Excellent chart on that page. Hurrah for asking their degree of confidence! The plurality of respondents had low confidence, of course, as scientists should pending some experimental reason to prefer one interpretation over another.
For those who don't click through:
- It's a Nature news feature from July 2025, including responses from 1100 people with papers in quantum physics
- 36% preferred the Copenhagen interpretation, and nearly half of those indicated "not confident"
- 17% epistemic theories, 15% many-worlds, 7% Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave theory
- small percentages for various others including "none"
Definitions are for math. For science it's enough to operationalize: e.g. to study the differences between wakefulness and sleep; or sensory systems and their integration into a model of the environment; or the formation and recall of memories; or self-recognition via the mirror task; or planning behaviors and adaptation when the environment forces plans to change; or cognitive strategies, biases, heuristics, and errors; or meta-cognition; and so on at length. There's a vast amount of scientific knowledge developed in these areas. Saying "scientists can't define consciousness" sounds awkwardly like a failure to look into what the scientists have found. Many scientists have proposed definitions of consciousness, but for now, consensus science hasn't found it useful to give a single definition to consciousness, because there's no single thing unifying all those behaviors.
Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere could lead gradually to a much thicker atmosphere, and even surface liquid.
I’m only 1% serious, but how do we know for sure which direction evolution went in within the ape family?
It seems not entirely unplausible that we have at some point in the scientific chain of custody assumed the “lesser” apes “evolved into” the “more advanced” human.
But a species could easily branch and have the branch lose its geographic portability features (e.g.ability to manipulate environment, most exogenous behavior learning-based) if they are no longer selected for in a particular environment, and I’m not aware of anything in the fossil record that firmly establishes directionality. Am I wrong?
> Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly?
Do regular people ever wax their zippers? (ChatGPT says it might be done by sailors or leatherworkers on occasion, for whatever that's worth.)
At the level of industries and large groups, the chief answer to your "Why?" is the same sort of reasoning as the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": Nobody ever got fired for using established performance metrics.
On the individual level, there's another tricky problem, which is that very few individuals could figure out an alternative performance metric that beats the established one, no matter how gamified the established one is.
On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial code changes!
For those who don't click through:
- It's a Nature news feature from July 2025, including responses from 1100 people with papers in quantum physics
- 36% preferred the Copenhagen interpretation, and nearly half of those indicated "not confident"
- 17% epistemic theories, 15% many-worlds, 7% Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave theory
- small percentages for various others including "none"
- additional charts for related questions
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