Sunday Special - Consciousness, Quanta, and Meaning

 There’s no shortage of theories trying to explain the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and consciousness often gets dragged into the mix. Some even claim it has a special role in state vector reduction—those quirky “quantum jumps.” Roger Penrose is one such advocate, but he’s not alone. When you ask these consciousness enthusiasts if physics behaves differently on the far side of the Moon (where no one’s watching) or if atoms over there just stop jumping, the answers get...let’s say, "evasive."

Who's Consciousness Is It Anyway?

Now, I'm not here to knock anyone’s ideas. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. But, honestly, this view feels a bit like trying to peer through a foggy window. I mean, whose consciousness are we talking about here? When John Wheeler, another big name in the "consciousness club," was pushed on this point, he eventually said it was “consciousness in general.” Sounds poetic, right? The problem is, no one knows what “consciousness in general” actually means.

And let’s be real—science knows more about quarks and gluons than it does about human consciousness. So, no, I don’t think consciousness is irrelevant, but I do think it’s being overhyped in quantum mechanics.

Is the Universe Watching Itself?

Measurements and observations in the universe happen, whether we’re looking or not. The cosmos doesn’t wait for us to wake up in the morning to start its business. Atoms are constantly observing other atoms, cats are keeping tabs on mice, and things happen regardless of our awareness.

This brings me to my simple, no-nonsense perspective: consciousness doesn’t create reality, it just interprets it. Consciousness, in my view, is there to give meaning to what we observe. The more complex the consciousness, the deeper and richer the meaning.

The meaning of it all?

The Meaning of Consciousness

Here’s the kicker: the higher your level of consciousness, the more meaning you can extract from an experience. A cat sees the world differently than bacteria, and we humans have the potential to see meaning on levels a cat can’t even dream of. This ability to find meaning ties into free will—we see meaning in something, and it allows us to make conscious decisions, changing ourselves and reality. It’s like designing your own narrative rather than just playing out some mechanical script.

So, no, I don’t believe in consciousness collapsing wave functions. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless—it’s just not responsible for playing referee in quantum mechanics.

Gravity vs. Consciousness: The Final Showdown

Now, if consciousness isn’t out there reducing wave packets, then what is? Gravity, maybe? Some theories suggest gravity might be responsible for collapsing quantum states. But here’s the twist—what if wave function collapse actually explains gravity? It’s one of those chicken-and-egg scenarios, except the chicken is quantum mechanics and the egg is the entire fabric of spacetime.

I don’t claim to know the definitive answer to what reduces wave packets, but I do know how to describe the process. And that’s what matters. A simple, quantitative description that satisfies both quantum theory and the observations of a humble peasant (equipped with the finest metaphorical pitchfork, of course).

Supernatural - A Simple Charm

 The following text is translation from Russian to English of a story taken from the book "Сверхъестественное. Научно доказанные факты (Supernatural. Scientifically proven facts). ISBN: 978-5-906789-00-6, Algorithm. Moscow, 2015" by Serge Kernbach.

This story is about a charming little experiment with sympathetic magic—it's as simple as it is convincing.

So, I had a wart under my nail. If you've ever had one of these unpleasant things, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I tried the over-the-counter freezing treatment, following the instructions to the letter. But, alas, it didn’t deliver the results the box had promised.

Next, I visited the doctor, who gave me a little bottle of liquid (a weak acid solution) that I was supposed to apply to the wart daily. I diligently followed this routine for several weeks, but again, the wart stubbornly refused to budge. By this time, about five or six months had passed since the wart first appeared, and it was looking pretty nasty. Worse still, it had grown larger and spread to more of my skin.

At this point, in a mix of frustration and desperation, I decided to try a well-known folk remedy. Now, I didn’t really believe it would work, but I figured, why not give it a shot? Here’s how the experiment went down.

I took an apple, cut it in half, dipped a string into the apple juice, and tied a knot over the wart. In my mind, I visualized that the knot was strangling the wart, causing it to fall off. Then, I tied the apple halves together with the same string and buried them in a field. The whole process took no more than half an hour. Being quite skeptical, I quickly forgot about the whole thing.

 

About two or three weeks later—after I’d stopped all other treatments—I noticed that the wart had completely disappeared. I should point out that I wasn’t consciously thinking about the wart during this time, nor was I doing any mental exercises. The timing of the wart’s disappearance coincided with the possible rotting of the buried apple.

