Consciousness and the Problem of Quantum Measurement
arXiv Preprint Archive November 2, 2019 preprint
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Quant-ph Quantum-consciousness Measurement-problem Quantum-mechanics Quantum-foundations |
| Key points | Proposes that a variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation using Fock space and unitary states of consciousness can avoid the quantum Zeno effect. |
Abstract
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. It does not make use of the familiar language of wave functions and observers. Instead it pictures the state of the physical world as a vector in a Fock space and, therefore not, literally, a function of any spacetime coordinates. And, rather than segregating consciousness into individual points of view (each carrying with it a sense of its proper time), this model proposes only unitary states of consciousness, Q(t), where t represents a fiducial time with respect to which both the state of the physical world and the state of consciousness evolve. States in our world's Fock space are classified as either 'admissible' (meaning they correspond to definite states of consciousness) or 'inadmissible' (meaning they do not). The evolution of the state vector of the world is such as to always keep it restricted to 'admissible' states. Consciousness is treated very much like what Chalmers calls an "M-Property." But we try to show that problems with the quantum Zeno effect do not arise from this model.