Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

[setarcos]

Good questions.

How would you define these things?

I can only surmise that it is easier to define these concepts than to apply those definitions to phenomena.
For instance I could define them this way...
A dream is a subjective experience incapable of being independently verified by other individuals which is dependent on the identity of the experiencer.
Reality effects experiencers objectively independent of their identity.
Seems simple. We've defined the terms now we merely have to apply them to phenomena.
But then how do we objectively and definitively apply those terms to the various phenomena?
For instance....if I dreamt of being in a terrible flood and then within 2 days my town flooded was my dream a premature experience of reality and thus a real experience of reality and not really a dream?
If the dream and the actual experience in reality both cause the same physiological and mental reactions in the person ; rapid increase in heart rate, sweating, emotional trauma, adrenalin rush, then what's the difference? If no one is around to independently verify the experience then how do I tell the difference?
Can reality itself cause dreamlike delusions in a person? What about the phenomena of mass hallucinations? If enough people have the hallucination does that make it reality?
What about those who think they are dreaming but actually perform actions in reality as in somnambulism ?
How can one actually verify they are dreaming versus actually experiencing reality without independent verification? And even with independent verification how can we verify that the verification isn't merely a part of the dream? I think defining these terms is probably tentative at best.
Considering that none of us can directly experience reality as it is, I'd say we're all always dreaming to some extent. So how are our dreams so coherent among us? Can universal coherence make a dream real? If you can get an entire species believing the same thing can you make that thing somehow real, or would it remain just a universally accepted delusion with some unknown verifier independently verifying it as such? I have my opinion but no verification.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

QM is the most widely used and widely corroborated science there is. It's kind of the platinum standard of science. So no, your analysis is wrong here.

It is used. but not fully understood.
When it is expect real major advances

 

[setarcos]

You and I can both look at the sky, describe what we see, and confirm each other’s observations.

Not as easy as you think. Variations in sensory ability may make what one sees, not what another sees. Synesthesia comes to mind. Or mass hallucinations whose collective reinforcement alters what real is. It has even been documented that these hallucinations can extend into similar physical reactions. It seems we can be collectively effected by what is not real into believing it is real. This collective experience of the unreal may uniquely effect each individual but then again so does what is actually real in the way we each may react differently to its effects. Now imagine your a member of the hallucinators. In the absence of an external to the hallucination independent verifier, how is the hallucination found out?

that would be a frightening solipsism, which I reject.

Curious. Why do you reject solipsism outright? How did you conclude that it is not a possibility?

 

[RestlessSoul]

Not as easy as you think. Variations in sensory ability may make what one sees, not what another sees. Synesthesia comes to mind. Or mass hallucinations whose collective reinforcement alters what real is. It has even been documented that these hallucinations can extend into similar physical reactions. It seems we can be collectively effected by what is not real into believing it is real. This collective experience of the unreal may uniquely effect each individual but then again so does what is actually real in the way we each may react differently to its effects. Now imagine your a member of the hallucinators. In the absence of an external to the hallucination independent verifier, how is the hallucination found out?


Curious. Why do you reject solipsism outright? How did you conclude that it is not a possibility?

Interesting points. What we call external, objective reality, French philosopher Hippolyte Taine suggested we should really call a “confirmed hallucination”. If our perception of the world is dependent on the ability of our unconscious minds to extract meaning from the kaleidoscope of symbolism presented to us by our senses, then Taine’s observation appears entirely valid.

Returning to the QM theme, physicist and science writer Michael Brooks wrote about experiments he had witnessed where several observers each agreed on what they had seen, but could not agree on what actually had happened. This seems to be at the heart of the philosophical conundrum presented by quantum mechanics - that if there even is a mechanical model that describes the behaviour of sub atomic particles, there is absolutely no consensus as to what that might be. Whilst the mathematical models are prolifically effective, no coherent description of the material world at quantum level is forthcoming. David Bohm suggested that quantum mechanics was a misnomer, because there is no apparent mechanism therein. Perhaps Niels Bohr and the Copenhagenists were right to say, “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description.”

Which brings us back to solipsism, illusion, and idealism vs realism. Professional illusionists, whether they be stage magicians, salesmen or politicians, will all confirm that illusions are sustainable for just so long as observers are willing to believe, or to suspend their disbelief, in what is referred to in metaphysical poetry as “the conceit”. The extent to which people are willing to do this may depend on how much they are invested emotionally or financially in the illusion - to what extent self deception is a necessity. It may be that our experience of the material world is a collective, confirmed illusion upon which we are dependent for our own material and psychological survival. Maybe.

