"Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function": Presentations

Our article "Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function", by David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen, is due to be published in the volume Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, edited by Shan Gao, forthcoming from Oxford University Press most likely in 2022. We presented versions of this work starting in August 2013 and circulated slides for these presentations. These versions have been widely cited and differ from the final version, so we have included here some links to the older presentations. Note that all of these are presentations of joint work.

Slides:

Oslo, August 2013 (Chalmers)
ANU, April 2014 (Chalmers and McQueen)
Tucson, April 2016 (McQueen)

Video presentations:

Göttingen, May 2014 (Chalmers)
Tucson, April 2016 (McQueen)
Mind-Matter Seminar, January 2019 (McQueen)
Fermilab, March 2020 (Chalmers)
Harvard Foundations of Physics, July 2021 (Chalmers and McQueen)

Text:

Draft of July 2013
Draft of April 2015
Draft of December 2016
Philosophy Now, August 2017 (McQueen)
Publication version, May 2021 (Chalmers and McQueen)

The slides were made available online and widely circulated. A text was not widely circulated until 2020 (aside from McQueen's brief popular piece in Philosophy Now), mainly because of the issues arising from the Quantum Zeno Effect. Eventually we wrote a separate paper on the Zeno problem ("Zeno Goes to Copenhagen") and we developed an approach to that problem in terms of ongoing collapse by localization (an idea briefly entertained at the end of the Oslo presentation in 2013) in "Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function".