You have a too narrow an interpretation of consciousness. You think it something inside your head, looking out. But the chip, the theory, and all of the componentry of that experiment, are products of the mind. — Wayfarer

The failure of that argument is I hope obvious to those reading on - whomever they are. You've expanded "consciousness" to include everything humans ever thought about or created, thus rendering the term useless. If you define everything as consciousness, then trivially, consciousness is all that exists. The ultimate ad hoc justification for a defeated hypothesis.

What I will say is that measurement is a conscious act. — Wayfarer

When, in the guts of the chip on which you are typing, a quantum tunnel sets off a current in a transistor, you are not aware of it. No one is. And yet the measurement has been made. You claim is false.

Your only out is to define measurement in terms of consciousness and then slide the goal post of measurement back to physical interaction.

If you're going to make a point, then make it. — Wayfarer

I have, here:

Some folk would have you believe that consciousness is what collapses the wave function. It isn't. The function is collapsed when measured. — Banno

You would jump from "measurement involves interaction between observer and observed" to "consciousness creates reality". There's a bit of a logical gap there. Bohr's anti-realism does not imply idealism nor that consciousness creates that reality.

What 'more'? — Wayfarer

This is where you back away from your own Mind-created world.

The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. — Wayfarer

So - let's solve that problem! — Wayfarer

See the reply to Joshs, above.

This:

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”. — Wayfarer

sits exactly in agreement with the view I've expressed, and contrary to your need for further metaphysics.

You are the one who wants to say more than is justified by the evidence.

We still need to explain why certain physical interactions produce definite outcomes while others maintain superposition. — Wayfarer

Not according to the Copenhagen interpretation. We have the calculations, they work with extreme accuracy, and nothing more is needed from an explanation. The Copenhagen interpretation denies that we need to explain the mechanism of collapse, that there's some deeper level of reality beneath the quantum description and that the measurement problem requires a solution.

And again, if any interpretation is a consensus amongst physicist, it's the Copenhagen interpretation.

Quantum mechanics works perfectly for making predictions, but it doesn't tell us what's really occurring when superpositions become definite outcomes — Wayfarer

Hang on - that word, "really", ought set one's teeth on edge. The fact is that Quantum Mechanics does tell us what will occur as the result of a superposition, with extraordinary accuracy.

Your sentiment for a deeper mystical account is not an argument. Least of all is some form of idealism required.

While "grammar is a product of the mind", it is also embedded in the world. Rather than being forced to choose between realism and idealism, we might reject the framework that juxtaposes the two. The world is our successful interpretation and communication within our forms of life.

Someone raised the question above : "what is a measurement?" The English word "measure" comes from Latin "mensura', and mensura derives from the root "mens-" meaning Mind*1. — Gnomon

You've misread your own reference. sure, mēns (“mind”) is from PIE *men- (“to think”), but mensūra (“to measure”) is form from PIE *meh₁- (“to measure”).

Measure dervives from Meh, not Mens.

, .

We differentiate between what is believed, understood, thought and so on, and what is true. We do this becasue sometimes what we take to be true is unfortunately not true. We are mistaken, or we are in error, or we are deluded.

It's common for folk with idealist tendencies to confuse what they believe, understand, think etc. with what is true. Folk who think the world is inherently mental phenomena are going to have difficulty differentiating between mental phenomena and the world.

So they might say things such as that "the act of observation seems inextricably connected with an experimental result", and in a way of course this is true - to understand an experimental result requires a mind, after all. To understand that the rock falls requires a mind.

But it would be a mistake to think that therefore the rock could not fall unless there is a mind present - that the rock's fall is inherently a mental phenomena.

That we cannot talk about the way the world is without thereby conceptualising it with our minds does not imply that there is no such world without our so conceptualising it.

There is the ontological truth, that the rock falls. There is the epistemic truth, that a mind holds it to be true that the rock falls. This distinction is what permits us to be mistaken as to how things are.

Physicists are not trained in theories of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Yep. If consciousness were central to physics in the way you suppose, wouldn't physicist be the "go-to" for explaining consciousness?

Again, in the Nature survey, the data is as follows:

Does a measurement require an observer?
Yes, and they must be conscious: 9%
Yes, but consciousness is not relevant (and an 'observer' can include
interaction with a macroscopic environment): 56%
No: 28%
Not sure: 8%

The supposition that there is a consensus amongst physicists that consciousness is an inherent feature of the physical universe is a fabrication. 84% of physicists reject the idea that consciousness is necessary for measurement.

