#33 – Testing consciousness causes collapse: an interview with Kelvin McQueen

In episode 33 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle interviews Kelvin McQueen on his recent theory on how consciousness might collapse the wave function. Kelvin is a professor of philosophy at Chapman University who investigates the nature of consciousness and role it might play in quantum mechanics. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is that there is a smoothly and deterministically evolving superposition that is abruptly “measured” and reduced to a finite physical state, but it is unclear what constitutes a measuring device. In collaboration with David Chalmers, Kelvin explores the hypothesis that the measurement device in quantum mechanics might be consciousness. However, consciousness is typically an ill-defined vague idea that does not produce any tangible upgrade to the mystery of what a measuring device is. Here, Kelvin uses the definition of consciousness from integrated information theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. Consciousness is the minimally reducible information state of a system, which is defined as a recurrent network of interconnected nodes that predict the next state of the system. According to Kelvin, this definition allows for testable predictions to be made regarding the role of consciousness. In the upgraded quantum IIT theory, the nodes are quantum bits (or qubits) and the edges are entanglement relationships. Thus, QIIT defines an interconnected quantum computer (of sorts…) as consciousness and this reduces the wave function. Furthermore, the collapse of the wave function is not instantaneous but instead is continuous, drawing from the continuous spontaneous localization theory of quantum mechanics. Altogether, these ideas present a picture where consciousness is integral to a fundamental description of the physical universe and might provide room for an expanded sense of self. In this interview, I interrupt intermittently to describe the relevant ideas with graphical representation and compare this model to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction model by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. There are some amazing new ideas that Kelvin McQueen describes in this episode, so be sure to check it out!

~~~ Timestamps ~~~
0:00 Introduction
2:28 Measurement problem of quantum mechanics
5:55 Integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness
15:54 Five axioms of IIT
28:55 Shortcomings of IIT
38:00 Quantum IIT
43:50 Consciousness is superposition-resistant
56:44 Comparing classical with quantum IIT
1:04:11 Continuous spontaneous localization
1:08:45 Implications of consciousness causes collapse
1:17:40 Comparison to Orchestrated Objective Reduction
1:25:00 IIT with respect to objective reduction threshold

#quantum #consciousness #integratedinformation

Music licensed from and created by Baylor Odabashian. BandCamp: @UnscrewablePooch
Painting behind me by Paul Seli, IG: @Paul.Seli.Art

[nrrgrdn]

Great rebuttal of IIT that acknowledges what it got right. Good you referenced Scott Aaronson, when will you interview him?

[Atheist]

Where does this fundamental rule that neural correlates of consciousness does not allow superpositions. Seems very arbitrary.

[philipm]

(2/2) In November 1900 Planck realized that his new entropy expression was scarcely more than an inspired guess. To secure a more fundamental derivation he now turned to Boltzmann’s probabilistic notion of entropy that he had ignored for so long. But although Planck now adopted Boltzmann’s view, he did not fully convert to the Austrian physicist’s thinking. He remained convinced that the entropy law was absolute – and not inherently probabilistic – and therefore reinterpreted Boltzmann’s theory in his own non-probabilistic way. It was during this period that he stated for the first time what has since become known as the “Boltzmann equation” S = k log W, which relates the entropy, S, to the molecular disorder, W.
To find W, Planck had to be able to count the number of ways a given energy can be distributed among a set of oscillators. It was in order to find this counting procedure that Planck, inspired by Boltzmann, introduced what he called “energy elements”, namely the assumption that the total energy of the black-body oscillators, E, is divided into finite portions of energy, epsilon, via a process known as “quantization”. In his seminal paper published in late 1900, Planck regarded the energy “as made up of a completely determinate number of finite equal parts, and for this purpose I use the constant of nature h = 6.55 x 10-27 (erg sec)”. Moreover, he continued, “this constant, once multiplied by the common frequency of the resonators, gives the energy element epsilon in ergs, and by division of E by epsilon we get the number P of energy elements to be distributed over the N resonators”.

The essence of quantum theory is energy quantization, and it is far from evident that this is what Planck had in mind. As he explained in a letter written in 1931, the introduction of energy quanta in 1900 was “a purely formal assumption and I really did not give it much thought except that no matter what the cost, I must bring about a positive result”. Planck did not emphasize the discrete nature of energy processes and was unconcerned with the detailed behaviour of his abstract oscillators. Far more interesting than the quantum discontinuity (whatever it meant) was the impressive accuracy of the new radiation law and the constants of nature that appeared in it.

