Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
A problem - this contradicts the Principle of Mediocrity which suggests there's nothing special about the human point of view.

We don't live at the centre of the solar system, or of the galaxy, or the universe. So it seems unlikely that the universe only exists because we perceive it. (Of course it only exists for us because we perceive it. But that's not quite the same thing.)

I might be convinced by the idea that our own unique perception exists because of us. The universe is out there as a extended haze of possibles, and our unique probability mix is personal.

But then the question becomes - how sentient do you have to become before this process starts happening for you?

So I'm not sure that's any more convincing as a point of view.

Penrose has suggested there's some kind of feedback loop between QM and gravity/local geometry, so effectively there's a trade off between mass and uncertainty. Small light things have a much wider range of uncertainty than big heavy ones - partly because it's impossible to maintain the ambiguity of pristine probabilistic virginity in a complex system, and partly because he likes the idea that geometry underlies everything and so it ought to be in the equations somewhere.

(I'm paraphrasing a little there, but I think that's more or less what he was trying to say. :) )

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 10:57:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Occasional Series