Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function
Our article “Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function”, by David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen, is due to be published in the volume Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness, edited by Shan Gao, forthcoming from Oxford University Press most likely in 2020. We presented versions of this work starting in August 2013 and circulated slides for these presentations. These versions have been widely cited and differ from the final version, so we have included here some links to the older presentations.
Slides:
- Oslo, August 2013 (Chalmers)
- ANU, April 2014 (Chalmers and McQueen)
- Göttingen, May 2014 (Chalmers)
- Tucson, April 2016 (McQueen)
Video presentations:
- Göttingen, May 2014 (Chalmers)
- Tucson, April 2016 (McQueen)
- Mind-Matter Seminar, January 2019 (McQueen)
Text:
The slides were made available online and widely circulated. A text was not widely circulated until 2019 (aside from McQueen’s brief popular piece in Philosophy Now), mainly because we did not have a good enough answer to the problem arising from the Quantum Zeno Effect. Eventually we wrote a separate paper on the Zeno problem (“Zeno Goes to Copenhagen”) and we developed a speculative solution to the problem (one in terms of ongoing collapse by localization of m-properties, an idea briefly entertained at the end of the original presentation in 2013) in the final version of “Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function”.
Other Online talks & interviews
Video Interview: Consciousness Central 2016 – @ Science of Consciousness Conference, Tucson Arizona, June 2016.
Radio Interview: What is Consciousness? For sverigesradio (Swedish Radio Station), Sat 26 Jan 2019.
Recorded lecture: Self-locating uncertainty and the many worlds interpretation @ Concepts and Paradoxes in a Quantum Universe Conference, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, June 2016.
