Consciousness and the measurement problem

[Viva-Diva]

Consciousness and "the measurement problem"

Hello All,

Just a reminder that I am not a physicist...but for those who closed my thread on power of the mind :-(((( , pleae share your views on

this- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse

and this- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab

If there is a lab at Priceton University studing this, why do you all think it is bull? Bear with me, I am just trying to understand.

Thanks to all in advance!
Viva-Diva

 

[OOO]

Hello All,

Just a reminder that I am not a physicist...but for those who closed my thread on power of the mind :-(((( , pleae share your views on

this- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse

and this- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab

If there is a lab at Priceton University studing this, why do you all think it is bull? Bear with me, I am just trying to understand.

Thanks to all in advance!
Viva-Diva

Unless you are able to measure consciousness by some instrument you can't prove any connection between consciousness and wave function collapse. Thus you will not find answers to your questions in the physics department.

 

[rewebster]

maybe it should have been in the 'philosophy' or 'Scepticism and debunking' forum area?

 

[Evo]

PEAR is defunct, over, kaput. It was never taken seriously. The funding was mostly private, it was a bit of an embarrassment to Princeton.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Measurement in Quantum Theory
From the inception of Quantum Mechanics (QM) the concept of measurement has proved a source of difficulty. The Einstein-Bohr debates, out of which both the Einstein Podolski Rosen paradox and Schrödinger's cat paradox developed, centered upon this difficulty. The problem of measurement in quantum mechanics arises out of the fact that several principles of the theory appear to be in conflict. In particular, the dynamic principles of quantum mechanics seem to be in conflict with the postulate of collapse. David Albert puts the problem nicely when he says:

'The dynamics and the postulate of collapse are flatly in contradiction with one another ... the postulate of collapse seems to be right about what happens when we make measurements, and the dynamics seems to be bizarrely wrong about what happens when we make measurements, and yet the dynamics seems to be right about what happens whenever we aren't making measurements.' (Albert 1992, 79)

This has come to be known as "the measurement problem" and in what follows, we study the details and examine some of the implications of this problem. [continued]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-measurement/

There is a view among some astophysicists [Quantum Cosmologists, I guess] that an observation of a QM system collapses the wavefunction of the observer, and not the function of that observed!