The second law of thermodynamics was always his favourite example of how a law of physics could be progressively freed from anthropomorphic associations and turned into a purely objective and universal law. After 1900 he increasingly recognized Boltzmann’s probabilistic law of entropy as grand and fundamental, but he stopped short of accepting its central message, that there is a finite (if exceedingly small) probability that the entropy of an isolated system decreases over time. Only in about 1912 did he give up this last reservation and accepted the truly statistical nature of the second law. As to the quantum discontinuity – the crucial feature that the energy does not vary continuously, but in “jumps” – he believed for a long time that it was a kind of mathematical hypothesis, an artefact that did not refer to real energy exchanges between matter and radiation. From his point of view, there was no reason to suspect a breakdown of the laws of classical mechanics and electrodynamics. Planck did not see his theory as a drastic departure from classical physics. Only in about 1908, to a large extent influenced by the penetrating analysis of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, did Planck convert to the view that the quantum of action represents an irreducible phenomenon beyond the understanding of classical physics.

The continued confusion around certain bizarre phenomena as perceived as a violent violation of the old mechanics is due to the over reliance of equilibrium dynamics. According to Valentini, the universe is fundamentally nonlocal, and quantum theory merely describes a special equilibrium state in which nonlocality is hidden in statistical noise. He furthermore showed that an ensemble of particles with known wave function and known nonequilibrium distribution could be used to perform, on another system, measurements that violate the uncertainty principle.

[Q-Rigal]

Amazing interview, I want to buy Kevin McQueen paper’s. There is no link or information about it. Thanks for your great information. ❤

[nsc]

When the system is measured, it acts randomly? Confused. When the measurement is made, isn't the wave function collapsed and reduces to one of its possible states based on the probabilities by its wave function?. It may appear as random, but it's determined by the wave function probabilities.

[AltarToRememberance]

Hello! I just got done with your fractal computation video, and I've gotta say that this correlates quite deeply with the work of the Resonance Science Foundation. If you're unfamiliar, I encourage you to check out their work! Your ideas and synopsis of the idea of others that you've presented in this series (Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Bohm, Penrose, and so on) are ones I'm quite familiar with by virtue of their physics and biophysics models. Thank you for all these videos! Take care ☺️

[voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang]

Sounds like Kelvin McQueen has not studied Basil J. Hiley's noncommutativity work. Bohmian physics of the quantum potential is actually noncommutativity as Hiley has detailed. Hiley says this changes physics on a deep level!

[Seehart]

There's a much simpler approach to all this: let's define Consciousness to simply be the phenomenon of finding oneself in a state. There's trillions of organisms and I just find myself in me. I might live to 100 years but I am only being now. No speculation about the role of information content. Just the property of exclusively being here now even though all time and space are.

Now let's take the Everett interpretation, aka "many worlds". This deals with the measurement problem by omitting the collapse of the wave function entirely. In other words, take quantum mechanics at face value, without making stuff up. No randomness, and no symmetry breaking. Everything in the Schrödinger equation happens. No collapse at all.

Put these two ideas together, and the apparent collapse of the wave function is actually a kind of anthropic selection bias. The collapse isn't a thing that happens, but rather the direct experience of finding oneself in a particular state. The idea that this requires a cause is like asking what causes it to be now.

[thenewzealandgringo]

"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.".

[yoananda]

What happens when we observe a far distant galaxy ? Do we "collapse" this entire galaxy ? Is it instantaneous ?
Where does the consciousness come from in this model ? I mean, from an evolutionary perspective, what happen to the earth before life appear ? How does the first consciousness appear on earth ?

[BryanChance]

Is this like double-slit experiment? When an observer, recording device or measurement device is introduced, it causes the wave function to collapse. (Not that I fully understand what all this means..LOL)

Scientists know what consciousness is? I guess in order to test consciousness, one would have to know what it is.

[ZeroInDaHouse]

Do you think its a coincidence it always boils down to 1 and zero. Or in geometric terms a circle and a line. The two most contradicting shapes. I believe these stretch and shrink to such an extreme degree that their ripples create standing waves creating and endless self repeating pattern of repeating states of structure and energy, layer upon layer of these two dichotomies create all these geometric cellular structural shapes full with life!

[philipm]

The wavefunction doesn't collapse. Take a simpler mathematical solution, the parabola of a projectile: Is the parabola observable? Only the projectile's motion is observable. If suddenly the projectile changes direction, we will not say that the parabola was broken. We will look for the obstruction in the path of the projectile, i.e an interaction that will change the model function.

It's important to clarify just what we are referring to here. There is no debate to the physicality of a wave function, it can't be anything but descriptive and is not actual. We are simply talking about a statistical model of a system in phase space. Quantum mechanics has its foundation in Planck's equations utilizing an ideal oscillator to describe a generalization of Maxwellian electrodynamics that could be applied to thermodynamics. Planck drew many of his ideas from the seminal contributions of Boltzmann in describing entropy and introduction of phase space statistics. Today, practically all quantum experiments are done in phase space as it takes a complex system and compresses it down to two dimensions. Phase space can be defined as “a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state corresponding to one unique point.” A point in phase space is determined by the positions and (conjugate) momenta of all the particles of the system. Now bear with me, I will do my best to succinctly summarize the evolution of physics that created quantum mechanics and demystify this terrible confusion around what these statistics are actually describing.

