The Quantum Universe is Probabilities

….until it is observed by a consciousness that fixes it to one potential state.

This is what science has been telling us, coming up on a century now, is happening at the quantum level where particles carry superpositions (e.g. existing in two different places at the same “time”) that are eliminated yielding a single position only upon observation.

The conclusion drawn from the foregoing is that reality is only “determined” upon observation – or put differently, doesn’t really exist independent of the observer.

That conclusion is belied by our experience of reality. We do not think that someone who is asleep alone in a cave somewhere exists in two or more different ways that are only fixed/determined at the moment when the first member of the rescue team walks in and “observes” that person.

But that’s not what the science is saying.

We experience the world at a macro level relatively speaking. People are not particles. They are made up of a myriad particles. What’s more, those particles are constantly changing. And yet, we interact with and ultimately bury and mourn one distinct person when that bundle of particles ceases to operate in a biologically active way.

We call the Sun the Sun even though its constituent “elements”, quite literally, at the particle level are dynamic and nobody is freaking out about that.

And yet our school systems are still not dealing with this in any meaningful way to allow the concept to gain adequate penetration and yield offshoot thinking that provides either more substantiation or attenuation and more importantly to allow the implications to gestate.

It’s all still considered controversial.

So every week someone puts out an article on this as though they for the first time just uncovered a secret tablet of ancient (potentially alien) knowledge and are sharing it with their readers with the same hold on to your seat undertone.

All because of one implication – that the underlying code of the universe is not a fixed mass of micro matter that exists in a definitive state independent of our observations.

That’s kind of the opposite of science.

Philosophy used to pick up where science had to step off but not anymore. Philosophy is no longer considered culturally valuable. We’re too busy figuring out social media and the alt-right. Philosophy must also bear some responsibility for its present impotent state. After all, when we let charlatans like Derrida (not Foucault just to be clear) take over and run the discipline like a rock and roll gig this is what we would inevitably inherit.

A world where Trump, photographed in intimate settings with a person several times over, stands up and says never met the guy and his supporters don’t give a damn because they’ve been reading JD and Schrödinger.