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Comment by CMay | Hacker News Reader

Is this a misunderstanding of what the double slit experiment actually means, or am I misinterpreting it? If this is based on the idea that reality changes strictly as a result of a conscious observer existing and it is somehow related to consciousness, etc, that is not accurate.

I learned this years ago from Philip Ball, one of the editors of Nature. There have been other scientists helping to clear up the confusion recently, though.

Here is Sean Carroll explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips

Here is Sabine Hossenfelder explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8

Philip Ball explained it in Beyond Weird: https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL

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Well, Nima has shown that space-time is emergent from higher geometry like he amplituhedron and is not the fundamental basis of reality. Then Hoffman suggests that conscious agents could plausibly be the substrate through his category theoretic work. It's not a misunderstanding of the double slit experiment. (I think that was a talking point for a long time amongst hippies.) The interpretation that wave function collapse requires a conscious agent would be consistent with this idea though, and also consistent with simulation theory.

Nima is a theoretical physicist and many of them have diverged away from hard science. Hard science needs to connect and relate back to classical physics mathematically and ideally have a way of being tested. Not all theoretical physics ever gets there, probably most don't. The best adjusted theoretical physicists are aiming to expand on our understanding of classical physics which we know to be useful and true to the best of our knowledge as opposed to coming up with entirely new untestable theories of physics that are themselves based on top of untested theories.

Psychology is also a soft science, so while clinical psychology can be useful when it is grounded in real instances of human behavior, theoretical psychology is on the softer end of an already soft spectrum of science.

Simulation theory isn't very convincing and it's really just the opposite end of the spectrum of people demonstrating proof of god. Both types of arguments are almost universally logically flawed. It doesn't prove or disprove them, it's just bad logic.

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