From Andrew Smyth, Los Angeles, California, US
On the subject of the pluriverse, the delayed-choice experiment may point to a remarkable conclusion: conscious realisation is itself a real fact, and it is this fact that fixes physical reality by converting virtual possibility into determinate actuality (21 March, p 28).
Before we know which path a particle takes in the double-slit experiment, it appears to exist only as a range of possibilities, not as one settled event. But once an observer consciously knows which slit the particle passed through, the situation changes. A formerly virtual possibility becomes a realised fact. One history is fixed; the alternatives are no longer part of experienced reality. Conscious realisation plays a constructive role in the passage from the possible to the actual.
Further, if human beings make pre-existing block universes real through their choices, this may shed light on the problems of free will and consciousness. It may also explain retrocausality and action at a distance, not as strange causal mechanisms, but as a natural consequence of selecting one block universe, with a pre-existing, consistent past and future, rather than another.
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