Observing the observer: Perception in Philosophy Psychology and Physics

What Do Descarte, Buddhists and Astrophysicists have in common?

The Answer?

To give a short answer. Fundamental appreciation of one's own epistemologic limitations and an understanding of the self-referential nature of perceiving one's existence.

In non-jargon: They pay attention to what they are paying attention to. In order to better understand this, lets take a brief tour through philosphy, psychology and astrophysics.

Descartes Says: "Cogito, Ergo Sum" {#cogito-ergo-sum}

I think therefore I am

A famous line everyone has heard before. Let's cover what Descartes meant by this.

Descartes was a Skeptic. He wanted to answer the question "What can I know for SURE". While this seems simple, it reveals some deeper questions. Can you trust your eyes? What about opical illusions? Can you trust your ears? What if you are hallucinating? If we cant trust our senses, what can we trust?

This question drove him insane until he came to one very important discovery.

Cogito, Ergo Sum - I think therefore I am

What this means, is that while we can doubt our knowledge, our eyes, ears and smell, we cannot doubt our own existence. Because any doubt itself is proof of our own existence.

This is such a profound statement, because stating it itself, is proof that it is not false. Even if you doubt your senses or your reasoning, it must still be true.

From this observation, Descartes (and thousands of philosophers after him) tried (and failed) to axiomatically reconstruct all of human knowledge. This fundamental axiom remains unchanged. You exist, because you can observe yourself.

Anthropic principle

In 1973, Brandon Carter changed astrophysics forever when he coined the "Anthropic principle". This principle states that the fact that we exist, is a necessary condition for us to make observations about the universe. This means that the range of observations that could be made about the universe is limited by the fact that observations can only be made within a universe capable of creating intelligent observers. An excellent anaology is to consider a sentient puddle of water, who is amazed at how perfectly the hole it is in fits it. The puddle's misconception is that the hole was made for it, when in reality, the puddle was made out of the hole.

This principle starts to explain why it seems like the universe is finely tuned to produce life. That is because, if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to notice it. It puts limits on the physical constants, the age of the universe and possibly why we haven't found aliens.

For example, why is the universe as old as it is? If it were a tenth of its current age, there would not be enough metal in the universe to sustain intelligent life. If it were ten times its current age there would not be enough active stars alive in the universe to maintain human life. Therefore, it is no coincidence that we live in a universal golden age. If we weren't then we wouldn't exist to notice that it is a golden age.

The anthropic principle is invoked many times in astrophysics to explain the remarkable coincidences we see in nature.

Mindfulness

Mental health practitioners, Buddhists, and plenty of wise people recommend mindfulness for managing anxiety and depression. This practice emphasizes observing one's thoughts and feelings from a detached perspective. It implicitly recognizes the existence of a conscious observer separate from the contents of consciousness.

In practice, a mindfulness exercise involves letting yourself feel emotions and experience thoughts while observing those emotions and thoughts from a detached perspective.

This is sometimes called meta-attention. Paying attention to your attention. The aim of practising meta-attention is to decouple your consciousness from your observations and thereby break the thought loops that cause anxiety and depression.

Mindfulness extends from the Buddhist and Hindu traditions and is backed by modern cognitive psychology. The practice of observing one's thoughts as the physical process of natural laws is a powerful tool for understandng ones place in the universe.

So what ties these things together?

The common thread linking these three concepts is the acknowledgment of consciousness or subjective experience as a fundamental starting point for understanding reality.

Specifically:

1. Epistemological starting point: All three ideas recognize that our subjective experience is the starting point for knowledge. We can't step outside our consciousness to view reality "objectively."
2. Self-referential nature: Each concept involves a kind of self-reference. Mindfulness observes the observer, Descartes uses thought to prove the thinker, and the Anthropic Principle considers observers observing the conditions for their own existence.
3. Limits of knowledge: All three ideas implicitly acknowledge the limitations of what we can know. Mindfulness reveals the constructed nature of our experiences through our senses and Descartes' scepticism provides a starting block to build our knowledge off of. Finally, the Anthropic Principle reminds us that our observations are inherently biased by our own existence.
4. Importance of perspective: Each concept emphasizes the role of the observer's perspective. Mindfulness shifts perspective, Descartes isolates a singular perspective, and the Anthropic Principle accounts for the observer's perspective in cosmological theories.

Where else does the role of the observer come up in study?

Plato's Cave

Plato's Cave is a philosophical parable that addresses the nature of reality and human perception. It is another concept very relevant to these concepts of observability. The allegory is summarised :

1. Prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall. They have lived facing this wall their entire life..
2. Behind them, a fire casts shadows on the wall from objects passing in front of it.
3. The prisoners can only see these shadows and believe them to be reality.
4. If a prisoner is freed and sees the true world outside the cave, they would at first be confused and disbelieving.

Copyright: Wikimedia Commons. 2018. Sharealike license

The lesson we learn from Plato's Cave is to consider how our perception limits our understanding of the universe. Plato argues that the philosopher is like the prisoner who escapes the cave to understand the world, while the unenlightened are content not knowing even what they do not know.

Plato's cave also prompts us to consider our own subjective existence in relation to our observations of the universe. Much like the prisoners mistake shadows for reality, mindfulness encourages us to not mistake our own thoughts and feelings for reality.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal

While less philosophically dense, Quantum mechanics is another topic which centres observability within its epistemic framework. Quantum mechanics centres the role of the observer within it via the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.

This principle places a limit on what we can know because the action of making an observation itself will affect the state of the thing we are observing. Mathematically this is expressed as:

This means, that the more precisely we know a particle's position , the less precisely we know its momentum and vice versa. This is because to figure out a particle's location, you need to interact with it in some way. This interaction affects its momentum.

Quantum mechanics even encodes the act of observing as a mathematical operation, expressed as a bra and "reality" as a ket . The observation of reality is calculated as a probability by multiplying the two:

Concluding thoughts

To be completely honest, I don't know how to tie this blog post together, other than noticing the interesting pattern of the role of the observer in so many different fields.The act of decoupling the concept of observing from understanding true reality, we have made strides in a wide range of fields, from philosophy, and psychology to astrophysics, and quantum physics.

If you can tie this idea of perceptibility to your own work let me know, either email me or hit me up on mastodon, because I am very interested to see where else it has come up. I hope to write a future blog post tying the concept of perceptibility to determinism and free will. So stay tuned for that!