Educación para la Salud y Promoción de la Salud

Another Nobel laureate, Dr. Eugene Wigner, added a more complex twist to the Schroedinger’s Cat problem, and conclusions emerged similar to Wheeler’s observer-created Anthropic universe, but also startlingly different.

Please remember that we deal always with probabilities, not certitudes, and you will not get too flustered as we proceed to the next twist in Quantum Psychology’s kinky yellow brick road.

In the original cat problem, we had a physicist in a lab, a box, a cat inside the box, a poison gas pellet inside the box, and some radioactive decay process that would sooner or later trigger the explosion of the pellet and the death of the cat. We found that, without opening the box, the equations that describe quantum decay yield a solution in which the statements “the cat has died”

and “the cat still remains alive” remain equally “true” or equally “false”, or at least remain 50%

probabilities. Von Neumann’s logic would have us say both statements remain in the “maybe”

state, like a coin in mid-air.

When we open the box, we find a live cat, or a dead cat, and no more maybe, like a coin that has landed heads or tails. It seems then that we collapsed the state vector by opening the box.

Very well, but now let us look at it from the perspective of another physicist, outside the laboratory. Wigner called this second Observer a friend of the physicist in the lab, and thus this new problem has the title, The Wigner’s Friend Paradox.

After ten minutes, as in our original example, the physicist in the lab, Ernest, opens the box and finds a live cat. (I like happy endings.)

For Ernest, then, the state vector has “collapsed”. The probabilities no longer register as 50% dead and 50% alive, but as 0% dead and 100% alive.

The friend in the hall, Eugene, however, has not heard the news yet. From his perspective, Ernest in the lab remains, like the whole experimental system, in a “maybe” state. Very concretely, Ernest consists of molecules, which consist of atoms, which consist of “particles” and / or “waves”, which follow quantum laws, and Ernest remains with an uncollapsed state vector…

until he opens the lab door, sticks his head out and announces, “Tabby hasn’t died yet.” For Eugene, then, hearing the news collapsed the state vector.

Of course, we all consist of molecules, which consist of atoms, which consist of “particles”

and / or “waves” and we all remain in various “maybe” states until we make a choice in the existential sense.

Between choices, we evidently return to the “maybe” state until we make another choice.

“Existence precedes essence,” remember?

So, from the point of view of Eugene in the hallway, we all contain quantum uncertainty.

The quantum uncertainty only “collapses” into a definite “he done it” or “he didn’t do it” when Eugene observes us.

Now, across the ocean another physicist waits impatiently for the result of this experiment in felixicide. Let us call her Elizabeth.

From Elizabeth’s point of view, the state vector does not collapse when Ernest tells Eugene, “Got a live cat in here, after all.” The state vector in Elizabeth’s universe only collapses when Eugene rushes to a phone, a fax, a computer net or whatever and transmits the signal,

“Live cat this time.” For Elizabeth, the state vector collapsed when the signal arrived. The signal, then, collapsed the state vector, in Elizabeth’s universe.

A fourth physicist, Robin, waits anxiously to hear what electronic message Elizabeth has received… and in Robin’s world, the state vector has not collapsed yet…

And so on… for any number of Observers.

We seem to have arrived back at Von Neumann’s Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, in a different form.

Some will attempt to evade the obvious implications here by saying the state vector only exists as a mathematical formula in human heads – and only in some human heads (those belonging to physicists, in fact). In that case, the Wigner’s Friend problem does not have the radical import of Einstein’s discovery of the relativity of instrument readings. In the Wigner case, the relativity (of when the state vector collapses) only exists in our conceptualizing, whereas Einstein’s relativity exists in meter readings.

This objection overlooks the fundamental discovery of quantum mechanics, which I have stated in dozens of ways ever since the beginning of this book, but which remains so “alien” to our Aristotelian culture that we continually forget it even after we think we have learned. That discovery, to say it again and yet another way, consists in the facts that:

(1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed “real universe”, or some

“deep reality” underlying “this universe”, or some “true reality”, etc. apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

Any statements we do make about such a “deep” reality separate from us can never become subject to proof, or to disproof, and that makes them “meaningless” (or “noise”).

(2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

The reader has read several variations on this, and performed exercises designed (I have hoped) to make this experientially clear, and yet Wigner’s argument probably still sounds a bit

“queer” to some of you out there. Well, it concerns only probabilities as I said again at the beginning of this chapter, and (1) it does not attempt to describe a “deep” reality separate from us and (2) it does describe the kind of “reality” we can experience with our nervous systems and other instruments, so the Wigner argument qualifies as meaningful scientific speech.

Let us try it in reverse. The “common sense” verdict would say, “Well, the damned cat is either dead or alive, even if nobody ever opens the box.”

Since, by its own terms, this can never become subject to test, it has no meaning. As soon as a test does occur, and somebody peeks into the box, we have left “common sense” and / or Aristotelian “reality” and entered operational non-Aristotelian “reality”. In short, once a test occurs we enter the area of science, of existentialism, and of meaningful speech. Without a test, we remain in the area of noise – “sound and fury signifying nothing,” as the Bard said.

“The cat is alive or dead even if nobody looks” has an uncanny resemblance, if you think about it, to that other famous “isness” statement, “The bread is now the body of Jesus Christ, even if every instrument still registers it as bread.” Such non-instrumental, non-existential “truths”

may make good surrealist paintings or poems – they may provoke creativity and imagination, etc.

– but they do not contain information or meaning in any phenomenological context.

But “we” of course remains undefined above.

If we define “we” as the folks in the laboratory, then meaningful speech begins when the box opens. If we define “we” as the folks in the hall, rubbing shoulders with Wigner’s Friend, meaningful speech begins when Ernest opens the lab door and says “Live cat again.” If we define

“we” as the physicists across the ocean, meaningful speech begins when the electronic signal arrives…

I know, I know. It all sounds very weird.

That’s why Einstein had to remind us, “Common sense tells us the earth is flat.”

Please note, that, even if “The cat is dead or alive even if nobody looks” may fit the meaningless category, but “The cat is dead” and “The cat is alive” do not fit that category.

They fit the category of the indeterminate. Remember the distinction between the indeterminate and the meaningless?

Thus, “Somebody put a time bomb under the table” does not qualify as a meaningless statement, even if nobody has looked yet. The odds seem very high that somebody will look, if you speak this loud. In fact, probably everybody will look…

The statement remains “indeterminate” in the time between hearing it and actually checking under the table carefully. Then it becomes either “true” or “false”.

Got it?

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existential / operational probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties.

That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damned near all the Religions on the planet, I think.

PART FIVE