Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
Can spirituality and humankind's apparent desire to have an awareness of that which is perceived to be divine point to an intrinsically human, even biological need to have communion with that which is perceived to lay beyond ourselves? Can we as rational human beings reasonably engage in an act of rational, objective observation when quantum physics has shown us that the mere act of observation has a direct effect on that which is being observed?
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What quantum mechanics shows (this might be pedantic, but I think there's a profound truth hidden here somewhere) is that what we thought of as "observation" is really interaction. It's not really that observation changes the state of what's observed, but that observation is the result of that change in state. A photon interacts with an atom, causing the atom and the photon to change states, and then that photon interacts with another atom, causing the state of that atom and the photon to change again. Observation is just that change of states, all of a sudden a point in my vision that was red is green. Where is the observer? The observer is everywhere and nowhere, but everything that is physically present is a field in constant flux. There is no point in that field that we could call "the observer," just various points that are interacting with all the other points.
The "measurement problem," the notion that we can't know what a particle is really doing because we change it by shooting light at it, is kind of like going up to a meditating monk, shaking him out of his meditation, and asking, "what are you feeling?" It's only a problem because there's a mistake inherent to the approach itself.