Homocentric Universe

THE NECESSITY OF BEING OBSERVED:

Quantum Mechanics and the Problem of Minds (Society of Catholic Scientists, October 13, 2025, Church Life Journal)

This leads us to a basic question. In quantum mechanics, there is always a “system” that is measured and that is described by a wave function, and an “observer” who makes observations or measurements of the system that collapse the wave function. The question is where the “system” ends and the “observer” begins.

Suppose that I am the observer, and the system I am studying is a radioactively unstable nucleus. One could count only the nucleus as the system, and consider the Geiger counter, my sensory organs, the part of my brain that processes the information from my sensory organs, and me in toto as the observer. Alternatively, one could lump the Geiger counter in as part of the system, meaning that there would be a wave function describing both the nucleus and the Geiger counter. Everything else would be considered the observer. Or one could consider not only the nucleus and the Geiger counter but also my sensory organs as part of the system. One could move more and more over from the observer side of the line to the system side. So it is somewhat arbitrary where the line between the “system” and the “observer” (sometimes called the “Heisenberg cut”) is drawn. Nevertheless, the logic of quantum mechanics requires that it must be drawn, and it must be drawn in such a way that there is something on each side of it. If one tries to put everything on the “system” side, so that there is nothing left on the “observer” side—so that there is no longer an observer at all, or any observation—you end up with a wave function that never collapses and probabilities that never jump to give definite outcomes. To quote Eugene Wigner again:

Even though the dividing line between the observer, whose consciousness is being affected, and the observed physical object can be shifted towards the one or the other to a considerable degree, it cannot be eliminated.

What is it that must remain on the “observer” side of the “Heisenberg cut”? It cannot be any part of his or her body, for these are physical and should be describable by wave functions. It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is some aspect of the mind of the observer that is non-physical.

THE DARN SCIENCE KEEPS LEADING TO DESIGN:

It’s getting harder for scientists not to believe in God (Michel-Yves Bolloré, 12 October 2025, TYhe Spectator)

It is true that the existence of God cannot be proved incontrovertibly. While absolute proofs only exist in the theoretical domains of mathematics and logic, relative proofs are what we normally deal with, and what is generally considered ‘evidence’ in everyday life. If, like Richard Dawkins, we take a rational and scientific approach to the existence or non-existence of God, then we should only be persuaded by multiple, independent, and converging pieces of evidence.

Scientists across many fields of inquiry are now coming round to the idea that the thermal death of the universe and the Big Bang are strong evidence that our cosmos had an absolute beginning, while the fine-tuning of the universe and the transition from inert matter to life imply (separately) some more extraordinary fine tuning, showing the intervention of a creator external to our world.

With sets of converging evidence from different scientific disciplines – cosmology to physics, biology to chemistry – it is increasingly difficult for materialists to hold their position. Indeed, if they deny a creator, then they must accept and uphold that the universe had no beginning, that some of the greatest laws of physics (the principle of conservation of mass-energy, for example) have been violated, and that the laws of nature have no particular reason to favour the emergence of life.

Weighing up the evidence on each side of the scale is a matter of intellectual rigour, and the question ‘Is there a creator God?’ is one we should all be asking ourselves, with serious implication for every one of us. What’s intriguing is that it’s actually the youth, who you’d think would be more preoccupied with more mundane and practical concerns, that are leading the way.

IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

The Math Says Life Shouldn’t Exist: New Study Challenges Origins Theories (Mark Thompson, 8/31/25, Universe Today)

A new study addresses one of science’s most enduring questions: how did life first arise from nonliving matter on the early Earth? Using advanced mathematical methods, Robert G. Endres of Imperial College London developed a framework indicating that the spontaneous emergence of life may have been far more difficult than previously thought.

The research highlights the immense challenge of generating structured biological information under realistic prebiotic conditions, underscoring how unlikely it would have been for the first living cell to appear naturally.

we are all designist.

THE CONTINENTAL DELUSION HUME SAVED US FROM:

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) (Adam Frank, July 8, 2025, Noema)

In this way, over time, scientists began to imagine a perspective-less perspective, a supposed God’s-eye view of the universe — free of any human bias. The philosopher Thomas Nagel calls this the “view from nowhere.” And this philosophical position eventually became synonymous with mainstream science itself.

The development of the thermometer, and from it the science of thermodynamics, offers a notable example of our scientific culture’s blind spot. In it, we can see how those unchanging elements of experience are extracted and then, in time, misconstrued as a false perspective-less perspective.

