Why is the question of consciousness shunned upon in the physics forum?

don't know

but maybe my last post may shed some understanding on this

yes

 

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@ kittamaru,

although wolf views (Dr. Quantum) are not popular. This 5 minute cartoon should sum up your question, and you will clearly see why the controversy. Warning: This cartoon does express Heisenberg/Wolf views of consciousness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

his videos are obviously not popular here. That experiment divided scientists. The coppenhagen interpretation was originally widely accepted, and now people prefer other theories. At least on Sciforums.

It made Einstein ask guests, "Does the moon exist simply because a mouse looks at it"? Einstein did not believe that consciousness cause wave collapse. It is the woo-woos like Heisenberg et-al.


@ River,

Interesting post. I had not heard of that DNA thing before and will research into the subject. Thanks.

@ Prom & crunchy,
I'll explain it to you when you get older.

 

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OH, okay! But... I thought the Heisenberg principle had to do with the fact that our measuring devices operated on a scale that was large enough to interfere with the objects we were observing.

Example: IF you were observing planets by "pinging" them with an object (say, a man-sized marble), you could observe the location and direction of a planet without issue. However, try to use that same system to observe a person, and you would alter their path because of the amount of force you would exert upon the thing you are trying to observe.

I could be wrong in my understanding of this idea, though...

 

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The video doesn't make any claims about consciousness.

 

@ kittamaru,
Heisenberg had his foot in many aspects of Quantum mechanics as he was a credited with the creation of quantum mechanics in 1932.

He is know for things such as The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

from wikipedia

He is also accredited with certain matrix maths. from wikipedia

Heisenberg was also a believer that if no conscious observer exists to collapse a wave function as in the double slit experiment, then the object would not really exist.
He believed that if nobody was looking at the moon it would cease to exist.

from
quantum mind-body problem wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind–body_problem
(this wikipedia link is the wikipedia version of this thread, although outdated.)

@ crunchy cat,
Then you obviously are not familiar with Professor Wolf ideas. Maybe you can read up on the subject before commenting, but if you cannot comprehend the subject in cartoon form; there might be little hope.
start here maybe...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Alan_Wolf

 

Everything that you just stated is irrelevant. Your claim was:

" This cartoon does express Heisenberg/Wolf views of consciousness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc... "

And the cartoon makes zero references to consciousness.

 

@ crunchy cat,

Do you want it dumbed down? Seriously?

 

It's interesting that you are taking up a stance of a fallacy. When I pointed out that your claim is false you attempted to turn it into an issue of my comprehension. So, let me put the onus back on you as you are the claimer. If your claim is true, then please point out the explicit time segment of the video that demonstrates that your claim is true.

 

Sorry. Nobody is that dumb. I won't waste time responding to trolling except a few words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
This cartoon may explain it to you.
Kittamaru got it with only 1 viewing. It is the last paragraph in the clip if you really are stupid (not meaning to offend as I think you are trolling).
Observer is questionable, but all observers are conscious. (am I speaking too fast). Is a mouse an observer/conscious. Is an insect?
If you are going to accuse people of writing fallacies. One iota of understanding this "WELL KNOWN" experiment that is an underlying staple in our quantum physics world would have saved you the embarrassment.
I was told I should report trolling so I have. As I say,"Nobody is that stupid".

 

My objections to your stance on quantum mechanics are well noted, however I'd like to point out that you have the facts wrong in this sentence.

I'm not going to deny that Heisenberg made a very important contribution to quantum mechanics, but I don't think any reasonable person would say he alone invented it. Quantum mechanics had quite a convoluted birth compared to say, general relativity. It began with Max Planck's quantum hypothesis in 1900 and developed through the work of Pauli, Schrodinger, Dirac, De Broglie, Born, Hilbert, Bohr, Heisenberg and others up to the late 1920's. Quantum mechanics as we know it today was certainly in place before 1930 because Dirac wrote his textbook "Principles of quantum mechanics" in 1930 and the quantum mechanical description of spin was developed by Pauli and Dirac by 1928.

I think you may be getting confused with another of Heisenberg's great breakthroughs (with Wigner, Pauli and Jordan) - in 1934 he reused the Dirac equation as a field equation and began the development of quantum electrodynamics. The date you've put is still wrong, but it seems closer to what you're trying to say.

