Quantum Consciousness

The Youtube video posted below has amassed almost two million hits; the clip is excerpted from the film What The Bleep Do We Know? This movie promotes the idea of quantum consciousness; that is, a hypothesis that posits a universal mind of humanity – living, dead and unborn, that is “embedded at the Planck scale”.

The first four minutes of the clip are reasonable, however, the annoying Dr Quantum does make some statements towards the end of the video that I take issue with:

The electron decided to act differently, as though it was aware it was being watched.

The electron did not decide to do anything. The macroscopic measuring device, which is itself comprised of atoms that contain electrons, simply interacted with the electron hence causing it to behave differently. 

What does an observer have to do with any of this? The observer collapsed the wave function simply by observing.

The makers of this movie and others like them, such as the fabulously wealthy self-help guru Deepak Chopra, postulate a profound association between quantum and mind as a consequence of the unfortunate choice of language employed by the founders of quantum mechanics. When Heisenberg described the necessary interaction between the observer and what is being observed, and how the state of a system is determined by the act of its measurement, he unintentionally gave the impression (to people who don’t understand the physics) that human consciousness plays a role. It doesn’t. Had Heisenberg spoken of measurements made by inanimate instruments rather than by “observers” clowns like Chopra (and Dr Quantum) would find it far more difficult to blur the distinction between real science and mystical nonsense. The following video features a proper physicist demonstrating Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Note that an inanimate instrument, which is presumably not conscious in any meaningful way, causes the photons to behave differently. Within this context “observing” something simply means measuring it using non-living, macroscopic instruments. In fact, after humans are long gone, some of our machines may remain active, and those machines will analyze and determine the state of quantum events no differently than they do today. It is inanimate objects that do our “observing”. Nothing in quantum mechanics requires our involvement.