What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.

To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism.

What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. Every time there is an interaction, you apply a discrete change to the observables. You always get the right statistical predictions and yet you don’t need the wave function at all.

The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense, and it baffles me that it is so popular for people to do so.

This is why Hilbert space is infinitely dimensional. If I have a single qubit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. If I have two qubits, there are four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. If I have three qubits, there are eight possible outcomes, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. If I assigned a probability amplitude to each event occurring, then the degrees of freedom would grow exponentially as I include more qubits into my system. The number of degrees of freedom are unbounded.

This is exactly how Hilbert space works. Interpreting this as a physical infinitely dimensional space where waves really propagate through it just makes absolutely no sense!

You don’t have to be sorry, that was stupid of me to write that.

Because the same functionality would be available as a cloud service (like AI now). This reduces costs and the need to carry liquid nitrogen around.

Okay, you are just misrepresenting my argument at this point.

Why are you isolating a single algorithm? There are tons of them that speed up various aspects of linear algebra and not just that single one, and many improvements to these algorithms since they were first introduced, there are a lot more in the literature than just in the popular consciousness.

The point is not that it will speed up every major calculation, but these are calculations that could be made use of, and there will likely even be more similar algorithms discovered if quantum computers are more commonplace. There is a whole branch of research called quantum machine learning that is centered solely around figuring out how to make use of these algorithms to provide performance benefits for machine learning algorithms.

If they would offer speed benefits, then why wouldn’t you want to have the chip that offers the speed benefits in your phone? Of course, in practical terms, we likely will not have this due to the difficulty and expense of quantum chips, and the fact they currently have to be cooled below to near zero degrees Kelvin. But your argument suggests that if somehow consumers could have access to technology in their phone that would offer performance benefits to their software that they wouldn’t want it.

That just makes no sense to me. The issue is not that quantum computers could not offer performance benefits in theory. The issue is more about whether or not the theory can be implemented in practical engineering terms, as well as a cost-to-performance ratio. The engineering would have to be good enough to both bring the price down and make the performance benefits high enough to make it worth it.

It is the same with GPUs. A GPU can only speed up certain problems, and it would thus be even more inefficient to try and force every calculation through the GPU. You have libraries that only call the GPU when it is needed for certain calculations. This ends up offering major performance benefits and if the price of the GPU is low enough and the performance benefits high enough to match what the consumers want, they will buy it. We also have separate AI chips now as well which are making their way into some phones. While there’s no reason at the current moment to believe we will see quantum technology shrunk small and cheap enough to show up in consumer phones, if hypothetically that was the case, I don’t see why consumers wouldn’t want it.

I am sure clever software developers would figure out how to make use of them if they were available like that. They likely will not be available like that any time in the near future, if ever, but assuming they are, there would probably be a lot of interesting use cases for them that have not even been thought of yet. They will likely remain something largely used by businesses but in my view it will be mostly because of practical concerns. The benefits of them won’t outweigh the cost anytime soon.

Uh… one of those algorithms in your list is literally for speeding up linear algebra. Do you think just because it sounds technical it’s “businessy”? All modern technology is technical, that’s what technology is. It would be like someone saying, “GPUs would be useless to regular people because all they mainly do is speed up matrix multiplication. Who cares about that except for businesses?” Many of these algorithms here offer potential speedup for linear algebra operations. That is the basis of both graphics and AI. One of those algorithms is even for machine learning in that list. There are various algorithms for potentially speeding up matrix multiplication in the linear. It’s huge for regular consumers… assuming the technology could ever progress to come to regular consumers.

A person who would state they fully understand quantum mechanics is the last person i would trust to have any understanding of it.

I find this sentiment can lead to devolving into quantum woo and mysticism. If you think anyone trying to tell you quantum mechanics can be made sense of rationally must be wrong, then you implicitly are suggesting that quantum mechanics is something that cannot be made sense of, and thus it logically follows that people who are speaking in a way that does not make sense and have no expertise in the subject so they do not even claim to make sense are the more reliable sources.