You've always seem to me to avoid it only by an appeal to mysticism or changing the subject.

Even accepting Bergson's distinction between time and duration - and I don't see that we need do so - the problem remains that things cease to exist when we are "unconscious". That problem is not resolved.

Ideas to me are irreducible mental events. — MoK

A pretty sketchy notion.

Indeed. We can detect consciousness. That's why we differentiate between some's being asleep and awake...

And we differentiate between doing something consciously and unconsciously - driving to the local shops being the usual example.

It's a problem for solipsism generally. And Idealism has a great deal of difficulty avoiding solipsism. If to be is to be perceived then things cease to exist when unperceived; including, it seems, other people.

Hence solipsism.

Is that a third way?

The clincher is the dynamic between a complete, incorrect account and an incomplete, correct account. I'm advocating the latter, and it seems you are, too.

I hadn't noticed this thread. But I covered much the same topic in my thread Two Ways To Philosophise.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia. — Banno

The trouble with a complete picture is that it tends to be completely wrong.

You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words. — Astorre

That's the analytic approach at work. Thanks for indulging me.

It might well be a language issue, since my reservation rests on that word "revealed". Something is revealed that it is already there but hidden, and comes to be seen. The letter is revealed by opening the envelope, the body revealed by removing the clothing, and so on. But a microscope does not have a hammerness that is revealed by using it as a hammer...

I think you have just shown how the terminology can spiral out of control very, very quickly when talking about the phenomenon of consciousness. — I like sushi

Thank you. That's what I'd hoped. To my eye this shows the incoherence of such talk. So mucht he worse for phenomenology.

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, — Astorre

I don't know how to make sense of that.

Is your suggestion that hammerness is a potential or opportunity or modus inherent in a microscope?

Much simpler to just say that someone might use a microscope as a hammer. Drop all the hoo-ha.

It depends on how you interpret what he was saying alongside what it appears he actually meant. — I like sushi

Obviously.

So, did the clock on your wall keep moving while you slept, or was there a leap from when you closed your eyes to when you opened them again, no time passing - nothing exists, just things leaping ahead as if time had passed?

Indeed, there would be no period of unconsciousness, since time is a part of the world that supposedly ceases to exist "while you are unconscious"...

There could never be a period in which you are not conscious.

C.G. Jung once said that the world only exists when you consciously perceive it. — Jan

Back to this. Was he right?

Did the world cease to exist last night while you slept?

What would happen if you were to pretend that it had? If you insisted that events that others claim occurred while you slept did not occur, becasue nothing existed while you were asleep?

How would others treat you?

Would any advantage accrue to you from this exercise? Any at all?

I’m not ‘proclaiming’ anything. — Wayfarer

Sure.

The graph isn't embarrassing, as indeed is pointed out repeatedly in the comments. The results from this small survey are not too far form the results in the bigger Nature survey I cited above. (thirty odd compared to 1,100). The Copenhagen interpretation hold steady in both.

To be fair, neither survey included your option, "It's magic".

...this is a philosophy forum... — Wayfarer

That doesn't validate a leap into proclaiming what is mere speculation.

nobody understands quantum physics' — Wayfarer

If you stopped there, we would have little disagreement.

But in a few posts you will be leaping beyond the obvious truth that we only know stuff with our mind, to the mind created world; to mind not just being an outcome of the way things are, but the reason that things are this way.

Now you may be right; but the evidence available does not support your certainty. And there are conceptual difficulties you have yet to overcome.

It's you who goes past Feynman's aphorism.

Calling it magic is not explaining it. But calling it magic might lead one not to look for a better answer.

Why make the leap to calling it magic? Why not just say: "I don't know, but I will try to find out..."

Sure. Someone will be along soon to remind us of the other three Aristotelian causes, and claim to be agreeing that efficient cause is but one and so not the whole of explanation. We also have logical structure, linguistic and semantic relations, normative and evaluative judgements, Constitutive rules... "counts as", emergent properties... And so on.

Sure. Nor is it answered by Indian mysticism.

, - to be sure, the account is not settled. There is room for discussion and compromise, and the answer may only be decided by experimentation.

However there are those here who, for their own reasons, will pretend that the issue is settled, and in favour of consciousness being needed to collapse the wave form.

In the Nature survey cited above, only 9% of physicists will agree with them.

