Big claims inbound. Quantum computing challenging reality as we know it.
This is frustrating. From fhe initial framing of the article (part that’s not paywalled) and the title It seems to be, for the 1000th time, insisting that reality is derived from conscious experience, but that is not how that works and people have spent decades trying to correct this misperception.
Anything that can be observable, whether it’s by a person or not, totally without any reference to human consciousness, will have macro scale properties.
It started with Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which showed us that lengths of space and durations of time vary depending on who is looking.
Ugh. Einstein was uncomfortable with the term “relativity” precisely because people might start talking this way. Spacetime is absolute, and the proportions of something distributed through space and through time are governed by rules that accurately predict what you’ll see at different places and times. That’s not quite the same as the implication here that it’s just different for different people.
The hook of the article is behind a paywall so I can’t see any more but it’s a worrying start.
Yeah, I got a bit pissed too when I first read this (wasn’t paywalled for me) as it scratches all the bullshit-bingo quantum-woo memes¹, but I came to the conclusion they just try way to hard to find non-sciency “easy” explanations.
¹ equating “observer” with “conscious being”, schrödingers cat out of context and for no reason, einstein was “wrong”, mind over matter
here’s a non paywalled version, and I agree with your sentiment https://web.archive.org/web/20220202175312/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333720-800-do-we-create-space-time-a-new-perspective-on-the-fabric-of-reality/
Sorry, when I opened the article I could read it (I don’t pay NewScientist), maybe I’ll try to copy paste it. It’s not about conscious experience, but from quantum interaction. Like when particles entangle with each other.
It’s a big mistery why those entangled particles decohere, and people have been trying to find answers. So, what they’re going for here is the obvious: “obviously those particles decohere because they’re decohering into a greater state of interaction”. It’s not about consciousness.
Last part of the article talks about trying to mathematically fix the communication of qubits, which, if it can be done, would support this claim that everything is constantly interacting.
It’s not about conscious experience, but from quantum interaction
The problem is that the article repeatedly flies very very close to the sun with all kinds of phrasing implying “perspectives” of individuals (e.g. consciousness).
In physics, as in life, it is important to view things from more than one perspective
lengths of space and durations of time vary depending on who is looking.
It seemed to show that by measuring things, we play a part in determining their properties
A century later, many physicists question whether a single objective reality, shared by all observers, exists at all.
For the first time, we can jump from one quantum perspective to another.
At a bare minimum it’s definitely equivocating between “perspective” in the sense of human perspective and perspective in the sense of frames of reference as it pertains to physics. And the article title is “do we create space-time”? Why even bother using open-ended phrasing that flirts with that possibility in the first place? We have so much misinformation that comes from people playing with meaning about the relation between quantum and conscious things that using paraphys upon paragraphs of phrasing that veers into and then out of that implication conveys the same impression as stating it outright.
Well, I would say maybe the writer hopes there is some relation. This thinking is “problematic” as in, yes, Quantum Coaching, but there is a possibility that quantum information and consciousness are related.
https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2020.08.002
Of course, I don’t think we, as humans, have much of an impact on Jupiter or Saturn, but there is a possibility these things are related.
It’s true that one cite this or that article that plays with quantum and conscious stuff, but they don’t represent a consensus position and there’s a long history of people attempting to blend these concepts together in ways that are obvious and vulgar mistakes. I think every next new attempt to do the same thing should be viewed in the context of that history and regarded with deep suspicion.
@jazzjfes posted a full link so we’re good. I was able to look further down the article, and I think there’s some meat there to the QC stuff that is independent of the framing that starts at the beginning of the article.
https://outline.com/XhtWcF For the whole article
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How is this overhyped?
What do you mean?
Things like this are often hyped by the mass media pop-science outlets, when they’re usually just lab experiments that aren’t really gonna happen forever. I’ve been reading about Quantum Computers in Popular Science since like the early 2000s.