It’s really a sentiment I am not a fan of. When we encounter difficult problems that seem mysterious to us, we should treat the mystery as an opportunity to learn. It is very enjoyable, in my view, to read all the different views people put forward to try and make sense of quantum mechanics, to understand it, and then to contemplate on what they have to offer. To me, the joy of a mystery is not to revel in the mystery, but to search for solutions for it, and I will say the academic literature is filled with pretty good accounts of QM these days. It’s been around for a century, a lot of ideas are very developed.

I also would not take the game Outer Wilds that seriously. It plays into the myth that quantum effects depend upon whether or not you are “looking,” which is simply not the case and largely a myth. You end up with very bizarre and misleading results from this, for example, in the part where you land on the quantum moon and have to look at the picture of it for it to not disappear because your vision is obscured by fog. This makes no sense in light of real physics because the fog is still part of the moon and your ship is still interacting with the fog, so there is no reason it should hop to somewhere else.

Now quantum science isn’t exactly philosophy, ive always been interested in philosophy but its by studying quantum mechanics, inspired by that game that i learned about the mechanic of emerging properties. I think on a video about the dual slit experiment.

The double-slit experiment is a great example of something often misunderstood as somehow evidence observation plays some fundamental role in quantum mechanics. Yes, if you observe the path the two particles take through the slits, the interference pattern disappears. Yet, you can also trivially prove in a few line of calculation that if the particle interacts with a single other particle when it passes through the two slits then it would also lead to a destruction of the interference effects.

You model this by computing what is called a density matrix for both the particle going through the two slits and the particle it interacts with, and then you do what is called a partial trace whereby you “trace out” the particle it interacts with giving you a reduced density matrix of only the particle that passes through the two slits, and you find as a result of interacting with another particle its coherence terms would reduce to zero, i.e. it would decohere and thus lose the ability to interfere with itself.

If a single particle interaction can do this, then it is not surprising it interacting with a whole measuring device can do this. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it.

At that point i did not yet know that emergence was already a known topic in philosophy just quantum science, because i still tried to avoid external influences but it really was the breakthrough I needed and i have gained many new insights from this knowledge since.

Eh, you should be reading books and papers in the literature if you are serious about this topic. I agree that a lot of philosophy out there is bad so sometimes external influences can be negative, but the solution to that shouldn’t be to entirely avoid reading anything at all, but to dig through the trash to find the hidden gems.

My views when it comes to philosophy are pretty fringe as most academics believe the human brain can transcend reality and I reject this notion, and I find most philosophy falls right into place if you reject this notion. However, because my views are a bit fringe, I do find most philosophical literature out there unhelpful, but I don’t entirely not engage with it. I have found plenty of philosophers and physicists who have significantly helped develop my views, such as Jocelyn Benoist, Carlo Rovelli, Francois-Igor Pris, and Alexander Bogdanov.

This is why many philosophers came to criticize metaphysical logic in the 1800s, viewing it as dealing with absolutes when reality does not actually exist in absolutes, stating that we need some other logical system which could deal with the “fuzziness” of reality more accurately. That was the origin of the notion of dialectical logic from philosophers like Hegel and Engels, which caught on with some popularity in the east but then was mostly forgotten in the west outside of some fringe sections of academia. Even long prior to Bell’s theorem, the physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, who adhered to this dialectical materialist mode of thought, wrote a whole book on quantum mechanics where the first part he discusses the need to abandon the false illusion of the rigidity and concreteness of reality and shows how this is an illusion even in the classical sciences where everything has uncertainty, all predictions eventually break down, nothing is never possible to actually fully separate something from its environment. These kinds of views heavily influenced the contemporary physicist Carlo Rovelli as well.

And as any modern physicist will tell you: most of reality is indeed invisible to us. Most of the universe is seemingly comprised of an unknown substance, and filled with an unknown energy.

How can we possibly know this unless it was made through an observation?

Most of the universe that we can see more directly follows rules that are unintuitive and uses processes we can’t see. Not only can’t we see them, our own physics tells is it is literally impossible to measure all of them consistently.

That’s a hidden variable theory, presuming that systems really have all these values and we just can’t measure them all consistently due to some sort of practical limitation but still believing that they’re there. Hidden variable theories aren’t compatible with the known laws of physics. The values of the observables which become indefinite simply cease to have existence at all, not that they are there but we can’t observe them.

