h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.

Actually that's b****ks. QM is entirely objective, the uncertainty principle tells you exactly what you can and can't know. The results of experiment are entirely predictable within the bounds of that principle.

Comparing QM to Buddhism is a bit like equating the sun to God - they are both huge, all-powerful, live in the sky, and without them we wouldn't be here (allegedly, in the case of the latter), but that doesn't imply that the resemblance is in any way significant.

I tend to think of QM as being about looking for, if not a creator, at least the raw material. That's the fascination of it for many people, spiritual or otherwise. I think my QM relative is not putting all his eggs or quarks in one basket.

The trouble with quantum theory being used in this way, as has already been pointed out, is that it doesn't really apply at macro scale (with exceptions, I know...)

We can predict pretty much exactly how large objects move, for example, without recourse to QM. It is difficult therefore to conclude that we cannot know anything for sure by citing quantum indeterminacy and extrapolating upwards to our level. Not being able to measure the spin of an electron does not mean we cannot accurately measure the speed of a car, for example.

Schrodinger's cat was only a thought experiment; there are very good reasons why no-one has ever actually carried it out, and not all of them to do with animal welfare.

I reckon people only pick on QM because it is just , counterintuitive, and no-one really understands it. If the Dalai Lama really needs to shore-up his personal beliefs with scientifically-supported indeterminism that really does apply at our scale, he should be looking towards chaos or complexity theory.

This is analogous to what DaveBlackeye just said. The position of the car can be known, using quantum mechanics, to within 1 part in 10^36 (about). Or

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001


Is the Dalai Lama claming the same level of accuracy for the spiritual?

The Dalai Lama doesn't need to know the position of the car only that he's sitting in it.
Dave Blackeye - Here's a quantum-type experiment you can do.
Lie down in a quiet and dark room and close your eyes. Let your mind go blank. After a while luminous shapes will manifest themselves in your brain, they may at first be purple in colour, and you will be able to see them. These luminous shapes must be on the quantum level mustn't they. When you become proficient, as you soon will, you can conjour up images of people, geometric figures, and other things.
This is not a sign of mental illness. Anybody can do it.
You can eventually control the shapes, people, light forms, with your conscious mind and send them in various directions out of your field of vision.
No these shapes etc. have no physical form and so are only images in the brain - or are they? Can any QM scientist tell me what these energetic things are and why it is people actually see them?

In a book I'm reading Ernest Hemingway is in Italy in WWI when a shell explodes near him. He has the sensation of leaving his body and floating away and believes himself to be dead. And then he feels himself drawn back into his body and then finds that he is still alive. This is another common experience - this out of body experience - and people have told me their similar experiences. Can QM assist here in explaining what's going on?

Maybe we really do need people like the Dalai Lama to explore the level of the invisible world.

>>"Lie down in a quiet and dark room and close your eyes. Let your mind go blank. After a while luminous shapes will manifest themselves in your brain, they may at first be purple in colour, and you will be able to see them."

Funny, if I lie down in a darkened room and try not to think of anything, the visual experience I get is of waves of light and dark flowing across my visual field, with the sources (either lines or points) slowly drifting around.
Possibly that's something in the visual centres of the brain, though I'd guess it's actually a natural background activation oscillation in the retinal cells.

I don't think there's anything obviously 'quantum' about that, and I'm sceptical there are classical-scale effects happening in the brain with a 'quantum nature'.
Without a good argument as to why there need be, or how there could be some special kind of quantum influence on consciousness, I'm afraid that vague 'it must be quantum' explanations of consciousness seem at the same level as 'it must be a soul'.

Taken to the extreme, quantum mechanics is involved in everything, but that means it's not a special explanation for anything. largely, it's not even a very useful explanation for things happening at much larger scales. With mind states (or parts thereof) seemingly being large-scale activation patterns across many neurons, they appear decidedly classical.

>>"No these shapes etc. have no physical form and so are only images in the brain - or are they? Can any QM scientist tell me what these energetic things are and why it is people actually see them?"

They're *thoughts*, more or less abstract.

" These luminous shapes must be on the quantum level mustn't they."
No, absolutely not.
You are oversimplifying the way we perceive the world to a huge degree.
As potholer says these could be background activation patterns in our retinal cells. Or it could be similar activation occurrences anywhere along the processing line that goes from our visual receptors to our internal virtual world. In fact it could have nothing to do with the visual centres at all, it could be something background in the way we create our internal representation of the world. If anything it is a cellular level event, not a quantum level one.

Perhaps of slight interest here is that I used to know a lad doing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Aston uni (I think) who had a neural net spread over about 16 sparc stations (this was back in the mid 90s) hooked up to a video camera. The idea being to see what would happen and teach it to 'see'. One thing they noticed after a fair while in was that if they turned off the cameras but left the neural net active it started behaving *as if* it was detecting input from the cameras. This is analagous I think, although not the same since neither the hardware or the software is exactly the same.

You wait, give it another 5 years and assuming the theories about dark matter continue to be developed and research backs up their claims we'll have people weaving that in the same way they do QM now.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" William Shakespeare.

