I’d say a good heuristic would be to include all mammals in any theory about consciousness, wave function collapse, quantum consciousness, etc. and then see if the theory still holds up. If it does, you are probably on to something.
I think scientifically we will look back on “humans are uniquely conscious” as a categorical differentiation instead of a gradient with other mammals to be as absurd as believing the earth is the center of the universe. “Unique consciousness” is a quasi-religious mechanism we use at a societal level to not run around all the time terrified of death.
No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal.
As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures.
A mental trick that helped me understand the concept of “an observer” in particle physics is to imagine it like playing billiards in a pitch black room.
In normal human-scale billiards, there are immense numbers of photons flying around bouncing off everything. The photon interactions are far too small to affect the path of a moving billiard ball, but we can detect them easily with our eyes. So we can use photons to passively observe the balls rolling around.
But when you’re trying to observe a photon itself… there are no tiny photon-equivalents flying around. It’s like playing billiards in pitch black: the only way to know which direction a ball is rolling is to touch it. And you can’t touch a rolling billiard ball without changing its path somehow. Likewise, you can’t “observe” a single photon without interacting with it in some way.
This is a great analogy, but also in experiments the presence or absence of the measuring device like a beamsplitter determines the outcome. The measuring device, the which-way detector is the observer, and it can be regarded as a quantum mechanical system. It's correlations with the rest of the system causes the particle behavior.
> No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal.
Are you saying that the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation[1] does not explicitly postulate consciousness to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement?
Those guys are excused, they were early on the floor, had no idea what's going on. They grew up believing that nature is deterministic, but quantum physics complicated that picture a great deal.
I should've said no interpretation in the 21st century.
> As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures.
That's a really interesting paper, thanks for that. It's also a bit depressing to consider that there's a good chance that everything we think that makes us special is really just an emergent property of a thermodynamics memory and prediction system.
I think scientifically we will look back on “humans are uniquely conscious” as a categorical differentiation instead of a gradient with other mammals to be as absurd as believing the earth is the center of the universe. “Unique consciousness” is a quasi-religious mechanism we use at a societal level to not run around all the time terrified of death.