
Do Our Questions Create the World? - ynonym00s
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-our-questions-create-the-world/
======
Tiki
Towards the end of the article was the question I had all along reading it:

"Where was mind when the universe was born? And what sustained the universe
for the billions of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers
us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not
an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the
farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking
back at us."

Can someone explain how his 'answer' is chilling or lovely? It's fine if he
wants to offer his own pet theory of reality, but to give a cop out answer to
its most fundamental question doesn't go far to support it.

~~~
s-shellfish
I find it both chilling and lovely. Because on one hand, life, endless
adventure, full of surprises, insights, new understandings and experiences,
feelings, etc. On the other, absolute, fundamental, loneliness (sophistry?) of
our own nature - having an individual sense of self but also feeling related
to everything we define as not 'I'.

Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from?
How did all of this happen?

Life is a waking dream, because we often completely forget that we really just
don't know at all why we are here. But we pretend, we forget, we make up
stories, we do anything we can do to run away from that question. Why. How did
all of this happen? Why does everything happen the way it does? What does that
mean, for what I am, all the way at the core?

It's not really nihilism, but it sort of is. It's just, that's the perpetual
question that never gets answered directly.

I've thought of myself before as a monad - a being so fundamentally lonely in
their own existence that they split themselves up into infinite pieces, just
to forget, there's nothing more than what they are. Maybe some buddhist
influences, but, we all have our struggles in life. It's not really intended
to be sophistry. It just is a very beautiful, but very chilling awareness.
What if I go back into what I was when I die?

You could see this as a mental metaphor my mind has arbitrarily made up for
all events I've witnessed and been a part of, some sort of perpetual social
ostracism I keep walking myself into. But I still think it's more than just
that. I loved science growing up. But I can never answer that question - and I
know absolutely, that I never will. What happened before 'I exist'?. For any
of us. My father often has had a variant of this question, and in the past,
it's rubbed people the wrong way because, only a fraction of it gets
expressed. We all wear masks. Sometimes there's just a profoundly deep sadness
that no one can see.

Chilling, and lovely. In perpetuity.

~~~
rellui
Whenever anyone asks me: why do you live? Where do we come from? I just ask
back: why do you care?

~~~
crooked-v
> The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three
> distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and
> Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

> For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we
> eat?", the second by the question "Why do we eat?", and the third by the
> question "Where shall we have lunch?"

------
mnw21cam
No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip
K. Dick)

~~~
alexpetralia
My metaphysical philosophy has always been:

\- Objective truth: the physical world as it is. There are no "chairs" in this
world (would an ant recognize a chair, or a bacteria?) - only data from which
we can derive patterns.

\- Consensus truth: what people have agreed to be true, often via perception
or abstract logic. This is math, that is red, this is a chair, that is
democracy.

\- Subjective truth: what I believe to be true, by my own rationality or my
own perception. This can sometimes deviate from consensus truth (eg. optical
illusions).

There must be a term for this philosophical position, but I haven't found it
yet (or the thinker associated with it). Obviously this is due to my ignorance
because this is not a particularly profound metaphysical position to take.

Does anyone know the name of this?

~~~
visarga
There's also:

\- Survival based truth: what we believe in order to keep being alive and make
more of us. The moment we mess too much, we're not there any more. An
unforgiving, but strangely, also somewhat flexible truth.

I think this is the winner, at least for people and animals. It's got an
internal self-righting system and transcends distinctions such as objective,
subjective and consensus - it's all of them. It's the kind of truth that keeps
existing by adapting to the world, or else it gets eradicated.

~~~
alexpetralia
I believe this is what Jordan Peterson calls "Darwininan truth." He thinks it
is the ultimate truth, but Sam Harris (on the side of "Newtonian truth") would
certainly beg to differ.

I can only imagine that there are both, the "Darwinian" one that we humans use
as an interface to an underlying, patternless, data-oriented "Newtonian
truth."

------
rags2riches
I can't claim to understand the first thing about quantum mechanics, but
whenever I read about it I always come to think of lazy evaluation. Then I
want to know if it's there simply for performance reasons or if it's to enable
an infinite universe.

~~~
sideshowb
If you were simulating the universe it certainly doesn't help performance
having to simulate an exponential quantity of interfering states rather than a
single classical one. It's anything but lazy evaluation.

~~~
carterehsmith
I remember when the "proceduraly generated" games first showed up - 30 years
ago?

You could get a billion different scenarios, each one involving a million
locations.

None of them existed before you started playing the game. And generating all
of them in advance would be a) impossible, given the memory requirements and
b) a huge waste, considering that 99.99999% of the players never needed to
experience 99.99999% of the scenarios.

So what they did, they only presented up what is "observable" to you, the
player.

So there is some saving there.

------
techbio
I immediately became lost in quest to trace the source of a quote near the top
of the article, and returned to bookmark this piece to read thoroughly, but
here is the fruit of my almost instantaneously easy etymology search:

The quote "" “Unitarianism [Wheeler's nominal religion] is a feather bed to
catch falling Christians” (Darwin); "" is from not one, but two Darwin's.

