Searching the web for references on the interpretations of quantum physics, particularly the idealistic one (which is just another name for the mind makes collapse interpretation), I stumbled on 2 blog articles by different authors.
Both authors are physicists, rationalists, logical positivists,
well trained in quantum physics and supporting its standard
Copenhagen interpretation.
Both are non-religious, and usually reject Christian views
(apologetics and so-called "Christian science") as packs of
anti-scientific fallacies.
And both were reviewing the same source of Christian apologetic
videos : the "InspiringPhilosophy" YouTube Channel, which supports
this "idealist" interpretation of quantum physics.
Here I will examine the arguments so as to sort things out.
Also because I am myself mixed between agreement and disagreement
with these videos. Indeed, I have myself a similar background as
the authors of both reviews, except that, instead of
the Copenhagen interpretation (I explained the difference),
I support this idealist interpretation of quantum physics which is
presented in these videos.
So, unlike Luboš Motl, I agree with the main idea that is presented in these videos. However, I still do not agree with all the details they contain. I do find there a number of flaws, as is naturally expectable from the part of Christian apologists not well-trained in physics, trying to bring scientific arguments in the face of a large public. I understand that Luboš Motl did not care to point out these flaws because he had other points to make.
I will not make a full list of the flaws of the videos here, but
focus on the points of criticism expressed by "AnticitizenX".
Before starting, I have an answer to offer to another article of his : What is Free Will
Now I will reply to the article on quantum mechanics and idealism point by point."Because unlike idealists, I've actually studied
quantum mechanics (...) none of you dumb-asses
understand quantum mechanics"
Unlike these idealists, yes. It is a pity for me to see
incompetent people gathering the bulk of public attention as
defenders of a view I support, and this way more or less
discrediting this view by their way of posing as its official
defenders, in the eyes of scientists who obviously won't be
convinced by such methods (at least those not mastering well
enough these specific topics to be immune from the repelling
effect of this sociological observation). As a saying goes, a view
suffers not as much of being strongly opposed, than of being
terribly defended.
Now the question is to distinguish between "these idealists" and
"all idealists". But, as the difference is a matter of whether
competent idealist exists, the question of this existence may be
interpreted in 2 ways: as a matter of necessity (scientific fact)
or as a matter of sociological accident.
My view is that it is a matter of sociological accident : that too
few competent scientists happened to come and work on supporting
this view, and the few who did, unfortunately did not happen to do
it well enough. This is why I decided to bring my own works on the
topic.
"The heart and soul of all quantum mechanics is the
Schrödinger equation"
Thanks, I know well this equation, I studied it. After this I
also started learning Quantum Field theory, which has its own
formalism, that looks different but with essentially the same
properties with respect to the famous paradoxes about measurement.
I also studied and understood the concept of density operator, and
the formulation of the phenomenon of decoherence that we can
deduce from it.
So I consider to know well what is the heart and soul of quantum
mechanics : this a specific kind of mathematical structure which
may take different forms depending on the context and purpose of
the particular problem that is considered. It happens to take the
form of the Schrödinger equation in cases where the
non-relativistic applies, but it takes different form in a
relativistic context. But I found a way to sum up the core
expression of this mathematical structure in relatively simple
terms independently of that kind of context : I expressed it terms
of a few principles as I explained in my page of introduction to
the concepts of quantum states and measurement.
So, I do see it essential to really and correctly explain the core
mathematical structure of quantum physics in order for a debate on
its interpretations to make sense. However, this turns out to be
not as hard to properly understand as this criticism assumes. In
these conditions, I see it not so absurd to consider the
possibility of drawing clear conclusions from these and correctly
explaining them to the public, though I do not consider this to
have been done correctly enough in these videos yet (some things
were correct, but unfortunately mixed with some errors). And I am
convinced that this cleaner formulation I brought, will also
contribute to make the idealistic interpretation look more
directly natural.
Of course, you may wonder : if it is so relatively simple to express the core mathematical concepts of quantum physics, why was this not already taught to you like this in official courses on the subject ? This is a long story, which I commented here in length (focusing on the case of relativity theory instead). See also my links page on the problems with the academic system, particularly my quote from Richard Conn Henry there.
Then, apart from how the academic system makes it more difficult
than necessary to understand hard physics, the other reason why
there appears so many uneducated people filling the space of
claims on the connection between quantum physics and
consciousness, is not that there is anything particularly
incompatible with science in the idea of such a link, but that the
world is full of idiots trying to put forward pseudo-scientific
speculations in general.
