New on the site: Michi-bot. An intelligent assistant based on the writings of Rabbi Michael Avraham.

Self-awareness and quantum

שו”תCategory: philosophySelf-awareness and quantum
asked 2 years ago

In an interesting article by Shnerb, he makes the following claim: Quantum dynamics slows down when many and frequent measurements are made. What will happen, then, when we make a continuous measurement? The system will simply “freeze,” that is, it will stop evolving in time. This is exactly the situation of an object measuring itself. Our very existence is known to us evidentially, as Descartes showed, and without entering into a discussion of the concept of measurement, it is clear that at the very least our knowledge is a measurement. It follows that a superposition of life (knowledge of itself) and death is not possible. These two physical entities cannot be in a complex state because “life” requires measuring itself and therefore must be in a state of self. How, then, can we explain the fact that we observe the creation and destruction of self-measuring beings? He offers two possible solutions – with respect to other measurers, the measuring object itself can be in a superposition state and therefore can move to a different state of self. The measurer himself is not of interest to us, since the observation of the “death” of any measurer is always made by other measurers. The flaw in this solution is that it assumes that the measurer himself remains in the same self-state even when, with respect to others, he is in an opposite self-state. The second option emphasizes the fact that self-awareness is a discontinuous process. Since the measurer is a physical object, the act of measuring has a certain rhythm in time, and between one self-measurement and another there is no self-state limit, and therefore it is possible to switch to a different self-value during this period. This solution seems simple from a physical point of view, but it casts a heavy shadow on the cogito itself. The existence of a “living” self-measuring object becomes a discrete series of unrelated events, and the consciousness of the continuity of existence (i.e., the assumption that “I think” a few minutes ago is the same as “I think” now) is perceived in this sense as an illusion. Ostensibly, both answers leave us with very unintuitive conclusions. Does the Rabbi have a solution for this?

Leave a Reply

0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 2 years ago

I read this article a long time ago and I don’t remember the details anymore. I just remember wondering back then about reductionism, according to which self-awareness is measurement and life is a measurable physical quantity. I think there is a wild extension of quantum ideas here. In other words: awareness concerns the noumena and the whole of quantum theory belongs to the phenomenon.

Leave a Reply

Back to top button