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Comment by ntr-- | Hacker News Reader

> And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic.

ahh good, so which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?

How is that relevant? All interpretations agree on the math, and the math leaves no room for consciousness in the equations of motion.

Only for certain definitions of "consciousness". What's yours?

Any definition of consciousness in which a human is conscious while a rock isn't conscious will do for my statement above.

And if your definition of consciousness makes rocks or electrons conscious, I don't think you're really capturing what most humans mean by the concept.

Note: animism or something like the Hindu concept of Brahman still imply the same kind of consciousness that I'm talking about. The soul (for animism) or Brahman itself are the conscious things, they just happen to live in/encompass rocks or electrons.

What if we realize consciousness is non-binary?

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_t...

Though, the loss of magic is most likely more correlated with approaching this mostly rationally and analytically, than our scientific progress as a species.

You seem to be confusing your personal semantics with fundamental truth (we're all slaves to this tendency, I think). If you're looking for magic you need to look inward, not outward. And see if you can make that voice of reasoning be quiet for some extended time.

IIT is exactly what I was thinking of as a bad definition of consciousness. Any theory that assigns a non 0 amount of "consciousness" to a rock is defining a completely different concept than what people mean when they say consciousness.

Also, IIT has no basis at all. They've just found some measure that satisfies the property "human brains have more of it than insect brains, and insect brains have more of it than rocks do". Nothing else makes the II measurement in IIT related to consciousness, as far as I've ever found.

Somehow we are still claiming that the system is fundamentally random when it is very obvious it is fundamentally deterministic (but not predetermined).

I'm not sure what this has to do with consciousness.

We can go into the details of what various interpretations of QM mean for determinism vs indeterminacy (e.g. MWI implies that there is fundamentally no randomness of any kind at the universal level, and everything is predetermined, but also every possible outcome will happen; Copenhagen implies a kind of epistemological randomness - the outcomes of measurements are random, and it's meaningless to talk about anything other than the outcomes of measurements; Pilot Wave theory implies that QM only has randomness in the sense that Newtonian mechanics already does - we can't measure the starting state well enough to say for sure what would happen, but the process is fundamentally deterministic and peredetermined).

However, there are only two possibilities: completely random (nothing can predict or influence which value the wavefunction will take after collapse) or fully determined (what you're eating for lunch today could be predicted by studying the initial state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang). There is currently no room for any other possibility in physics.

I feel most comfortable with the pilot wave approach in this regard; it is generally compatible with emergence-from-causality type theories.

Free will in the fundamental physics sense is most likely an illusion, probably one that confers mental hardiness in face of adversity out of one’s control.

However, it could be an emergent phenomenon and thus irreducible to individual quanta anyway: more than a sum of its parts. Fundamental interactions do demonstrably yield complex structures itself capable of higher order interactions.

It’s not obvious at all at the quantum scale. Nothing we’ve seen indicates that eg. the timing of the decay of a single particle, or the ability of a single electron to escape an energy well is deterministic, though they are easily predictable in aggregate.

What does “deterministic but not predetermined” mean?

It means that like in Game of Life, the rules are set, but the outcome at any timestep is not determined until the simulation reaches that timestep.

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