Towards the end of the article was the question I had all along reading it:<p>"Where was mind when the universe was born? And what sustained the universe for the billions of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking back at us."<p>Can someone explain how his 'answer' is chilling or lovely? It's fine if he wants to offer his own pet theory of reality, but to give a cop out answer to its most fundamental question doesn't go far to support it.
No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it.<p>Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)
I can't claim to understand the first thing about quantum mechanics, but whenever I read about it I always come to think of lazy evaluation. Then I want to know if it's there simply for performance reasons or if it's to enable an infinite universe.
I immediately became lost in quest to trace the source of a quote near the top of the article, and returned to bookmark this piece to read thoroughly, but here is the fruit of my almost instantaneously easy etymology search:<p>The quote
"" “Unitarianism [Wheeler's nominal religion] is a feather bed to catch falling Christians” (Darwin); ""
is from not one, but two Darwin's.<p>Here is Charles Darwin quoting Erasmus Darwin in his own slant:
<a href="https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5" rel="nofollow">https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5</a><p>The source is a Charles Darwin ancestor, Erasmus Darwin.
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-erasmus-darwin" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-era...</a>
I'm too materialistic for taking those views seriously, but I recommend a nice Science Fiction book that deal with this:<p>"Distress" by Greg Egan [1].<p>1. <a href="http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html</a>
for the physics people: first look up charge whitout charge and mass without mass. once you understand what Wheeler says about fundamental particles, and how charge and mass could be topological properties, and how Wheeler coined the term "wormhole". then go and read Maxwell (the original king of unification [of magnetism and electrostatics]) treatise on electromagnetism. There is a chapter on monodromy of electric potential, which would be senseless in an euclidean sense,... i.e. Maxwell himself considered wormholes, but skips over them rather quickly and turns to what is more easily modeled with R^n... On wikipedia "wormhole" concept is attribute to Einstein and Wheeler, but as I read it, even Maxwell considered the possibility that discrete charges were a topological effect in exactly the same sense as "charge without charge"!!
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question: <a href="http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html</a>
Questions require a questioner. The normal scientific view is that the world, in part through Darwinian evolution, produced beings that can ask such questions. To have the questioners exist first and then create the world assumes they must be non-material spirits.
Ugh. Has Scientific American become PseudoScientific American?<p>Recently they published this <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-mult...</a>
by an author who believes
""There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters. This idealist ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism ..."
<a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006" rel="nofollow">https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...</a>
>“I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,”<p>I can’t take anyone seriously if he suggests that. Is hunger figment of imagination? The war crimes and multitudes of unspeakable injustices? Nature is really real. The effects seen in the atomic world must not be conflated to the big.
>Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality<p>Flagged for pseudoscience.