These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Einselection:
Darwinian Collapse One man who has
been studying the problem of how classical Physics emerges from Quantum Physics
(how objects that behave deterministically emerge from particles that behave
probabilistically, how coherent states of Quantum Mechanics become classical
ones) is the Polish-born Wojciech Zurek. He does not believe that
consciousness has anything to do with it: it is rather the environment that
determines the emergence of reality. Since 1991,
experiments have been performed to show the progressive evolution of a system
from quantum to classical behavior. The goal is to observe the progressive
collapse of the wave function, the progressive disappearance of quantum
weirdness, and the progressive emergence of reality from probability. Zurek ("Environment-induced superselection rules", 1982) has proposed a different twist to the debate on the
"collapse of the wave". It doesn't necessarily take an observer. Zurek
thinks that the environment destroys quantum "coherence"
(superposition). The environment includes anything that may interact with the
quantum system, from a single photon to a microscope. The environment causes
"decoherence" (the choice of one or some of the possible outcomes)
and decoherence causes selection (or "einselection") of which
possibilities will become reality. The "best fit" states turn out to
be the classical states. Systems collapse to classical states because classical
states are the ones that best "fit" the environment. The environment
causes the collapse of the wave just like an observer. Decoherence occurs to
any system that interacts with other systems. Large objects are classical and
not quantum objects because they are inherently "decohered" by being
a collection of interacting parts. Small objects are isolated to some extent
and therefore exhibit quantum behavior. Quantum Darwinism explains how quantum possibilities can give rise to objective, classical reality. What is objective reality? It is a measurement that is the same for all observers. The size and position of this desk are the same for all observers, therefore this is objective reality. Quantum Darwinism is the theory that this objective reality is the result of a process analogous to natural selection in evolution: what we call "objective" is the "fittest", the survivor. The fittest property makes copies of itself and spreads from observer to observer, whereas the properties that are not fit do not make copies and quickly disappear. The US physicist
James Anglin, a close
associate of Zurek, studied the
evolution of "open quantum systems" far from equilibrium, which
resemble Prigogine's studies on
open classical systems (“Decoherence of Quantum Fields”, 1997). This line of
research was, indirectly, establishing intriguing similarities between the emergence
of classical systems from quantum systems and the emergence of living systems
from non-living systems. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters |
![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |