Article Do our observations make reality happen?

[C C]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01773-x

INTRO: This week, physicists are gathering on the German island of Helgoland to commemorate 100 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics. In the century following Werner Heisenberg’s theoretical masterstroke — made while convalescing from hay fever on that island — this theory has become ever more precise in its descriptions and successful in its applications. With technologies such as quantum computers, we stand at the cusp of a revolution that promises to bring the quantum world into many aspects of our lives.

Yet there is still no consensus about what it all means — about the deep lessons that quantum mechanics reveals about the fundamental nature of reality. Addressing this issue takes us from the domain of physics into the realm of philosophy. Although physicists are best placed to develop and extend the mathematical framework of quantum theory and design experiments to test it, philosophers of physics are needed to come to conceptual grips with the result: they have the tools to contextualize that framework and set it in a coherent account of reality.... (MORE - details, few ads)

[Magical Realist]

In the words of the Christopher Fuchs, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and one of the creators of QBism, “what is at stake with quantum theory is the very nature of reality. Should reality be understood as something completely impervious to our interventions, or should it be viewed as something responsive to the very existence of human beings?”11. In this view, the privileged status of observers in creating reality is the distinctive claim that quantum mechanics makes.

I agree. Wheeler's thought experiment, later confirmed in an actual lab, and his conclusions about what this means for reality/consciousness, are for me the final word so far on the matter. Even Chalmers explores the dual nature of information:
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"Chalmers suggests that the dualistic (non-physical) element might be information. Indeed it might. With this idea too, information philosophy completely agrees. Mind/body is a property dualism, not a "substance" dualism, as Descartes thought.

Chalmers says that a "fundamental theory of consciousness" might be based on information. He says that "physical realization is the most common way to think about information embedded in the world, but it is not the only way information can be found. We can also find information realized in our phenomenology." (ibid, p.284)

He is quite correct. Information is neither matter nor energy. It needs matter to be embedded temporarily in the brain. And it needs energy to be communicated. Phenomenal experiences transmitted to us as visual perceptions, for example, consist of information that is pure radiant energy. The pure (mental) information content in one brain can be transmitted to other brains, by converting it to energy for communication; other brains can then embody the same information (perhaps with significant differences in the details) for use by other minds (the "multiply realizable" software in different brains' hardware).

But such transmitted information is stripped of the contextual emotions that are generated by each individual's past-life experiences reproducer (ERR). So the same "information" "or "knowledge"

Chalmers comes very close to our view of the mind as information. He describes his fundamental theory as a "double-aspect principle."

'The treatment of information brings out a crucial link between the physical and the phenomenal: whenever we find an information space realized phenomenally, we find the same information space realized physically...It is natural to suppose that this double life of information spaces corresponds to a duality at a deep level. We might even suggest that this double realization is the key to the fundamental connection between physical processes and conscious experience. We need some sort of construct to make the link, and information seems as good a construct as any. It may be that principles concerning the double realization of information could be fleshed out into a system of basic laws connecting the physical and phenomenal domains.

We might put this by suggesting as a basic principle that information (in the actual world) has two aspects, a physical and a phenomenal aspect. Wherever there is a phenomenal state, it realizes an information state, an information state that is also realized in the cognitive system of the brain. Conversely, for at least some physically realized information spaces, whenever an information state in that space is realized physically, it is also realized phenomenally...

Information seems to be a simple and straightforward construct that is well suited for this sort of connection, and which may hold the promise of yielding a set of laws that are simple and comprehensive. If such a set of laws could be achieved, then we might truly have a fundamental theory of consciousness.'

It may just be...that there is a way of seeing information itself as fundamental.

In his conclusions, Chalmers declares himself to be a mind-body dualist.

'I resisted mind-body dualism for a long time, but I have now come to the point where I accept it, not just as the only tenable view but as a satisfying view in its own right. It is always possible that I am confused, or that there is a new and radical possibility that I have overlooked; but I can comfortably say that I think dualism is very likely true. I have also raised the possibility of a kind of panpsychism. Like mind-body dualism, this is initially counterintuitive, but the counterintuitiveness disappears with time. I am unsure whether the view is true or false, but it is at least intellectually appealing, and on reflection it is not too crazy to be acceptable.' "

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/s.../chalmers/