I recently came across a theory from Japan that tries to rethink physics from the standpoint of the observer.
Instead of treating reality as something fully given “out there,” it suggests that reality may emerge when certain structural conditions of the observer are satisfied.
What I found interesting is that it reframes the gap between relativity and quantum mechanics as a problem about how the observer is defined.
Philosophically, it feels closely related to the question of whether observation is passive or constitutive of reality.
It’s summarized in a short video, so if you’re interested, I’d really appreciate your thoughts: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/c714dc8c-eb93-4317-b369-8e57fac880fc?artifac
I don’t have anything to learn from crackpot woo. My interest in this subject is precisely to dispel the woo, because it is not only popular among Laymen like yourself, but also among academics.
@bunchberry@lemmy.world
Through discussions like this, I start to see what kind of frameworks people are operating within.
That alone makes it a valuable learning experience for me.
It doesn’t matter how much you learn if you don’t value reason to begin with. Even if you are aware of the fact that theories like quantum mechanics can be explained in simple realist terms, if you just want to believe in bizarre things like people’s consciousness can influence the outcome of quantum mechanical experiments, just thinking about a certain outcome really hard makes it more likely, then you would end up believing that just because you want to believe it and don’t want to have a materialist worldview.
@bunchberry@lemmy.world
I think you may be misunderstanding what this theory is actually saying.
It’s not about claims like “human consciousness influences quantum outcomes” or “thinking really hard about a result makes it more likely to happen.”
More fundamentally, subjectivity and consciousness are not the same thing in this framework.
Consciousness may be something that exists within humans — for example, in the brain.
But subjectivity is defined differently: it is not something located within a person, and it is not something that can be measured.
It’s a conceptual structure of a completely different kind.