Thread: Consensus Reality

And somehow this is relevant to consensus reality?
By observation...
Reality is shaped by observation....
And expectations...
So what the majority believe to be reality
manifests to confirm their expectations?

Wow. I'm really surprised to see how active this thread became. Heh. Haven't been able to read much, but I'll have to get caught up soon.

No takers on post #128?

Oh, I looked at that post this morning. Haven't watched the slides you linked to yet though, I've been busy. I have heard of this experiment before, and it's always fascinated me. I honestly don't know what to say about it. By all accounts it seems to suggest that our observations can change the past, but some part of me really can't fathom that. It's a tough one to wrap your brain around, that's for sure.

That is hard.
But our thoughts definitely change the future.
But how can anything change the past?
I've tried to change the past after I did something extremely stupid or harmful that I regret or when I lost someone that I love, but never did manage to change the past.
Has anyone? If nobody has done it then it must be impossible.

My take is that we're not "changing the past," simply choosing which of the photons' pasts to observe. The classical assumption is that the photon has a fixed path regardless of whether it is observed, and observation simply discovers a fixed value that was always present; this hypothesis does not stand up to testing. One interpretation of the experimental outcomes--the one that yields the "changing the past" confusion--is that the photon does not have a fixed path before observation, but does afterward, implying that observation somehow caused the photon's actions retroactively. There is another possibility: the photon has no single, fixed path either before or after observation. Instead, the photon is always taking all possible paths, because neither it nor anything else in the universe was ever a single, discrete object to begin with, and what changes due to observation is simply how much of the photon we can see. Before the observation is made, we can "see" a wider range of the proton, but only dimly, whereas after the observation we can see and interact with only a narrow subset of the total proton: what the classical model would take for the whole thing.

Originally Posted by Dannon Oneironaut

And somehow this is relevant to consensus reality?
By observation...
Reality is shaped by observation....
And expectations...
So what the majority believe to be reality
manifests to confirm their expectations?

The reality that is viewed is shaped by the viewing. The reality that is looked for is shaped by expectations. Expectations are created by ideas and interpretations of what has been viewed. Collectively accepted ideas and interpretations are expected to be closer to what has been viewed and what can be viewed, and so we only look for those things that we know most people collectively expect to find, and therefore that is what we see when we observe.