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“observing changes the result” doesn’t mean conciousness attempting to look at it changes the result, there is nothing special about conciousness (in quantum mechanics)
“observing changes the result” means we try to measure atoms and fields but unfortunately our measurement tools are also made out of atoms and fields which interact with the atoms and fields we are trying to measure, giving us a different result than if we don’t attempt to measure it
It does bring up interesting questions about what the “real” behavior of reality is tho, since anything we observe is technically different than what it would be if left alone. We can only ever know what a slightly altered state of reality is
Think of it like this:
You can use a tennis ball machine to measure how far away a house is by firing the tennis ball at a constant velocity, timing how long it takes the tennis ball to come back to you, multiplying that time by the velocity, and dividing by 2 (since you measured the distance for a round trip). This works pretty darn well for measuring the distance to houses.
But now try this same trick to measure the distance to another ball. When your measuring ball hits the ball you want to measure, it doesn’t stay resolutely planted in the ground like that nice friendly house. The energy from your measuring ball bounces the ball being measured off into the distance. Even if you could get your measuring ball to return, the ball you measured isn’t in the place you measured it.
Replace that tennis ball with a photon, and you have the basic picture. There’s no such thing as passive observation. Measuring something interacts with that thing. Conventional measurement is like in the case with the house, the thing being measured is so much bigger and more stable than the thing we’re measuring with that the effect is negligible. But once you start trying to measure something on the same scale as your measuring tool, the ensuing chaos makes it basically impossible to get useful measurements.
What happens if you try to cut a photon in half with a knife?
The edge of a knife has to be thinner than the thing it’s cutting, and we haven’t found anything thinner than a photon
Clearly you haven’t seen my penis.
By that implication it’s fundamentally impossible for anyone to see it.
If only conciousness did affect reality, it would salvage the soul, which sadly doesn’t appear to exist - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8121175/
This always bugs me. Quantum Mechanics isn’t actually that difficult. It has some nasty maths, yes, but that’s mostly slog work, rather than an impossibility. 90% of it is the Schroedinger’s equation + boundary conditions.
The main issue is that you have to abandon the particle model of reality. This is deeply engrained into our brains. If you try and understand it as “Particles + extras”, you will fail. You have to think of it as “Waves + extras”. It then, suddenly makes logical sense.
It does have some interesting implications, however, about deeper reality however. E.g. what exactly IS decoherence, from a physical point of view. Also, what is physically happening, dimensionally, when a wave is complex, or even pure imaginary. These are beyond the scope of QM however.
The problem of quantum mechanic is that the physics it shows us is not intuitive, and it sometimes breaks other laws of physics.
Quantum intrication means that information travels faster than light for example. Counterfactuality also breaks causality.
It’s not the maths that are the problem, it’s that it doesn’t make physical sense in the world we currently understand. And the equations explain nothing. They merely describe a a world that doesn’t make sense.
Quantum mechanic is like having a machine from the future that does cool things, but you don’t understand how it works. It’s like people did chemistry before they understand what chemistry was. We do uber cool things with it, but it is a spotlight on our ignorance at the same time.
Actually, I think it’s time to reveal, that to some people QM is actually pretty intuitive.
It’s just that the masses and the news media don’t understand it, so they assume that nobody does. The particle worldview is deeply ingrained into many people’s brains, because it’s deeply useful to them on a day-to-day basis. If you loosen that requirement, then there’s literally nothing standing in your way to accept a wave-worldview.
What about the Copenhagen interpretation debate? What about the non-locality?
These are academic debates, not people ones. Saying that quantum mechanic is intuitive is arrogant at best. You may have a perfect understanding of the current theory and how to use it, and you maybe comfortable using it everyday, but then you should be aware of the limits shouldn’t you?
Otherwise it’s like alchemy.
