2001/08/08 by Don N. Page, Page, Don N.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0108039
36 pages, no figures, LaTeX, invited contribution to be published in Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Quentin Smith and Alexandar Jokic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). (This is mainly a philosophical account of the ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics in quant-ph/9506010 and elsewhere.)
The ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics are expressed in lay terms for philosophers of consciousness and others. A framework is proposed and explained for the `psycho-physical-parallelism' between conscious experiences and the mathematical structures of quantum physics (e.g., a set of quantum operators obeying some algebra, and a quantum state giving the expectation value of each operator). In particular, it is proposed that each set of possible conscious experiences has a measure given by the expectation value of a corresponding operator (a positive-operator-valued measure). Then one has a generalization of the Weak Anthropic Principle named the Conditional Aesthemic Principle: given that we are conscious beings, our conscious experiences are likely to be typical experiences in the set of all conscious experiences with its measure.