Perhaps The Bard had a feeling for things QM just as the Dalai Lama appears to have.

SHADOW (now there's a QM case of synchronicity for you) claims the behind the retina images mentioned are on the cellular level. Can we prove that? A camera is one thing. The human brain and its mysterious quality of consciousness is another.

the name's Ictoan - the shadow bit is part of a title But lots of people make that mistake - atleast you didn't call me icotan!

You are right of course, how the mind works is a complex system and we are only on the most distant shores of understanding it. But what we kjnow so far, and we do know this, is that the various senses, whilst they have processing at all stages from the initial detectors through to the brain regions, do in fact cross over and integrate with each other to provide a coallesced form which we represent internally. hence why we can locate sounds to objects and smells to distances and so forth (that's overly simplified as well).

But it ain;t quantum.

What you can show at a cellular level is that all neurons 'leak' neurotransmitters, even when they are unstimulated. Under 'normal' circumstances, this doesn't matter much - there's enough stimulation going on to cause release of large amounts of transmitter and drown out any leakage. If you're lying quietly in a dark room trying to let your mind go blank, then that leakage may be more likely to actually register as an event that can be 'perceived'.

and yes, we can 'prove' it - cognitiveneuroscience is an approach which seeks to understand the human mind through understanding the workings and interoperability of the various parts of the brain. The brain highly interconnected but does have regions where certain things are done.

One of the things that can be done is to isolate a particular neuron and then measure its output for various inputs. this is how we know about the complexities of individual neuron operation and what they react to/inhibit on.

You can also do various types of scanning which basically show bloodflow to various regions at various levels of detail, indicating which areas are activating.

But this is all obvious stuff. I'm intrigued now since you concept of QM seems to differ vastly from what it actually is. And whilst I have a layman's understanding of the issues there are others here with proper understanding.

So perhaps it would help if you detailed what you think QM is and what it means and then perhaps those with better knowledge than me can spot any inaccuracies in your understanding?

I've read that there is in the Himalayas a so-called holy cave. You enter and of course it's black and it's cut off from all sound and other stimuli. Perhaps you can smell the rock? I don't know. Certainly you must feel it. They say you can sit in the cave and receive strange thoughts. What are these thoughts? Where are the coming from? Are they mere 'leakage'? If so, from where? From you? From the rocks? Are you the subject of the experiment or is it the planet. Or is it both of you - an interaction or maybe inter-reacation? Is it QM? Is it cellular. Can QM particles combine to come up to the cellular level? Or is it merely chatter between neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors?

>>"SHADOW (now there's a QM case of synchronicity for you) claims the behind the retina images mentioned are on the cellular level. Can we prove that?"

Well, it would seem extraordinarily likely that one cell (whether in the retina or visual cortex) must be setting off neighbours in order for patterns at the cellular level to emerge. Just as the physical scale is decidedly macro, the timescales involved are right in the area where bulk processes such as diffusion of chemicals seem entirely adequate explanations.

>>"A camera is one thing. The human brain and its mysterious quality of consciousness is another."

Thing is, current general or personal ignorance about how consciousness works is no more an excuse for saying 'It's quantum' than for saying 'It's God'. Both explanations may be appealing to people wanting to define an explanation that combines giving them the feeling they understand with the contradictory feeling of mystery, but what is appealing is not necessarily what is correct.

Without any explanation of *how* quantum effects cause consciousness, it's essentially a meaningless explanation, which is really no explanation at all.

Now, *noise* (which may have quantum origins) may be exploited by the brain to some extent in its operation, but noise, like matter, is everywhere, and consciousness isn't.
What's special about the brain is not that it's made of subatomic particles or atoms (which by definition are interchangable components, each one essentially identical to all the others), but how those atoms are arranged into molecules, cells, and higher structural entities, and how those wet, dirty, noisy classical entities interact.

>>"They say you can sit in the cave and receive strange thoughts. What are these thoughts? Where are the coming from? Are they mere 'leakage'?

Sensory deprivation.
I know a fair bit about being in caves. Brains make stuff up to fill in gaps in sensory input. It happens to everyone and it is not remotely profound.
Voice-tuned pattern recognition circuitry in the brain will hear faint voices underground when there's no-one there, especially if there's a convenient source of low-level noise like distant dripping or flowing water, or maybe wind. If waiting for people, the voices heard often sound distinctly like the people expected, even when those people are much too far away to possibly be heard.

If I interpret this properly, Lucky is suggesting that hallucinations may be a macro-scale manifestation of quantum effects. But turning this on its head, surely our mental pictures count as observation and would therefore instantly collapse any quantum superpositions? Therefore the forcing function, fluctation, stimulating signal or whatever, by definition, must be classical in nature.

It's the same problem. The Dalai Lama cannot refuse to accept that anything is real based on QM; the fact he observes it makes it real.

Wow, this thread is a good example of "quantum abuse". Lucky, you really should try and get hold of a textbook on quantum mechanics and find out a bit more about what it really is.

