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...
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...
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...
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...
Well, when it comes to the Michael Strevens video, then I am probably not going to watch it because I've read several of his published works and met him (briefly) once and agree with much that he has to say. It's also nothing new (although in some of his more technical publications he does offer...
I will grant you that the video in the OP and similar bunk is nonsense (both as metaphysics and physics), but I do not share the view that 20th and 21st century metaphysics is:
Such a statement can certainly be true in some cases, such as in much of Bohr's writings (who was, obviously a...
When patients enter an MRI machine or participants in some neuroscience study do so for fMRI scans, the signal is generated quantum mechanically using the spin of hydrogen atoms. For example, blood-oxygen level dependent signals are generated from fluxes in the hemodynamic neuronal activity in...
The problem is that, in order to use the wavefunction in applications (or in any way at all), one has to be able to actually write it down. That is, you are using words taken from a physical theory, but bereft of their appropriate mathematical and physical contexts. That is not, in and of...
No, actually very little is. In particular, the dynamics of QM are essentially deterministic, both in the Schrödinger picture where one evolves the wavefunction forward in time and in the Heisenberg picture where one absorbs time as a parameter into the operators themselves (using, at least...
I don't who "these people" are. In my experience, people who believe that there is little or no evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus or his disciples have are almost always ignorant of ancient history, classical studies, classical languages, archaeology, and just about the sum...
And yet, quantum mechanics can be formulated entirely without it, and quantum theory more generally is inconsistent with it.
Also, since all of our evidence for any validity to or reality of the wavefunction depends upon observations made of objects in space and in time (not to mention the ways...
No. The possiblity isn't necessarily infinite, nor is this all that relevant but rather is a confusion of language. Any continuous probability distribution over arbitrarily small intervals (or generalized volumes) is uncountably infinite in terms of the possible outcomes that can be realized vs...
"The questions with which Einstein attacked the quantum theory do have answers [does the moon exist only when it is looked at]; but they are not the answers Einstein expected them to have. We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks."
Mermin, N. D. (1981). Quantum...
The same holds true for for addition in the sentence "One apple plus one apple equals two apples." Mathematics is largely concerned with, and rooted in, the abstract conceptions and their patterns and structures. Classical physics is no less dependent upon would-be Platonic ideals than is the...
This is simply not true. It is quite radically incorrect for a number of important reasons, some of which are actually relevant to this discussion.
First, if one had to characterize “time” in modern physics in such a manner as you did, one would say that it is a parameter, not a coordinate or...
"any such emission [i.e., (virtual) particles from the quantum vacuum] is an irreducible, genuine instance of creation coming from nothing (ex nihilo); more precisely, in theological terms, the spontaneous emission of light and other particles amounts to an instance of creatio continua."...
But this simply isn’t true. It may be that science education and exposure to scientific inquiry was somewhat worse roughly 50 years ago, but it certainly wasn’t better. And about 100 years ago, the complete inadequacies of the overhaul in science teaching by those like Dewey initiated around the...
And in my experience, we have no end of would-be science “defenders” who are quick to share their misunderstandings, misconceptions, preconceptions, etc., all-to-often in a manner that suggests they are well-versed in the subject while those they are responding to are laughably ignorant. Of...
1) The double-slit experiment is not a "standard scientific experiment of wave-particle duality" nor does it require photons. Wave-particle duality is, for the most part, an unfortunate relic that remains due to the overwhelming influence on standard textbook quantum mechanics as well as an...
I don't see how an online popular science site written by a college dropout with a background in software development is "scientific consensus." The guy could be many times the genius of Witten, Penrose, Weyl, Dirac, etc., and have many doctorates and other impressive accolades, but it would...