Indeed a lot of pseudo-science is regularly produced by amateurs
without any serious understanding of the core maths of what they
are talking about, trying to "resolve the paradoxes" of quantum
physics (and the same for relativity) by proposing theories which
look more "reasonable" in their eyes, precisely because they are
more "mechanical", getting rid of the role of the observer so as
to better satisfy their materialistic prejudices... as they fail
to have learned and understood the evidence of the fact that all
this category of ideas has already been proven fundamentally
incompatible with scientific data since long ago. Luboš
Motl abundantly reported about this sociological fact
already, and I did it too in my adventure with the fqxi essay contest.
"... in order to effectively engage in quantum mechanics, you have to embrace several key principles of logical positivism (...); principles, I might add, that Christian idealists are all more than happy to reject at almost every opportunity..."
This claim may induce confusion by the choice of subject: "Christian idealists". The problem is, Christianity is one thing, but idealism is another. So, while it is possible that, indeed, "Christian idealists" reject the principles of logical positivism (though I did not stumble on explicit declarations yet), this claim fails to specify whether it is supposed to be because they are Christians, or because they are idealists. So we have here 2 different topics to discuss:
Topic 1 : Christianity vs. logical positivism. As far as I can see, they are indeed opposed. I have my own long and painful experience of how Christians keep all sorts of beliefs as matters of moral principle, independently of any possibility for these beliefs to be verified or falsified, including how they so often manage to preserve their beliefs by fleeing and "criminalizing" any attempt to report evidences of their falsity. Still, beyond this observation of their clearly wrong and harmful ways of rejecting logical positivism in action, I also quickly found references confirming that they also explicitly reject logical positivism in theory :
For more explanations on how religion is precisely made harmful
by its rejection of logical positivism, see Greta
Christina's article : The Armor of God, the same idea being
developed in that video
(starting at minute 26).
Topic 2 : Idealism vs. logical positivism. Unlike Christianity, I find idealism
perfectly compatible with logical positivism. First because some of its basic principles,
particularly the existence of free will, are directly expressible in logical positivist terms
as I did. Second, because both are very similar
in their principles : idealism says "Conscious experiences (in the sense of a universal
consciousness beyond individual ones, that may seem inaccessible only in usual
approximations) are the only realities beyond those of maths".
Logical positivism says that claims of facts beyond pure logic are only meaningful
(legitimate objects of science) insofar as they specify possible
observations vs. impossible or unlikely ones,
so as to be refutable by observations if they don't match. So that they need to take the form
of expectations on possible conscious experiments.
By the way, this fundamental similarity between idealism and the
logical positivism of quantum physics, was the basic motivation
for Luboš Motl's praise of these videos.
To make it clear how Christianity and the mind makes collapse
interpretation should not be confused, you can refer to this
article : A Theological
Argument for an Everett Multiverse, by a high-level
physicist who is Evangelical Christian.
Personally I don't argue from authority. I write my own exposition of arguments on what is wrong in other interpretations, analyzed one by one (Copenhagen, hidden variables, Many Worlds, Spontaneous collapse). Many of these arguments are quoted from (or similar to) what I could find in other sources (scientific articles); I also understood them as valid by myself, so that I also engage my own responsibility in quoting them. A few more arguments are my own."Quantum idealists constantly argue from authority in place of actual argument."
I'm not going to defend Henry Stapp as any good scientific reference."several of his most key arguments are supported almost entirely by the abject say-so of completely obscure figures with no authority at all. (...). I don't know any nice way to say this, but Henry Stapp is a complete scientific nobody"
The physical universe is the trajectory of a visit of consciousness in the mathematical universe : a part of the mathematical universe which is distinguished by the event of being consciously perceived. At every conscious time, the state of the physical universe is the mathematical projection in the Hilbert space, of the universal conscious memory of all past physical perceptions.Also refer to the scientific debate between the diverse interpretations (Wallace, Genovese, and others; I collected a list of references ; an entertaining video debate is also available.
"The entire idealist argument relies on aspects of quantum
mechanics that are known to be unresolved mysteries. what is the
proper physical interpretation of a wave function? What
constitutes a "measurement?""