Here is Charles Darwin quoting Erasmus Darwin in his own slant:
[https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-
DAR-00115-00015/5](https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5)

The source is a Charles Darwin ancestor, Erasmus Darwin.
[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-
era...](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-erasmus-
darwin)

------
RobertoG
I'm too materialistic for taking those views seriously, but I recommend a nice
Science Fiction book that deal with this:

"Distress" by Greg Egan [1].

1\.
[http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html](http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html)

------
DoctorOetker
for the physics people: first look up charge whitout charge and mass without
mass. once you understand what Wheeler says about fundamental particles, and
how charge and mass could be topological properties, and how Wheeler coined
the term "wormhole". then go and read Maxwell (the original king of
unification [of magnetism and electrostatics]) treatise on electromagnetism.
There is a chapter on monodromy of electric potential, which would be
senseless in an euclidean sense,... i.e. Maxwell himself considered wormholes,
but skips over them rather quickly and turns to what is more easily modeled
with R^n... On wikipedia "wormhole" concept is attribute to Einstein and
Wheeler, but as I read it, even Maxwell considered the possibility that
discrete charges were a topological effect in exactly the same sense as
"charge without charge"!!

------
adrian_mrd
Brilliant reply to the parapsychologists 'incident':

"Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” John Archibald Wheeler

------
BjoernKW
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question:
[http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

------
woodandsteel
Questions require a questioner. The normal scientific view is that the world,
in part through Darwinian evolution, produced beings that can ask such
questions. To have the questioners exist first and then create the world
assumes they must be non-material spirits.

------
known
"The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason
for existing" \--Einstein

------
jatsign
Reality is a distributed consensus algorithm.

Work in the blockchain somehow, sell a million books.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
It'll be like "The Secret" except that if you believe hard enough, Satoshi
will add bitcoins to your account.

------
solresident
What a vapid piece of a garbage:

books by wheeler worth reading?

------
wazoox
Mmmhkay, so that's a rehash of good ol' George Berkeley's philosophy, then?
That's cute, only coming 300 years later :)

~~~
n4r9
There's a world of difference between solipsism and viewing observation as an
act of creation.

~~~
wazoox
Berkeley is not solipsist. He posits that reality exists only as much as it is
perceived or thought; perceiving is creating. Therefore the world persists
only because God perpetually perceives and think it, and the Creation is a
continuous process from God's thought.

------
lainga
If so, by Betteridge's law, the Universe must disappear.

------
irickt
Ugh. Has Scientific American become PseudoScientific American?

Recently they published this
[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-
mult...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-
personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/) by an author
who believes ""There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other
living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness,
surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the
revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world
with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters. This idealist
ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically
rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism ..."
[https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...](https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006)

~~~
s-shellfish
For as much as reality is patterned, and can be comprehend 'absolutely' in a
pragmatic, utilitarian sense - there's also another side to awareness (or
many, I can never be sure). Imagine that everything that has to do with 'mind'
is just as comprehensible in a different way. Or rather, imagine that that
awareness 'takes over' or 'overrides' the natural awareness one was taught or
learned to comprehend 'reality' with.

Science is vitally important to understanding things, making progress (however
humanity defines it), building things, etc. But deep insight philosophically,
I mean in my opinion, that's just as important, because they go hand in hand.
One becomes a tool for the other. Or a tool turns into an awareness.

As someone whose had more than their fair share of experience wading in the
somewhat deep (as in 'crazy') parts of the conscious pool of thought, yea,
reality, comprehending it in the same way it's known to others - absolutely
vital. But also not.

Doesn't make it pseudoscience. Just different questions, different things
being noticed, taken apart, figured out, asked about, pondered on. Just like
anything else, like ants on a trail to Feynman. Just because it looks 'weird',
misinformed - whatever - for a brief instant, doesn't mean that's what it's
going to turn into.

~~~
irickt
Over a few decades Scientific American has gone from deep research reports, to
pop science, and now to untestable cosmic thinking and other clickbait. If it
is not testable it is not scientific thinking.

Philosphical thinking may also be grounded in recurring phenomena or be
completely blue-sky. A philosophy that premises alternate reality begins by
ignoring how underdetermined is the human brain when reflecting on itself. A
scientific exploration is grounded in physical premises even if no objective
data is possible.

~~~
optimuspaul
I think you may be looking at the past through a filter. Perhaps you
definition of pop science has drifted over the past few decades.

------
hi41
>“I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the
imagination,”

I can’t take anyone seriously if he suggests that. Is hunger figment of
imagination? The war crimes and multitudes of unspeakable injustices? Nature
is really real. The effects seen in the atomic world must not be conflated to
the big.

~~~
gowld
Those are strange examples. How is "hunger" or "injustice" anything but
imagination?

------
eli_gottlieb
>Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing
speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality

Flagged for pseudoscience.

~~~
akvadrako
John Wheeler is a highly respected physicist and his “it from bit” is still
referenced in many papers every year. It's speculative and still not rigidly
defined, but definitely not pseudoscience.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to
reality" is not.

~~~
akvadrako
I personally wouldn’t characterize it from bit that way, but it’s not as crazy
as it seems.

We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But
the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best.

If it exists it isn’t anything like the classical world we inhabit - that has
been proven multiple times over.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But
the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best.

Objective reality can kill me, so I'd consider that rather less shaky than the
images that appear when I sleep.