Potholer's post about sensory devrapation is leading somewhere. There's no such thing as empty space. We fill it up.
re QM book, I couldn't get beyond p29 in Hawking's Brief History!

>>"Potholer's post about sensory devrapation is leading somewhere. There's no such thing as empty space. We fill it up."

It's leading to the conclusion that a sensory-processing machine devoid of sensory input might easily free-run or produce garbage.
It's got nothing to do with 'empty space' in a physical sense, let alone in a subatomic sense, merely that a machine containing subsystems whose operation is defined by activation patterns related to external reality will still have some kind of activation pattern in the absence of the appropriate external reality.
One possible pattern is 'all off', but particularly in the presence of input noise, a subsystem whose function is signal processing and pattern extraction in a more-or-less noisy world may generate spurious output.

It's extremely clear to anyone who has studied perception at even the most amateur level that the brain, in an attempt to make something out of poor input, can make the wrong thing out of poor input, or even out of little real input at all.

Looking at optical illusions, the brain can be 'fooled' by quite simple tricks. However, the relatively simple rules which seem to be 'to blame' for most illusions are also phenomenally powerful tools used second-by-second and to massive effect in terms of generating a consistent and reliable physical model of the remote world. *Their* 'gap filling' seems to have no arguable connection whatever to any quantum processes - just good old fashioned classical signal and image processing and heuristics, with some 'downwards' help from higher-level guesswork or knowledge about what is or what may be expected.

Likewise, with audio processing, circuits tuned to lock on to and extract 'vocal-type' signals from a mass of noise, which can function extraordinarily well in even a cacophonic environment can also extract the apparent sound of unintelligible distant voices (especially the voices it expects to hear) from noise in the right spectral regions.

With *speech* processing, it's quite possible that the basic ongoing signal-extraction circuits have to be capable of tracking speech-like signals before any higher-level linguistic circuitry pays them any attention - their job is to actively hunt possible input, and return the best candidate, even if that is just spurious misfiring - higher-level processing can always then think "That *sounds* a bit like Anne, but I can't tell what she's saying", and rank it as a 'possible' or dismiss it as a trick of the mind.

Lucky, let's go over what quantum really is.

1) de Broglie proposed that particles behave as waves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie_hypothesis

2) Thomson and independently Davison and Germer discovered that electrons make diffraction patterns. See this article to learn what diffraction exactly is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction

this article describes electron diffraction (read the history section)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_Diffraction

This confirmed what de Broglie had proposed

3) Now that we know matter behaves as waves, instead of using Newton's equations, we should use the wave equation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_equation

Wave equations generally describe the oscillation of something. For example, a wave equation can be used to describe the compression and expansion of air that occurs in a sound wave. It can be used to describe the oscillation of the electric and magnetic field of an electromagnetic wave.

There are 2 main components to any wave - amplitude and frequency. For sound, amplitude = volume, frequency = pitch. If the amplitude of the sound wave is high, you're experience high volume. This means the local pressure of air is high. Similarly, if the local pressure is low (below the regular pressure), the volume is also high (negative amplitude). If the amplitude is 0, then the pressure is the same as the regular air pressure.

Based on de Broglie and the experimental confirmation, there is a wave equation for matter - the Schrodinger equation. It can be used to solve for matter waves. Now that we know the electron behaves as a wave, we can use the sound wave description to understand what that means. If the electron wave amplitude is high (positive) or very low (negative) that means that the electron is present. If it is zero, the electron is not present.

That's really all there is to it. The "spookyness" that occurs are just things that occur for *any* wave. For example, if you want to know the frequency of a sound wave, you need to measure the sound for a certain amount of time. But once you've measured a sound wave for a period of time, the wave has travelled a certain distance. So you with your basic sound wave, you can't simultaneously point to a specific portion of the wave and say you know the frequency.

The same is true with any wave you care to describe - including electrons. As many people have said, when you look at the "words" describing these phenomena, it seems spooky. But when you look at the maths, you realize it's just basic, fundamental properties of waves. *Any* wave.


Have you read this?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A781823

And you might try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_quantum_mechanics

Sure, as Potholer says, there are "tricks of the mind". I mean the psychiatric units are full of people who hear voices which "aren't there" in the "real sense". But, of course these voices are extremely real to those who hear them. What I'm really driving at is that things such as these voices are "physical" on the cellular level - they must exist in the brain of the hearer, for what is a brain if not a bundle of energy with all kinds of "electrical-type" actions and reactions going on in it.

If you took a brain and split it right down to it's basic components, you'd only have atoms and electrons. Now these atoms and electrons must live near the boundary of the "known physical universe" and the "quantum universe" and might therefore be sensitive or aware of some things going on in the quantum universe mightn't they? You can if you like imagine it rather like iron filings being affected by the presence of a passing magnet.

And so, when an invisible particle from outer space travels through my brain a couple of atoms in my brain might be able to register its passage mightn't they? Perhaps in the same way that an instrument in a box at the bottom of a disused coal mine?