The black in the box

To be or not to be?

1. This is the question… Or is it not? Are we or are we not? In other words, do we really exist?
2. We do have a strong impression about reality. This is partly due to the pain (the stimuli of the body) we feel, and partly to the belief (the function of the soul) that we truly exist.
3. But while pain, and generally the external and internal stimuli, produce automatic responses, which although promote do not presuppose our conscience, our belief in life and in ourselves is what makes us feel that we are needed and wanted.
4. Is the impression we have about our own being either a necessary or a sufficient condition of existence? Are we real because we do believe or think so? Or is it enough that we exist, either we think about it or not?

Schrödinger’s cat

5. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment about the nature of quantum physics. To describe this experiment, Schrödinger wrote: “A cat is locked up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

6. In simple terms, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) both ‘dead and alive.’ This is used to represent how scientific theory works. No one knows if any scientific theory is right or wrong until the said theory can be tested and proved. [1]

The many-worlds interpretation

7. Can a cat be both dead and alive (like some kind of zombie?) Although it may seem absurd in the context of everyday experience, such an assertion may have some basis in scientific theories.
8. One such theory is the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, formulated by Hugh Everett, and which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the possibly-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them.
9. When opening the box, the observer becomes entangled with the cat, so ‘observer states’ corresponding to the cat’s being alive and dead are formed; each observer state is entangled or linked with the cat so that the ‘observation of the cat’s state’ and the ‘cat’s state’ correspond with each other. Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other.
10. Roger Penrose criticizes this: “I wish to make it clear that, as it stands, this is far from a resolution of the cat paradox. For there is nothing in the formalism of quantum mechanics that demands that a state of consciousness cannot involve the simultaneous perception of a live and a dead cat.” [2]

Is Consciousness the solution?

11. The problem however in Schrödinger’s thought experiment is not the simultaneous perception of both states (a cat both dead and alive) but the simultaneity between the observer and the object of observation (the cat either dead or alive). But what is simultaneous in the process of observation is in fact our own perception of the event.
12. So let’s imagine that we simply have a black box (a box supposed to be empty). That the box is empty is a mere assumption (an axiom). But as soon as we make that assumption, it seems that the box is filled with our thought (which is spontaneous). Thus the box seizes to be an empty thing as soon as we think about it.
13. Furthermore not only the box is filled with something (our own thought) but also acquires subsistence, because we are unable to say if the box itself had existed before we made a thought about it. Therefore the fundamental question is not simply if Schrödinger’s box had been occupied, but if it had been there (either empty or filled) in the first place.
14. But where is the box, since the only place it could have originally been is our own mind? Moreover had our mind, together with all its contents, existed before we thought about it? How can any thought exist if there is no mind to contain it? Since thought cannot be produced without the mind, while the mind cannot be perceived without thought, then thought and the mind are needed so that we have the knowledge of anything which might exist.
15. In fact the box could take the place of any kind of object- including us. As soon we observe an object, the object becomes real, while at the same time our own consciousness finds meaning. We might say that before the observation took place neither the subject nor the object of observation had existed. What seems to be important in the process is neither us nor the object. Both we and the object are part of a process of thought- the evolution of Consciousness in the Universe.

The ‘black in the box’

16. We may now ask ourselves again: Had the universe existed before we observed it? Do we exist when we don’t pay attention to our own existence?  As soon as we have conscience about the world surrounding us, the world also begins to change. But since we are part of the world, as soon as the world begins to change we also change. Thus we become part of what we observe as soon as we observe it, while in the process we get some proof of our own existence. Therefore the ‘observer who observes the object’ is nothing more than a self-referential argument. 

[1]: [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat]

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat]

8/3/2018

Image: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/07/with-many-worlds-all-quantum-mechanics-is-local/]