But subjective consciousness and qualia fit nowhere in our modern model of physics.

How so? What is “consciousness”? Why do you think objects of qualia are special over any other kind of object?

I don’t think it’s impossible to explain consciousness.

You haven’t even established what it is you’re trying to explain or why you think there is some difficulty to explain it.

We don’t even fully understand what the question is really asking. It sidesteps our current model of physics.

So, you don’t even know what you’re asking but you’re sure that it’s not compatible with the currently known laws of physics?

I don’t subscribe to Nagel’s belief that it is impossible to solve, but I do understand how the points he raises are legitimate points that illustrate how consciousness does not fit into our current scientific model of the universe.

But how?! You are just repeating the claim over and over again when the point of my comment is that the claim itself is not justified. You have not established why there is a “hard problem” at all but just continually repeat that there is.

If I had to choose anyone I’d say my thoughts on the subject are closest to Roger Penrose’s line of thinking, with a dash of David Chalmers.

Meaningless.

I think if anyone doesn’t see why consciousness is “hard” then there are two possibilities: 1) they haven’t understood the question and its scientific ramifications 2) they’re not conscious.

You literally do not understand the topic at hand based on your own words. Not only can you not actually explain why you think there is a “hard problem” at all, but you said yourself you don’t even know what question you’re asking with this problem. Turning around and then claiming everyone who doesn’t agree with you is just some ignoramus who doesn’t understand then is comically ridiculous, and also further implying people who don’t agree with you may not even be conscious.

Seriously, that’s just f’d up. What the hell is wrong with you? Maybe you are so convinced of this bizarre notion you can’t even explain yourself because you dehumanize everyone who disagrees with you and never take into consideration other ideas.

This is accurate, yes. The cat in the box is conscious presumably, in my opinion of cats at least, but still can be “not an observer” from the POV of the scientist observing the experiment from outside the box.

“Consciousness” is not relevant here at all. You can write down the wave function of a system relative to a rock if you wanted, in a comparable way as writing down the velocity of a train from the “point of view” of a rock. It is coordinate. It has nothing to do with “consciousness.” The cat would perceive a definite state of the system from its reference frame, but the person outside the box would not until they interact with it.

QM is about quite a lot more than coordinate systems

Obviously QM is not just coordinate systems. The coordinate nature of quantum mechanics, the relative nature of it, is merely a property of the theory and not the whole theory. But the rest of the theory does not have any relevance to “consciousness.”

and in my opinion will make it look weird in retrospect once physics expands to a more coherent whole

The theory is fully coherent and internally consistent. It amazes me how many people choose to deny QM and always want to rush to change it. Your philosophy should be guided by the physical sciences, not the other way around. People see QM going against their basic intuitions and their first thought is it must be incomplete and needs to have additional complexity added to it to make it fit their intuitions, rather than just questioning that maybe their basic intuitions are wrong.

Your other comment was to a Wikipedia page which if you clicked the link on your own source it would’ve told you that the scientific consensus on that topic is that what you’re presenting is a misinterpretation.

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser#Consensus:_no_retrocausality

A simple search on YouTube could’ve also brought up several videos explaining this to you.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5yON4Gs3D0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQv5CVELG3U

There is “observer-dependence” in quantum mechanics in a comparable way that there is observer-dependence in general relativity. It has nothing to do with some “fundamental role of consciousness” but comes from the fact that reality itself depends on how you look at it, it is reference frame dependent. The “observer” is just a chosen coordinate system in which to describe other things. I know, you probably got this from Kastrup too, right? Idealists have been getting desperate and resorting to quantum woo, pretending that something that changes based on coordinate system proves fundamental consciousnesses.

Kastrup is entirely unconvincing because he pretends the only two schools of philosophy in the whole universe are his specific idealism and metaphysical realism which he falsely calls the latter “materialism.” He thus never feels the need to ever address anything outside of a critique of a single Laymen understanding of materialism which is more popular in western countries than eastern countries, ignoring the actual wealth of philosophical literature.

