you can't change the past until it's been formed, and it isn't formed till you look. So with that picture of the universe with the eye closing for your closed circuit, the point is in this picture the universe doesn't properly exist, yeah, until the eye is look back on the universe.

Now, not many physicists will believe that. They will think it's too, too metaphysical, but it is in some sense an implication of the view that consciousness collapses the wave function.

But then you get into the question of what is the consciousness collapsing the wave function?

Because the critics will say, well, look, I can see the universe. I'm looking with my space, the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm seeing things in the universe before any human beings and possibly before any alien beings ever formed.

So how is this possible if, if there was no consciousness? In other words, how could the universe have existed before there were any observers?

But the counter-argument is you've got to decide what you mean by consciousness because consciousness with the little 'c' may not have existed, but what about Consciousness with the big 'C' if mind was primary?

Yeah. So, and the idea of consistent history, consistent histories, which is what we are talking about, it's not as weird as it sounds.

And like Bernardo was explaining, even if we know history, we know history only at a very coarse level: characters, events.

We don't know the positions and trajectories of every elementary subatomic particle corresponding to those micro events.

So there are many, many, many possible histories, paths of, of those paths that are consistent with what we do know.

Yeah. So you can imagine that a consistent history is what you get when you take a magnifying glass and you look at the past with a microscope and then those various possibilities that are consistent with the past at a coarse level, which you do know, they will collapse into one of them, one of those possibilities, because you looked with a microscope at them and you're not changing then into something else because you change your past.

No, this is not any more crazy than the measurement problem in the present already is. It's no more crazy than that. It may be crazy, but it's no more crazy than the one that we have in the present.

How does an observation, uh, produce one single result if all we have is the laws of large numbers and Schrödinger's equation?

Yeah, I thought that even the even the distinction between quantum and classical might be observed dependent because, um, in in fact, a feature of specious presence, even, because, you know, the quantum in the, we classically an electron goes around a proton, but in quantum mechanics, it's the electron doesn't go around the proton, it's it's actually a wave around the proton.

Yeah, and that's rather reminiscent. You remember in my talk, I showed this light going around and how it goes around and it's and it sort of is basically a sine wave.

Well, this is rather like this proton which instead of being a point going around is a is a a circle.

And so I've often thought, well, maybe the the division between quantum and classical is something to do with the specious presence of the observer.

And and if that was the case for a being with a much longer specious presence, then a large much larger domain of the world would appear to be quantum.

Okay, because I mean, you've got a longer time scale.

On the other hand, with a being with a much smaller specious presence, a lot of the quantum world would appear classical. Yeah, again, this isn't mainstream physics, but it's often struck me there might be a link between because that's a big issue in in in physics, what is the divide between the quantum, where does it stop, the classical realm?

And uh, George Ellis made a big thing about that, so we don't really know because the point is that we it's nice to say quantum mysteries just apply in the microscopic domain, but it's not as simple as that.

We do know they propagate into the macroscopic domain, possibly brains, but certainly in biological systems. So the idea that in some sense what is quantum and what is classical depends upon the the the the nature of the observer, it doesn't sound to me completely crazy.

Is the Conscious Observer 'Creating' the Material Universe? | Prof.Bernard Carr & Bernardo Kastrup

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