Homocentric Universe

MIGHT?:

You are not the person you see in the mirror (Marina Zilbergerts, 6/11/26, IAI News)

Suppose a person acquired a superpower that allows them to track all the physical processes of their body. They could identify what the stomach is digesting and pinpoint the location of an infection. They could log the content of every thought, register each emotional shift, and accumulate all of it as data.

And yet, such a person might remain prone to self-deception. They might struggle to sustain meaningful relationships, unable to connect their actions, desires, and emotions into a stable way of being with others. They would possess an exhaustive account of their processes, and yet lack any understanding of their own heart.

We can’t even know ourselves but pretend that empathy is more than a conceit.

WHY EMPATHY IS SELF-DELUSION:

The moderately easy problem of consciousness (Noah Smith, Apr 27, 2026, Noahpinion)

You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.1 The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

Similarly, you’ll never know what it’s really like to be someone else — whether the color red looks to you like it looks to them, whether they feel pain the same way you do, and so on. In fact, you’ll never even know what it was like to be you in the past. Subjective experience is incommensurable.

Sympathy is ample.

IT IS OBSERVED, THEREFORE IT AM:

What About the Quantum Physics Observer Effect? (Larry Gottlieb)

Classically, the conscious observer is contained within the world an as object among many other objects. In the inverted view, the world is contained within the consciousness of the observer as an interpretation of sensory data delivered to the brain. The form we call the human animal then is the end result of the interpretive mechanism which takes optical, tactile, and other sensory data and produces a multisensory picture in the brain. It is this picture to which we refer when we use the term “human being.”

How, then, does the “observer effect” show up when the world of objects is recognized to be the result of an interpretive process?

The default or classical understanding of the observer effect is the phenomenon of changing the situation from the way it was before being observed to something different. But when the world and all its components are viewed as the result of interpretation by the observer, the observer effect is no longer an agent of change but rather an agent of creation. The observer brings the world he/she is experiencing into being through interpretation. There is no situation prior to its observation, and therefore there can be no effect on the situation in the usual sense.

This inversion of the relationship between the world and the observer has numerous benefits. Psychologically, it puts the observer in a position of personal power with respect to the world of one’s experience which is unavailable in the classical view. Most of us have found that changing the world is difficult at best. However, interpretations can be changed or replaced, and thus the world as a product of interpretation can be changed as well.

In quantum physics, we find the idea of the wavefunction. The wavefunction is a description of the building blocks of nature (electrons, protons, and so on) in which each particle is represented by the probability of any particular result of a measurement on some aspect of the particle. For example, the particle’s position in space is not fixed, but a measurement can result in a number of positions each with a probability of finding it there.

The process by which a measurement of one of these aspects appears to select one possibility from among them all is called the collapse of the wavefunction. The phrase “collapse of the wavefunction” refers to the fact that the normal state of an unobserved particle is what’s called a superposition of possible states (possible outcomes of any yet-to-be-performed experiment on or measurement of the particle), and the actual experiment or observation causes this superposition to disappear. We know this because we never observe a physical object, no matter how small, in more than one state at a time. This collapse is very hard to explain when the particle is considered to exist as it is, whether it’s being observed or not.

However, when what we think of as the particle is the result of a process of interpretation of sensory data (augmented of course by detectors or other scientific devices), it’s the interpretation, or the description we so derive, that contains the collapse.

Physics just mathematizes Hume.

A CHOICE OF IDEOLOGIES:

One of the Largest Physics Surveys Ever Finds No One Agrees on Anything (Gayoung Lee, May 13, 2026,, Gizmodo)

“I think the most surprising finding was the gap between the public perception of scientific consensus and what scientists actually said when asked,” Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada and the Perimeter Institute, which co-managed the survey with APS, told Gizmodo. “Ideas often presented as the standard view, such as inflation, string theory, particle dark matter, or a constant dark energy, did not command overwhelming support. Inflation barely crossed 50%, while several of the others fell well below a majority.”

AS CONFIRMED BY PHYSICS:

Why Dr. Johnson Kicked a Stone After Hearing Berkeley’s Argument (Vanja Subotic, 5/07/26, The Collector)

Berkeley’s key idea, the one that so enraged Dr. Johnson, is neatly summed up in his neat Latin phrase: Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). He argues that for anything to exist, it must be perceived by someone. Put simply, an object that no one is aware of through their senses simply cannot exist. […]

Something often omitted in the retelling of this philosophical anecdote is that, according to Boswell, Johnson kicked the stone more out of frustration than demonstration. Both he and Johnson considered Berkeley’s ideas to be at odds with common sense. But try as hard as they could, neither of them could come up with a way of disproving Berkeley’s arguments. They were absolutely convinced that Berkeley was wrong and annoyed that they could not vindicate common sense.

No one can.