Anyone who actually reads books on philosophy would inevitably find Kastrup to be incredibly unconvincing as he, by focusing primarily on a single school, never justifies many of his premises. He begins from the very beginning talking about “conscious experience” and whatnot when, if you’re not a metaphysical realist, that is what you are supposed to be arguing in the first place. Unless you’re already a dualist or metaphysical realist, if you are pretty much any other philosophical school like contextual realist, dialectical materialist, empiriomonist, etc, you probably already view reality as inherently observable, and thus perception is just reality from a particular point-of-view. It then becomes invalid to add qualifiers to it like “conscious experience” or “subjective experience” as reality itself cannot had qualifiers.

I mean, the whole notion of “subjective experience” goes back to Nagel who was a metaphysical realist through-and-through and wrote a whole paper defending that notion, “What is it like to be a Bat?”, and this is what Kastrup assumes his audience already agrees with from the get-go. He never addresses any of the criticisms of metaphysical realism but pretends like they don’t exist and he is the unique sole critic of it and constantly calls metaphysical realism “materialism” as if they’re the same philosophy at all. He then builds all of his arguments off of this premise.

Reading books on natural philosophy. By that I mean, not mathematics of the physics itself, but what do the mathematics actually tell us about the natural world, how to interpret it and think about it, on a more philosophical level. Not a topic I really talk to many people irl on because most people don’t even know what the philosophical problems around this topic. I mean, I’d need a whole whiteboard just to walk someone through Bell’s theorem to even give them an explanation to why it is interesting in the first place. There is too much of a barrier of entry for casual conversation.

You would think since natural philosophy involves physics that it would not be niche because there are a lot of physicists, but most don’t care about the topic either. If you can plug in the numbers and get the right predictions, then surely that’s sufficient, right? Who cares about what the mathematics actually means? It’s a fair mindset to have, perfectly understandable and valid, but not part of my niche interests, so I just read tons and tons and tons of books and papers regarding a topic which hardly anyone cares. It is very interesting to read like the Einstein-Bohr debates, or Schrodinger for example trying to salvage continuity viewing a loss of continuity as a breakdown in classical notion of causality, or some of the contemporary discussions on the subject such as Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics or Francois-Igor Pris’ contextual realist interpretation. Things like that.

It doesn’t even seem to be that popular of a topic among philosophers, because most don’t want to take the time to learn the math behind something like Bell’s theorem (it’s honestly not that hard, just a bit of linear algebra). So as a topic it’s pretty niche but I have a weird autistic obsession over it for some reason. Reading books and papers on these debates contributes nothing at all practically beneficial to my life and there isn’t a single person I know outside of online contacts who even knows wtf I’m talking about but I still find it fascinating for some reason.

Why do you think consciousness remains known as the “hard problem”, and still a considered contentious mystery to modern science, if your simplistic ideas can so easily explain it?

You people really need to stop pretending like because one guy published a paper calling it the “hard problem” that it’s somehow a deep impossible to solve scientific question. It’s just intellectual dishonesty, trying to paint it as if it’s equivalent to solving the problem of making nuclear fusion work or something.

It’s not. And yes, philosophy is full of idiots who never justify any of their premises. David Chalmers in his paper where he calls it the “hard problem” quotes Thomas Nagel’s paper as “proof” that experience is something subjective, and then just goes forward with his argument as if it’s “proven,” but Nagel’s paper is complete garbage, and so nothing Chalmers argues beyond that holds any water, but is just something a lot of philosophers blindly accept even though it is nonsensical.

Nagel claims that the physical sciences don’t incorporate point-of-view, and that therefore point-of-view must be a unique property of mammals, and that experience is point-of-view dependent, so experience too must come from mammals, and therefore science has to explain the origin of experience.

But his paper was wildly outdated when he wrote it. By then, we already had general relativity for decades, which is a heavily point-of-view dependent theory as there is no absolute space or time but its properties depend upon your point of view. Relational quantum mechanics also interprets quantum mechanics in a way that gets rid of all the weirdness and makes it incredibly intuitive and simple just with the singular assumption that the properties of particles depends upon point-of-view not that much different than general relativity with the nature of space and time, and so there is no absolute state of a system anymore.

