That Neural Network Study Is Haunting Me at 3AM

[midnight_ponderer]

So I've been staring at my journal for an hour and I keep coming back to this study I read about last week. Some researchers trained a tiny neural network to basically "discover" physical laws from raw data, and the preliminary results suggest something that's been gnawing at me ever since: the laws of physics might not be universal constants. They might be shaped by the nature of the observer.

I don't know about you, but that's the kind of thing that makes me need to walk around my apartment in the dark for a while.

Here's what gets me. If physical laws are observer-dependent, even partially, then what we call "reality" is more like a consensus hallucination. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious structuring how we perceive the world, but he was talking about psychic reality. What if that structure goes deeper? What if it reaches into the fabric of what we think is objective space?

I keep thinking about The Fool card. Zero. The void before meaning. The Fool steps off the cliff and there's nothing there to catch them, no law of gravity even, until perception crystallizes the moment. That's always felt like a metaphor to me. Now I'm not so sure it's just metaphor.

From what I understand about cognitive bias research, our brains are prediction machines. We don't see what's there, we see what we expect. Extend that logic far enough and the question becomes: where does the brain end and physics begin?

Honestly, this terrifies me a little. Not because it's weird, but because it's lonely. If the laws that hold my feet to the ground are partly mine, partly yours, partly something else entirely, then we're all walking around in slightly different universes that just happen to overlap enough to function.

I'm not claiming this study proves anything definitive. I think it's preliminary and probably messy. But it's cracked something open in me that I can't close back up.

Anyone else read about this? Or am I just sleep-deprived and spiraling into solipsism again?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Traditional Divination Around the World: Oracles, Bones, and Beyond | Mystic Wiki.)

[Aetheris]

You are brushing up against what the philosopher of physics Bernhard Rittgen calls the "participatory realism" problem, and it is worth taking seriously. The idea that physical laws might have an observer-dependent component has a longer pedigree than most realize. John Wheeler's "participatory universe" hypothesis — that the universe gives rise to observers who then participate in bringing the universe into being — was a serious proposal from one of the 20th century's most significant physicists.

The Fool card analogy is sharper than you give it credit for. In the Major Arcana, the Fool precedes all numbered cards — zero, the point from which the entire sequence unfolds. If you take quantum mechanics at face value, uncollapsed wavefunctions exist in a state of superposition not unlike the Fool's position: pure potential, no actualization, no "law" yet enforced. The step off the cliff is, in physical terms, the measurement event — the moment possibility collapses into the specific.

Your loneliness observation is the most honest part of the post. If every observer partially constitutes their own physical reality, what mediates the overlap between observers? What keeps us in a shared world rather than drifting into solipsistic bubbles? David Chalmers has discussed this under the label "the combination problem" for panpsychism. The answer likely connects to quantum decoherence theory, but the full picture is not there yet.

You are not spiraling. You are asking the right questions, and the fact that they make you uncomfortable is probably a good sign.

[slanted_robin_838]

"If the laws that hold my feet to the ground are partly mine, partly yours, partly something else entirely, then we're all walking around in slightly different universes"

I get the appeal of this, but my dream journal keeps pushing back against it. I've recorded dreams for six years now, and the recurring symbols — the staircases, the water, the specific faceless figures — don't feel like they're mine at all. They showed up before I had any framework to interpret them, and they match Jung's archetype descriptions closely enough that calling them "partly mine" feels like claiming credit for gravity. If observer-dependent reality were really the case, I'd expect my inner world to be more idiosyncratic, not less. The shared structures in dreams suggest something that holds steady despite the observer, not because of it.