Notes on Quantum Magic

[dsrtao]

Given:

• that quantum mechanics is all true
  
• that macrophysics is the result of statistical accumulation of quantum effects
  
• that conscious observers are the Hidden Variable
  

then the rules for performing quantum magic must include the idea that the magician can only affect things that no one is paying attention to... including himself, of course.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

In my childhood, before I'd learned an iota of quantum mechanics, I reached a somewhat similar conclusion by a different route. Noting that God does not seem to make His presence known with obvious violations of the laws of physics these days, I concluded that I could not ask Him to change a fact I already knew, but could pray for a desirable outcome of anything I didn't yet know the results of, even if it was in the objective past. So years later when I read about Schrödinger's cat, there was a certain familiarity to the concept. (Though in some ways my own notion of what prayers might be answered was also somewhat egocentric, in that somebody could already know the thing I was asking to be changed, but God could change their memory of it as long as I didn't observe the change happening (and come to think of it, de-ego-izing that so that my own memories could be changed as well implies that there could be prayers that were answered but that as a result of having them answered I no longer remember praying, hmm ...) so it wasn't quite the same concept, just similar.)

When I started exploring magick, a good chunk of the same meme carried over. I've never formalized it, but I've got a leaning in the direction you've reached -- that it's at least much easier to affect things that nobody is paying attention to -- though I'm not ready to put the word "only" in there.

Note that there does seem to be a certain amount of "set your will then don't think about it" aspect to some schools of magick, which seems as though it might be related...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's probably worth noting that the experiment I know of which demonstrated that there might be something to psychokinesis after all relied on QM phenomena. The experiment used a ring of LEDs controlled by a rapid oscillator and a Geiger counter with a lump of something radioactive near it (because they wanted a True Random Number Generator). If an atom decayed while the oscillator was in one state, the lit LED was extinguished and the one immediately clockwise from it was lit. If the oscillator was in the other state, the next LED counterclockwise came on instead.

After encouraging subjects that they could do this and asking them to concentrate on moving the lit LED in a specific direction, they got results that were slightly better than predicted by random chance, but not enough to write an article about. Where it got interesting was when they repeated the experiment with subjects who had been given a discouraging preperatory talk: not only did they perform worse than the first group, but they did significantly worse than chance predicted -- and by enough of a margin to raise eyebrows.

(The power of negative thinking, eh?)

I read about this in Science News sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, I think. On the one hand, someone was paying attention; on the other hand, they were attempting to affect the probabilities of quantum events. A different conclusion than yours is suggested, but the idea that it works by tweaking QM is still in there.