The embodied feeling of being hot or cold is a basic example of direct experience. But developing a measurable scale of this experience for future scientific inquiry took centuries of work. Much of this story played out in what we now call laboratories, where those elements of experience could be isolated and probed. First, hot and cold needed to become correlated with something like the level of alcohol or mercury in a graduated tube. This was the invention of thermometry. Once a way to measure degrees was established, those degrees could then be used to investigate other focal points of experience, like the boiling point of water. A mathematically formulated theory of thermodynamics was then slowly developed, describing the relationship between temperature and heat flow. Later, higher levels of abstraction came as the random motions of unseen atoms — studied via the new field of statistical mechanics — were recognized as the true nature of heat. In this way, more phenomena studied in labs became describable in ever more precise terms. Along with those new, precise descriptions came new, powerful capacities to control the world via technologies like heat engines or refrigeration.

As this upward spiral of abstraction was traversed, something, however, was lost. In what Husserl called the “surreptitious substitution,” abstractions like thermometric degrees were treated as more real than the experience they imparted. Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, enthalpy, Gibbs potentials and phase space became more fundamental and more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot.

Science is nothing more than a product of consciousness.

IT’S BRANCH RICKEY’S UNIVERSE…:

On the Unlikeliness of Life: Why We’re Still Lucky to Be Alive Today (Simon Boas, July 23, 2025, LitHub)

I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.

There can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.

I’ve always approached this issue much more from the empirical, scientific side, and yet the conclusion is the same. Any physicist can explain the origins of the universe from a description of big bangs and space­time and matter, but will also attest to two things: that none of this would have existed but for some pretty spectacular ‘Goldilocks’ coincidences (not too hot and not too cold); and that there are myriad things which not only can’t be explained now, but which may never be.

The universe is fine-­tuned for us to exist.

…”Luck is the residue of design.”

IT NEVER RECOVERED FROM HEISENBERG/SCHROEDINGER:

REVIEW: of Escape from Shadow Physics By Adam Forrest Kay (Reviewed by Stephen Case, July 20, 2025, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The “best summary of quantum physics,” writes Kay, “[is these] five words: ‘Don’t look: wave. Look: particle.’” The phrase refers to the cryptic double-slit experiment used to determine whether electrons are waves or particles. The shocker? When humans are not observing, this experiment reveals electrons to be waves. But when they are observing? Electrons are particles. (For a clever and convincing demo, see Jim Al-Khalili’s video on YouTube.)

Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynmann said the two-slit experiment is “impossible…to explain in any classical way,” yet many physicists couldn’t care less about such quantum puzzles. When newbie students ask skeptical questions, in fact, some professors in the field allegedly bark, “Shut up and calculate!” Their reasoning? “[W]e cannot do better than the probabilities…even in theory,” Kay says. “The…hidden variables that would [explain what is happening] do not even exist.”

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN:

Wolfgang Smith’s Legacy: Smith observed that while the sciences’ blind adherence to a flat material reality permits a certain utility, it does not account for the multidimensional world in which we actually live. (Scott Ventureyra, 7/18/25, Crisis)

One of Smith’s most profound distinctions was between the corporeal and the physical, not merely as empirical categories but as ontological realities. The corporeal refers to the fully realized world of lived experience, rich with quality, meaning, and symbols of what we truly encounter as beings-in-the-world. The physical, by contrast, lacks intrinsic being; it is not a full level of existence but something ontologically deficient. Drawing from the metaphysical insight of St. Thomas Aquinas, Smith described the physical as akin to materia signata quantitate—matter designated by quantity, which is something that lies midway between being and non-being. It is not yet actualized by form and thus lacks full existence.

This “sub-existential” status explains why modern physics, which focuses solely on this domain, provides only a fragmented account of reality rather than a complete one, abstracted from the concrete and meaningful whole. In Smith’s view, this is precisely what makes quantum mechanics both fascinating and ontologically unstable, since it operates in a realm of semi-reality that permits technological utility but cannot account for the fullness of existence. Without the reintegration of the corporeal, modern science remains blind to the symbolic and spiritual dimension of the cosmos.
In Smith’s view, this is precisely what makes quantum mechanics both fascinating and ontologically unstable, since it operates in a realm of semi-reality that permits technological utility but cannot account for the fullness of existence.

For Smith, quantum theory itself hinted at a metaphysical order that science could not account for. The collapse of the wave function, for instance, required an ontology that distinguished between the corporeal and physical domains

Physics depends on the Observer and then denying one existed.