The only other problem that I feel may require a similarly "out-there" explanation would be the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation? The existence of some type of cutoff between macroscopic and microscopic seems to me to suffer from inevitable inconsistencies. More likely, I would think, is that something like the many worlds interpretation is correct.
Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar will happen when we understand consciousness more deeply. Simply saying that it's an emergent property is sort of cheating and discounting how different the sense of experience is from anything else that we have seen in nature.
People get hung up on this semantic concept of 'measurement' when that's not what it's about at all. It's not "if you measure a property of a particle then you change that property", it's "if you interact with a property of a particle then you change it, and that it's impossible to measure without interacting".
The electron doesn't care whether you're conscious and certainly not whether you're writing anything down. Its momentum or whatever is still going to change regardless.
a photon that has been "marked" and then "unmarked" will interfere with itself and produce the fringes characteristic of Young's experiment.
The way I understand it is that particles are fuzzy, but if they interact with sharper things they get less fuzzy themselves. Naturally large amounts of interacting particles (macroscopic objects) are way sharper than single isolated particles. So measurement is just theoretical concept that relates to system physically getting immensely less fuzzy to a point we can safely assume for the sake of easier calculations that it's not fuzzy at all. You can still describe such sharp system with Schrödinger equation, it still works even after measurement, but you don't do that since there are easier ways like Newtons mechanics. There's no artificial cutoff. There are just many orders of magnitude difference of how sharp things become through interaction.
You can see that experimental scientists managed to make pretty large systems to display quantum superposition if they are properly isolated from interaction with way larger systems that could knock them out of superposition.
As for consciousness my opinion is that it's just some specific algorithm that has some evolutionary utility for some animals. It's fairly good for modelling self, environment and the future. It's not in any way pinnacle of development. It's gradual like human has more consciousness than dog, and dog more than a hamster, but not to the point of absurd, that single electron or even single neuron has some amount of consciousness. Just the same as you shouldn't think that single electron or even neuron has some intrinsic ability to perform sorting or image recognition. You need hardware, and yes, more powerful hardware yields stronger results, but you still need to have at least rudimentary versions of correct algorithm running on that hardware before you can actually say it does the thing.
It appears to be more complicated than that, see Wigner's friend[1] thought experiment and a recent experimental realization of it[2].
From the paper's abstract: "In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realise this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. If one holds fast to the assumptions of locality and free-choice, this result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way."
So when Wigner's friend makes the measurement of quantum system through interacting with it he causes it to collapse to sharper form. Wigner unaware of the result may still think that there's still some fuzziness in the system that consists of his friend and the experiment he performed. But in fact all the fuzziness was gone when his friend performed the experiment. The fact that Wigner doesn't know that yet, changes nothing in reality. Sure, he can treat his friend and his experiment as if they were quantum system. But they are not. The math I think looks the same if you don't know things about sharp stuff or if you know all there is to know about fuzzy stuff.
The actual 6-photon experiment is a bit too technical for me but I don't supposed "Wigner's friend" in it is built of billions of particles interacting with each other. If the friend is something smaller, like just a few particles that perhaps loosely interact then it's perfectly fine to expect that after measurement of one fuzzy system by another there's plenty of fuzzines left for the macroscopic observer (Wigner) to see.
There's a more approachable explanation, and lengthy discussion, over at Physics Forums: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/a-realization-of-a-bas...
I'm no expert, but it seems to me the issue is of a different, more fundamental, nature.
That's exactly what I think about Schrödinger's Cat experiment. It's often implied that the hypothetical cat may be simultaneously both alive and dead, as if there are only two possible states for the cat.
There are approximately 7 x 10^27 atoms in the average human body. The figure for a cat wouldn't be much far from that I suppose. Taking that into account we can safely say that the quantum system (cat + radioactive source + poison) may actually simultaneously be in an abysmally high number of different entangled states, which may converge to, as you say, a "sharp" form.
...except it's not that simple, and here is why I don't like those experiments (and why in reality, they're always realized using atoms, and not cats): there's no Wigner, or Schrödinger's cat, as a unit in physical sense. They're made of atoms. Atoms that interact and radiate information all the time. That box with a cat with it, the cat radiates information at the speed of light, which gets absorbed by the box and reradiated away. If the result of your thought experiment could be changed or confused by the following setup:
- a) put a broad-spectrum camera suite around the box prior to the experiment
- b) have it record data on the hard drive
- c) have the experimenter do their experiment
- d) have someone pull the data from the hard drive and read out the actual state of the experiment subject
... then it means your explanation for the thought experiment is wrong.
However, we can also view physics itself as something inherently informational, given that all the base particles in the standard model can ultimately be boiled down to scalar values. Would it be possible to say that those values are ultimately derived from the inherently mathematical properties which result in this reality “existing”? What does it mean for something to exist on the basis of its inherent mathematical identity?
If both consciousness and reality are purely mathematical phenomenon (maybe consciousness is more derived through the computation-generating properties of life), why would one such phenomenon be any less expected than the other? Isn’t it impossible for a non-mathematically-derived (informational) consciousness to exist at all in such a universe?
C.S. Lewis for one, this is from "The Abolition of Man":
> But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
Alternatively, there's the obligatory xkcd (https://xkcd.com/877/), but I feel it kind of misses the point a little.
It sounds suspect to me too, but the reason the idea is appealing is that it's worked fantastically for hundreds of similar phenomena. To vastly oversimplify thousands of years of philosophy, for most of human history the default position has been that every idea had to be reified into some metaphysical essence.
What is the essence that makes a dog a dog? That makes bread nourishing but rocks not? That makes rocks solid? That makes fire hot? That makes falling objects seek Earth? Again and again, we've found simple physical explanations for these puzzles, that once were regarded as just as inexplicable as consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is now the last essence that survives, and that's why some bet it'll go the same way as all the rest. "But this one is different", indeed, and every single time so far that argument has been wrong.