NO OBSERVER, NO REALITY:
‘In Search of Now’ Review: Blurring Forever and a Day: Our understanding of time as a one-directional flow of moments is central to how we perceive the world. It may also be an illusion. (Andrew Crumey, March 13, 2026, WSJ)
Do we simply model reality, or could it be that our mental models are reality? For many researchers this is a step too far, but it links back to physics. A paradox of quantum mechanics, known as Schrödinger’s cat, concerns a box in a laboratory containing a cat and a radioactive sample. Theory suggests that the cat should remain a mixture of two potential outcomes—alive and dead—until someone opens the box. What about another person outside the lab? From their perspective, is there a mixture of happy researcher inside holding a live cat and a sad one with a corpse?
One answer comes from Qbism (pronounced “cubism”). Short for quantum Bayesianism, it involves the same kind of probabilistic inferences that brain researchers are interested in. Qbists think the universe is a matter of perspective even at the most fundamental level; there is no single, objective moment when the cat’s fate is determined everywhere.
We are all designist.