Epistemic status: A quick rejection of the quantum consciousness woo. If you have already read the sequences, there's nothing new in here. If your new to the site, or need a single page to point people to, here it is.

Real Quantum mechanics looks like pages of abstract maths, after which you have deduced the results of a physics experiment. Given how hard the maths is, most of the systems that we use quantum mechanics to predict are quite simple. One common experiment is to take a glass tube full of a particular element and run lots of electricity through it. The element will produce coloured light, like sodium producing orange, or neon producing red. So take a prism and split that light to see what colours are being produced. Quantum physisists will do lots of tricky maths about how the electrons move between energy levels to work out what colour different elements will produce.

There have been no quantum mechanics experiments that show consciousness to have any relevance to particle physics. The laws of physics do not say what is or is not conscious, in much the same way that they don't say what is or is not a work of art. Of course, consciousness is a property of human brains, and human brains, like everything else in the universe, are made of electrons and quarks playing by quantum laws. The point is that human brains are not singled out for special treatment, they get the same rules as everything else.

For the writers among you, think of a word processor feature that takes some text, and turns it into ALL CAPS. You can put a great novel into this feature if you want. The point is that the rule its self acts the same way whether or not it's given great literature. You can't use the rule to tell what is great literature, you have to read it and decide yourself. Consciousness, like literature, is a high level view that's hard to pin down precisely, and is largely a matter of how we choose to define it. Quantum mechanics is a simple, mechanistic rule.

Yes I know that some of you are thinking of the double slit experiment. You make a screen with two slits, shine light through and get an interference pattern. Put a detector at one slit, attach a dial to the detector, and have a scientist watching the dial so they can see which slit the photon went through, and the interference pattern disappears. Perhaps, thought some...

Wayne C. Smith

Wayne C. Smith