Through the lens of humanity

BCP1928 said:

Pardon me, I just would hate anyone to slide off the edge into "...trying to deny God's promise in the Bible of punishment for their wicked lifestyles" which we hear so much of in these forums.

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Anything is possible, especially if "sliding off the edge" is defined by what's on someone else's dinner plate rather than our own.

jasperr said:

I think it may have been Mortimer Wheeler who suggested that when we look at the universe it is the universe which is looking at itself through our eyes.

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I'm wondering:

If that's the case, then when we talk to the universe, is it the universe talking to itself?

John Archibald Wheeler did not believe in pantheism or panpsychism but was a cosmologist addressing the philosophical question of the role of the observer in Quantum Mechanics.

According to Quantum Mechanics the observer can be my telescope/CCD combination which took this image of the Hydra Galaxy Cluster.


Wheeler came up with the “It from Bit” idea where all physical things ultimately emerge from information where in this case the observer (the human) makes sense of the information in the image by producing a software program that is able to annotate the image and identify all the galaxies in the image by their NGC, IC and PGC numbers. Stars are identified by their TYC numbers.



This raises an interesting question what happens if the observer happens to be AI?
I asked ChatGPT to annotate the image giving it zero prior information.

It is impressive ChatGPT correctly identified the image from nothing despite the annotation being hopelessly wrong including objects that do not appear in the original image, one would expect this deficiency to disappear with advancements in supervised and unsupervised machine learning.
It reinforces the issue the observer doesn't have to be a conscious being.