by: Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, read in 2008
13 "Back in the 1950s, it was said that any nontenured faculty member in a physics department would endanger his or her career by showing any interest in the implications of quantum theory."
83 "In the year 2005, more than a hundred billion transistors were manufactured -- every second."
103 "Quantum theory has no atom in addition to the wavefunction of the atom."
105 Heisenberg: "Whether we take electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular."
166 "Ithaca assigns consciousness to a "reality" larger than the "physical reality" to which physics, for the present at least, should be restricted."
166 "In [the Quantum Information Interpretation,] the wavefunction, or the quantum state, provides only a compact mathematical device for calculating the most that can be known by predicting the correlations between observations, for example, between an initial measurement and a subsequent measurement. The quantum state is thus not an objective physical thing; it's only knowledge"
166 "...in a sense it therefore limits the scope of quantum mechanics to being only about consciousness
175 "There was a young fellow named Todd
Who said, "It's exceedingly odd
To think that this tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the Quad.

The reply:

There is nothing especially odd,
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why this tree
Can continue to be
When observed by
Yours faithfully, God.
176 "If God collapses the wavefunctions of large things to reality by His observation, quantum experiments indicate that He is not observing the small."
178 "Christof Koch: ...Given the centrality of subjective feelings to everyday life, it would require extraordinary factual evidence before concluding that qualia and feelings are illusory. The provisional approach I take is to consider first-person experiences as brute facts of life and seek to explain them."
179 "Chalmers goes on to speculate on these principles. The one he considers basic, and the one most interesting to us, leads to a "natural hypothesis that information (at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect."" This is my "upward information" and "downward information".
180 "According to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman "I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exist. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.""
181 "Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey sees it differently: "I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery."" And who exactly are "us" and "we"? And who is the designer?
182 "One young woman objected: 'I've dated guys who couldn't pass a Turing test'"
206 "Whoever 'breathes fire into the equations,' would presumably be omnipotent enough to do it properly at the very beginning and not need to tinker with every step of evolution." Why make that presumption?
207 "Though quantum mechanics seems to deny the existence of a physical reality independent of its conscious observation, if our observation creates everything, including ourselves, we are dealing with a concept that is logically self-referential -- and mind-boggling." My single helix fixes that.