By Boltzmann's definition, a 'microstate' is a state specified in terms of the constituent particles of a body of matter or radiation that has been specified as a macrostate in terms of such variables as internal energy and pressure. A macrostate is experimentally observable, with at least a finite extent in spacetime. A microstate can be instantaneous, or can be a trajectory composed of a temporal progression of instantaneous microstates. In experimental practice, such are scarcely observable. The present account concerns instantaneous microstates.
The value of W (entropy) was originally intended to be proportional to the Wahrscheinlichkeit (the German word for probability) of a macroscopic state for some probability distribution of possible microstates of unobservable microscopic single particles in which the (observable macroscopic) thermodynamic state of a system can be realized by assigning different positions and momenta to the respective ideal points.

For the dynamical laws that we are considering, governing the behaviour of our system, these laws are deterministic in the sense that the state of our system at any one time completely determines the state at any other time, whether earlier or later. To put things another way, we can describe the dynamical evolution of our system, according to these laws as a point p which moves along a curve—called an evolution curve—in the phase space T. This evolution curve represents the unique evolution of the entire system according to the dynamical laws, starting from the initial state, which we can represent by some particular point p0 in the phase space T. In fact, the whole phase space T will be filled up (technically foliated) by such evolution curves (rather like a bale of straw), where every point of T will lie on some particular evolution curve. We must think of this curve as being oriented—which means that we must assign a direction to the curve, and we can do this by putting an arrow on it. The evolution of our system, according to the dynamical laws, is described by a moving point p, which travels along the evolution curve—in this case starting from the particular point p0— and moves in the direction in which the arrow points. This provides us with the future evolution of the particular state of the system represented by p. Following the evolution curve in the direction away from p0 in the opposite direction to the arrow gives the time-reverse of the evolution, this telling us how the state represented by p0 would have arisen from states in the past. Again, this evolution would be unique, according to the dynamical laws.

One important feature of phase space is that, since the advent of quantum mechanics, we find that it has a natural measure, so that we can take volumes in phase space to be, essentially, just dimensionless numbers.

From the perspective of Planck and his contemporaries, it was natural to seek an explanation of the entropy law in Maxwell’s electrodynamics. After all, Maxwell’s theory was fundamental and was supposed to govern the behaviour of the microscopic oscillators that produced the heat radiation emitted by black bodies. Planck initially believed that he had justified the irreversibility of radiation processes through the lack of time symmetry in Maxwell’s equations – i.e. that the laws of electrodynamics distinguish between past and present, between forward-going and backward-going time. However, in 1897 Boltzmann demolished this argument. Electrodynamics, Boltzmann showed, provides no more an “arrow of time” than mechanics.

While looking for a continuation of deterministic dynamics which could be formulated from entropy, Planck’s thoughts centred on how to understand “irreversibility” on the basis of the absolute validity of the entropy law.
In the 1890s the debate about the second law centred on the statistical (or probabilistic) interpretation that Ludwig Boltzmann had originally proposed back in 1872 and expanded in 1877. According to Boltzmann’s molecular-mechanical interpretation, the entropy of a system is the collective result of molecular motions. The second law is valid only in a statistical sense. Boltzmann’s theory, which presupposed the existence of atoms and molecules, was challenged by Wilhelm Ostwald and other “energeticists”, who wanted to free physics from the notion of atoms and base it on energy and related quantities.
What was Planck’s position in this debate? One might expect that he sided with the winners, or those who soon turned out to be the winners – namely Boltzmann and the “atomists”. But this was not the case. Planck’s belief in the absolute validity of the second law made him not only reject Boltzmann’s statistical version of thermodynamics but also doubt the atomic hypothesis on which it rested. As early as 1882, Planck concluded that the atomic conception of matter was irreconcilably opposed to the law of entropy increase. “There will be a fight between these two hypotheses that will cause the life of one of them, ” he predicted. As to the outcome of the fight, he wrote that “in spite of the great successes of the atomistic theory in the past, we will finally have to give it up and to decide in favour of the assumption of continuous matter”. By 1895 he was ready to embark on a major research programme to determine thermodynamic irreversibility in terms of some model that did not explicitly involve the atomic hypothesis.

The study of black-body radiation had begun in 1859, when Robert Kirchhoff, Planck’s predecessor as professor of physics in Berlin, argued that such radiation was of a fundamental nature. By the 1890s several physicists – experimentalists and theorists – were investigating the spectral distribution of the radiation. Important progress was made in 1896 when Wien found a radiation law that was in convincing agreement with the precise measurements being performed at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin.

