Roedy Green said:
"Particles appear not to decide where they have been until forced to
do so by being observed. The implication is that portions of the world
we live in are not actually "rendered" until some conscious observer
turns her attention towards them. After all, there's no point wasting
valuable "computes" of the celestial computer than renders our
Universe. This gives new meaning to the question about the unheard
tree that falls in the forest."
~ Ray Kurzweil
It would seem highly strange for the universe to not bother rendering
itself until humans came along. Something that fundamental surely is
not specific to man. It sounds pretty darn low-level.
This is something that many people do not understand about quantum mechanics
and the decoupling of quantum effects.
The question, "what is an observer?" must be addressed to see how the
universe must indeed be rendered, so to speak, even without the presence of a
human mind. Ask yourself if a chimp observing things would result in the
rendering of reality, or the persistence of quantum coupled states. Surely an
animal's experience of things is just as valid- after all, many animals can make
decisions and understand planning and strategy.
But let's step back another level.
The more massive an entity, the less wave-like its existence. Particles
with mass are less subject to Heisenberg's uncertainties because they, in
binding into more massive structures, share a sort of consensus. One such
result is that they do not pop in and out of existence at remote locations but
tend to persist in one consistent place.
Now, this is very important- when those laws that we observe in our
pedestrian world emerge from the strangeness of the quantum world, things are
very different. You no longer have as much of the quantum strangeness carried
over to us. We have to look hard to see most quantum effects; indeed, they are
cloaked in a world of "normalcy" where objects follow predictable paths, heat
flows like a fluid, and things come in discrete, well-known quantities. We just
don't see most quantum effects because at our scale, they are fragile things
that break down at any opportunity.
In other words, once you have a world of large or macro scale objects with
significant masses, most quantum and uncertainty effects are ruled out and the
cosmos is indeed "fully rendered". Nobody ever claimed that an observer had to
be conscious, simply that it had to register events. Any little crust of solid
matter can act as an observer- all it has to do is register changes in vibration
or temperature, absorb or reflect light, fall downhill...
Note that the type of experiment you perform will determine whether you see
waves or particles when observing light. Did the machinery itself cause that or
did your mind cause that? It is the nature of the measurement itself that
"selects" the viewpoint. The hardware itself creates the decoupling conditions,
not the person pushing the button.
If you need proof of this, then set up any device that will observe the
particle or wave nature of light, then go away. Let the machinery continue to
run. It will "observe" the effects just as well as you might, and to suppose
that it does not is plain wrong. The universe does not depend on the human mind
to exist. It existed before us, and will long after we are gone. Quantum
mechanics shows us a lot about the underpinnings of nature and how things work,
but it does not dictate that our world has zones of "unrealized" or "unrendered"
reality. Why? Because no system ever truly exists in isolation. It is coupled
to all of its neighbors by the light cones of the events and particles within
the system, and your act of observation is also bound by those self-same light
cones. Just as quantum effects show couplings and smearings out of events,
observation and reaction sharply decouple those things just as effectively.
Cheers!
Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page -
http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip
