Dear Rodney Bartlett , dear all,

there is a subtle, yet not at all able to overlook difference between the typically introvert - often mostly highly theoretical - mathematical physicist, and the typically extrovert - allround style 100% lab savvy and complex large team management capable - often mostly highly practical - experimental physicist, driving the worlds knowledge truly forward by knowing theories cannot ever be proven by experiment, but for sure be easily falsified - once and for all - with a single hard to achieve repeatable experimental result.

So I don‘t at all think „Scientists believe theories must be proven by experiments.“ but (while of course not all) way too many theoretical mathematical physicists „believe theories must be proven by experiments.“ while it is fully clear (actually to all, but such is way too easy to forget) that ideas, models and even full fledged mainstream accepted theories like QM and Relativity can only be FALSIFIED by experiments.

So - what is „objective reality“ anyway - is there something like objective reality out there anyway in practice, just maybe typically called and accepted as (peer reviewed in top 20 of the worlds journal like Nature) scientific mainstream - or aren‘t we all more than just of the „allowed minimum“ for a true scientist quite subjective followers of our very much own brain internal driven „I want to believe“ followers of our subjective cultural and often even - implied or explicit - religiously driven prisoner in our own over the decades built up mental cage, unable to ever leave such any more in a scientific objective way - as with no exception always should be !?

So while we of course by todays objective knowledge about brains thought processes (despite all recent progress in AI) and all our physical accepted mainstream knowledge of QM (or whatever other mathematically driven only theory!) simply cannot tell if observers might be able to interlock and with this truly influence „the observed“ in the sense of the statement made by your interesting yet more philosophical than physical scientific results driven question (influence in sort of holodeck style magic bit-flip physical change creating).

As some interesting far reaching physical theories like Thomas Görnitz AQIs based ones (fully mathematically substantiated!) show indeed the *whole* is the target to approach when looking from a knowlegable quantum theoretical point of view (and not just plain old very weak QM based approach) like largely influenced by the groundbreaking work of Weizäckers binary Ur-alternatives theory and few others who ever seriously persued research in such direction, like my own iSpace theoretic model of constants of nature, being imho impressively able to show how quantum world - the very small - and cosmology - the very large - is intrinsically connected and inseparable interlocked by constants of nature itself:

Preprint Hubble constant H0 is derived from Newtonian gravitational c...

Preprint iSpace - Quantization of Time in iSpace-IQ Unit-System by 1/...

If such extremely powerful base principle also might hold for our brain and conciousness structures of our mind itself remains to be seen by still to be thought out and made experimental evidence - everything else would be just unphysical philosophically only driven speculation.

Kind regards and thanks for this interesting question,

Christian G. Wolf

If (once again: if!) thoughts can influence objective reality, then both the thoughts of the adherents of the Copenhagen interpretation and the thoughts of its opponents possess this property. Let us hope that these influences are in dynamic equilibrium.

I think there is always the tendency to conflate mathematics with science. Mathematics in not science. Science is not mathematics. Mathematics is built on logical deduction based on well defined logical concepts. A mathematical theorem can be proved. No scientific theory can be "proved." A scientific theory can, however, be falsified through contradictions in the prediction of the theory and the results of a repeatable experiment. That mathematics is used in science to expand scientific theories or derive predictions for scientific theories to be tested by experiment does not make mathematics a scientific discipline.

The concept of a manifold was defined by Bernhard Riemann in his thesis he wrote under the direction of Gauss in the early 1830's. It gave a whole new foundation of geometry and give rise to many areas of study in mathematics.

Just because Einstein used the concept of a manifold to develop his general theory of relativity 80 years later does not mean the mathematics associated with differential geometry, differential topology, geometric analysis are scientific disciplines. It turns out that the tools of the above mathematical tools provide an effective method of making calculations which result in predictions of the theory. In fact it wasn't Einstein that developed the model - it was Einstein's "math guy" Marcel Grossmann and well know expert in differential geometry and tensor analysis that noted that Einstein's field equations were more coherently viewed as a Lorentz manifold.

