At the centre of Quantum Mechanics lies a single problem that makes all the other weirdness pale into insignificance. The strangeness that consciousness — the simple act of observing — causes the collapse of probability into the real.
Consciousness causes collapse. But how? What magical property must humans have to trigger the ongoing creation of reality as such? This is a different level of strange, and far more so than any other part of this.
How can something cause reality to happen? Is consciousness standing outside reality? How can anything stand outside reality? By definition, anything outside reality isn't real, and so isn't going to have much of an impact on anything, let alone something as big as 'triggering reality's existence'.
Can you see the problem? It's a big one.
And so, in the naming convention set up by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, I advance a new interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It has an new, ironclad rule, rule one — that reality is coherent. It has a new perspective on time, one that brings the Quantum world in line with our own. Now let's see if we can use this to finally answer the riddle of Schrödinger's cat. How is that happening, and why?
In the Edinburgh Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, consciousness does not cause the collapse of probability into reality.
Consciousness actually is the collapse of probability into reality.
And it's not generated by the brain.
The brain is generating patterns. Patterns of concept (left-hemisphere) and quality (right-hemisphere). It is combining them to project an illusion, for the purposes of a mating display — the illusion of a human self.
What is this illusion being projected onto? Where is the illusion happening?
Or perhaps, a better question would be — when? When is the illusion happening?
Well, the answer is very simple. The illusion is happening when everything is happening. Now.
You see, it's not enough to say that there's an image. An image needs a space (or in this case, a moment) in which to be projected, in which to exist, as an image.
And all the experience of human life, the colours, the sounds, the thoughts, the feelings — all of it, exist somewhere. That somewhere is the rolling moment of total coherence that we experience as the present.
The awareness in which all experience happens is not something the brain is generating. It's something the brain works to fill. Fill with colour, fill with sound, fill with noise — fill with self.
But the actual existence of the present moment is not something that is being churned out by the brain.
And from this point of view, the central strangeness of Quantum Mechanics is immediately, and for the first time, resolved.
It's not that observation has a magical quality that makes things happen.
We're not looking at observation. We're looking at occurrence. And occurrence doesn't need a magical quality to make things happen. Occurrence actually is things happening, already.
Probability collapses into reality through a moment of occurrence that we experience as the present. And the experience of the present moment — the smooth, indivisible and real experience in which things actually occur, is exactly the same as the human experience of consciousness.
What do we mean by consciousness? Well, simply, the field of ‘awareness’ in which things happen. But even calling it awareness isn't really right.
At the most fundamental level, what we call consciousness is the place of happening. The place in which experience occurs, the field in which all this happens, the canvas on which all phenomenal existence is painted.
The now. Consciousness. The present. It's the same thing. And indeed — from this fresh point of view, just as we have to ditch the idea of ‘awareness’, it's not even really accurate to call it consciousness. That's quite the human conceit.
The actual reality of existence is not something generated by the brain, outside of the fevered fantasies of solipsists, the insane, and writers of hackneyed science fiction.
No. This is a novel way of understanding what is really going on. A way of stepping beyond the old assumptions about consciousness and awareness. What we're really looking at is occurrence, and everything that exists, occurs at the same time. That is what it means to exist. To occur. And to occur at the only time. Now.
What you are experiencing as consciousness, isn't from you. You are an image, projected within it, and it's not consciousness — it's occurrence. Reality happening, and within that, the image of you as one of the things indivisible with the coherence of all.
This is the heart of the Edinburgh Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and it makes a clear prediction of every experiment ever made. If even once this prediction fails to happen, the Edinburgh Interpretation fails.
It's this. That just as in the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment, if you delete the measurement data before it is observed, the effects of the measurement vanish, so too must this be true of every possible experiment where probability collapse occurs. No interference effect will occur, ever, in any experiment, unless it is observed — because observation doesn't exist.
It's just occurrence.
So now, armed with this new understanding, we can see that consciousness, such as we experience it, stands outside the hemispheres. This necessitates a radical reorienting of many old assumptions, but because consciousness is not being generated by either hemisphere, another element is brought into play, which breaks the deadlock.
And because of this element, the agonised suffering of the human state, with all its needless suffering, and needless pain can be opened up in a new way.