Both general relativity and relational quantum mechanics not only treat reality as point-of-view dependent but tie itself back directly to experience: they tell you what you actually expect to observe in measurements. In quantum mechanics they are literally called observables, entities identifiable by their experiential properties.

Nagel is just an example of am armchair philosopher who does not engage with the sciences so he thinks they are all still Newtonian with some sort of absolute world independent of point-of-view. If the natural world is point-of-view dependent all the way down, then none of Nagel’s arguments follow. There is no reason to believe point-of-view is unique to mammals, and then there is further no reason to think the point-of-view dependence of experience makes it inherently mammalian, and thus there is no reason to call experience “subjective.”

Although I prefer the term “context” rather than “point-of-view” as it is more clear what it means, but it means the same thing. The physical world is just point-of-view dependent all the way down, or that is to say, context-dependent. We just so happen to be objects and thus like any other, exist in a particular context, and thus experience reality from that context. Our experiences are not created by our brains, experience is just objective reality from the context we occupy. What our brain does is think about and reflect upon experience (reality). It formulates experience into concepts like “red,” “tree,” “atom,” etc. But it does not create experience.

The entire “hard” problem is based on a faulty premise based on science that was outdated when it was written.

If experience just is reality from a particular context then it makes no sense to ask to “derive” it as Chalmers and Nagel have done. You cannot derive reality, you describe it. Reality just is what it is, it just exists. Humans describe reality with their scientific theories, but their theories cannot create reality. That doesn’t even make sense. All modern “theories of consciousness” are just nonsense as they all are based on the false premise that experience is not reality but some illusion created by the mammalian brain and that “true” reality is some invisible metaphysical entity that lies beyond all possible experience, and thus they demand we somehow need a scientific theory to show how this invisible reality gives rise to the visible realm of experience. The premise is just silly. Reality is not invisible. That is the nonsensical point of view.

You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).

The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.

“Observation” is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or “zeroing” your coordinate system, and isn’t “collapsing” anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.

Quantum mechanics is incompatible with general relativity, it is perfectly compatible with special relativity, however. I mean, that is literally what quantum field theory is, the unification of special relativity and quantum mechanics into a single framework. You can indeed integrate all aspects of relativity into quantum mechanics just fine except for gravity. It’s more that quantum mechanics is incompatible with gravity and less that it is incompatible with relativity, as all the other aspects we associate with relativity are still part of quantum field theory, like the passage of time being relative, relativity of simultaneity, length contraction, etc.

well IBM does have cloud accessible quantum computers that they don’t charge to use

I used those to teach myself some stuff about quantum information science

The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the “first cause” since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.

For example, in China they teach “dialectical materialist” philosophy part of required “common core” in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.

It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn’t even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.

However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein’s distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.

He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell’s theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.

The point I’m making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to “materialists” or “naturalists” which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.

Use IBM’s cloud quantum computers to learn a bit, you can indeed find YouTube videos that explain to you how to do the calculations and then you can just play around making algorithms on their systems and verifying that you can do the calculations correctly. With that knowledge alone you can then begin to learn how to step through a lot of the famous experiments that all purport to show the strangeness of quantum mechanics, like Bell’s theorem, the “bomb tester” thought experiment, GHZ experiment, quantum teleportation, etc, as most of the famous ones can be implemented on a quantum computer and you can get an understanding of why they are interesting.

That would seem like more of a question of sociology and history, studying why certain cultures develop the ideas they do, and it probably would not be the same for every culture. Not really a question that I have the proper expertise on to answer.

The subjective experience of consciousness is directly observable, and definitely real, no?

Experience is definitely real, but there is no such thing as “subjective experience.” It is not logically possible to say there is “subjective experience” without inherently entailing that there is some sort of “objective experience,” in the same way that saying something is “inside of” something makes no sense unless there is an “outside of” it. Without implicitly entailing some sort of “objective experience” then the qualifier “subjective” would become meaningless.