As for my rejection of solipsism, I reject it for the same reasons I reject nihilism, or indeed atheism; because I feel that it is through connection with people, with other living things, with nature, and with God, that my own life has meaning and value. I believe that I am not alone in the universe, because to believe otherwise would be intolerable. And futile.

 

[sayak83]

It is used. but not fully understood.
When it is expect real major advances

Perhaps. But it was incorrect to compare it with alchemy.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

Perhaps. But it was incorrect to compare it with alchemy.

We still consider Newton a great scientist, although his major interest was Alchemy.
Alchemy lead to the scientific development of the whole branch of science we now call chemistry.
What will quantum theory lead to?

 

[setarcos]

What we call external, objective reality, French philosopher Hippolyte Taine suggested we should really call a “confirmed hallucination”.

Not very familiar with this philosopher. I would have to ask how the term confirmed is used? How confirmed and by who?

If our perception of the world is dependent on the ability of our unconscious minds to extract meaning from the kaleidoscope of symbolism presented to us by our senses, then Taine’s observation appears entirely valid.

I would say that if our senses extract meaning from something external to themselves then that something would have to be real since what is already presumed real - Our senses - cannot be effected by what is unreal since it doesn't exist. I can't help but think that Descartes was right in his "Cogito ergo sum". The being that hallucinates must itself be real to do so.
If nothing really exists to effect our senses then nothing exists for our senses to extract meaning from. So in this sense I'd have to disagree with Hippolyte in calling objective reality itself a hallucination. If that's what he was getting at.
However if the consciousness of the individual is the ONLY thing that is real is it creating the hallucination by giving it meaning through its senses? In other words we would not be hallucinating about reality by extracting meaning from it through our senses but are instead through what is real - the self - creating what isn't real by projecting meaning through our senses into a hallucination.
Of course there are good reasons for believing this solipsistic view of reality to be wrong.
I believe that while we are subject to extracting limited meaning from a reality we cannot perceive or even comprehend directly, that reality has a real existence. So it seems something real is necessary in order to give rise to the extraction of meaning.
One possibility I think is that only each self identifying conscious being really exists and we each project meaning onto our collective hallucination through our senses. This collective hallucination is made mostly uniform for every individual by what is the only independently real thing existent. That is what we call God. This God sustains our collective hallucination by projecting what meaning our senses can extract from it.

It may be that our experience of the material world is a collective, confirmed illusion upon which we are dependent for our own material and psychological survival.

I believe it is. Anyone who has testified to a bad LSD trip shows us just how damaging a discordant reality would be for us. We are dependent that's for sure. Either on nature holding itself together for us, or on an existent God doing it. I've chosen to believe in an existent God doing it. Never the less through nature or the supernatural we were made to conform to the reality that was built for us and any departure from that norm would be most distressful.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

Life is a mystical experience. It's not something we can yet understand fully.
It's wrong to call it just a dream, IMO. It's actually more real than we imagine but we imagine it's only the physical, when it's spiritual and unexplainable.

 

[setarcos]

It's actually more real than we imagine but we imagine it's only the physical, when it's spiritual and unexplainable.

Not sure what you mean by "more real than we imagine" but I agree, I believe it certainly includes more than we may have or even can experience and it is a grand ole mystery.

 

[Valjean]

For instance....if I dreamt of being in a terrible flood and then within 2 days my town flooded was my dream a premature experience of reality and thus a real experience of reality and not really a dream?

I'll take this from a Hindu perspective:
Was the actual flood Reality, or just another dream? Did you dream your own precognition?
And from a mundane perspective, coincidences happen.

There are layers of subjective reality; dreams within dreams. REM (dreaming) sleep is 2nd-state consciousness. Each morning you "wake" to 3rd-state. Both are equally subjective.

If the dream and the actual experience in reality both cause the same physiological and mental reactions in the person ; rapid increase in heart rate, sweating, emotional trauma, adrenalin rush, then what's the difference? If no one is around to independently verify the experience then how do I tell the difference?

It's all subjective. From 3rd-state, the inconsistencies and contradictions of dream-state become obvious.

Can reality itself cause dreamlike delusions in a person? What about the phenomena of mass hallucinations? If enough people have the hallucination does that make it reality?

When you say "reality," which subjective reality are you referring to? -- or are you talking about real, "big-R" Reality -- a direct perception of quantum reality?
The "mass" in mass hallucination is, itself, a hallucination. There exists only a single, unified consciousness.

What about those who think they are dreaming but actually perform actions in reality as in somnambulism ?

