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Consciousness is irrelevant to Quantum Mechanics

An Interview with Carlo Rovelli

19th July 2022
| Italian theoretical physicist and loop quantum gravity pioneer. He is the author of, among other books, White Holes, The Order of Time, Reality Is Not What It Seems, and Anaximander.
| Managing editor for the LSE's British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously the senior editor for the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas.
1,687 words
Read time: approx. 8 mins

From its very inception quantum mechanics troubled physicists. It seemed to challenge our conception of reality and lead to apparent contradictions. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, questioned whether the theory offered a description of reality at all. Others, like Niels Bohr, claimed that somehow human consciousness played a role in the theory. In this interview, Carlo Rovelli explains Heisenberg’s anti-realist motivations, clarifies the role of the “observer” in quantum mechanics, and articulates his relational interpretation of the theory, according to which reality is a network of interactions.

 

The founders of quantum mechanics were very uncomfortable with its results – famously Einstein thought it an incomplete theory and quipped “God doesn’t play dice”, and Schrödinger abandoned physics altogether for biology. What was so radically different about quantum mechanics than classical physics that caused such discomfort to its own creators?

Physics used to describe what happens in a physical process. If you kick a ball and break a window, physics describes the full path of the ball from your feet to the window. Quantum theory doesn’t do so.  It only describes how your kicking the ball gives rise to the breaking of the window, without telling what happens in between, how the ball has been flying. When you try to fill-in a story of what happens in between, you get nonsense: like the ball being in two places at the same time.


Are physicists today still conscious of how radical the theory is and its wider implications for our picture of reality?  Or have we become so familiar with quantum mechanics, because of its technological applications and because it’s been around for a while now, that we don’t appreciate its radical nature?

Yes, I think that the majority of physicists are very conscious of how radical the theory is.  Some think about it, some just accept it, and use it to predict the outcome of processes, without bothering asking what the hell is really going on. But most realise that this is definitely strange. 

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Consciousness never played a role in quantum mechanics, except for some fringe speculations that I do not believe have any solid ground.

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Do you think there will ever come a time when quantum mechanics no longer puzzles us? Or will it always challenge our received picture of reality?

I think that a time will come when we have clearly understood the radical novelty of quantum theory and what it says about the world. I am optimistic that this time will be soon. But the everyday picture of reality will be challenged. This is what science has always done, like when we discovered that the Earth is round, that it spins fast, or that the chimpanzees are cousins, or that solid matter is made of atoms. It is just a process of continuously readjusting our understanding of the world. It’s not different from what happens when we see a distant forest as a uniform green and then get closer and start seeing the trees, the branches, the insects....  we learn more about the world, and in this process our previous pictures are challenged.  


 consciousness and the wavefunction collapse SUGGESTED READING Consciousness is the collapse of the wave function By Stuart Hameroff The observer and consciousness seemed to play quite a central role in the early interpretations of quantum mechanics, but no longer. Why is that?

Carlo Rovelli
Alexis Papazoglou
19th July 2022

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Grant Castillou 24 July 2022

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly.

Jim Johnson 1 22 July 2022

If the wave function collapses in the quantum state, why do some theorists believe that in our everyday "classical physics" world that quantum effects can occur? Like the many worlds theory?

Liam B 1 22 July 2022

I really enjoyed Helgoland by Rovelli, recommend the audiobook for anyone. The relational model is so elegant and compact I think it should be used to reformulate philosophical logic. It’s powerful enough to express quantum and does more than classic logic. As for the principle of the article, the “consciousness is needed” argument has to assume this division between humans and matter and is antiquated. All the quantum magic still exists in Rovelli’s view, but the whole universe participates in it not just human observers, and it lets us recover a lot of the realism that made classic science great.

ElizabethS 21 July 2022

Refreshing, and something of a relief - thank you both. It seems to be human nature to see things based on our own lived perspectives. We put ourselves in a special place in the universe. Within the framework of creation (itself a loaded word) the scale of man is very small. Yet we try to join the extremes of scale using abstract ideas. And consciousness could be merely a comforting concept. I ticked the 'I am not a robot' box! Thank you again.

Samuel Bebber 21 July 2022

Thanks for your post. I’ve been thinking about writing a very comparable post over the last couple of weeks, I’ll probably keep it short and sweet and link to this instead if thats cool.