Do we create the world by looking at it?

Every few weeks some extremely old philosophy comes trotting out wearing new clothes. Just read a brief overview of western philosophy and you won't be wowed by this sort of stuff so much.

This particular example is the subject-object problem, popularized by Immanuel Kant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-object_problem

Quantum mechanics makes me think we live in a computer simulation and at the lowest level (where the most calculations are needed), the world is implemented using a lazy-evaluation scheme to minimize processor usage.

One of my favorite stories was about a women who frantically wrote to Bertrand Russel (of Principia Mathematica fame) claiming: "I'm a solipsist and, I have to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us."

> at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable: Distant events do not affect one other, and properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements. One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.

I'm pretty sure it's the second one. If, say, 2 spinwise-anticorrelated particles had x-spin values prior to measuring their respective x-spins, you wouldn't get Bell's inequalities. Isn't that why they were a big deal?

Look up the word "world" in a dictionary. Then look up the definitions of each of the words in the definition of "world". Then look up the words in those definitions. Continue on like this until you'd rather not.

Could they not condense the article into one paragraph. I could not find the point among all the useless information, like that one:

"On my final morning in vienna, snow was tumbling like dryer sheets as I stared out the window of the IQOQI waiting to speak again with Zeilinger. Suddenly, there was a great flash of lightning and a long roll of thunder as snow continued to fall. I turned around to no one and Zeilinger's assistant appeared. He now had time to talk."

Whatever...

some philosopher thought that the world would pop in and out of existence when it was not being observed. He said that because it did not become inconsistent (blue couch turning red when you looked back at it) was because there was a grand observer god that kept everything under observation and therefore nothing popped in and out.

I like this interpretation: http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp

Here's the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

descartes was right all along