Shay wrote:
> What I wonder is: if chaos can be accepted as a natural force, why can't 
> consciousness? Is there a logical argument against consciousness 
> affecting our particles towards non-deterministic behavior?
> 
Well, for one, as someone else already said, first define 
"consciousness" as something more tangible than "some word we made up to 
describe how some things do other things, based on how they react to the 
world around them." That definition doesn't allow for any "interaction" 
that doesn't involve say.. pushing the cup off the edge of the table. 
However, the more silly definition is, "some thing we insist exists 
separate from the body (Already a problem here. How the hell do you know 
its separate, since the only "observation" of its comes from seeing what 
someone's body does?) and which can spookily effect the world somehow 
(Second problem. The only 'evidence' of this seems to be mentally ill 
people thinking they can do things with their minds, studies that 
inevitably turn out to be faked, done wrong, or actually prove it 
doesn't work, and some people's insistence that purely statistically 
plausible, but intellectually unbelievable things, like both people 
trying to call each other at the same time, "prove" that something like 
a separate "consciousness" exists. In other words, this definition isn't 
supported by "any" evidence.)"

The logical argument against such interaction is:

1. There is no evidence that the spooky version of consciousness exists.
2. No evidence exists that indicates the things attributed to it are 
anything but statistical inevitabilities, and human hubris that odd 
things mean more than that you just got lucky.
3. Most people get the "observation" part of quantum mechanics dead 
wrong. When someone says that an "observer" has effected the experiment 
in a way that collapses the state, what they mean is that some other 
physical object, which "has" a stable state, as interfered with the 
unstable particle, in such a manner that "its" state reverts to a stable 
one as well, like a small drop of water which hits something very cold. 
Large masses of particles create "stability" within their own structure, 
allowing them to all... I don't know, I suppose "resonate" the same, so 
that they all retain the same "stable" state. Individual particles, 
separated enough from the surrounding matter, are in an unstable state 
because their is no interactions with other particles. The moment you 
cause an interaction (i.e., make an observation), the state becomes 
"fixed". Well, that isn't precisely right. Its been theorized that you 
could, if you acted quickly enough, reverse the state transition and 
restore the particle to its unstable condition. There where two thoughts 
on this, either a) it happened instantly, so this wasn't possible, or b) 
it would take some measurable time for this to take place, so that a 
particle in "transition" could be made to revert. I read something about 
a month ago where someone tested the later possibility and as actually 
able to reverse the state change, by altering the interaction as the 
transition was in progress, thus "undoing" the interaction that was 
making the particle shift into a known state.

Now, in the world outside the lab, you just don't see this stuff 
happening at all. Why? Because any place mater exists, all particles, 
unless in vacuum, are interacted with "mater", thus remain as mater. In 
places where dark mater is instead., the everything there would be 
interacting with the same, so "its" state would be forced by constant 
interactions into a "dark mater" state. It takes very specific 
conditions to "force" a particle loose from this arrangement, or 
otherwise make it change states, when its inclination is to retain the 
same state as everything else around it. Or, at least that is the sense 
I get. The point being.. Consciousness would have to have some rather 
obvious, clearly identifiable, and undeniable, properties, if it existed 
as something that could tangibly effect the universe *by itself*, and 
the only argument "for" this sort of "consciousness as a force" argument 
  is based entirely on a complete and total misunderstanding of how the 
term "observer" is used in quantum mechanics, and what exactly it means.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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