The mathematical models physicists use describe their theories provide predictions from which experiments can be developed to test if the predictions hold true. As Ricard Feynman often said, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

However, currently the validity of the model of general relativity comes into question as one looks back closer to the big band where quantum forces have to be taken into consideration. That simply means the assumption that under these conditions modeling of universe as a Lorentz manifold fails to hold - saying nothing about the mathematics of Lorentz manifolds.

As Richard Feynman also said often, “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”

https://www.cantorsparadise.org/richard-feynman-on-the-differences-between-mathematics-and-physics-c0847e8a3d75/

Of course the problem of the observer has been attacked by many from Copenhagen school, to the von Neumann - Wigner interpretation. Feynman stated anyone that says they understand QM is lying. I think the problem gets down to the term "interpretation." In his latter days this seemed to be the conclusion Hawkins and his students were coming to.

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Time-Thomas-Hertog/dp/0593128443

BTW Roger Penrose was Hawking's "math guy." Penrose published a paper on differential geometry showing by tracing forward the geodesics in the manifold structure in an area of ever increasing mass of general relativity, they merge at a singularity. That singularity because know as a black hole. Of course the existence of black holes were found later and it turns out the universe is full of black holes. In Hawking's thesis he simply turned time in reverse and used the same basic argument to show the universe originated from a singularity a.k.a. the big bang. It close to the big bang where the difficult question arise and unfortunately we may never be able to test the predictions because as we go further and further back to the big band, we need more and more energy to run the experiments.

Dear colleagues,

QM experiments, and probably even higher-level systems, are definitely proving to be affected by observers; e.g., see the research of Dean Radin on the deviation of the mean value of quantum random number generators and rest of his research. 

On the other hand, large systems are often in a state of decoherence, and hence, quantum effects have no impact on the behavior of such macroscopic objects and processes. The line between those two extreme cases is blurry and constantly shifting. 

What is astounding is that the bulk of research confirming that consciousness is impacting reality is constantly growing. It has far-reaching consequences. One of the most profound impacts is our innate ability to alter our well-being and health and even heal from serious diseases. 

A list of important publications describing quantum biology functioning follows. This research has gained impetus in the last couple of years. According to my understanding, from this research, we can start to understand the principles of coupling between consciousness and quantum systems outcomes. 

What is your take on this exciting area of research?

References:

[1] Madl, P.; Renati, P. Quantum Electrodynamics Coherence and Hormesis: Foundations of Quantum Biology. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24, 14003. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijms241814003

[2] Madl, P.; Renati, P. Quantum Electrodynamics Coherence and Hormesis: Foundations of Quantum Biology. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24, 14003. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijms241814003

[3] Lewis Grozinger, Martyn Amos Pablo Carbonell, Thomas E. Gorochowski, Diego A. Oyarzún Harold Fellermann, Ruud Stoof , Paolo Zuliani, Huseyin Tas & Angel Goñi-Moreno: Pathways to cellular supremacy in biocomputing, Nature Communications 10(1) (2019),

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13232-z

[4] Michael P. Robertson & Gerald F. Joyce: The Origins of the RNA World, Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 2012;4:a003608, DOI: 10.1101/cshperspect.a003608

That there is a relationship with consciousness and reality nor that there is an underlying relationship with consciousness and quantum physics is not new. It fact it is not even new in 2000. It goes back to Sir Roger Penrose's conjectures in "The Emperor's New Mind" which interesting enough was address the concept of Strong Artificial Intelligence. Penrose and others have been looking at connections in nuerobiology between quantum effects and consciousness. In fact it dates back further when Candice Pert discovered the Opioid receptor as a grad student at Johns Hopkins in the early 1970's. She showed up on the doors of both the physics department and mathematics asking what "the action at a distance" she uncovered could mean.

So quantum entanglement on the biological level - it is not a new concept.

Of course Penrose is still at it.

https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute-236591/

We might know some day. However, he told he was a fool when he prove a theorem in differential geometry that implied the existence of singularities in Einsteins model for the theory of relativity. Now we know these singularities as Black Holes and they are all over the universe. His proof was modified for a young physicists grad student named Steven Hawking in a theory known as the Big Bang.

It will be fascinating to see what the neuroscientist uncover as they develop better ways to perform experiments.