Hacker News Reader

Comment by dantillberg | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219). "why do conscious observers like us perceive..." is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or maybe psychology, depending on where you took that).

But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.

And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.

(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)

View on HN

There is a strong tradition of physicists (scientists of all stripes, really) assuming they have some deep understanding of the natural universe and logic far beyond that of philosophers and stepping far outside their expertise to say laughably absurd and quackish things about hard problems in philosophy. So I appreciate your caution.

But it's also the case that just because a physicist is trying to tackle consciousness -- a much harder problem than anything physicists have taken on this far -- doesn't make him a quack. To dismiss it out of hand is foolish; IIT is a thing and this paper certainly fits within that framework, though I don't know enough to judge it beyond that without careful study. But from your post, neither do you.

No self respecting physicist would claim to have deep understanding of anything. The entire process of scientific investigation runs on self-doubt. To keep things grounded, theory-experiment-new theory cycle is essential. If you can't verify your theory then you are as well be doing philosophy.

if you read the article its clear that Tegmark is raising deeper questions, not claiming to have the answers.

1. It's clear you did not read the paper and are ignorant that the author is high profile physicist and cosmologist famous for developing measurement methods.

2. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.

There are plenty of great scientists who have nutty ideas about things outside of their specialty. I've only read the OP, but that's the vibe it gives me.

Which is good, isn't it? I mean, how nutty was the idea that matter could bend space(time)? What about time dilation? Black holes? Particle/wave duality? The brilliant dots in the sky being immense balls of burning gas? Big discoveries begin with a nutty hypothesis.

1. I don't care who he is, and nor should you, this is science and not the middle ages. I will not bow to a Barron, and I will not accept what an MIT professor says without applying my critical facilities to it.

The paper is extremely difficult to read and extremely long, very few people will have the time or comprehensive knowledge required to read it completely. This is a fault of the paper, not the readers.

2. Theorizing is great, ideas are free, but that is because their value is very low without proof.

That's a funny perspective, considering that the greatest physicist in history is well known for mainly considering hypothetical and conceptual structures.

But Einstein's theories were still testable.

eventually. But not all of them were testable at the time, or only testable to a limited extent.

The atomic clocks/airplane experiment is a good example a test that came way later.

He was doing good physics the whole time, even when his ideas weren't testable.

meh, the paper was written by Prof. Max Tegmark from the Department of Physics of the MIT, I think it's pretty understandable that it's being associated with "physics"; the paper itself it's pretty much about physics. I don't think there is a fundamental problem with trying to approach a philosophical/psychological topic with physics, I mean, I really believe that at some point everything will reach the domain of "physics".

Did you open the paper and browse through it? It'd be interested in seeing what he has to say. Just because we can't observe something yet, doesn't mean we can start playing the ideas of what proofs for such things would look like.

In the science fictional world of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the characters discover that neurons are able to store so much data because they exist in different quantum states; that much of what happens in the brain is unobservable by conventional means.

..of course that's fiction, but we find crazy stuff in nature all the time like the species of Snapper Shrimp that able to generate crazy hot super heated cavitation bubbles.

We don't have any working models on how consciousness works (or even what it really is), so anything at this stage is worth documenting. As science developers, we may find ways to test these hypothesis in the future.

What's interesting is quantum mechanics requires an observation to determine the final state. Without observation the solution is probabilistic with infinite outcomes. By defining a conscious observer we limit the final state to ours, i.e., our current universe.

> By defining a conscious observer

No. Absolutely not. All you have to do is choose which outcome you'd like to predict from the theory, and so you choose the ones that are consistent with observation.

This is a misconception. When you read about quantum things (superposition, for example), it's convenient to replace "observe" with "interact with."

Without interacting with the universe, it's probabilistic. The problem being that a lot of things in the universe interact with each other as a matter of course. A particle bumping into another particle breaks the probabilistic state that you're talking about – regardless of whether that particle ends up in the view of a conscious observer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com