cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14869314
"I want to live forever in AI"
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you're a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It's still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don't understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I'm not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
Actually, it is. It's the same meaning we've had for waves in physics since the first time someone figured how to plot a 2d graph. Only the medium is a quantum field instead of water, its amplitude is probabilistic instead of height, and instead of time we have some other property of distributions, usually space-time.