A large pile of bizarreness does not warrant arbitrary bizarreness. Most physicists do not adhere to the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation, including, eventually, Wigner.
Arbitrary bizarreness?
Von Neumann's claim is that it is needed by the mathematics. That is hardly arbitrary.
Do you even know what interpretation most physicists adhere to? I'll give you a hint:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/
It's the Copenhagen interpretation. And what does the Copenhagen interpretation say about collapse? Pretty much nothing! The von Neumann interpretation is the logical and ontological extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Most physicists don't care enough to go into this since they can run their experiments without dealing with this extra part. Most quantum physicists are pretty instrumentalist about this.
And just because most don't believe in conscious collapse doesn't mean that it's wrong! Do you notice that only 9% believe in some sort of objective collapse model? I know there are folks working on the GRW interpretation, and what if that ends up being correct? Well using your logic I guess it won't since most don't believe in it!
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Here is a paper that claims it has been falsified and proposes another experiment to test it:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.2404
Read my previous post on this paper. This does not falsify the von Neumann interpretation at all.
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
You need to read the scenario more carefully. If the secretary hears the bell, then the measurement was "down." If the secretary does not hear the bell, then the measurement was "up." In the second case there was no interaction at all. The state must have collapsed prior to the printing in order to give the secretary the chance of collapsing the state. A solution might be that everything is still superposed even after the secretary hears the bell, since there is one path on which she does not hear it.
Apparently you did not read the paper you just linked to:
...in experiments
similar to that proposed here, if “which-path” information
was in principle obtainable, then even though no
actual attempt was made to extract this information (i.e.,
to measure it), no interference pattern was found.
In other set of experiments (Eichmann et al., 1993; Durr
et al., 1998), “which-path” information was measured
but was not recorded by any macroscopic device (for
example, this information was stored only in the state
of single atom or photon) and, therefore, was not accessible
to a conscious observer.
The secretary is interacting with the system in this way. She doesn't have to directly hear the bell in order to interact with the system. I go into more detail in my previous post on this paper about how the end conscious observation creates the consistent past histories under the von Neumann interpretation.
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
It may be that consciousness-causes-collapse is still on the table. If so, adherents need to figure out what sort of consciousness is required to stand outside QM and collapse wavefunctions. It's a nasty form of interaction dualism.
No, it's not a form of interactive dualism. It can also be a form of what Chalmers would call "Type F Monism." In fact, in another area of science, Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness posits that consciousness is fundamental, and this theory is actually philosophically incompatible with dualism, and is compatible with the Type F monism (and a type of materialism, but I think if combined with the von Neumann interpretation it is then only compatible with type F monism).
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
"[T]he evolution of conscious life on this planet is due to appropriate mutations having taken place at various times. These, presumably, are quantum events, so they would exist only in linearly superposed form until they finally led to the evolution of a conscious being—whose very existence depends on all the right mutations having 'actually' taken place!"
---Roger Penrose
You're quoting Roger Penrose, whom I'm sure you know is a proponent of the Penrose Objective Reduction model, which is a type of objective collapse model. In the survey I linked to earlier, only 9% said they believe in such a model, and if you notice, the objective collapse theory also includes the GRW theories, which are actually more popular than Penrose's objective reduction. So by your logic that "Most physicists do not adhere to the" objective reduction interpretation, then it must not be true.
Well of course this isn't true, but this entangled hierarchy collapse paradox is really the only paradox that conscious collapse model contains, however there are ideas regarding this. One is that there is simply an entangled hierarchy, or a "dependent co-arising" of the quantum system and the observation. This could be possible if we take the ontological position that both the wavefunction and the "particle" do not exist. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the implied ontological status is that the wavefunction is "unreal" and the particle is "real." If the substratum of consciousness has the ontological status of existing, then both the wavefunction and the particle do not have inherent existence, and in which case, there is no problem of something being created, but rather than one of the quantum possibilities is "experienced" by consciousness, which appears as a dependent co-arising.
The other possibility would be that some type of pre-cognition-like effect is going on, where the future affects the present (whether through teleology or some sort of backwards interaction). In this case, the present wavefunction is collapsed by the future existence of the human observer (in this case).
There is also an implicit assumption of what constitutes a conscious being, which could be
very wrong. Integrated Information Theory could have it that much more simple systems than us could be conscious, and perhaps systems such as cells or colonies of cells could have been what first caused collapse, not human observers.
But contrast this to objective collapse models such as Penrose's, which doesn't even hold up to experimental evidence like the EPR paradox. And how would fit experiments using quantum teleportation where the quantum information of the state vector of a photon is teleported many kilometers instantly? It doesn't fit with the Wheeler delayed-choice type of experiments, either. I would rather take an interpretation that at least fits all the experimental data we have.