 

@ Prom,
Just quoting wikipedia, and also it was only a short note to show there was more to him than "The Uncertainty Principle".

Link to Wikipedia article entitles Werner Heisenberg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg

Max Born should also receive credit, and shared a Nobel prize 22 years later with another physicist.

It was a short sentence that did not convey the entire field of responsible people. Heisenberg was in charge of the German Atomic Bomb program throughout World War II, and if he was a bit smarter we might all be speaking German now.

I do agree that I should have included at least Max Born in that statement, it is pretty much an exact quote from wikipedia. I also think the point was made without going into his life history.

However; here is the line you say is factually wrong, followed by a direct quote from wikipedia. They are almost word for word.

vs
quote from wikipedia (ref above)

When I re-read your above post it seems you are the one mistaken. At least in accordance with wikipedia. However; you can see where my statement was exactly right based on this article, and I did not confuse anything.

Also you say I have a stance. This is also wrong. I just do not want moderators to censor what they think is wrong when there is a long list of scientists who do not share the moderators "feelings".

I do not know what is correct view of the consciousness issue, but would like to hear from both sides. I know I have stated this before.

 

As I said before, I'm not trying to reduce Heisenberg's contribution to QM but saying he invented it doesn't do justice to the others that were involved in it. A list of these people is included in my above post, but most notable are the people that shared the Nobel with Heisenberg - Dirac and Schrodinger.

Are you seriously telling me you can't see a difference between "won the Prize for 1932 for the creation of quantum mechanics" and "he was a credited with the creation of quantum mechanics in 1932."?! The Nobel was awarded in 1932. Quantum mechanics was created before then.

If you say you don't have a stance then you are deluding yourself, or you have an ability to be completely vacant. I don't know which one it is. The consciousness issue can be discussed on here as has been proven by exactly that happening, but the physics and maths forum is categorically not the place for it.

I saved this bit to last, because it is an incredibly stupid thing to say. Think of all the wars in the past between various nations - can you think of a single one where the language of the loser has been replaced by the language of the winner? By your logic, everyone in Germany should be speaking a mixture of English, French, and Russian today, which they obviously aren't.

 

I stand by my previous post. You take the Nazi thing too seriously.

So you think "open Government" is the place for consciousness threads. It would have been more intelligent to place it here then than move it to the cesspool like you did.

The consciousness issue has not been discussed here? It is nothing more than you trying to prove you were right when you were so obviously wrong. My issue was with you censoring the threads based on your "opinions". That is the topic of this thread.

Physics is not all defined at the quantum level. We can use maths and physics to calculate kinetic energy and lots of knowns, but there is aspects of physics where total agreements are not made.

Several posts ago I said a second physics thread should be opened for the unknown aspects of quantum physics. You wrongly said it was a rubbish idea.
I now see that maybe that decision was based on the fact that you feel "open Government" is the place for consciousness in physics discussions.

When I say I do not have a stance, it is because I am open minded until more discoveries are made. You seem to feel this lack of opinion as delusion. Yet you are making decisions without knowing all the facts. I gave no opinion or posts on the consciousness threads opened. I was going to comment but the thread was in the cesspool by its 4th post.

”

Some people might be smart enough to recognize that I was inferring the Germans might have won. Secondly; here you are making up facts as you would like them. If you were the moderator of this forum perhaps you would like to edit/censor my post so it reads correctly. You have no way of knowing if Hitler would have enforced one language. He wanted one race, why not one language.
Now I'd also like to point out a conquered race OFTEN speaks the language of the conquering. Do any american indians speak english? Do people now speak russian in areas conquered by Ivan the great? Name a British colony that does not speak english? When the France borders kept expanding, do the people there all speak French. Every country with its own languages was once a different country with different rules/different borders and sometimes different languages. You saying

is not very intelligent at all.

sadly it was meant as a joke that went over your head and ended up in both of us arguing over your inability to "get it".

”
vs

Again. I admitted I could have expanded, but post #65 was fine without it. I answered the question and saved on typing. I did say in my last post it would have been polite to expand, but not polite to anybody who will read it. Polite only to the people who also deserved credit.

The above quotes do say the same thing. He was accredited in 1933 (a year late) for the creation of quantum mechanics by the nobel prize people. I did not say that is when it was developed. I stated when he was recognized (by Nobel). You seem to think post 65 (which was addressed to Kittamaru btw, not you) should give his entire biography as well as those he worked with.

