I really wish that instead of railing at me and other commentators you would go read Adam Frank's excellent article. Read the very clear, very concise description of the alternatives of taking either the position that the wave function, itself, is a picture of reality or the one we happen to measure being what it would seem to be, the measure's perspective on reality and not an objective reality itself. The first one, the stubborn insistence that what is obviously not a concrete view of reality comes with a huge price, as Frank says, it insists on the really crazy results of the ever expanding multi-universes that turns the "turtles all the way down" line atheists love to use against religious folks on its head and turns equations into creator gods on the say so of contemporary physicists. I have always wondered how the tiny little actions we take generating new universes would square with the materialists' ideas of force and power needed to do things could be fit together but if there's something like that within the theories, I've never come across it. It would seem to be that we, like the young witches in Harry Potter, are unconsciously doing far more impressive magic. All the time, Every one of my keystroke while I write this have, I suppose, created universes in which someone doing exactly what I did typed every single other available wrong letter or character or left out every one of them, or something like that. Try describing every alternative to even one tiny act you take and imagine what alternative universes would be generated to constitute every possible variation on it.
The multiverse theory that is so influential in pop culture and in university departments would seem to turn us all into unconscious creator gods far more potent in their creation than God in Genesis. Only, the materialists can comfort themselves that we're not creating by intention but through the power of their equations. I wonder if there are universes in those all other possible universes where physicists come up with equally potent equations that cancel out the power of our physicists, disproving the multi-universe conjecture. If our equations can have such power, why not theirs?*
Of course the other view, that the the many (infinite?) possibilities of the wave function collapsing into some kind of imposed reality when someone makes a measurement also has consequences of the people measuring influencing the actual physical reality. Or at least what we choose that to be.
From what I understand you can either choose to have our and everyone elses' every act generating entire new universes continually or you can choose to say that whatever reality we can have of the physical universe being, in a real way, the result of our our minds, our decisions, and choices but NOT the classical idea of it being an "objective" "real" view of a hard material reality. I think the decision of which one is chosen is, as Frank says, entirely dependent on which one you like and really not on anything else. I've read physicists, mathematicians, and others involved in these issues note that which one is chosen probably has as much to do with the geographical location of where you went to grad school and which view dominated which department granted you your degree and which also gave you a professional and, likely, financial stake in your chosen denomination of physics. Which is just another undermining of the classical-materialist belief in a solid, scientifically certain, material reality which comes with this.
For the attempt to turn the mind into another material object, governed by whatever forces under whatever laws whichever ideological scientist might prefer the problem is far more basic. And here I think Frank put it very well.
Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole materialist perspective. A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.
And, for the atheists in the audience, don't pretend that both of the choices available to materialists, either the elevation of the wave function into an ever expanding, multi-universe reality or the one that admits that, for human purposes, our own choices govern what we will ever have as reality, whatever we can coherently or incoherently talk about matter being, BOTH OF THOSE ALTERNATIVES ARE dependent on our minds, our choices. There is no old fashioned, comforting, classical view of a solid, dependable universe available to you if you, as you also will, insist that the reality of the material universe is uniform at every scale of its existence.
The price for pretending otherwise is that ultimate decadence of pretending that our minds are an illusion which not only collapses the variables in an equation those meaningless minds come up with, it collapses the possibility that any of it has significance and produces any knowledge of any truth or reality. The mind only become a "hard problem" when atheists want to force our minds out of what they are and into a narrow, classical physical world that died in the early 20th century. It is in every way irrational, every way anachronistic, in every way as much a product of the emotional preferences of the materialists who are engaged in that because they just can't stand anything that implies that our intuitions derived from the reality of our minds not being like physical things implies that there is a God.
God ain't going away, dear, there is not a coffin big enough and no lid strong enough. People will not ignore the problems with materialism as long as they think and the materialist hegemony that clogs universities and the media isn't going to stop that. It can't even stop people believing in the stuff CSICOP railed against, there are probably more people who believe in those things than there were in the mid 1970s. It's materialism, in the high-brow form, that's in trouble, though, as we can see from the product of indoctrination into hard-core materialism in the old Soviet Union and China, the vulgar form of it and the fascism that comes with that are flourishing. Materialism always seems to collapse into that. Look at David Horowitz. That high-brow materialist-atheist view of life is merely a matter of snobbery by people with degrees or those who would like to be taken as such without the work. It is a product of social and class coercion and vulgar economic-social aspiration as much as anything else that people figure will get them ahead.
* Maybe a finger typed out every other possible "M" at the beginning of this sentence in a slightly different place on the key, and in some of them they forgot to capitalize it, or maybe they don't capitalize at the beginning of sentences in some of those universes. Maybe they choose different type faces.... It almost immediately becomes absurd.
Hate Update: What's an ignorant, middle-brow, blog babbler like you to do?
The Humanities Major Atheist Solution
Though never a whiz with the math,
And so on to science, no path,
I'll fake it with attitude,
Materialist platitude,
And pseudo-historical wrath.
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