Observation

Full Title or Meme

Observation and Information Theory says that an Observation is just a recording of some physical event. Typically the observer will stage that event to confirm or falsify some physical theory.

Context

Observation requires a transfer of energy between the observer and that which is observed. In our example, the photon from the sun gives energy to the electron in Felipe’s retina. One way to think about the term “observer” is that the interaction is called observation because it is the moment at which the photon becomes observable. At this moment, it has created a physical change in our universe. In this way, it is observed and recorded in the history of our universe. An information theorist would say that the photon has created information.

Must the observer be conscious? The use of the term “observer” in quantum physics can be confusing. It seems to imply it’s a human being or maybe a particularly constrained cat.

Solutions

An Observer Theory explains "how 'special' what an observer does. At its core it’s just about taking a large set of possible inputs, and returning a much smaller set of possible outputs. And certainly that’s a conceptual idea that’s appeared in many fields under many different names: a contractive mapping, reduction to canonical form, a classifier, an acceptor, a forgetful functor, evolving to an attractor, extracting statistics, model fitting, lossy compression, projection, phase transitions, renormalization group transformations, coarse graining and so on. But here we want to think not about what’s “mathematically describable”, but instead about what in general is actually implemented—say by our senses, our measuring devices, or our ways of analyzing things."

We might have thought that the only thing ultimately “out there” for us to observe would be our physical universe. But actually there are important situations where we’re essentially operating not as observers of our familiar physical universe, but instead of what amount to abstract universes. And what we’ll see is that the ideas of observer theory seem to apply there too—except that now what we’re picking out and reducing to “internal impressions” are features not of the physical world but of abstract worlds.

Or, in other words, reality is in the mind of the beholder.

Local Reality

We have a theory of local reality from Bell's inequality. It basically says that information cannot move at a speed faster than the speed of light. This theory has been falsified time and again by multiple experiments. So if we limit reality to what we can see and measure, then we do not have a theory about why entanglement works. Or entanglement is not real just as dark energy is not real. We could redefine reality to include these and the Ruliad, but there is no compelling reason to do so as they are not part of our perception. Perhaps when there is a theory that is not falsified, we can expand our definition of reality.