Now will come a series of arguments aimed at discounting the view of collapse as measurement, beginning with

↪Banno But are can only be validated by observation a posteriori. — Wayfarer

Note that this is a seperate point - the simple truism that we can only know how things are by looking at how things are. It ignores the difference between somethings being true and being known to be true. A common bit of antirealist rhetoric.

That seems right. — Janus

Cheers.

The mechanistic model is a great example of a case taken far beyond it's context. We seem to understand how causation functions in a game of billiards; the picture gains such a hold on us that we presume the same sort of causation is at work in thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics or psychology or sociology or even ethics.

...revealed... — Astorre

Ok, so you are saying that the hammerness is already there in the thing, logically prior to the use as a hammer; and that the use brings out the hammerness.

Why not go the whole hog and say that there is no "hammerness", no property of being a hammer already there; but that what happens is that we decide that it counts as a hammer, basically for our own purposes. That there is no "hammerness already there in the thing".

Hammerness is just an example — Astorre

Sure.

Does hammerness inhere in the hammer, or is it something we attribute to the hammer?

Is hammerness a permanent, even essential, part of the hammer, or is it something we do with and attribute to the hammer?

Examples of measurements without consciousness:

• A photon hitting a photographic plate and causing a chemical reaction
• Cosmic rays interacting with particles in space
• Radioactive decay triggering a Geiger counter in an empty room
• DNA mutations caused by radiation

Each collapses the wave function. None involve consciousness.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y

I did. You speak of "Hammerness". I don't think that helpful. You have the "hammerness" being "revealed" by its use. Better to drop "hammerness" all together and just have that thing being used to hammer as our reason for saying that it is a hammer.

It's not revealed, since that implies that it was a hammer apart from it's use as a hammer. Better to say attributed.

We include that in the set of hammers. It isn't in the set of hammers apart from our so including it.

Some folk would have you believe that consciousness is what collapses the wave function. It isn't. The function is collapsed when measured.

I'm confused. I'd understood from your previous account that, as it were, being a hammer is something we do with that - an attribute, as put it.

But now you are back to talking about a somewhat mysterious notion of "hammerness".

...the hammer is revealed in its use... — Astorre

As if it were a hammer already, apart from our attribution.

You seem to have rid yourself of properties only to reintroduce them.

an icon of what science is about — Ludwig V

Oh, yes. But when one looks closely, it turns out to be difficult to say what sort of thing a cause is, and to describe actual science in causal terms. Like the scientific method, we know what it is until we try to say how it works.

there are reasons for thinking that deductive certainty is not all that it is cracked up to be. — Ludwig V

Yep. TheOP's framework assumes that genuine explanation must bottom out in metaphysical causes. But this misses how much successful science operates at other explanatory levels entirely.

Are you saying that we should stop talking about causes altogether, or that we need to re-think the concept of causation? — Ludwig V

I'd favour the more humble point, that cause is overrated if it is considered to be the only, or even the most important, explanation. When causation is master, non- causal explanations are forced into casual form, as when ethics is seen as mere biology, or maths aw psychology; Non-causal structures and patterns are missed; or worst case, folk mistake the absence of a causal explanation for the absence of any explanation at all.

...underdetermination is the space for research and discovery — Ludwig V

Yep. That willingness to live with and investigate the precariousness inherent in the absence of deductive certainty is more than just science; it's the human condition" "I don't know, buy I'll take a look"

Somethgn like that, anyway.

Well, in pure set theory a and b are sets too, because it's sets all the way down. — litewave

Well, trivially, yes, since pure set theory is about nothing but sets of sets and the empty set.

a and b are sets too? — litewave

No, but {a} and {b} are.

Chairs are collections too. — litewave

We'd have to look into Wittgenstien's analysis of simples here, and ask if the chair or the leg or the table set is the individual.

A step too far, I think, for this thread.

"abstract" objects — litewave

I spoke a bit about how we might define "abstract" here - that we have a and b and then add the abstract item {a,b} without adding anything to the domain - it still contains just a and b, but we can talk as if there were an abstract thing {a,b}.

I was responding to your post in which you used the phrase "reified metaphysical entities". I understood them simply as real entities. — litewave

Cool. Too many words, too many crossed discussions. The aim might be to be clear about what the individuals we are talking about are.

So we can talk about a and b. And we can change the game a bit and talk about {a,b}. And in one way we have added a new thing to the conversation, yet in another way we are still just talking about a and b. We may be tempted to ask which way is real, but perhaps that question is irrelevant provided we talk clearly.

Chairs are collections too. — litewave

There's a whole new barrel of fish.