Do sleepwalkers realize they're asleep?

It's a medical abnormality that has little to do with the Nature of Reality. In sleepwalking the normal block between consciousness and sensory input+motor activity fails. 3rd-state reality bleeds into 2nd-state, and, without motor inhibition, the sleeper can physically act out his mixed-consciousness dream.

How can one actually verify they are dreaming versus actually experiencing reality without independent verification? And even with independent verification how can we verify that the verification isn't merely a part of the dream? I think defining these terms is probably tentative at best.

Good points. As I mentioned, with each "awakening," as one's mind expands through higher levels of consciousness, one becomes aware of the impossibilities of the previous states develops. From waking-state, physicists can calculate and demonstrate the contradictions and inconsistencies of waking-state, but they cannot perceive them. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics remain counter-intuitive and counter-perceptual.

Considering that none of us can directly experience reality as it is, I'd say we're all always dreaming to some extent. So how are our dreams so coherent among us? Can universal coherence make a dream real? If you can get an entire species believing the same thing can you make that thing somehow real, or would it remain just a universally accepted delusion with some unknown verifier independently verifying it as such? I have my opinion but no verification.

I wouldn't go so far as to say none of us can directly perceive real Reality, after all, this is the whole point of many of the 'mystical.' or the Eastern religions.
We, in our current, 3rd-level waking state, perceive a whole world of other people, all apparently perceiving the same reality we are, but they're part of the coherent illusion. We're dreaming the whole thing.

Verifying a dream from within the dream is problematic. The verification and verifiers would be part of the dream.

 

[Valjean]

As for my rejection of solipsism, I reject it for the same reasons I reject nihilism, or indeed atheism; because I feel that it is through connection with people, with other living things, with nature, and with God, that my own life has meaning and value. I believe that I am not alone in the universe, because to believe otherwise would be intolerable. And futile.

An emotional rejection? Disbelief from distaste?
What if the people, other living things, nature -- and your own perception of yourself -- are just part of a dream; an illusion? Where would that leave your concepts of meaning and value? Wouldn't they be as baseless as the rest of the dream?
What if you're already, in Reality, alone in the universe?

 

[Valjean]

We still consider Newton a great scientist, although his major interest was Alchemy.
Alchemy lead to the scientific development of the whole branch of science we now call chemistry.
What will quantum theory lead to?

The computer you're typing on?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

We still consider Newton a great scientist, although his major interest was Alchemy.
Alchemy lead to the scientific development of the whole branch of science we now call chemistry.
What will quantum theory lead to?

Quantum theory led to the foundations of chemistry. Essentially, it was our understanding and development of quantum theory that allowed us to place the whole of chemistry on sound theoretical and conceptual footing by e.g., explaining the stability of atoms.

QM, Is very much science in progress. It is at about the same stage as alchemy was in Newton time.
When we eventually fully understand it, and it become a " usable science" it will seem as logical as it appears illogical today.

This is ridiculous. Firstly, the whole of modern society depends rather crucially on our successful application and understanding of quantum mechanics and quantum theory more generally. To compare it with alchemy when it enables us to understand what (in your words) " alchemy led to the scientific development of" (namely, chemistry) is prima facie ludicrous. But to speak of QM as something that will "become" a "usable science"? It's used everywhere and has been increasingly essential in ever more ways for many decades. Medical imaging depends upon it crucially, as e.g., there is no classical analogue to the spin underlying NMR that allows us to use MRI and fMRI machines for medical imaging and in neuroscience (and elsewhere). It is fundamental in nanoscience. It has enabled the development of new forms of matter (topological matter) that (like spin) have no classical analogue.
The only reason that GPS and the recent detection of gravitational waves are touted basically solely as successes in favor of general relativity is because QM has too many successes to readily count already. But GPS depends upon our understanding of quantum mechanics. And the detection of gravitational waves required an increase in our ability, both theoretically and experimentally, to make incredibly accurate quantum measurements to detect quantum effects at enormously macroscopic scales.
Cell phones, everyday screens, modern optics and telecommunications, nuclear power, and little hand-held laser pointers you might use to play with your cat are all made possible thanks to our understanding and application of quantum mechanics.
That's without getting into the theoretical explanations it enables, such as oh, I don't know, the entirety of the standard model of particle physics (which in turn is the foundation for the standard model of cosmology).

 

[Twilight Hue]

I have the same problems with many modern philosophers.

Especially when they make things up.

Like creepy pasta.

