Article by Stephen Wolfram: “We call it perception. We call it measurement. We call it analysis. But in the end it’s about how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impression of it that we have in our minds.
We might have thought that we could do science “purely objectively” without any reference to observers or their nature. But what we’ve discovered particularly dramatically in our Physics Project is that the nature of us as observers is critical even in determining the most fundamental laws we attribute to the universe.
But what ultimately does an observer—say like us—do? And how can we make a theoretical framework for it? Much as we have a general model for the process of computation—instantiated by something like a Turing machine—we’d like to have a general model for the process of observation: a general “observer theory”.
Central to what we think of as an observer is the notion that the observer will take the raw complexity of the world and extract from it some reduced representation suitable for a finite mind. There might be zillions of photons impinging on our eyes, but all we extract is the arrangement of objects in a visual scene. Or there might be zillions of gas molecules impinging on a piston, yet all we extract is the overall pressure of the gas.
In the end, we can think of it fundamentally as being about equivalencing. There are immense numbers of different individual configurations for the photons or the gas molecules—that are all treated as equivalent by an observer who’s just picking out the particular features needed for some reduced representation.
There’s in a sense a certain duality between computation and observation. In computation one’s generating new states of a system. In observation, one’s equivalencing together different states.
That equivalencing must in the end be implemented “underneath” by computation. But in observer theory what we want to do is just characterize the equivalencing that’s achieved. For us as observers it might in practice be all about how our senses work, what our biological or cultural nature is—or what technological devices or structures we’ve built. But what makes a coherent concept of observer theory possible is that there seem to be general, abstract characterizations that capture the essence of different kinds of observers…(More)”.