I read an opinion piece in Scientific American today: "Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?" by John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. In the article, Horgan talks about the challenges of understanding and coming to terms with the lack of commen sense in quantum physics, and "QBism’s premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints."
Surely, there is a more nuanced understanding of subjective reality, a more continuous, rather than dichotomous, interpretation. Something more like:
$$Reality(obs) = SubjectiveReality_{obs}$$
Where \(obs\) is some measure of the observers/observations.
In the special case of \(obs=1\), we get an individual's reality. And as \(obs\) increases towards infinity:
$$\lim_{obs \to \infty} Reality(obs) = ObjectiveReality$$
In this way, objective reality is a funtion of the observations and observers. [Note: I am not going to talk about the challenges of weighting observations or observers. This is the domain of the scientific method. But suffice it to say that observation in science is NOT a democracy! ☺ ]
Horgan suggests that, perhaps like T.S. Elliot's poem, The Waste Land, "Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise."
I would suggest that it is my responsibility, as a conscious, sentient, self-aware being, to understand my own limitations, my own subjective reality, and to endeavour to move closer to some objective reality, at least within epsilon, where epsilon is small enough that any further attempts to aproach objective reality are beyond my abilities and/or lifetime.
Perhaps the only difference between physicists, who are admonished to "Shut up and calculate!", and "friends majoring in philosophy", who one might advise to “Shut up and procreate!", is the size of their "epsilon".
To Horgan I would suggest, get a smaller epsilon!
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