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http://quantumenigma.com/reviews-our-responses/


Except in summary toward the end, the book does not, as the subtitle might suggest, posit anything about the nature of consciousness, the great mystery now being explored by neuroscientists and philosophers, among others. Instead it examines comprehensively the paradoxical consequences that abound in the Copenhagen Interpretation of classical quantum mechanics—specifically, the notion that conscious observation appears necessary in order to transform the superposition of disparate quantum states into the immutable reality of common experience.

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N. David Mermin, emeritus professor of Physics at Cornell University


So I would call this a fine but flawed presentation of quantum mechanics for the general reader. The flaw is in the one-sided and misleading (or at least ambiguous) treatment of the role of conscious perception in quantum physics.

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Originally posted by Jo-self

Thanks for the book reference, of course. Its great that people on this forum bother to recommend what they think would be interesting or helpful.

I was going to try to get this book, but then I started reading the reviews and the sample pages. Did not seem really about the subject of consciousness. Just a very good pop Quantum Physics introduction. We already have tons of those.

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http://quantumenigma.com/reviews-our-responses/


Except in summary toward the end, the book does not, as the subtitle might suggest, posit anything about the nature of consciousness, the great mystery now being explored by neuroscientists and philosophers, among others. Instead it examines comprehensively the paradoxical consequences that abound in the Copenhagen Interpretation of classical quantum mechanics—specifically, the notion that conscious observation appears necessary in order to transform the superposition of disparate quantum states into the immutable reality of common experience.

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And, even that I don't think sounds correct. I thought I read that you can have a mechanical sensor that would randomly measure an elementary particle, and that would "fix" its state. You could even write a computer program to control the sensor, and we all know that is not conscious.

The Mermin review is more in depth, and I think he even read the book unlike many of the others. Beware of reviewers who only read the jacket covers.

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N. David Mermin, emeritus professor of Physics at Cornell University


So I would call this a fine but flawed presentation of quantum mechanics for the general reader. The flaw is in the one-sided and misleading (or at least ambiguous) treatment of the role of conscious perception in quantum physics.

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Of course, read the author's rebuttal to this one, very interesting.

-- jo-self (skeptic, but hopeful)

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from http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/...604079v1.pdf
We first dismiss the idea, still current in popular accounts although long discounted by most physicists, that a conscious mind is necessary for reduction. It should suffice to say that there has never been any evidence for this opinion, which arose only from the difficulty of understanding the reduction, but has never helped to solve that problem. The evidence against it is the obvious Concordance Problem— if reduction is in the mind of the observer, how does it come about that the reductions produced by different observers are the same? This problem is particularly acute for our proposed type of experiment, in which the fact that one observer is on Earth and the other on Mars causes relativistic difficulties.

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from Gerard ’t Hooft, ON THE FREE-WILL POSTULATE IN QUANTUM MECHANICS, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/...701097v1.pdf

In short, one cannot modify the present without also modifying the past (and, of course, the future). Can one modify the past in such a way that, at the present, only the setting of our measuring device are modified, but not the particles and spins we wish to measure? Can we modify our settings without modifying the wave functions of the particles approaching us? This is the question we address, in particular in Section 5. ‘Free will’, meaning a modification of our actions without corresponding modifications of our past, is impossible. In chapter 5, we will further address the practical consequences of this ‘absence of free will’, which we claim to be much less drastic than often implicated.

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Could fry one's brain trying to fathom it. Better to just smell the flowers. :)

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