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But that’s all. Let me say something else which outside the laws of known physics, this is not something that people normally even recognize as a problem. I mean they do, but they shove it under the carpet. Which is what’s known as the collapse of the wave function. Now you see, current quantum mechanics, strictly speaking, is an inconsistent theory. That’s rather a brutal way of saying what Einstein and Schrodinger and even Dirac said, quantum mechanics is incomplete. And the way to explain this is, okay there’s a wonderful equation which tells you how a state evolves in quantum mechanics called the Schrodinger equation. Now the Schrodinger equation tells you if you know what the state of a system is now, the Schrodinger equation tells you what it will be tomorrow if you like. The evolution of that state is governed by this wonderful equation due to Erwin Schrodinger. The trouble is that it doesn’t. That’s to say, the way physicists usually use the Schrodinger equation is to work out certain probabilities of what an observation on the system would tell you. So what you have to do is you wheel out of the cupboard a measuring device, and this measuring device, you set it on the system which is evolving according to the Schrodinger equation, and it measures it. And the process of measurement does not follow the Schrodinger equation. It gives you a probabilistic answer, this or this or this. That’s another outside the system problem. It’s certainly outside the Schrodinger equation. Right, right, right. And Schrodinger was terribly worried about this. I mean, he produced his cat in the box and all sorts of things, you see. He clearly realized there was a problem, as did Einstein. There’s no question about that. Some others didn’t. Well, they took a different view. They said, look, we don’t understand the theory well enough. And that’s more that we’re saying. Where Schrodinger was not saying that. He was saying we understand it well enough to see that that’s not the way the world operates. When you make a measurement on the system, it does not follow the Schrodinger equation. And that’s what people understand about quantum mechanics. But it’s a sort of vague set of rules about it doesn’t tell you what constitutes a measurement. Right. That’s your trouble. Yeah, that’s a big trouble. That’s the big trouble. Yeah, yeah. They say if you do a measurement, then it just becomes probability for one this or that or the other. But it doesn’t say what kind of a device makes a measurement. Now, there’s one school of thought which has been going on from way back to the early days of quantum mechanics. Wigner in particular promoted this point of view, that it’s a conscious being observing the system. And that makes the measurement. That’s what Wheeler believed, I believe. I think Wheeler might have believed. Quite a lot of people believe that. I think von Neumann had a similar sort of view. I’m not quite so sure about his view. But certainly Wigner, and I talked to Wigner about this. Yeah. I got the feeling from Wigner, he wasn’t quite as dogmatic. He was made out to be on this issue. He just thought this was a possibility, I think. But anyway, people often refer to it as the Wigner view that it’s a conscious being who makes the measurement. That’s not my view. My view is that it’s almost the opposite of that view. That there is an objective physical process which deviates from the Schrodinger equation in which the state does collapse so that it becomes one or the other or the other with certain probabilities. And that this has to do with when gravity is brought into the picture. And there’s reasons for believing this. I don’t want to go into that. But there is reason for seeing. I’d like you to go into it if you would be willing to. Because I’m very… Well, it’s a very clear mathematical calculation. There’s not a question about it. It’s a question of what you do with it, you see. And what you do with it, according to me, is to say, okay, it tells you that this system has a lifetime and it will, in that lifetime, become one or the other. Without a measurement? It’s sort of, that’s right, yes, without a… Well, it’s so interesting to me that you’re interested in consciousness and you see that consciousness in this Goodell theorem sort of manner. And I would think the most predictable thing for you to believe as a consequence of that would be that it is conscious measurement that collapses the quantum indeterminacy, the waveform. And yet you don’t. You think that that statistical vagueness will collapse into something that’s essentially, is it either or, is it binary? Is it zero one, the collapse? No, you mean, no, there’s a probability it’ll do whatever. Right, but when the probability collapses. Well, if it’s a two state system, you see you might have an object which is in a superposition of here and here. That was Dirac’s first lecture, I remember. And he took out his piece of chalk and said, well, and he was talking about atoms, you see. According to quantum mechanics, or a particle, one particle can be here, or it can be here, or it can be in a state which is partly here and partly here at the same time. And then he took out a piece of chalk. And people tell me he used to break it in two. I can’t quite remember, because my mind was drifting away from what he was saying, and I was looking out of the window and thinking about something completely different. And unfortunately, it only came back after he’d gone on to the next topic. So I missed the explanation, which was probably a good thing, as I think back on it, because probably the explanation was something sort of to calm you down and stop worrying about the problem. I suspect it was something like that. So you don’t think that a conscious observer, per se, is necessary to collapse the wave form? Absolutely, that is what I don’t, I mean, I’m agreeing with you. I don’t believe that, yes. But you do think that, if I’m not mistaken, that the presence of an observer in the universe, that is to say, the observation of the universe by us, is that true to say is fundamental to the universe? Not really. That’s an interesting question, but it’s not part of my view. The world would be there quite independently of whether they were creatures of consciousness. Yes, yes.