Thought Provoker
Posts: 530
Joined: April 2007
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Hi Creeky Belly,
You wrote...
| Quote | | The article you think seems to raise more questions than it can answer. There was no waveform collapse until conscious beings evolved? Are detectors conscious? Why is the notion of decoherence with neighboring systems not enough? |
Let's take them one at a time. Penrose offers the Waveform Collapse (he calls it Objective Reduction) has a time limit. It will collapse regardless of whether anyone is observing or not. Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive in 10^-31 seconds whether anyone is observing or not. Actually, the fact that the cat is a conscious observer complicates things. This is why Penrose usually uses mechanical weights in his examples (did the weight fall or not?).
Mechanical devices are not conscious, but they have mass which influences things. Penrose's proposed FELIX experiment uses a mechanical mirror in superposition to test his decoherence calculations.
Decoherence can result from interference from neighboring mass. That is why Penrose-Hameroff spend the effort to explain how the microtubule structure keeps tubulin dimers isolated from neighboring systems.
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