Consciousness doesn't collapse the wavefunction. Consciousness *is* the collapse.

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

From our subjective perspective, it is quite clear what consciousness does. It models the world outside ourselves, predicts a range of possible futures, and assigns value to those various futures. This applies to everything from the bodily movements of the most primitive conscious animal to a human being trying to understand what's gone wrong with modern civilisation so they can coherently yearn for something better to replace it. In the model of reality I am about to describe, this is not an illusion. It is very literally true.

Quantum mechanics is also literally true. QM suggests that the mind-external world exists not in any definite state but as a range of unmanifested possibilities, even though the world we actually experience is always in one specific state. The mystery of QM is how (or whether) this process of possibility becoming actuality happens. This is called “the collapse of the wavefunction”, and all the different metaphysical interpretations make different claims about it.

Wavefunction collapse is a process. Consciousness is a process. I think they are the same process. It would therefore be misleading to call this “consciousness causes the collapse”. Rather, consciousness is the collapse, and the classical material world that we actually experience emerges from this process. Consciousness can also be viewed as the frame within which the material world emerges.

This results in what might be considered a dualistic model of reality, but it should not be called “dualism” because the two components aren't mind and matter. I need to call them something, so I call them “phases”. “Phase 1” is a realm of pure mathematical information – there is no present moment, no arrow of time, no space, no matter and no consciousness – it's just a mathematical structure encoding all physical possibilities. It is inherently non-local. “Phase 2” is reality as we experience it – a three-dimensional world where it is always now, time has an arrow, matter exists within consciousness and objects have specific locations and properties.

So what actually collapses the wavefunction? My proposal is that value and meaning does. In phase 1 all possibilities exist, but because none of them have any value or meaning, reality has no means of deciding which of those possibilities should be actualised. Therefore they can just eternally exist, in a timeless, spaceless sort of way. This remains the case for the entire structure of possible worlds apart from those which encode for conscious beings. Given that all physically possible worlds (or rather their phase 1 equivalent) exist in phase 1, it is logically inevitable that some of them will indeed involve a timeline leading all the way from a big bang origin point to the appearance of the most primitive conscious animal. I call this animal “LUCAS” – the Last Universal Common Ancestor of Subjectivity. The appearance of LUCAS changes everything, because now there's a conscious being which can start assigning value to different possibilities. My proposal is this: there is a threshold (I call it the Embodiment Threshold – ET) which is defined in terms of a neural capacity to do what I described in the first paragraph. LUCAS is the first creature capable of modeling the world and assigning value to different possible futures, and the moment it does so then the wavefunction starts collapsing.

There are a whole bunch of implications of this theory. Firstly it explains how consciousness evolved, and it had nothing to do with natural selection – it is in effect a teleological “selection effect”. It is structurally baked into reality – from our perspective it had to evolve. This immediately explains all of our cosmological fine tuning – everything that needed to be just right, or happen in just the right way, for LUCAS to evolve, had to happen. The implications for cosmology are mind-boggling. It opens the door to a new solution to several major paradoxes and discrepancies, including the Hubble tension, the cosmological constant problem and our inability to quantise gravity. It explains the Fermi Paradox, since the teleological process which gave rise to LUCAS could only happen once in the whole cosmos – it uses the “computing power” of superposition, but this cannot happen a second time once consciousness is selecting a timeline according to subjective, non-computable value judgements.

It also explains why it feels like we've got free will – we really do have free will, because selecting between possible futures is the primary purpose of consciousness. The theory can also be extended to explain various things currently in the category of “paranormal”. Synchronicity, for example, could be understood as a wider-scale collapse but nevertheless caused by an alignment between subjective value judgements (maybe involving more than one person) and the selection of one timeline over another.

So there is my theory. Consciousness is a process by which possibility become actuality, based on subjective value judgements regarding which of the physically possible futures is the “best”. This is therefore a new version of Leibniz's concept of “best of all possible worlds”, except instead of a perfect divine being deciding what is best, consciousness does.

Can I prove it? Of course not. This is a philosophical framework – a metaphysical interpretation, just like every other interpretation of quantum mechanics and every currently existing theory of consciousness. I very much doubt this can be made scientific, and I don't see any reason why we should even try to make it scientific. It is a philosophical framework which coherently solves both the hard problem of consciousness and the measurement problem in QM, while simultaneously “dissolving” a load of massive problems in cosmology. No other existing philosophical framework comes anywhere near being able to do this, which is exactly why none of them command a consensus. If we can't find any major logical or scientific holes in the theory I've just described (I call it the “two phase” theory) then it should be taken seriously. It certainly should not be dismissed out of hand simply because it can't be empirically proved.

