Is the Conscious Observer 'Creating' the Material Universe?

You can't change the past until it's been formed, and it isn't formed until you look. So with that picture of the universe, with the eye closing a closed circuit, the point is in this picture the universe doesn't properly exist until the eye has looked back on the universe. Now not many physicists will believe that, they will think it's too metaphysical, but it is in some sense an implication of the view that consciousness collapses the wave function. But then you get into the question of what is the consciousness collapsing the wave function? Because the critics will say, well look, I can see the universe, I'm looking with my space, the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm seeing things in the universe before any human beings, and possibly before any alien beings ever formed. So how is this possible if there was no consciousness? In other words, how could the universe have existed before there were any observers? But the counter argument is you've got to decide what you mean by consciousness. Consciousness as a little c may not have existed, but what about consciousness as a big c, if mind was primary? So the idea of consistent histories, which is what we are talking about, it's not as weird as it sounds. Like Bernardo was explaining, even if we know history, we know history only at the very coarse level, characters, events. We don't know the positions and trajectories of every elementary subatomic particle corresponding to those macro events. So there are many, many, many possible histories of those paths that are consistent with what we do know. So you can imagine that a consistent history is what you get when you take a magnifying glass and you look at the past with a microscope, and then those various possibilities that are consistent with the past at the coarse level, which you do know, they will collapse into one of them. One of those paths, yeah. Because you looked with a microscope into them. And you're not changing that into something else because you changed your past, no. This is not any more crazy than the measurement problem in the present already is. It's no more crazy than that. It may be crazy, but it's no more crazy than the one that we have in the present. How does an observation produce one single result if all we have is the loss of large numbers in Schrodinger's equation? I've also thought that even the distinction between quantum and classical might be observant dependent because, in fact, a feature of specious precedent, because, you know, the quantum, we classically, an electron goes around a proton. But in quantum mechanics, the electron doesn't go around the proton, it's actually a wave around the proton. Yeah. And that's rather reminiscent. Do you remember in my talk, I showed this light going around and how it goes around too fast. And it sort of is basically a line. Well, this is rather like this proton, which instead of being a point going around, is a circle. And so I've often thought, well, maybe the division between quantum and classical is something to do with the specious precedent of the observer. And if that was the case, for a being with a much longer specious precedent, then a much larger domain of the world would appear to be quantum, because, I mean, it's got a longer time scale. On the other hand, with a being with a much smaller specious precedent, a lot of the quantum world would appear classical. Again, this isn't mainstream physics, but it's often struck me there might be a link between, because that's a big issue in physics. What is the divide between the quantum and the classical realm? And George Ellis made a big thing about that. So we don't really know, because the point is that it's nice to say quantum mysteries just apply in the microscopic domain, but it's not as simple as that. We do know they propagate into the macroscopic domain, possibly brains, but certainly in biological systems. So the idea that in some sense, what is quantum and what is classical depends upon the nature of the observer, it doesn't sound to me completely crazy.