Transcription
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We've all experienced it. Perhaps we were walking down the street. Perhaps we were sitting on a park bench. Perhaps we were watching a video at home. Suddenly, it hit us: a momentary but lucid breakaway from our normal perception, our normal focus on what seems like center stage. We look around and realize no one is watching what we are watching; no one is seeing what we are seeing. Everyone else is watching something different, their own show from their own position in the theater. We realize there isn't even really a center stage or show at all; there's just one big audience, each individual performing in their own section with their own spotlight for themselves. Occasionally, some performances bump into each other, their spotlights briefly overlapping.
This realization has a term, known as *saudade*, which is defined as the sudden awareness that everyone is living an entirely unique life, just as complex, vivid, and real as one's own. The millions of people whom you've passed by, physically or digitally—all the blurs of the cars you've seen fly by, all the rear silhouettes that you've waited behind in line, all the lights of apartment windows that caught your eye—each of these flickers in your life belong to unfathomably deep, full lives, just as your passing car, hazy silhouette, and dim window light belong to yours. This world emanates a spectrum of conscious experience, devoid of centrality—billions of people experiencing each moment in the strange and almost ethereal realm of consciousness.
But what is this realm? What does every life, every story, and every observation suggest about the nature of what we are experiencing as a whole? What do we all share in this theater of existence? What is this theater of existence? How real are the shows we watch and the stories we tell?
The observer effect. Most of us tend to think that there is one true reality, which is fixed and independent of observation and subjectivity. Though this sounds obvious and intuitive, there are legitimate reasons to question this, to consider the possibility that reality, as we define it, might be meaningfully altered by our observations—not merely as it appears to us, but reality itself. Both throughout history as well as presently, there are both philosophers and physicists who believe, to varying degrees, that reality is far more entangled with observation than what we tend to think. The 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley went so far as to argue that observation not only alters reality but creates it. In other words, reality does not exist independent of the mind but is the result of the mind. The fundamental nature of everything is not matter but mental constructs or ideas in the mind. This view would eventually come to form the metaphysical philosophy known as subjective idealism, though at the time Berkeley referred to it as immaterialism.
Of course, there appear to be many problems with this argument. The idea that reality is created purely out of mental constructs seems to suggest that without the presence of a conscious being somewhere, nothing would occur in that location, since there would be no reality being created. The classic tree falling with no one around to hear it would not make a sound, but it would also seem that, with this theory, it couldn't even fall. But, of course, it appears that it could. Things do seem to happen in the world regardless of any person or animal present. An empty room, devoid of any person, animal, or plant, can be left and returned to without any apparent changes, and everything appearing to have continued as one would expect. A candle that was lit in the room before leaving, for example, assuming there is no draft or alterations to the oxygen levels in the room, will continue to burn, and the wax will have continued to have melted at the rate that one would expect when they return. How then could observation create reality if things don't appear to cease happening when no one is around? Perhaps our brains create the continuity, but with the amount of coordination required amongst other brains, that seems far less likely. For Berkeley, the answer was God. Since everything was always being observed by God, things always happen everywhere, even when there are no humans or animals in direct proximity. For some of us, this might sound like an interesting conclusion, but for many others of us, this likely sounds like we took a very wrong turn somewhere. But what if this idea of ubiquitous observation points us towards something profound, a place we can traverse and explore without needing to bring God with us?
Quantum anti-realism. Quantum mechanics is the field of physics that deals with the nature of reality at the atomic and subatomic level—particles like electrons, photons, neutrons, and so on. During around the 1930s, there were two opposing views forming about the nature of reality pertaining to quantum mechanics. The first view is known as realism, which was supported by Albert Einstein, among many others. Realists argue that the universe is real and independent of observation and measurement. The physical world—everything, including tiny particles at the quantum level—is deterministic and fixed, with definitive properties. As previously mentioned, this is what we all tend to intuit. But the problem is quantum mechanics appears to pose serious threats to this view. The other opposing school of thought is known as anti-realism, which was argued for by the physicist Niels Bohr, among many others. Anti-realists argue that particles have undefined properties, and they only become defined when they are observed or measured. In this theory, reality, at least at the quantum level, is not real in a defined, fixed sense until it is observed or measured. This has been displayed in several experiments, including the famous double-slit experiment, where a particle that otherwise acts as a wave without a defined state suddenly acts as a particle with a defined state when it is observed through the slit it's being sent through. "No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon," said the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
Non-locality. In 1972, the American physicist John Clauser conducted an experiment in which he used photons emitted from calcium atoms to explore the correlations between particles that had interacted with each other at the subatomic level. This process of interaction results in what is known as entangled particles, where their quantum states become linked. The conclusion of Clauser's experiment proved something extremely strange: a violation of what is known as locality, which in physics refers to the principle that an object can only be directly influenced by its immediate surroundings. In 2022, Clauser, along with Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect, won the Nobel Prize for their work, which collectively proved one of the most confounding aspects of quantum phenomena: quantum entanglement. Their work showed that not only does a particle being measured determine its state, but the act of measuring one particle also determines the state of the other particles it is entangled with, even when the particles are separated by vast distances, potentially light-years away—even though supposedly information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. The determination of one particle state instantaneously determines the others. Collectively, these findings show that locality appears to not be fundamental to reality. In other words, the universe is not locally real, and quantum phenomena does not operate in a deterministic, fixed way. With this, the anti-realists were right, and Einstein was wrong. Everything in the universe appears to be far stranger and more interconnected than we could even conjure up with our most presumptuous of woo-woos.