Guided by Boltzmann’s kinetic theory of gases, Planck formulated what he called a “principle of elementary disorder” that did not rely either on mechanics or on electrodynamics. He used it to define the entropy of an ideal oscillator (dipole) but was careful not to identify such oscillators with specific atoms or molecules. In 1899 Planck found an expression for the oscillator entropy from which Wien’s law followed. The law (sometimes referred to as the Wien-Planck law) had now obtained a fundamental status. Planck was satisfied. After all, the law had the additional qualification that it agreed beautifully with measurements. Or so it was thought.
In 1896 Wilhelm Wien derived an empirical law that appeared to accurately describe the radiation emitted by a black body. However, as these spectra measured by Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim in November 1899 reveal, Wien’s theoretical curve (green line) did not agree with the experimental data (red line) at long wavelengths, indicating the inadequacy of Wien’s law. Faced with this grave anomaly, Planck looked for a solution, during the course of this he was forced to introduce the notion of “energy quanta”. (1/2)

[raycosmic]

Wave = peripheral attention
Particle = focused attention
Attention = wave function collapse

[ChristianSt]

great! a continuus collapse seems much more natural than an instantaneous one

[mattsigl]

The boundaries of a system (exclusion) are intrinsically determined by the maximal existence principle which says that what exists is what exists the most (highest phi) such that if a set of elements in a system has a phi value smaller than the phi value of the elements when analyzed as elements within a larger system with higher phi, only the system with the larger phi really exists, as an element in a state can only contribute to one experience. So the high-phi functional cluster in my brain that generates, say, my sense of space is a smaller phi complex than the one that generates my sense of space plus my sense of space as populated with the current objects I see in this space, and the only one that actually exists is the larger, more informative one. This is intuitive: I don’t think that on top of my looking at a red apple there is another consciousness happening right now that just is my perception of red and nothing else, even though you could analyze a portion of my brain with a phi value that would imply this experience happening; it doesn’t because that subset, though integrated, is part of a larger integrated system, and the larger system is what’s most real.

[jimmyjasi-]

"Consciousness has no Objective"- sounds worrying. I had always trouble to understand why some people think that it's cool to live in the Universe governed by Subjective Idealism? Such existence would be akin to lifelong masturbation without any meaning- if "experience is all that exist" and nothing can be known about world we live in.
What Bells Theorem really tells us is that we have only two binary and mutually exclusive metaphysical hypothesies.
1 Everything is subjective and nothing... nothing is in absolutely any way possibly objective: Many Worlds, Superdeterminism, Kastrup and Wigner-Von Neumann Idealism all although mathematically very different all boils to it that objectivity does not exist
2 Objective Quantum Realism:
And it basically means either Sir Roger Penrose Collapsist Model or Pilot Wave Theory (ψ either objectively collapses or doesn't exist at all because is just imperfect human tool of approximating entirely deterministic and Non-local Bohmian trajectory)

Anyway what follows is that parapsychologists should understand that although consequences of Bells Theorem and it's loophole free confirmation are :
1 We can't have Objective Realism without Telepathy which becomes impossible to deny if either Wave Function is a real object (Shan Gao) or Pilot Wave governs the Universe.
2 If someone wants to be subjective Idealist one must say that Telepathy is fundamentally impossible and vice versa if someone wants so badly to deny telepathy he must divorce himself of any notion of Objective Reality whatsoever.
This makes sense because although Dean Radin likes to talk about psychokinesis and "Quantum Healing" if you read his books and experimental statistics you will see that although Ganz Feld and EEG studies of Telepathy are extremely statically significant, all ψ domains where mind is supposed to influence something are barely meaningful looking and are likely to be due to some unconscious bias.
So poor old Shermer is right that he persecutes Psychokinesis claims and Flying Saucers but it's Time he should acknowledge that if he wants to do that he must ally with telepathy team
Pity you didn't ask him about Anirban Bandyopadhyays work

[Seehart]

I like this Integrated Information concept, but I want to see it rebuilt on Everett instead of Copenhagen. Collapse of the wave function is an illusion.

[jimmyjasi-]

"Consciousness causes". Every good scientist know that "correlation does never necessarily imply Causation".
Best anegdote:
"Global warming started when number of Pirates has declined"
Haha!

[jimmyjasi-]

Reality cannot be magically changed regardless of what consciousness is or isn't. So what is "consciousness collapses superpositions" good for?!
I know that I'm not a God and other people are just as real as I am (hope you have no doubt about it too) so if reality cannot be changed by mere wishing to do so why not just acknowledge that whatever collapses Superpositions is objective! Long Live Sir Roger Penrose and his Legacy!