About references to quantum theory – #2

What is this “quantum weirdness,” and how does it relate to the seer’s explanation (the explanation, not the book)?

First, quantum theory tells us that when physicists describe the world, they do so in terms of a range of possibilities, each with a probability of being observed during an experiment.  As an example, each atom – of which all familiar objects are composed – has intrinsically a range of possibilities where it might be found, and each of these possibilities has a probability of that location being the result of an experiment (i.e. an observation).

But when we do the experiment, when we make the observation, that atom is actually found to be somewhere.  It appears that we require an observer to make the atom “choose” from among all its possible locations.  How do we do that?  The answer is, among physicists, still highly controversial.  But the seer’s explanation says that all those possibilities are represented in different real worlds, and we choose the possibility we observe as a function of our conditioning.  And we share that conditioning and resulting choice with everyone else with whom we share our reality, our world.

The second aspect of quantum weirdness has to do with something called “quantum entanglement.”

As Kuttner and Rosenblum put it, “Quantum theory tells that any things that have ever interacted are forever connected, ‘entangled.’ For example, your friend’s freely made decision of what to do in Moscow (or on Mars) can instantaneously […] influence what happens to you in Manhattan. And this happens without any physical force involved. Einstein called such influences spooky actions. [But] they’ve now been demonstrated to exist.”

This points to another aspect of the seer’s explanation, which is that the entirety of the world we think we are observing is actually a reflection of the description we use (without our being aware of it) to make sense of the world.  And that includes space and time!  So the distance between Mars and Manhattan in the preceding paragraph is part of the description of the world and not of the world itself.  And distance in the context of a description of the world is fundamentally different from distance in the context of the world itself!