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Comment by Comevius | Hacker News Reader

No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal.

As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271

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A mental trick that helped me understand the concept of “an observer” in particle physics is to imagine it like playing billiards in a pitch black room.

In normal human-scale billiards, there are immense numbers of photons flying around bouncing off everything. The photon interactions are far too small to affect the path of a moving billiard ball, but we can detect them easily with our eyes. So we can use photons to passively observe the balls rolling around.

But when you’re trying to observe a photon itself… there are no tiny photon-equivalents flying around. It’s like playing billiards in pitch black: the only way to know which direction a ball is rolling is to touch it. And you can’t touch a rolling billiard ball without changing its path somehow. Likewise, you can’t “observe” a single photon without interacting with it in some way.

I know all analogies are imperfect, but that is a really great one. It really captures the problem of observing so elegantly.

Observer effect while applicable is distinct from Quantum Weirdness aka Heisenberg Uncertainty

This is a great analogy, but also in experiments the presence or absence of the measuring device like a beamsplitter determines the outcome. The measuring device, the which-way detector is the observer, and it can be regarded as a quantum mechanical system. It's correlations with the rest of the system causes the particle behavior.

> No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal.

Are you saying that the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation[1] does not explicitly postulate consciousness to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

Those guys are excused, they were early on the floor, had no idea what's going on. They grew up believing that nature is deterministic, but quantum physics complicated that picture a great deal.

I should've said no interpretation in the 21st century.

> As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures.

That's a really interesting paper, thanks for that. It's also a bit depressing to consider that there's a good chance that everything we think that makes us special is really just an emergent property of a thermodynamics memory and prediction system.

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