It from bit. What is at the bottom of all this interconnectedness? What causes particles to do or not do something? Is there something more fundamental than matter and energy that bridges the gap between the material world and the observed reality? Some individuals believe the answer is information. Perhaps reality is not purely mental, like Berkeley thought, and it is not purely deterministic and independent, like Einstein thought, but rather reality is created by the interaction between the two. In other words, reality is formed through the information exchanged between material and measurement. This idea was proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, with what he coined the participatory universe. This idea has led some individuals, including Wheeler, to believe that reality is fundamentally information processing—essentially no different from the information processing of a computer or brain. Thus, the bottom of all reality is essentially binary bits of information, or sets of yes or no answers. Reality becomes reality through the processing of these bits of information via yes/no questions asked through methods of measurement. Experiments based on what is known as Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment have, in fact, unbelievably but definitively shown that the behavior of particles becomes defined not only when a measurement is made but when the choice of what kind of measurement is made. Put differently, the question being asked of reality affects the answer given by it. With this, reality seems to almost function like a giant game of 20 questions, but it has yet to even pick an object for us to guess. Instead, by asking certain yes/no questions, reality becomes defined. To describe this process, Wheeler coined the phrase "it from bit." He wrote, "It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin; and this is a participatory universe."
The nature of consciousness. With observer-centric theories of reality and physics, we are seemingly left with the same problem that Berkeley's philosophy of idealism faced: we are left without an observer to explain the continuity of occurrences in the cosmos—the falling trees, the burning candles, the swirling dust in deep space. What allows for the events in the cosmos when no apparent measurement is occurring, where more information is being processed? Famously, Einstein once asked those who argued for observer-centric theories, "Do you really believe the Moon is not there when you are not looking at it?" But what if we have a misunderstanding of what it means to look and what qualifies as a measurement or observation? There is a theory about the nature of reality and consciousness that is equally controversial as it is profound, known as psychism. Psychism claims that consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon of a complex biological system, but rather it is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe—everything down to individual particles possesses a sort of note of consciousness, a quality of mind. Consider how we as humans acquire our consciousness. It appears to come about through the matter and energy that make up our brains. But how does matter and energy produce conscious, first-person experience if it does not possess the ingredient of consciousness to begin with? Psychists resolve this dichotomy by arguing that matter does possess the quality of consciousness, and a system simply becomes more conscious as matter combines and becomes more complex in arrangement. But throughout all levels of complexity, the quality of consciousness persists. Things only appear to the human mind as conscious when they appear like a human mind, because perhaps the human mind is fallaciously projecting its own standard of mindedness onto the world—a giant brain.
If consciousness were to be a fundamental feature of reality, what would that suggest about how information travels, how particles act and interact, how reality unfolds and is altered through observation? In some sense, could there always be observation and information processing? What if the universe functioned like a giant brain, always exchanging and processing information with itself? Who is to say that the universe couldn't and doesn't think? Would this explain the effects of observation, the unfolding and apparent indeterminate malleability of quantum events, and the entangled interconnectedness of particles across vast distances? We have a habit as humans of extracting ourselves from processes and equations, as if we are observing the universe and the "we" is separate. But, of course, we are not; we are ourselves entangled with it. And perhaps in our attempt to observe and define the universe, we are like a mirror faced against another mirror: we reflect ourselves and see nothing. We are missing something, and that something is perhaps in us, or a part of us, a part of everything. We are like neurons in the brain of the cosmos, trying to understand what the whole brain is doing.
Of course, it's crucial to state how much of all this—nearly everything that's been mentioned—is extremely theoretical and abstract, some ideas being far more so than others. As we weigh out into the theoretical depths, where we find ideas like panpsychism and a universe that could think, we shed most of our scientific skin and morph into a more esoteric and philosophical form. In truth, we haven't yet even defined what or how consciousness works in ourselves, and so applying it to everything is quite a leap. Likewise, in the case of the universe not being locally real and reality being defined by observation and choice of measurement, perhaps these are merely limitations in our knowledge or in our capacity to perceive and form knowledge. Perhaps these seeming incongruities are overcomable, perhaps not, or perhaps our reality is as strange and participatory as it appears. Ultimately, our frameworks of thought are weak, and the mysteries of the universe are infinitely heavy. Whatever reality is or isn't, we will almost certainly never know.
But if we return to that experience of *saudade*, the realization that everyone else is experiencing their own unique life, just as vivid and real as one's own, the meaning of "vivid" and "real" take on an unfathomable and almost eerie meaning now, in this deeply interconnected and perhaps observer-centric reality. The events we observe and the stories we tell seem to be imbued with some substrate of the cosmos that affects or indicates so much more than we can even fathom. Every person, every brain, every tree, every leaf, every clump of dirt, every rock, every planet, every star, and every particle all participate in telling the story of everything. The sum of each subjective reality weaves together the singular objective reality. There is no separate; it is all one. Our uncertainties, our questions, our answers, and our false convictions are parts of reality's interplay with truth, just as how our thoughts shape each of our own lives, the cosmic reality shapes our thoughts, and then maybe, just maybe, our thoughts turn back out and help shape reality.
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