Interestingly, there’s another folk remedy that works similarly. You take a potato, cut it in half, rub the wart with both cut sides, then put the halves back together and bury them in the ground. When the potato rots, the wart is supposed to vanish. (Editor's note.)

My original intention was to write about another hypothesis of how to obtain the fine structure constant through  quantizing everything and using category theory, as in the following papers:

[1]  Lucian M. Ionescu, “e, pi,chi,...,alpha?”

https://vixra.org/abs/1912.0360

[2] Lucian M. Ionescu, “The Fine Structure Constant revisited”, https://vixra.org/abs/2308.0180

Then I thought, perhaps I will better write about gravity control and antigravity as in this paper:

[3] Lucian M. Ionescu, Alzofon-Ionescu Theory of Gravity, https://vixra.org/abs/2106.0056

But finally I decided that charming is more important. Question is: how exactly  it works?

P.S. 29-08-24 13:34 Simple charm:

Sailor Moon 「Moonlight Densetsu」

P.S. 29-08-24 18:49 Simple charm:

Smashed by the cosmological constant

This post is an English rendering of an old post (May, 2019)  from my now abandoned Polish blog.

I have been interested in gravity since childhood. Then, as a student, I puzzled over Einstein's field equations. I shared my thoughts with my colleagues - one of them even immortalized it in a photo.

Einstein's equations of gravity

Then my interests became a bit more serious. I received a German Humboldt scholarship, during the scholarship I stayed in a hotel for scholarship holders, it was Europa Kolleg,

Europa-Kolleg Hamburg

near the DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) research center in Hamburg, where I worked.

I was working on advanced gravity. In the hotel, in the same corridor, a couple of doors away, lived another grantee - a Russian. Since I knew Russian, every now and then he would invite me to his room for a discussion. On the table he would put a bottle of vodka, a loaf of bread, and we would start the discussion. The end of the discussion I usually did not remember, as well as the return to my room. I only remember that I was returning, as it were, against the laws of gravity and certainly not along the shortest (geodesic) line - as Einstein commanded.

Then I dealt with various things. For example, the basics of quantum mechanics. I wrote one book on theories of gravity and one on quantum mechanics and quantum fractals. Both books are apparently ahead of the era - no one reads them. Maybe in a hundred years.

Recently, somehow, I went from Clifford's algebras to gravity. I started thinking about antigravity and that's how I came across "bimetric theories." I began to correspond with authors of papers writing about these theories and negative masses. I wrote a short note criticizing the errors I noticed in their works. The result is that one of these authors stopped talking to me because I did not defend him in a dispute over priority with the other. However, I still have good contact with the other author. This one drew my attention to yet another theory of gravity - which seems to be becoming more and more fashionable lately . It is called unimodular gravity. This phenomenon escaped my attention, so I began to study what it was about. And I found out that it goes to the problem of the cosmological constant.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote a nice review of "The cosmological constant problem." Weinberg's paper is from 1988, but is still cited as a classic. You can download it from here.

There is a small problem with this cosmological constant. We have two great theories, we (we physicists, and we humanity) are very proud of them. These are the General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We like to highlight their great successes. Time and again we read that quantum mechanics may be strange, may not really explain anything, but if we take the pragmatic attitude of "shut your mouth and get down to the calculus" - then quantum mechanics is never but never wrong. Similarly, the General Theory of Relativity. It predicted, as it should, the strange motion of Mercury, it predicted, as it should, the deflection of light rays by the Sun, it predicted various lensings and such, it predicted black holes, and recently a photograph of such one was even in the paper. So what is this little problem? This is what Weinberg wrote about.

When we combine the powers of these two theories together, we can calculate from here the value of the cosmological constant responsible for the observed course of expansion of our Universe. And we get the number as needed. This number obtained by using our best theories, of which we are so proud, we compared with observations. It turns out that it doesn't quite agree.

Perhaps it is for want of other crises to worry about that interest is increasingly centered on one veritable crisis: the theoretical expectations for the cosmological constant exceed observational limits by some 120 orders of magnitude.

The theory comes out with a number 10 to the power 120 times too large. How many times too big? By 10 times? 120 times? No, 1 with 120 zeros times too big. Weinberg writes that we have something to worry about. We have a CRISIS.

One of the ideas to get out of this crisis is precisely unimodular gravity. A good review paper came out not too long ago (2011), authors are Ellis and co, title: "On the trace-free Einstein equations as a viable alternative to general relativity".

That's what the newspapers say, that it's supposedly like in the picture, but what is it really like?