If someone said edison invented the lightbulb should they not also give credit to Davy or swann?

I think you are way too serious, and read too much into things. These are not the reasons why i think you are a bad moderator, but they are now contributing to that belief.

 

At least you made an attempt to support your claim, but unfortunately it failed (and hitting the report button for "trolling" won't change that fact). So now I will issue a claim and support it. My claim is that one or more of the following statements are true:

* You lied about the video expressing Heisenberg/Wolf views of consciousness.
* You do not fully understand what the video is demonstrating.
* You do not fully understand what the word "observer" means.

Below is the evidence:

 

I didn't even know this thread was being discussed here :/

 

Oh I did... I just forgot!

 

Utter nonsense.

Once of the benefits of learning a lot of mathematics is you get to a point where you see how so much of physics is essentially the same mathematics but with different interpretations. Classical mechanics can be written in terms of symplectic geometry. So can quantum mechanics. In fact that was Dirac's huge realisation in the 20s/30s, that it's all pretty much the same formalism.

Lay persons think there's some huge controversy in the QM community but there isn't really, just like there isn't actually a controversy over creationism vs evolution in the science community. It's all the minds of people who don't understand the science. In both cases.

And SciForums is mostly non-scientists. Do you ask your car mechanic for medical advice? Would you really care too much about his opinion about medical matters? I doubt it.

Science is not a popularity contest. If it were we'd be teaching creationism in much of the US, despite it being utter clap trap.

I'd say the view from the people on SciForums who actually know quantum mechanics about quantum mechanics is pretty much all the same.

I really don't think you're in a position to be talking down to people. Your comment about quantum mechanics being separated out from physics discussion just shows how clueless you are. Particularly when you say it to someone like Prom, a doctorate in theoretical physics.

There isn't an area of physics 'all defined', we have gaps in our knowledge everywhere. Quantum mechanics is counter intuitive but only if you don't work with it day in day out and can't do any mathematics.

Given a firm grasp of linear algebra much of quantum mechanics becomes a great deal simpler. More than once I've read some QM result in its mathematical form and thought "Yes, that's pretty clear in how the result is derived" only to then find out it's consider a 'paradox' (not actually inconsistent but just contrary to expectation) by many. That's part of the power of doing everything formally using mathematics, you work by logic, not intuition. If everyone worked by intuition we'd never develop anything unexpected. And the unexpected is the best kind of result.

Several posts ago I said a second physics thread should be opened for the unknown aspects of quantum physics. You wrongly said it was a rubbish idea.
I now see that maybe that decision was based on the fact that you feel "open Government" is the place for consciousness in physics discussions.

We know more about the quantum world today than Maxwell did about electromagnetism or Newton about gravity or Watson and Crick did about DNA. How many discoveries, how many research dollars, how many man years does it take before you consider enough discoveries have been made. In 1900 we didn't know about even the electron, we thought atoms were indivisible. Now our civilisation is built on electronics.

So what was your comment about splitting QM from physics discussion? It certainly wasn't well informed.

Oh oh, I can play this too. Errr...... if you were here you'd like to stab me with a screwdriver and eat my brains. See, it's easy to make up stuff about people.

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There is absolutely loads of history on consciousness related physics. James asked a while back for some references, but I can no longer find the location of that thread either.

There are some interesting works over the years, from Bohm [1], Schrodinger [2] (intercepting the very question of life), a student of Schrodinger [3] Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose [4], Yakir Aharanov has took some interest recently [5], but more notably, Fred Alan Wolf, (who I need not qoute), interestingly John von Neumann who was a mathematician but also gave substantial help to physics created the conscious-collapse model [6], Amit Goswami, geeze, even Russel Targ have all contributed their thoughts on consciousness. Indeed, there are most likely a cascade more!


http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_3.html [1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life? [2]
http://www.fredalanwolf.com/myarticles/Bass_1.pdf [3]
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/consciousevents.html [4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakir_Aharonov [5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann [6]

 

Consciousness!!!


http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?p=2877526&posted=1#post2877526

 

Can you tell us what major contributions Amit Goswami has made to mainstream physics? Has he ever done anything notable besides joining JZ Knight's cult and appearing in her "What the Bleep" scam?