Tying some things together

In quantum mechanics, until a superposed system entangles with you (i.e., information about the system reaches you), you are not entitled to say that it is in a definite state. In a meaningful sense, the place you call "the world" comes into definite existence only when it comes into contact with you.

A key lesson from Mahayana Buddhism is that the world you think you are passively experiencing is actually a world that you are fabricating. Listen to a sound. It seems like it is happening to you, right? Well, it turns out that if your attention becomes precise and subtle enough, you'll discover that you are constructing that experience out of a slew of assumptions and habits.

In both of these descriptions, the word "you" is central, but what does it really refer to? Who or what are you, exactly? Discovering the answer to this question is, of course, another crucial issue in Buddhism. Who is fabricating the world? What is that without which no world exists?

A common meditation to learn first is breathing meditation, where you passively observe the sensations of breath. With practice, you may learn to passively observe other sensations as well. The pinnacle of this kind of practice is to be the silent observer of your entire field of experience. This is sometimes called "bare attention"; a kind of raw perception supposedly without interpretation.

But in such a practice, there's a subtle activity that's not privy to observation: the very effort required to artificially separate oneself from the field of experience. And until that subtle effort is released along with the rest of the field of perception, it is impossible to uncover even subtler forms of identity.

When the subtle effort of distancing "oneself" from perception finally subsides, it becomes clear that the whole radiant field of experience is experiencing itself. Listen to a sound again, and notice that the experience is a sort of energetic phenomenon. This energy can manifest as sound, as color, as smell, as thought, etc. You are not a separate self experiencing this energy; "you" are the energy itself, contorting itself into a form called "my human perspective." The whole experience you call "the world" is made of you.

The task before you is to discern how exactly you play this game of hide-and-seek. You are all that exists, and yet you form yourself into a perspective that seemingly doesn't know or believe this. In fact, in most incarnations, it flatly refuses to even consider such mystical nonsense.

Sooner or later, though, the game will be up.

You've probably heard of superpositions in quantum mechanics.

In the Schrödinger's Cat scenario, the cat is said to be in a superposition of alive and dead, and we're asked to note the absurdity of a cat that is somehow both alive and dead (which isn't exactly what a superposition is, but never mind that).

Thanks to a phenomenon known as decoherence, it's not really feasible to put such a macroscopic system into the kind of superposition that's useful, the kind you can exploit. So maybe we never have to worry about such a cat.

But you might still wonder: what if some far future technology allows us to do so? There's every reason to believe it's theoretically possible. And what if we put a human into a coherent superposition? Or, as quantum computing professor Scott Aaronson suggests, upload their consciousness into a quantum computer, where we would keep it coherent?

Instead of using the macabre example where the human lives or dies, suppose they simply either see a red or blue light. And suppose you leave the experiment running for five minutes. At the end of it, the subject will report having seen only one colored light for the past five minutes.

Imagine being such a subject. Imagine seeing one light turn on and stay that way for five minutes. At the end of it, you'll have a memory of having done so. And it will be an authentic memory, right? All that time really happened.

But now switch back to being the experimenter. Are there really two subjects, each seeing one light? There are various forms of the many worlds interpretation of QM, but the modern ones suggest that worlds split only when there's decoherence. Here there is none.

From the outside, we can say (in a precise and provable way) that there was no definite state for the light or subject during those five minutes. Nothing "really" happened. But the subject will find that absurd.

Is their memory reliable? Did it "really" happen? It depends on whose perspective you take.

You don't know that you're not in some elaborate quantum experiment right now. What is real to you may not be for others who you may even one day meet.