Quantum Living - Part Nine - Observers or Players?

OUR ROLE AS OBSERVERS

This raises the question of conciousness and its role in the world. Are we, as conscious beings, able to experience the world as it is? Or are we only able to change the world through our being here? It turns out that we are active players in the world - changing things through our experience of them. So much for leaving the environment as we found it!

We have both a role and a responsibility as observers. We cannot simply observe- we change things. It is our task to ensure that we change the world responsibly, and for the better, if possible. However, Uncertaintly dictates that we cannot know for certain the effect of our intended action.

The Newtonian thinkers among us are not happy with that idea. They are of the opinion still that we ought to make Life's outcome a complete certainty. They surround us with laws, regulations, rules, and enforcement to ensure a pre-determined outcome. It is all in vain. Life is a continual unfoldment of uncertainty - a repeated roll of the universal dice. Until we learn to be comfortable with that, there will always be friction between the ones who try to keep things under control, and those who simply want to 'go with the flow'.

This suggests that we are in for a conflict of world-views as we adapt to make the Planck-Heisenberg model the basis for our ordinary thinking, in the same way that most of us now embrace the Newtonian notion of certainty.

Since the pace of this kind of shift is very slow, we may not see it happening – but there are signs of it. The idea that we should stop trying to predict the world, and begin to create it, is a powerful thing, and here and there you can see leaders making it work, clumsily perhaps, but with baby steps.