The Limits
Can there exist limits to something we don’t truly understand?
Can there exist limits to something we don’t truly understand?
We’re just slightly more developed primates than our cousins. We have adopted structures, systems, habits, cognition, and consciousness. Our frameworks are based solely on what we know at the time and arise from plenty of trial and error. There exists known knowledge and unknown knowledge. Our human cognition is aware there exists unknown knowledge. It could be that we haven’t explored certain mysterious aspects of our lives or the connection of two currently unrelated fields. Our knowledge is limited until we discover yet-to-be-discovered information. But we can’t know what we do not know.
One such area of unknown knowledge is the conscious. The hard problem of consciousness still exists. This refers to the origin and nature of consciousness.
In certain worldly fields, we’re bound by limits. We’re limited in mathematics between bounds of negative and positive infinity. But what of concepts that don’t exist in a definable plane?
What if there’s no limit to our consciousness, for example? What unknowns could we pursue? Before we dive into consciousness, let’s explore a topic of which we currently have very little understanding: Quantum Theory.
The Two-Slit Experiment
In quantum mechanics, particles can behave simultaneously as both a wave and a particle, called wave-particle duality. In broad terms, the process of quantum superposition covers this scenario and details when quantum systems exist in multiple states or configurations at the same time.
The Experiment
1) A beam of light is directed at a barrier with two small slits. The light passes through the slits and hits a screen.
2) If light behaves as a wave, it creates an interference pattern. This occurs as the two waves produced by the two slits reinforce or cancel each other out.
The key conclusions from the experiment are the most interesting elements:
When the experiment isn’t observed, particles demonstrate the interference pattern as though they possess wave-like characteristics (image above).
When the experiment is observed, the inference pattern disappears. This creates a consistent pattern of individual entities, not interacting with each other (image below).
Note: By “observed” it just means a detector that measures which slit a particle passes through. It detects the particles that affect the behaviour of a quantum system.
It’s as though quantum systems know they’re being watched, and they’ve been tasked with withholding the secrets of the universe. When it knows we’re watching, no evidence of wave-particle duality whatsoever. The wave function collapses.
The wave function usually mathematically describes a quantum system using probabilities of finding the system in different states.
But this entire idea is impossible, right? Nothing can exist in two states at once, can it? Or perhaps we’re limited by our self-imposed limits. If we shed our limits, who knows what’s possible?
Self-Imposed Beliefs
If we’re not constrained by often self-imposed limits, what can we achieve?
It’s said in business and innovation, that if you ever want to create something of value, consider the current limits in your area of interest and shatter the glass ceiling. Push the sector into areas that nobody had ever considered to be possible.
For millennia, many would have pondered the flight of birds, never once considering we one day would fly in metal birds ourselves. It took one of the greatest creatives ever to live, Leonardo da Vinci, before someone finally considered the limits of our beliefs, and sought to shatter the glass ceiling.
Regardless, these are limits of the physical world. There could exist other worlds, however—other realms.
The Many-Worlds Interpretation from Hugh Everett in 1957 seeks to explain the behaviour shown in the two-slit experiment. He proposes that instead of the collapse of the quantum superposition when observed, all possible outcomes of quantum measurement occur at the same time. In turn, this creates a separate branch of a different universal branch. All these branches exist in a multiverse.
As I sat and pondered this experiment, and the lack of clear explanation, one major unexpected question arose.
What are the limits of consciousness, and how can we draw on this experiment in quantum theory to help us understand consciousness, and the wider universe? More on this next week.