The wave function is known to be the basic object of physics. More
precisely, the state of a physical system is best defined to be
the density operator, which is related to the concept of wave
function in a well-known mathematical manner.
Still a number of people have troubles to accept this fact because
of some philosophical prejudices which they want to keep
disregarding the known scientific evidence: they have their own a
priori opinion that the physical world ought to be based on some
kind of thing which they could qualify as "physical", to fit some
a priori sense of what they want to mean by this word, and they
feel unhappy because what was discovered in physics as the form of
basic objects, did not meet their expectation. So they wish to
"interpret" what was found, in terms of what they expect. Of
course it will forever remain a "mystery" how 2 things might fit
when they actually don't. So they have some candidates, which they
found to be unsatisfactory. On the other hand, it is possible to
understand things in an idealistic way that perfectly fits.
Unfortunately, despite its simplicity, this solution remains
ignored in debates. One of the main reasons for this seems to be
that they just did not happen to hear and grasp a clean version of
this concept.
"Do particles obey local realism or not? "
This is not any mystery : it has been scientifically proven that
they don't.
"These are all
actively debated questions in quantum mechanics with no real
consensus beyond the standard Copenhagen interpretation."
Yes I know, I have studied these debates as I already mentioned
above (Number 3). I watched this video,
and studied the article State
of Play by David Wallace, among many other sources.
Unfortunately, they are only analyzing and comparing diverse
naturalistic interpretations, that is, not including the mind
makes collapse interpretation in their comparative analysis. So,
despite their huge effort effort to develop naturalistic
interpretations, usually motivated by their a priori wish to
eliminate any fundamental role of conscious observers from the
picture, they still could not find any clearly acceptable one.
Apart from both above mentioned factors (the role of prejudices
and the lack of publicly known precise expression of the mind
makes collapse interpretation), we can also find in that video
(around 51:00) another sort of reason why they did not include it
in their debates : there is no equation to describe consciousness
and the way it collapses the wave function. If there was any
equation for this, we could use it to mathematically analyze how
it works, how coherent it is, and can we find any defects there.
Without any equations, such an analysis cannot be developed as an
academic work. Unfortunately, since the very nature of
consciousness and the wave function collapse is that they are
non-physical, which precisely means that they cannot be described
by any equation, there no way for this requirement to ever be
satisfied.
And for the same reason that the mind makes collapse
interpretation cannot be expressed in terms of equations, to
deduce lots of complicated consequences or possible defects lists,
there is a sort of impossibility to publish tons of articles about
it in physics journals. Somehow, Henry did publish
articles (see my selection of relevant ones in references):
especially one in Nature,
and some unofficial pages of comments about others works. He
formulated there
things as follows : "let me offer the Henry interpretation:
There is no actually existing universe at all. The universe is
purely mental.".
Of course, the temptation is natural to misinterpret this lack of
tons of publications on the Henry interpretation as if it was any
sign of invalidity. It isn't.
Of course this involvement of the hologram concept was ridiculously out of subject here. They may have been mislead by the fact that nobody yet had the courage to delete or at least include strong warnings of non-scientificity in the wikipedia articles about Bohm's ideas of "implicate and explicate orders" and related pseudo-holographic stuff, a sociological phenomenon similar to what I once experienced about Scale Relativity. There is also the naive assumption in the public's eyes that "hologram = illusion" just because all what the public knows about holograms is that it is a technique to produce illusions of 3D stuff. However, you can notice that the wikipedia article on the holographic principle, as considered in theoretical physics, rightly has no mention of "illusion" or similar, as there would be no reason for such a link.
However, not only we can make predictions from the idea of consciousness at the
foundation of reality as above mentioned,
but lots
of experimental results have already been obtained since long
: that is the whole field of parapsychology. The only problem is,
these results are subtle, not easy to reproduce. Like in any
scientific field, a significant amount of training is needed to
figure out what exactly this large body of experiments and
observations says, and assess it properly, so as to really
understand the reasons for some possible conclusions. What often
happens is that "skeptics" only have a quick superficial look at
it and just rationalize the small pieces of data they look at as
explainable by chance, fraud, delusion, or anything like this. But
by their superficial, naive way of looking and accusing of
pseudo-science their opponents, they are behaving in a
pseudo-scientific manner themselves.
I initially got to know about this phenomenon some time ago as I
developed this
page in French criticizing the French skeptic movement,
"Zététique".