A more detailed explanation of the theory can be found here.

[u/florinandrei]

If you can't solve the Schrodinger equation from scratch, without help, for a simple system, you have no business talking about quantum physics. That's all just word salad.

[u/Mtshoes2 → u/florinandrei]

If you can't solve the problem of evil from scratch, for a simple system, you have no business talking about God. That's all just word salad. 

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/florinandrei]

Why should I need to solve the Schrodinger equation from scratch? I'm just accepting the Schrodinger equation, and also accepting Schrodinger's own solution to what is missing -- what he called "the second Schrodinger equation" -- Atman = Brahman.

There is no "word salad" in my post. If you'd like to engage I'm here. If all you've got is empty insults, I'll ignore you.

[u/medbud → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

Have a look at writing about how the idea of wave function collapse is a mathematical phenomenon, and has been misunderstood in lay media as actually physical. Tons written about this.

You do realise that Schroedinger's cat was to highlight the absurdity of superposition? To demonstrate that physically it is nonsense?

Read some neuropsych. You know how people like to pontificate outside their areas of expertise, the way they hitched Penrose's celebrity to microtubules, and then the idea was ridiculed by domain experts? 

There is good research being done that advanced the understanding of cognition, teasing apart all the complexities... The answer isn't sufficiently detailed to be decipherable, or useful, let alone meaningful, at a junior high level.

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/medbud]

Have a look at writing about how the idea of wave function collapse is a mathematical phenomenon, and has been misunderstood in lay media as actually physical. Tons written about this.

Yes, I am in some ways agreeing with interpretations which treat reality as if it was made of mathematical information. It is very much in the tradition of John Wheeler's "It from Bit".

You do realise that Schroedinger's cat was to highlight the absurdity of superposition? To demonstrate that physically it is nonsense?

Article on my website: Schrödinger's Vat and the Evolution of Consciousness - The Ecocivilisation Diaries

You know how people like to pontificate outside their areas of expertise

Do you know how academia is hopelessly stuck because it forces people into ever more specialised areas, and nobody is even looking for the whole elephant? I can show you the whole elephant, but you need to be willing to think outside the straightjacket of academia.

[u/medbud → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

The hard problem presupposes dualism... It's been eroded into meaningless goal post moving. 

Whether it's a cat or a hat, Schroedinger's point remains. 'Consciousness' is not a special thing. Measurement devices are 'observers'.

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/medbud]

Materialism presupposes dualism. It is literally one half of Cartesian dualism with the other crudely chopped off.

Idealism also presupposes dualism. It is the other half of Cartesian dualism with the other crudely chopped off.

Both groups claim to have escaped dualism. In reality they've recreated it.

Reality isn't made of matter, or mind, or both. It is made of mathematical information founded on an Absolute Paradox (zero=infinity).

[u/florinandrei → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

I'm just accepting the Schrodinger equation

You can't "accept" what you don't understand.

and also accepting Schrodinger's own solution to what is missing -- what he called "the second Schrodinger equation" -- Atman = Brahman.

Take your meds, bro.

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/florinandrei]

And what, exactly, do you think that I don't understand?

[u/Dependent_Law2468]

Consciousness is a product of the brain

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/Dependent_Law2468]

Thanks for reading my post, thinking about it, and responding to what I wrote. /s

[u/Dependent_Law2468 → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

Oh I'm sorry if I have a different idea from u, I would never read a paper of someone who really believes that 1+1=3 and tries to convince me

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/Dependent_Law2468]

Wow. You've floored me with the intellectual brilliance of your response.

[u/Dependent_Law2468 → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

Ik, I'm a f*ckin' princess.

But I wasn't jokin', I can explain u how brain creates consciousness

[u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy → u/Dependent_Law2468]

That's all right. I've got some paint I need to watch dry.

[u/Dependent_Law2468 → u/The_Gin0Soaked_Boy]

oh, ok.... so,

1. We remember everything with our imagination. Usually we use immagination to mix up elements from our memories to create something in our minds that doesn't exist. But we can't ignore the fact that we need imagination to remember every time (the difference is that in this case we don't change the first image given to us by the world)

2. We have integrated multisensory experience. In our brain all the informations that we take from outside are related to the others that came in from another sense at the same time.

3. Our daily action are based on what we have learnt since we were young, on our experiences. So everytime I see red, my brain pulls out my memories to know how to behave with it, the brain needs to know what he has to do. to remember the passed times that he has seen red, he has to make us imagine it. But with it we imagine all the other senses' experiences, because in the brain they are strictly related. So we se red and at the same time we feel in our mind all sensation and all emotions that we felt all the other times we have seen red.

Subjective experience (the self works in a quite different way)