Mind over matter reality or myth?

[Mark Harder]

And what makes human beings so special that their minds can collapse quantum systems, or bend spoons for that matter? I have a story that illustrates my point. Erwin Schroedinger sits in a room in house. Inside the room, there is a vial of hydrogen cyanide. There's also a weak radioactive source and a radiation detector to count the radioactive particles. A hammer is poised to smash the vial if the counter detects a nuclear decay. If the vial is smashed, Schroedinger is toast and never lives to write his ridiculous story. After a while, Erwin's cat, who he has kindly placed outside the room, gets hungry and comes looking for its master. So, the question is, is Erwin half dead and half alive until his cat peeks into the room and sees Erwin and collapses his wavefunction to either a dead physicist or a live one, no uncertainty about it?

 

[Nugatory]

And what makes human beings so special that their minds can collapse quantum systems

Nothing. This idea of consciousness causing collapse is a popular misconception about quantum mechanics, not something that you'll find when you study the real thing.

I have a story that illustrates my point...

You may be misunderstanding Schrodinger's thought experiment with the cat - easy enough to do, because this is another of those misconceptions widely repeated in the popular press. Neither Schrodinger nor anyone else at the time was actually suggesting that the cat might be in this superposition of half-dead/half-alive - everyone agrees that's not what happens. Instead Schrodinger was pointing out a problem in the then-current (1920s vintage) formulation of quantum mechanics, namely that the theory couldn't explain why it didn't happen.

It took another few decades to resolve this question. You can google for "Quantum Decoherence", although you may find the math to be somewhat heavy going. There's also Bruce Lindley's book "Where does the weirdness go?", which is a reasonably layman-friendly and math-free overview.

 

[Bruno81]

Ever since i was a young boy, i always had deep trouble understanding the nature of motion of macroscopic objects... It has always been the most incomprehensible fact of life - the simple fact that a 3d body stops existing at x,y,z at time T and reappears at x',y',z' at time T'. Quantum mechanics and its inherent measurements/decoherence of quantum systems provided by far the best insight into the workings of Nature as far as motion is concerned. But everything comes at a price - a non classical reality can be quite hard to grasp with respect to naive realism. The question about the Moon is more about existential(philosophical) problems and the nature of reality and much less, if any, about classical human beings bringing the Moon into existence.

 

[adfreeman]

Ever since i was a young boy, i always had deep trouble understanding the nature of motion of macroscopic objects... It has always been the most incomprehensible fact of life - the simple fact that a 3d body stops existing at x,y,z at time T and reappears at x',y',z' at time T'. Quantum mechanics and its inherent measurements/decoherence of quantum systems provided by far the best insight into the workings of Nature as far as motion is concerned. But everything comes at a price - a non classical reality can be quite hard to grasp with respect to naive realism. The question about the Moon is more about existential(philosophical) problems and the nature of reality and much less, if any, about classical human beings bringing the Moon into existence.

I kind of agree with you when you say that the question looks more philosophical than related to physics -though I always took it as a metaphor in this context-. What I find even more interesting is the possibility of our combined consciousness creating all this as we go. I would dare to go even further, as sometimes I have the hunch that when I die the whole universe will simply cease to exist. Sorry guys, that means that you are also a product of my imagination.

And it's funny that you referred to the movement of 3D bodies through space and time in that way. Just this morning I was considering: is it possible that space and time could also be quantized; therefore jumping through space-time in the fashion you described?

 

[Nugatory]

it possible that space and time could also be quantized; therefore jumping through space-time in the fashion you described?

It is possible, but there is no particularly convincing theory or experimental evidence to lead us to believe that it is.

(There are popular misunderstandings about the significance of the Planck length and Planck time - we even have an Insights article on this: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/hand-wavy-discussion-planck-length/)