Our science - Greek science - is based on objectification, through which it cut itself off the path to an adequate understanding of the Subject of knowledge, reason. And I am convinced that this is exactly the point at which our current way of thinking needs to be corrected, perhaps by a blood transfusion of Eastern thought. - Erwin Schrödinger.
Why scientists have ignored the problem of consciousness
The scientific approach to the study of the surrounding reality from the standpoint of materialism over the past centuries has introduced a stable one-sided worldview into society, in which a meaningless material substance is the only and last reality. Moreover, space is only a mechanical jumble of galaxies and stars, and our planet is a speck of dust lost in this cosmic chaos. Life on it is a specific, rare and ultimately useless process - most likely an accidental natural anomaly, and human consciousness, its “I”, is an entity that disappears along with the death of the body.
Such a monochrome, gloomy and flat picture of the world naturally leads a thinking person to the question of the meaning of his existence, to which he does not find an answer. As a result, spiritual pessimism is formed in society, leading to the only goal-oriented attitude to possessing only material values and momentary pleasures as a possible real way of filling one's existence with meaning. However, many scientists understood that such a model of the universe is only a rough reflection of the real world, in which the necessary and very important details are probably missing.
One such important detail that remained outside of scientific analysis for a number of reasons was the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness in no way appeared and did not enter into the equations of classical physics, it simply did not exist in the laws revealed by science, it was always outside the scope of the scientific approach. But such a limited view had a right to life only at an early stage of scientific knowledge. With further deeper penetration into the secrets of the universe, this limitation should have declared itself.
Indeed, with the development of quantum mechanics, ambiguity arose with the properties of the electron and with the role of the observer in the experiment. As it turned out, the electron has a dual nature, and the results of the experiment depend on the observation conditions set by the observer. The question directly affects the interaction of the observer's consciousness with the surrounding reality.
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The dual nature of the microworld and not only it
To understand the duality of the properties of matter in the microworld, let us turn to a simple two-slit experiment. Surely, this experiment is known to many readers from school physics.
The essence of the experiment is that the flow of electrons (light quanta) is directed through a partition with one or two narrow slits - slits - onto a photographic plate. If there is only one slit, a single light strip appears on the photographic plate, that is, electrons behave like particles. When there are two slits, not two, but many stripes appear, that is, electrons in this case behave like waves. A typical interference pattern appears on the photographic plate. In this case, the width of the slits and the distance between them are on the order of the light wavelength of the beam that falls on them. It is curious that when trying to fix with a miniature device, through which slit the electron passes, the interference pattern is destroyed. It is as if the electrons know that they are “being watched or counted” and behave like particles. I.e,The “mysterious nature” gives light quantum properties: either the properties of a wave or particles, depending on the observation conditions.
Back in 1924, Louis de Broglie suggested that such properties are characteristic not only of light, but in general for all particles. Experiments with protons, neutrons and even atoms completely confirmed this assumption in the future. Moreover, at the end of 1999, Austrian scientists demonstrated the wave properties of C70 fullerene molecules. These are the largest objects in which wave properties have been observed.
Numerous experiments convincingly show that whatever particles we take, they all exhibit wave properties under certain conditions. Today, examples of the manifestation of quantum properties of particles are known not only in the microcosm, but also on a macroscopic scale, for example, the phenomenon of superfluidity of liquid helium. In reality, quantum objects are neither classical waves nor classical particles, acquiring the properties of the former or the latter only in a certain approximation.
Effect of measurements on an object
One of the most important questions arising in connection with the properties of measuring quantum states is the question of clarifying the role of the observer (or his consciousness) in the course of the measurement. More recently, a group of scientists from the University of Vienna (Zeilinger et al.) Carried out experiments on fullerene molecules, which are “heated” during flight by a laser beam so that they can emit light and thereby find their place in space. As a result, fullerenes significantly lost their ability to “bend around obstacles” - thus it was shown that the role of an observer can be played by the environment: the mere possibility in principle to detect the position of the fullerene changed the outcome of the experiment. The role of the observer here was to create the experimental conditions (in this case, the heating of fullerene by a laser), in accordance with which nature gave one or another answer.
But scientists from the United States, led by Professor Schwab, have recently shown experimentally that the measurement of the position of a quantum object and the object itself are closely related. In particular, they found that when measuring the position of an object, its spatial state changed. Moreover, the measurements turned out to lower the temperature of the object. Measurements can cool an object better than any refrigerator, Schwab says.
In these studies, scientists discovered the manifestation of the laws of the quantum world not only in experiments with elementary particles, but also with large objects. They found that by observing an object, you can not only change its position, but also its energy.
But in the experiments carried out at MIT (USA) under the leadership of the Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, a thirtyfold slowdown in the decay of an unstable microparticle was observed. For the first time, a comparison was made of the effect of pulsed and continuous observation of a quantum system on the decay process. Under the impulse action, a cloud of atoms was irradiated with a “machine-gun burst” of short and powerful light pulses that quickly followed each other at regular intervals. With continuous exposure, the cloud was irradiated for some time with a beam of low but constant power.
Experiments have shown that with both types of exposure there is a slowdown in the decay of the excited state. Moreover, the stronger the impact (that is, the denser the queue of impulses in the first experiment and the greater the power of light in the second), the more significant the slowdown in decay.
The origin of such a paradoxical phenomenon, according to the researchers, can be explained in the simplest words as follows: “In quantum mechanics, any measurement or even observation“perturbs”the measured particle. If it “tries to decay,” observation returns it (almost) to its original quantum state, from which it tries to decay again. That is why too frequent observation of a particle significantly lengthens its decay time”.
There is only one step from the influence of measurement to the influence of the observer's consciousness on reality
The idea of the need to include the consciousness of the observer in the theory was expressed by many scientists from the first years of the existence of quantum mechanics. For example, this was typical of the views of Jung and Pauli. Wigner's work contains even a much stronger statement: not only must consciousness be included in the theory of measurement, but consciousness can influence reality.
Today this approach is being fruitfully developed by Professor Mensky. He writes: "Apparently, one has to draw a conclusion that is difficult for physicists to accept: a theory that could describe not only the set of alternative measurement results and the probability distribution over them, but also the mechanism for choosing one of them, must necessarily include consciousness."
So, again in quantum physics, two ambiguities have emerged: how is the choice of one alternative in quantum measurement, and what is the role of consciousness in this? Scientists know that it is sometimes more effective to solve two difficult problems at the same time. Apparently, Jung and Pauli were right when they said that the laws of physics and the laws of consciousness should be considered as mutually complementary. Hence, we can assume that the role of consciousness in quantum measurements is to choose one of all possible alternatives. Arguing further on the basis of such a hypothesis, one can notice that only a small step remains from it to Wigner's thought that consciousness can influence reality.
Moreover, as Professor Wheeler put it, the act of observation is, in fact, an act of creation, and that the activity of consciousness has a creative power. All this suggests that we can no longer consider ourselves as passive observers who do not affect the objects of our observation.
Yuri Yadykin