 

[RestlessSoul]

An emotional rejection? Disbelief from distaste?
What if the people, other living things, nature -- and your own perception of yourself -- are just part of a dream; an illusion? Where would that leave your concepts of meaning and value? Wouldn't they be as baseless as the rest of the dream?
What if you're already, in Reality, alone in the universe?

It's not simply an emotional rejection. I don't find the arguments for solipsism intellectually or spiritually satisfying either, although it might be helpful to define terms here; if solipsism is the belief that only the self is real, then I consider that an unhealthy deception perpetrated by the ego. If, on the other hand, we propose that there is a higher Self, a universal consciousness of which we are all manifestations, and that this is the One Great Reality, then I am generally receptive to such a concept. In this case, it is our disconnection from the external world and from each other, which is the illusion.

As for meaning and value, we are co-creators of our own narrative there; how much free will we ever have is a subject for another thread, but I absolutely believe we are free to choose how we relate to the world and to each other, and we are free to choose, or perhaps rather to seek out and discover, what is important to us, what gives our lives meaning, what matters to us. Sometimes also, we are in need of moral guidance. It's for this reason, primarily, that I am still nominally Christian; because however poorly his example may have been followed by some of those who have claimed to act in his name, history and literature can offer few better moral teachers than the Christ of the Gospels. But that, also, is a subject probably not appropriate to this thread.

 

[paarsurrey]

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

and we wake up, not physically, as the present physical body dies and a new spirit is born from within the present one, but say virtue-ally (dark if our actions are bad, enlightened if our actions are virtuous) as Mirza Ghualm Ahmad 1835-1908 told in the "Conference of World Religions", please. Okay?

Regards

 

[Triumph]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

I can feel neutrinos flying through me just reading your post and they rarely react with my matter not that it matters. The tao particle is called the tired particle because it just can't quite get up to lightspeed so I tell it to keep trying because with faith anything is possible like being in 2 places at the same time. It needs to be careful because there are only 26 levels of space/time so if it makes a quantum leap past that 26th string well it will probably end up back at the same time on the 1st string theory which might be where the theory of evolution first took place while at the same time it didn't and it will have to start all over again or not, depending on how tired it is as it loops. Physics in a nutshell or a nutshell in Physics depending upon your location in space and how warped you and your surroundings are or not. A fulcrum can not budge me on my decision to be or not to be.
P.S. Thoughts are things, an inanimate material object as distinct from a living sentient being although the thought that being a living sentient being is a thing to consider as sentient.

 

[Triumph]

It's not simply an emotional rejection. I don't find the arguments for solipsism intellectually or spiritually satisfying either, although it might be helpful to define terms here; if solipsism is the belief that only the self is real, then I consider that an unhealthy deception perpetrated by the ego. If, on the other hand, we propose that there is a higher Self, a universal consciousness of which we are all manifestations, and that this is the One Great Reality, then I am generally receptive to such a concept. In this case, it is our disconnection from the external world and from each other, which is the illusion.

As for meaning and value, we are co-creators of our own narrative there; how much free will we ever have is a subject for another thread, but I absolutely believe we are free to choose how we relate to the world and to each other, and we are free to choose, or perhaps rather to seek out and discover, what is important to us, what gives our lives meaning, what matters to us. Sometimes also, we are in need of moral guidance. It's for this reason, primarily, that I am still nominally Christian; because however poorly his example may have been followed by some of those who have claimed to act in his name, history and literature can offer few better moral teachers than the Christ of the Gospels. But that, also, is a subject probably not appropriate to this thread.

My free will is limited because I am told to be home by 10 so I do not add more chaos to the cosmos, disconnecting me from the universal consciousness of free will, so yes, moral teachers do matter to matter. Love is the rein that reigns.

 

[Wildswanderer]

find this unhelpful and drifting too close to quantum woo for comfort. I dislike articles like this that try to make things mysterious, instead of doing what in my opinion is the job of science, which is to analyse natural phenomena and demystify them.

But what if that's not what reality is? What if the mystics turn out to be right?

 

[exchemist]

But what if that's not what reality is? What if the mystics turn out to be right?

That's not the point here. The point is that this is a misleading article, suggesting something that is first of all needlessly mystifying and secondly is not justified by the science.

There continue to be debates about what quantum mechanics suggests, philosophically, about the nature of reality, but it is meaningless and wrong to suggest that any of them involve reality being "a dream".

As I say, one of the most tantalising aspects of it is the idea that what we think of as "reality" is discontinuous, determined only at the points of interaction of QM systems, and indeterminate in between interactions. But that's got nothing to do with dreams.