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I recently came across a theory from Japan that tries to rethink physics from the standpoint of the observer. (fedia.io)

submitted 20 hours ago by BlueberryAlice@fedia.io to c/philosophy@lemmy.world

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I recently came across a theory from Japan that tries to rethink physics from the standpoint of the observer.

Instead of treating reality as something fully given “out there,” it suggests that reality may emerge when certain structural conditions of the observer are satisfied.

What I found interesting is that it reframes the gap between relativity and quantum mechanics as a problem about how the observer is defined.

Philosophically, it feels closely related to the question of whether observation is passive or constitutive of reality.

It’s summarized in a short video, so if you’re interested, I’d really appreciate your thoughts: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/c714dc8c-eb93-4317-b369-8e57fac880fc?artifac

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[–] bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I don't really buy any of these exotic approaches to QM because no one has ruled out the non-extraordinary explanation that it is just a statistical theory. People all pretend it was ruled out by Bell's theorem, but all Bell's theorem shows is that it cannot be a local statistical theory. Okay, then it is non-local. Nothing more needs to be said. All the "paradoxes" that these exotic interpretations try to "solve" arise from starting with the position that it is not just a statistical theory. I really have trouble entertaining exotic extraordinary viewpoints if we have a trivially simple, intuitive, and consistent viewpoint right on the table which has not been ruled out.

[–] BlueberryAlice@fedia.io 1 points 7 hours ago

@bunchberry@lemmy.world

Even if a nonlocal statistical theory can reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics, that would still remain at the level of describing outcomes, wouldn’t it?

In reality, the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity has remained unresolved for over 150 years, and the deeper issue is that the framework itself does not define the structure of observation.

This theory, on the other hand, addresses that very point by defining the conditions under which outcomes are realized— that is, the structure of observation itself— and treats quantum mechanics and relativity as aspects of a single generative process.

In that sense, the question is not whether it can be described statistically, but whether the theory is structurally complete.

From that perspective, this framework provides a more consistent explanation.