Andréa Morris - "Testing a Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Conscious-Spawning Theory of Reality"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/?sh=554dfa85209b

In 1931, mathematician Kurt Gödel revealed his incompleteness theorems—theorems of mathematical logic that show there are statements in mathematics that must be true even though they can’t be proven. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Goodstein's theorem sometime later, made an indelible imprint on Penrose. He took from these theorems that there’s a unique property of the physical universe giving rise to conscious understanding. This is our human ability to understand truths that cannot be derived from the rules that gave us those truths. In other words, the rules allow us to ascertain truths beyond the rules. The ability to understand Gödel and Goodstein’s theorems means there’s something about our conscious understanding that is not confined to computational boundaries. Since all theories of physics are computational, Penrose believes something must be happening in the reduction of the quantum state that gives rise to non-computational understanding. “All I have are all the theories we know in physics. Computational, computational, computational. I mean, you've got to find room for this thing,” says Penrose. He confirms that this thing that physics has to make room for is understanding.

Benjamin Libet is best known for his seminal research that seems to show that our choices to act are too slow to be made consciously. The brain "registers" the decision to make movements before we consciously decide to move.

Gwern Branwen - "Feynman's Maze-Running Story"

 https://gwern.net/maze 

But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-Number-1 experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science.

Jim Baggott - "Quantum dialectics (How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory)"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-soviet-communist-philosophy-shaped-postwar-quantum-theory

As the founders of the theory argued about what it meant, the views of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr began to dominate. He concluded that we have no choice but to describe our experiments and their results using seemingly contradictory, but nevertheless complementary, concepts of waves and particles borrowed from classical (pre-quantum) physics. This is Bohr's principle of "complementarity". He argued that there is no contradiction because, in the context of the quantum world, our use of these concepts is purely symbolic. We reach for whicever descsription - waves or particles - best serves the situation at hand, and we should not take the theory too literally. It has no meaning beyond its ability to connect our experiences of the quantum world as they are projected to us by the classical instruments we use to study it.

Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. Alas, despite his strenuous efforts to exercise care in his use of language, Bohr could be notoriously vague and more than occassionally incomprehensible. Pronouncements were delivered in tortured "Borish". It is said of his last recorded lecture that it took a team of linguists a week to discover the language he was speaking.

Complementatiry also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s, through the Second World War, to the Cold War that followed. Both Bohr and Einstein were of Jewish descent and, to Nazi ideologues, complementarity and relativity theory were poisonous Jewish abstractions, at odds with the nationalistic programme of Deutsche Physik, or 'Aryan physics'. But the proponents of Deutsche Physik failed to secure the backing of the Nazi leadership, and any threat to complementarity from Nazi ideology disappeared with the war's ending. Much more enduring were the objections of Soviet communist philosophers who argued that complementarity was at odds with the official Marxist doctrine of 'dialectical materialism'.

Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism. Nevertheless, an influential group of Soviet physicists, including Vladimir Fock, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm and Matvei Bronstein, promoted Bohr's views and for a time represented the 'Russian branch' of Bohr's school. This was not without some risk. Communist Party philosophers sought their dismissal, to no avail, largely because they could not agree on the issues amongst themselves.

Quantum Entanglement Drives the Arrow of Time, Scientists Say

    as particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time.


    Lloyd found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a "1" for clockwise spin and a "0" for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.


    Consequently, a tepid cup of coffee does not spontaneously warm up. In principle, as the pure state of the room evolves, the coffee could suddenly become unmixed from the air and enter a pure state of its own. But there are so many more mixed states than pure states available to the coffee that this practically never happens - one would have to outlive the universe to witness it. This statistical unlikelihood gives time's arrow the appearance of irreversibility. "Essentially entanglement opens a very large space for you," Popescu said. "It's like you are at the park and you start next to the gate, far from equilibrium. Then you enter and you have this enormous place and you get lost in it. And you never come back to the gate."


    The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.