Thread: Would the universe exist without observers?

^^ That's all very excellent stuff, Snoop, but, perhaps oddly, what it does for me is illustrate the real problem behind this question:

Why do we assume that something must be real to us in order to be real at all?

I have always felt that the arrogance of humans (and probably lots of other sentient beings in the universe with time on their hands to wax intellectual) is profoundly on display when we say things like the universe will not exist if we are not there to observe it. The universe exists all by itself, without our help and observation, and somehow did so for many billions of years before we ever existed to observe its presence, just as it will still be there long after we're gone.

I blame folks like Einstein and Heisenberg, plus quantum mechanics in general for all this seemingly collective solipsistic nonsense (if that's even possible). Well, I don't blame them; I guess I blame the tradition of misinterpretation of quantum mechanics, and our (also human) need to find all the cool stuff we can about a theory few people even understand and apply those bits to our waking-life existence; i.e, that the observation of an electron will change its state does not equal that the observation of, say, a mountain will change its state.


Also

Originally Posted by Athylus

Just like when we aren't dreaming, there is no one to sense the surrounding. No one can see, feel, hear, smell or listen to the dream we make up. Does it still exist then? I don't think so. I think the same can be said for our universe.

The problem here is that your dream never existed, even while you were dreaming it. Not in any physical sense, anyway (and no, I'm not counting synaptic energy between brain cells, because I don't think that is what you were talking about). Aside from your memory of it, your dream really is gone when you wake up, because it was never "there" in the first place. The universe, however, was there before, during, and after your observation of it... whether you like it or not.