From this paper we learn, among other things, that from combining the forces of ordinary quantum theory and Einstein's theory of gravity, it follows that our Universe should have a diameter of 31 km:

"... one can easily compute that R = 31 km [17]. So this value drastically affects the solar system, since there would be no solar system.

It seems prudent to look for a way out."

 I'll just mention that the authors seem to show a bit of black humor here.

To lift your spirits, let me briefly say what the idea of unimodular gravity is all about. Normally, gravity is described by a 4x4 symmetric matrix of gravitational potentials - the space-time metric. These are the dynamical variables of the ordinary theory of gravity. Unimodular gravity arises when we impose constraints, i.e., when we find that not all these ten functions are independent functions. Constraints are the imposition of a condition on the determinant of a matrix, that it should have a predetermined value and that's it. For this "predetermined value" can be taken (in the chosen system of units) the value of 1 (variations then have trace zero). One , odin, uno - hence also the name "unimodular". When this is done, the cosmological constant appears only as an integration constant, not predicted by the theory, and then we can take its value as we are comfortable. In boxing, this is "evading the blow". It has its own value. Even if we lose the fight, it's only a matter of time and not right now.

It is not easy to be a physicist. In order to survive one needs black humor and faddishness. One such fad in our house is daily gymnastics, a combination of Chinese, Tibetan and Western exercises. We have our own repertoire. The picture below shows how we exercise. I myself am lying down and hiding my face in the grass on the top left. It's because of this cosmological constant.

---

That was in May 2019. Today I am coming back to the idea of unimodular gravity. And unstable gravity waves. Another  nice review of the subject can be found here: Unimodular conformal and projective relativity, Kaća Bradonjić, John Stachel

And here is  one of my own old attempts at proposing a new theory of gravity based on a conformal structure rather than on Riemannian metric: A Note on Conformal Field Equations. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 18, (1979) p. 107-112.

I am going to return to this subject again and again.

P.S.1. Thursday Feb. 2. 2023, 12:40: As I wrote above, it is not easy to be a physicist. This very morning I was subjected to the direct attack - the smash by an unstable gravity wave (materialized as a variable g heavy hammer). Here is the result:

This event cause a number of secondary effects. The end result being: we won the war. The office chair has been fixed. And, at the end of the day, results is all that counts.

P.S.2. My present task: t will understand every line in the paper W. Kopczyński and L.S. Woronowicz, A geometrical approach to the twistor formalism, Rep. Math. Phys. Vol 2, pp. 35-51 (1971). It is a paper of an indescribable beauty!!! 

And I will understand it at least as deep as the authors of this true pearl understood it!

Quntum Metamechanics

 Reading  Christopher Langan: "Quantum Metamechanics (QMM)".

From Wikipedia:

Langan's IQ was estimated on ABC's 20/20 to be between 195 and 210,^[2] and in 1999 he was described by some journalists as "the smartest man in America" or "in the world" (...) 

He calls his proposal "a true 'Theory of Everything', a cross between John Archibald Wheeler's 'Participatory Universe' and Stephen Hawking's 'Imaginary Time' theory of cosmology"^[3] additionally contending that with CTMU he "can prove the existence of God , the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics."^[1][4] Even so, Langan does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma"

Let me start with this description of the present status of quantum mechanics, pp. 273-274:

 On the bare-bones algebraic mannequin of QM, layer upon layer of clothing has been draped and piled by designers who differ strongly in their opinions of what looks good on it. To put it mildly, their visions clash with even less appeal than the underlying skeleton, tending to cancel each other. Consequently, even after their disorganized attempts to bury it under a mound of conceptual raiment, its bones poke through as starkly as ever,  dangling  and  jutting  like  the  girders  and  cranes  of  an  unfinished skyscraper. Thus, while grudgingly praised for its spectacular empirical success, it  continues  to  be  roundly  panned  for  its  abominable  aesthetics,  prompting various efforts to “dress it up” in new interpretations that on close examination turn out to be equally counterintuitive and unappealing.  

p. 275:

 (...) Even  worse,  most  of  the  complex mathematical  apparatus  of  QM  has  nowhere  to  go;  the  empirical  universe contains nothing that obviously corresponds to it and thus has “nowhere to put it”.  There  appears  to  be  nothing  in  empirical  (observable)  reality  capable  of supporting  such  things  as  probability  waves  and  the  equations  that  govern them.  

Not to mention complex numbers and most operators (Hermitian or not) .

