🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 5, 4:35 pm, James Warren <jwwarren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not such a new idea. Who is *us* exactly. Surely we are not the only
> observers in the universe and what constitutes an observation? This
> is not a good idea.

Each observer -- or group of observers -- sees the multiverse in a
different way.  What would constitute a group, I'm guessing, is
anything that makes an observation similar...  E.g., presumably,
humans see and think in much the same way; so our observation would be
a collective one.  We're composed of and depend on the same
"stuff" (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sufficient values for the EM force,
gravity, and so on).

It follows from a combination of the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics and Feynman's "sum over histories" interpretion.


Following a similar line of thinking, a Buddhist book I read a while
back (_Embracing Mind_ by B. Alan Wallace) indicated that the idea of
a "real universe out there" -- one whose exact form is independent of
observation -- is essentially a Christian one... or, rather, an
ancient Greek one that like-minded Christians embraced 2000 years
ago.  Where there's a creator-God, there's such a universe -- one
whose form doesn't rely in any way on human observation but on God's
absolute laws.  This idea isn't common in the East.

Alan Watts, a British philosopher of religion, made a similar remark
in a lecture...  He said we once lived under the superstition of the
Ceramic Model -- i.e., the idea that the world is an artefact that was
made.  "Remember," he said, "Jesus was the son of a carpenter... and
he was also the son of God."  That was, he claimed, the power of that
myth -- that idea.

But we now, having "fired" God, live under the superstition of what he
called the Fully-Automatic Model -- i.e., the idea that the universe's
form exists independent of observation.  "We got rid of the god and
kept the laws," he says.

(And interestingly, what he calls the Fully-Automatic Model is
inconsistent with every variant, every interpretation, of quantum
physics -- the Copenhagen interpretation and Bohr's notion of
complemetarity, Feynman's "sum over histories," Everett's "many
worlds" interpretation... one of which has to be somewhere in the
vicinity of the truth... in as much as any human concept can be).

The Fully-Automatic Model is easily dismissed by asking questions
like, "Where does 'blue' come from?"  The answer is that it comes not
from one thing, but a combination of things: (1) the light present,
(2) the quality of the surface reflecting the source light, (3) the
observer's eye and brain, and (4) the experience of 'blue' that the
brain gives us in response to all that.  It's that idea that the
universe is more a set of relationships that anything concrete -- the
ultimate "relativity theory," as it were.


db