One of the books I’m currently reading is A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau. Essentially, it concerns Gödel’s conclusion that the Theory of Relativity naturally leads to a universe where time isn’t real. I also started The End of Time by Julian Barbour, who comes up with a similar conclusion, though his formulation is much more recent, and in the few pages that I have read, he necessarily bases his ideas partly on the way that the brain processes information (without actually going into the messy neuroanatomically and neuromolecular details.)

The beginning of A World Without Time goes into biographical details about Einstein and Gödel, and by doing so, taught me about positivism. From what I understand, the whole idea is that the only things that are real are things that can be sensed. Yourgrau then notes the irony of Ernst Mach, who believed in this idea so much that he refused to acknowledge the existence of atoms since they can’t be detected without sensory augmentation. (And yet, we now know that life, and therefore, the human body, is dependent on processes that occur at the atomic and molecular level, and we in fact possess a rather exquisitely tuned molecular detector, also known as the otic nerve.)

Yourgrau also discusses the sad life of Ludwig Boltzmann, who came up with the statistical interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics. The fact that entropy ever increases is what results in the so-called arrow-of-time. Boltzmann, however, was afflicted with major depression, and eventually ended up killing himself, probably partly because Mach hated him so much. When I learned about Boltzmann in high school, I ended up with the impression that he killed himself precisely because he was a misunderstood genius.

I logged into Google Reader for the first time in several days, and just realized how out-of-touch with the outside world I am. I barely realized that the Summer Games had started, that Russia had just started a war with Georgia, and that John Edwards was caught lying about having a mistress, and that there’s a possibility that he’s her baby-daddy. Good thing he dropped out of the Presidential race, I guess? And that probably pretty much kills off any notion of a vice-presidency, although he had already publicly disavowed such an idea anyway, since he’d been there and done that already.

But one of the other things that I found myself reading was yesterday’s post at Cosmic Variance (a blog by astrophysicist/cosmologist Sean Carroll) which, in part, discusses the “measurement problem”, which is basically the quantum mechanic-specific version of the Observer’s Paradox. (Yesterday’s post also happens to contain a link to a very lucid description of non-destructive quantum interrogation, otherwise known as quantum computing. The best part is that he explicitly avoids any cat-killing metaphors.)

In the description of the measurement problem, Carroll talks about the major different ways that QM has come to be interpreted: the Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, which states that wave function collapse indeed happens, but the non-measurable states have no real importance and may not even truly exist; the Many Worlds Interpretation, which basically says that every probable outcome results in a branching of the universe; and the hidden-variables interpretation, which states that while we can’t directly measure certain things, they do in fact exist.

I tried slogging through the comments, but what disturbed me was the recurrence of the misconception that consciousness collapses the wave function, when in fact is it physical measurement that collapses the wave function. (According to any of these major interpretations, there is no difference between me opening the box and seeing if the cat is dead or not, or if a robot were to open the box and detect whether the cat was dead or not. There is no need to invoke the anthropic principle here.)

The main issue I have is that we don’t even really know what Consciousness is. You can’t just wield it around like some magic wand.

Which leads me to yet another book I am reading: I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. So far, I’m getting an idea of what exactly he means by a strange loop. The easier part is simply the recursive nature of consciousness. In computer science terminology, it is a process that basically monitors itself. I haven’t gotten far enough into the book to know, but one of the thoughts that comes to mind is whether or not this process has some causal agency (does my consciousness necessarily allow free-will?) or whether it just happens to be a passenger attached to the actual causal processes that occur subconsciously and are the result of millions of years of evolutionary programming responding to external stimuli, thus giving us the illusion of free-will but never really straying from a deterministic system.

If we ever figure out what it actually means to be conscious, then we may have a chance at figuring out AI, and maybe even how to interpret QM, but until then, Consciousness in the context of QM has no relevance.

Which serendipitously leads me to yet another blog post that manages to encapsulate a lot of my thoughts: Gina Franco (author of reli{e}able signs) excerpts a passage from from John Caputo’s description of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on faith. Apparently one of the Jesuit priests who taught at my high school had also read Derrida. I will always remember that he told us that faith has nothing to do with certainty, and that certainty in fact eradicates the need for faith.

So we find ourselves perched between a scenario where the only things that are real are the things that you can sense, and a scenario where reality is just whatever you decide to make of it. But if QM and deconstructionism can teach us non-physicists and non-metaphysicists anything, it is the fact that reality typically eschews any black-and-white interpretations. Reality is always somewhere in between whatever we can describe.