In the Summary Langan concludes:

 (...) All  that  remains  is  to  apply  QMM  to  the  beasts  of  the quantum  jungle,  namely,  the  often  strange  and  apparently  wildly  conflicting QM  interpretations  that  have  been  freely  proliferating  at  the  frontier  where physics meets metaphysics. It has just been demonstrated how this is done, with examples. 

Langan discussed the following examples

1. Copenhagen interpretaion (Bohr and Heisenberg)
2. Observer-Created Reality (John Wheeler)
3. Consciousness-Dependent Reality (von Neumann-Wigner-Stapp)
4. Bohmian Mechanics (early David Bohm)
5. The Implicate Order (late David Bohm)
6. Many Worlds (Everett)

Of these he has granted highest scores to 2 and 3. Other interpretations scored rather badly. Those that have scored high involved either "consciousness" or "observer". My own child, EEQT, would probably get the lowest score, because in EEQT we do need either consciousness or observer and, moreover, EEQT is "dualistic", and Langan repeatedly criticizes Bohmian Mechanics for being dualistic. 

Finally, close to the end of his paper Langan concludes:

The CTMU Metaformal System is an intrinsic language, the involutional coupling of a language with a manifold whose points are the elements  of  the  signature  of  the  language,  or  in  semiotic  terminology,  its “signs”.  This  manifold  is  dynamic,  with  dual  outward  and  inward  gradients accounting for gravity and the relative linear motions of physical objects (the curvature  of  spacetime  equates  to  the  inner  expansive  gradient  of  the conspansive manifold, which is dual to the timelike collapse gradients of T). Its evolution  can  be  described  in  terms  of  two  operations,  conspansion  and  telic recursion. By virtue of conspansion, the evolving manifold closely resembles the existing formalism of quantum mechanics; and by virtue of telic recursion, this formalism can be carried into the linguistic aspect of the manifold and the deep structure of the Metaformal System. (For now, we refrain from asserting that the Metaformal System is a “theory of quantum gravity”, but this will no doubt eventually emerge.)    

Being a (mathematical) physicist I have failed to understand most of the above paragraph, with the exception of those few terms that I have put in bold. Elsewhere in Langan's paper I have found some poetically (or channeling) sounded phrases which I think I have liked, though I am not able to make (yet) much sense of them. For instance:

The  generative  dynamic  of  the  conspansive  manifold  has  primary  and secondary stages. The primary stage consists of a self-dual n-ary (n-fold unary, n  ≥  2)  operation,  conspansion,  with  two  alternating  phases,  inner  expansion  and collapse.  Inner  expansion  potentializes  the  state  transitions  of  the  syntactors coupled  in  events  –  the  points  and  events  are  brought  into  intersection  by internal rescaling through the primary quantum (point) so that they “overlap” – while collapse re-actualizes the inner-expanded syntactors as compact objects in  new  interactions.  

....

The  conspansive  manifold  evolves  by  way  of  generative  information mappings that supersede standard physical causation occurring along timelike (or null) worldlines. Inner-expansive potentialization “opens” a tertiary identity or point of the manifold to N while collapsative actualization “closes” it in T; potentialization is null, while collapse is spacelike. Together, inner expansion and collapse comprise  conspansive  potentialization-actualization cycles which form self-dual information mappings, each of which initiates and actualizes a potential by restricting it to a specific outcome for a net gain of information. 

• See also: The Portable Chris Langan
  

But there is more that has attracted my attention in Langan's paper, something more basic that I am having troubles with understanding, and, since I would really like and need to understand more, I will discuss these more basic and easier problems in my next posts.

P.S.1. From the workbench:

Today, finally, after four years long struggle, got this:

Thank you for publishing with Springer Nature.

Your article
Corresponding author (you)
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Title
On the Bundle of Clifford Algebras Over the Space of Quadratic Forms
DOI 10.1007/s00006-022-01251-x
Article type
T.C. : ICCA 12, Hefei, August 3-7, 2020
Journal
Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras

P.S.2. The struggle with another paper still continues. For those interested here is a copy of a reply to the referees' reply sent on October 10. The paper is still in reviews.... 

P.S.3 Yesterday I have discovered that that a brand new monograph by two mathematicians  Josef Janyška and  Marco Modugno "An Introduction to Covariant Quantum Mechanics", Springer 2022, quotes seven of  my papers ((mostly coauthored). Which for me is a nice encouragement to publish more original stuff. In principle I should not care whether my papers are being quoted or not, I should care that they satisfy my requirements of being good stuff. But somehow it feels good....