
The Orch-OR model suggests that consciousness is neither a mere biological "epiphenomenon" nor a "mystical property" that alters equations, but rather a direct bridge between complex biology and the discrete geometric structure of spacetime.
Upon collapse, the mind neither chooses randomly nor follows a computable algorithm: it accesses a pre-existing order of information within the fabric of the universe, explaining the human capacity to glimpse mathematical truths and experience flashes of direct intuition.
To fully ground this non-computable, integrative capacity of consciousness within relativistic physics, we must turn to the pioneering work of French theoretical physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard.
As early as the 1940s, Costa de Beauregard recognized that the fundamental equations of physics, from Maxwell to Dirac, are strictly time-symmetric (𝑡→−𝑡). He argued that the apparent unidirectionality of quantum collapse is an artifact of our classical perspective, proposing instead a retrocausal “zigzag” topology (𝑉-pathway) through spacetime.
In this framework, information does not merely flow linearly from past to future, a measurement or intentional act at time 𝑡2 sends a backward-propagating wave that conditions the state at 𝑡1. By framing retrocausality as an intrinsic property of quantum non-locality, Costa de Beauregard provided the time-symmetric architecture that allows future boundary conditions to actively participate in shaping present reality.
Integrating Costa de Beauregard’s retrocausal negentropy into our framework completes the physical basis for intuition as the defining function of consciousness.
Conclusion:
If Mensky demonstrates where alternative classical realities reside (in the superposed Everettian branches), and Penrose identifies what guides their selection (non-computable geometry at the Planck scale), Costa de Beauregard supplies the temporal mechanism: how the mind accesses this distributed information. Intuition, under this unified synthesis, is neither an algorithmic extrapolation of past data nor a random guess. It is a non-local, retrocausal sampling, a moment where the conscious mind taps into information distributed across inaccessible quantum alternatives and future boundary conditions, collapsing them into a coherent, direct insight that no forward-calculating binary system could ever compute.
Some interesting articles also debating this topic:
Can a Future Choice Affect a Past Measurement's Outcome? Yakir Aharonov, Eliahu Cohen* Avshalom C. Elitzur https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6224
Super-intuition and correlations with the future in Quantum Consciousness Michael B. Mensky https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2627