QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

mathematician, questioned the traditional idea of the detached observer by presenting as a
solution to the measurement problem the projection postulate, according to which only one of the
many possibilities included in wave functions could be realised in a measurement situation. As
will be explained in more detail in the following section 4.3.6., von Neumann did not provide
any clear explanation for his projection postulate, but Fritz London and Edmund Bauer soon
suggested that reduction of the wave function was not perhaps a straightforward physical
process, but that its occurrence demanded the consciousness of an observer. Consciousness
somehow collapses the wave function. Reduction of the state function only occurred when the
observer somehow became conscious of the measurement result. 678
The idea that consciousness somehow made it possible for the quantum reality which included
superpositions to manifest following a measurement in the familiar classical world was
advocated at a later point in the discussion of the interpretation of quantum mechanics by, for
example, Eugen Wigner and J.A.Wheeler, according to whom ”an elementary phenomenon is a
phenomenon only when it is an observed phenomenon.” 679 Their viewpoint can be viewed as an
argument supporting subjective idealism in the traditional discussion concerning the psychophysical
problem. In this way of thinking, consciousness was presumed to be an entity
independent of matter and it did not need to conform to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Consciousness is viewed as a more important factor than matter in shaping the appearance of the
observable reality.
Quantum mechanics does not however offer any evidence for the thought that mind can directly
affect matter. No-one can even predict what experimental results will be yielded by a specific
measurement situation, to say nothing of the fact that they might be able to consciously bring
about the desired result. Idealists can try to get around this problem by appealing to supernatural
influences such as God, the spirit of the world, or Pauli’s archetypes, to whom quantummechanical
indeterminism allows the possibility that they, without humans being aware of the
fact, choose the desired result from what to us appears to be a wide range of random possibilities.
In my view, this idealistic way of approaching the nature of mind and matter or their interaction
does not disclose anything more than the materialistic models which draw on classical physics
and attempt to reduce spirit to matter. In spite of centuries of pondering, Reductionist
678 Herbert 1985, Murdoch 1987, 126-127.
679 J.A. Wheeler in Jahn (ed.) 1981, 1, 91.
252