Observation Disturbs and Creates

[Reiku]

''Like I said, I'm not entirely sure what criteria an object would have to fill to count as an 'observer' in this sense, but I think that the bar lies closer to simple particle interaction than complex thought.''

Here i am assuming you ar referring to decoherence...?

That's o'k, as such effects are predicted by physics anyway. But great chunks of reality, according to Hawking (Let's keep Wolfy out of this one), would still have been in heavy superpositioning. This would mean that reality was very ghost-like without the observer... without the first observer.

 

[invert_nexus]

Here i am assuming you ar referring to decoherence...?

You would be correct in that assumption.

This would mean that reality was very ghost-like without the observer... without the first observer.

Yes.
Well. Quantum theory doesn't exactly extend all the way back to the big bang, does it?
But, regardless, the first 'observer' was most likely not a thinking being. Rather, it was some sort of interaction.

It does still leave a conundrum of how that first interaction took place if none of the quantum goofiness had settled down yet. But, as I said, quantum theory doesn't remain valid back to the beginning and thus it is quite possible that this need for 'observation' is rendered moot by the rules which would have applied.

 

[Reiku]

''Well. Quantum theory doesn't exactly extend all the way back to the big bang, does it? .''

In theory yes, but in reality no, as we haven't found the GUT of Everything.

''But, regardless, the first 'observer' was most likely not a thinking being. Rather, it was some sort of interaction.''

I agree, an interaction on these scales had to occur, but as i said, it's not enough. Gaps are still within reality, nothing totally defined, even though a beginning and end had occured, true to the simplicity of relativity.

''It does still leave a conundrum of how that first interaction took place if none of the quantum goofiness had settled down yet. But, as I said, quantum theory doesn't remain valid back to the beginning and thus it is quite possible that this need for 'observation' is rendered moot by the rules which would have applied.''

Again, i agree. It does leave to ''how everything came about anyway.''

I like to adopt some anthropic idealism where the universe began so it could exist through us. Other scientists right now are considering that the universe was able to come out of blue, through a tunneling process, much like how a virtual photon comes out of the nothingness. But quantum theory, in theory, should remain balanced in the beginning, so long as we know what that beginning was... even if it had one.

 

[Gustav]

there is a procession
awareness expands outwards
i observe myself before anything else
it could be as basic as a memory of a previous state
a coordinate rather than an actual self

 

[Reiku]

The first interaction would have been during the nucleosynthesis. This isn't quite a decoherence, but it is an interaction and production of elements. It wouldn't have been until gravitational affects took hold will have any of the heavier elements fallen into each other, passing by each other in their quantum wave-like states that they helped to decohere into actual particles, creating stable planatoids... but here is the rub. According to the statistics and ratio of how certain supergalaxies formed, because they should have taken more like 80 billion years to get to the states they are in today.

 

[Gustav]

motion implies knowledge of prior coordinate or state
or ....
it doesnt

 

[Frud11]

A sensor doesn't have consciousness, yet it acts as an observer as far as quantum theory goes. No active mind has to perceive, rather the particles merely need interact with the physical in some form...

The cat in the box is a detector, except it dies if another detector interacts with a decay (a random event, right?). So the cat is alive or the cat is dead. Opening the box is another kind of detection. A cat isn't a single electron.
Photons interact with pigments, which are photon detectors; this is fundamental to vision, but just one end of the connection.

Exactly what the requirements of this interaction are, I don't know. But, I do know that they lie far below conscious thought and observation...

By the way, Frud should be arriving here soon, I imagine.

Hey.