Stuart Hameroff and quantum consciousness

[Count Dooku]

So, there is a debate going on in another forum I frequent (I just lurk here and enjoy reading, but I'm very active in the other forum I'm speaking of) about the validity of quantum consciousness. You can search on youtube for Stuart Hameroff or any video about 'quantum consciousness' for a good look at what I'm talking about, but here's me question: is it valid?

I've only taken one quarter of quantum chemistry, but from what I remember (from last quarter), a photon collapses a probability wave (in the double slit experiment, for instance), not a conscious observer. Is this correct? Stuart Hameroff would claim that it's a conscious mind that collapses the wave. On the other forum I argued that you could run the experiment as follows: 1) such that you'd get the classical wave interference pattern, 2) measure which slit a photon goes through to get the classic 'bullet' pattern, and 3) measure it, but don't have a conscious observer present, and look at the results. The measurement, not the conscious observer, is what causes the wave to collapse, and the only way to measure it, is to shine light on it, bringing us to dxdp, and that SHOULD be a simple enough explanation to disprove the conscious observer bit, right?

[FireNexus]

This seems like the kind of idea that would be blatantly unfalsifiable. They would shift the goal posts on you so any knowledge of any potential experiment maybe occurring at some unknown time would be sufficient to activate the magic quantum consciousness effect.

[Dave]

Not that I know anything about quantum mechanics, but as I understand it, measuring or observing it is what collapses the "probability wave", not consciousness, because to measure or observe it, you have to interfere with it. The act of bouncing something off it to observe it would be what collapses the probability wave.

Is the probability wave another way of saying "we don't know?" That's what it sounds like to me. Because until you look at the results of the double slit experiment, the only knowledge you have about the results of the experiment is what the probability should be.

The illusion of the "necessity of consciousness to observe it" would be the result of mentally modeling the state of the experiment in the above manner.

And yes, as FireNexus says, it would be impossible to falsify the quantum consciousness effect, and further, as he says, it could be applied to all experiments, hell, even all future events. So we don't know the future until we see it; news at eleven.

EDIT: grammar.

[Kuroneko]

I've only taken one quarter of quantum chemistry, but from what I remember (from last quarter), a photon collapses a probability wave (in the double slit experiment, for instance), not a conscious observer. Is this correct?

The 'orthodox' (and considerably outdated) view is that in QM, there are two fundamental processes: a unitary evolution of the system left alone, given by Schrödinger's equation, and a non-unitary state reduction caused by observation by some macroscopic system. But if you consider a system and its environment interacting in some thermodynamically irreversible manner, then there will be a flow of information between them. But then taken by itself, the system's evolution will be non-unitary, because some information is lost to the environment.

Well, actually, I'm being slightly disingenuous--in this view, there is no "true" collapse at all, so I'm presupposing a particular interpretation. But it does lead to a point: there are interpretations of QM in which there is no collapse and also interpretations of QM in which collapse is an objectively real event that has nothing to do with consciousness (indeed some in which it doesn't even happen at at any specific time). All of them at least bring some mathematical formalism to describe the (either "true" or "apparent") collapse.

It's not clear to me whether one can consistently ascribe collapse to consciousness, but it is pretty clear that even if so, the enterprise would be a dubious case of special pleading and inordinate vagueness compared to its competitors.

Is the probability wave another way of saying "we don't know?"

No. The quantum state, which has this probabilistic interpretation, is literally all there is to know about the system. Bell's theorem guarantees that any successful theory that satisfies the principle of locality must have no more information than quantum mechanics.