(February 1, 2015 at 10:38 am)Brian37 Wrote:(February 1, 2015 at 10:33 am)Alex K Wrote: I don't know how it could possibly contribute to the philosophical discussion at hand in a meaningful way, but photons are currently not known to be spatially extensive - they are, like electrons, mathematically described as point particles which are subject to quantum mechanical uncertainty, and no measurement so far falsifies this assumption. If string theory is correct, we'd know more about their shape, as it would be a 1-dimensional string instead of a point particle, but that's pure speculation.
Science is pointing away from a consciousness as a requirement as a cause no matter what we currently don't know about QM.
There simply is no need to fill in the gap with a giant cognition.
That's right. In the first decades of QM some people thought consciousness was the thing causing wave functions to collapse, spawning all kinds of woo on the sidelines, but this view has been largely discarded now as an artifact of the initial confusion about the theory.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition