Quantum Reality and Self Awareness

So I continued reading a book on quantum mechanics and philosophy pertaining largely to how people perceive reality while being part of it. Philosophers in the field of epistemology have considered what it is people know and how they know it so far as the conscious mind goes as it has input from the natural world.

Quantum mechanics and especially the Copenhagen Interpretation found that quanta like photons have an indeterminacy or uncertainty principle about them. One can calculate a photons speed or position yet not all at once. Photons are a wave in a field. One can measure a point at the wave yet the point isn’t in motion, and besides the wave kept moving one or was everywhere all at once anyway. An other point is that quanta can be entangled with distant quanta and have the same position when one has its waveform collapsed and seemingly convey the information faster than light. There are several theories to explain that including John Wheeler’s that there is only one electron in the Universe and it can travel forward and backward in time. It would have a travel itinerary something like that of the blue man’s pen laser that goes through the ears of opponents in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. This post isn’t about physics. It is about the relation between philosophers (some not all) and physics especially the field of quantum mechanics.

Well it’s at least about the point that reality is completely relational in the quantum field. Observers are part of the system they observe and necessarily interfere with it when they make observations at the quantum level. Physicists need to now how the system functions so they can understand it and usefully to everyone else, explain its structure and do things with the knowledge. Philosophers might consider what’s what without becoming bogged down in the technicalities, as if a kind of awareness of the quantum structure of nature would lead one to infinite, mind boggling reductionism and passive acquiescence in the Higgs field as just another region of the field’s mass particle entanglement that is self-aware.

Some physicists are unable to accept the distinction of consciousness from the entangled field of which it is a part because it is a part of the field. A human mind is just a concatenation of sense data input and selection processes that leads it to choose courses of action determined originally solely because they are functional immediately. Th mind remains a part of the complete quantum field and really isn’t so much of an individual person different from others. Rather it is a region of the field thinking for itself as if it were a complex artificial intelligence continuing to input data creating for-itself an appearance of self awareness. If the A.I. mind were really smart it would think of itself as an individual mind at all but nothing more than a quantum field fluctuation at the summit of field phenomena able to view the wave crest and other wave crests extending out to infinity on the sea of quantum virtual reality like dreaminess.

In my opinion an individual is better compared to being in a quantum river and also a part of the river that is able to think for-itself and consider what the river is. Physicists study the river and learn of its quantum character and its possibility of generating its flow of space-time, mass and energy from nothingness. They become entirely reductionist in trying to understand the river’s first principles and place their own existence and mind within the river’s mechanical account. They understand the quantum and pointillist superposition of the flow that is in theory reversible in time and that gravity seems to draw the river inward toward itself in whirlpools like black holes as it moves down the slope of entropy toward a hypothetical debauch in the wilderness or a big rip over a waterfall of accelerated space-time expansion. Philosophers on the other hand consider what physics relates, and contemplate the nature of the flowing quanta and are aware they are part of it and that there perceptions may determine the collapse of some wave functions of river quanta yet they are also able to regard themselves as real individuals qualitatively different than the thoughtless quanta comprising the river.

It may be that philosophers can consider purpose and meaning in the river even though they are part of it while for physicists the pure explanation with complete reductionism elevates the parts forever to a prominence above the whole. To switch to a different simile;

Physicists are like members of the audience existing in a Shakespearian play who accept the idea that all of life is meaningless quanta, or that information is simply quantum information regarding relationships and entanglements, superpositions of quanta etc and believe therefore that the information and events in the play of which they are part is meaningless. The events of Christian eschatology or having faith would to them be as unreal and meaningless as the entire play because it is all quantum phenomena. To continue to another simile; physicists without faith are like mechanics riding in a car that believe only in the relationship of the parts and cannot have any faith that the vehicle actually has a meaningful purpose or destination. One may see through a glass darkly, and the horizon may be beyond human knowledge, yet those of faith believe life does have a purpose and that it is going somewhere meaningfully.