Quotes About Observation

The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle ages who lacked the capacity to "see" witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous to see what is objectively happening.

The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

If you look at your watch, realize you still don't know the time, and look again, were you strictly speaking awake the first time you looked?

Remember: I am not asking you to believe these yarns at all. We know how much nonsense gets published these days, do we not? I am merely asking that you observe in yourself the strength and immediacy of the impulse to deny at once. Does this impulse vary according to the weight of the circumstantial evidence (such as it is) or according to how much your own imprinted and conditioned reality-tunnel is challenged?

Back in the Vietnam War days, I attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations and the police's crowd-count never agreed with the organizers' count. My own observations never gave me clear reason to believe anybody's estimate. I don't know how people judge the size of large crowds, or how they can use techniques they sincerely believe have "objectivity." Even in looking at spilled marbles, I think people estimate very subjectively.

Meanwhile, we might all remember the verdict of Count Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages: you respect them more if you haven't actually seen how they're made.

In short, we don't need to postulate a supernatural Designer. Our experiments create the universe observed by our experiments — which when interpreted always yield an Anthropic universe, rather than any of the millions or billions of possible non-Anthropic universes — because we designed the experiments.

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level.

I have suggested in other books that Einstein's physical relativity is just a special case of a more general neurological relativity: the observer, with or without instruments, always remains co-creator of the observation. To quote Nietzsche again: We are all greater artists than we realize.

Even Aristotle, despite the abuse he has suffered in these pages, had enough common sense to point out, once, that I see always contains fallacy; we should say I have seen. Time always elapses between the impact of energy on the eye and the creation of an image (and associated name and ideas) in the brain, which explains why three eyewitnesses to a hit-and-run such as we postulate here may report, not just the blue Ford of the first speaker, but a blue VW or maybe even a green Toyota.

If you think about it from the perspective of E-Prime, the world consists mostly of UFOs and UNFOs. Very few things (space-time events) in the air or on the ground give us the opportunity to identify them with certainty.

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, called the father of the hydrogen bomb in some circles (others attribute paternity in that regrettable case to Dr. Edward Teller) has repeatedly urged that the simplest, most honest explanation of quantum paradoxes holds that the known universe results from the observations of those who observe it. This observer-created universe bears an uncanny resemblance to some of our data about self-fulfilling prophecies, it begins to appear.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

Like most other experimenters he found only and always what he looked for.

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

5. James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.

Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show.

In short, to claim that all these theories have been proven false appears more like a propagandistic assertion than a neutral factual observation. The issue is still open, except in the minds of those who wish it were not open.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.