If you associate “experience” with “minds,” then you’d be implying there is some sort of objective mind, i.e. a cosmic consciousness of some sorts. Which, you can believe that, but at that point you’ve just embraced objective idealism. The very usage of the term “subjective experience” that is supposedly inherently irreducible to non-minds inherently entails objective idealism, there is no way out of it once you’ve accepted that premise.

The conflation between experience with “subjectivity” is largely done because we all experience the world in a way unique to us, so we conclude experience is “subjective.” But a lot of things can be experienced differently between different observers. Two observers, for example, can measure the same object to be different velocities, not because velocity is subjective, but because they occupy different frames of reference. In other words, the notion that something being unique to us proves it is “subjective” is a non sequitur, there can be other reasons for it to be unique to us, which is just that nature is context-dependent.

Reality itself depends upon where you are standing in it, how you are looking at it, everything in your surroundings, etc, how everything relates to everything else from a particular reference frame. So, naturally, two observers occupying different contexts will perceive the world differently, not because their perception is “subjective,” but in spite of it. We experience the world as it exists independent of our observation of it, but not independent of the context of our observation. Experience itself is not subjective, although what we take experience to be might be subjective.

We can misinterpret things for example, we can come to falsely believe we experienced some particular thing and later it turns out we actually perceived something else, and thus were mistaken in our initial interpretation which we later replaced with a new interpretation. However, at no point did it become false that there was experience. Reality can never be true or false, it always just is what it is. The notion that there is some sort of “explanatory gap” between what humans experience and some sort of cosmic experience is just an invented problem. There is no gap because what we experience is indeed reality independent of conscious observers being there to interpret it, but absolutely dependent upon the context under which it is observed.

Again, I’d recommend reading Jocelyn Benoist’s Toward a Contextual Realism. All this is explained in detail and any possible rebuttal you’re thinking of has already been addressed. People are often afraid of treating experience as real because they operate on this Kantian “phenomenal-noumenal” paradigm (inherently implied by the usage of “subjective experience”) and then think if they admit that this unobservable “noumenon” is a meaningless construct then they have to default to only accepting the “phenomenon,” i.e. that there’s only “subjective experience” and we’re all “trapped in our minds” so to speak. But the whole point of contextual realism is to point out this fear is unfounded because both the phenomenal and noumenal categories are problematic and both have to be discarded: experience is not “phenomenal” as a “phenomenal” means “appearance of reality” but it is not the appearance of reality but is reality.

You only enter into subjectivity, again, when you take reality to be something, when you begin assigning labels to it, when you begin to invent abstract categories and names to try and categorize what you are experiencing. (Although the overwhelming majority of abstract categories you use were not created by you but are social constructs, part of what Wittgenstein called the “language game.”)

(I don’t think adding some metaphysical element does much of anything, and Penrose still doesn’t really explain it, just provides a potential mechanism for it in the brain. It’s still a real “thing”, unexplained by current physics though.)

We don’t need more metaphysical elements, we need less. We need to stop presuming things that have no reason to be presumed, then presuming other things to fix contradictions created by those false presumptions. We need to discard those bad assumptions that led to the contradiction in the first place (discard then phenomenal-noumenal distinction entirely, not just one or the other).

Also, to your other point, my I believe everything is just an evolving wave function.

This is basically the Many Worlds Interpretation. I don’t really buy it because we can’t observe wave functions, so if the entire universe is made of wave functions… how does that explain what we observe? You end up with an explanatory gap between what we observe and the mathematical description.

The whole point of science is to explain the reality which we observe, which is synonymous with experience, which again experience just is reality. That’s what science is supposed to do: explain experiential reality, so we have to tie it back to experience, what Bell called “local beables,” things we can actually point to identify in our observations.

The biggest issue with MWI is that there is simply no way to tie it back to what we actually observe because it contains nothing observable. There is an explanatory gap between the world of waves in Hilbert space and what we actually observe in reality.

The Copenhagen interpretation is just how the many worlds universe appears to behave to a conscious observer.

What you’ve basically done is just wrapped up the difficult question of how the invisible world of waves in Hilbert space converts itself to the visible world of particles in spacetime by just saying “oh it has something to do with our consciousness.” I mean, sure, if you find that to be satisfactory, I personally don’t.