Wandering Towards Physics: Participatory Realism and the Co-Emergence of Lawfulness

Abstract

Q-Bism’s champion Christopher Fuchs recently wrote: “Since the advent of quantum theory, (…) there has always been a nagging pressure to insert a first-person perspective into the heart of physics.” (C. A. Fuchs, “On participatory Realism”, in I. T. Durham, D. Rickles (eds.), Information and Interaction: Eddington, Wheeler and the Limits of Knowledge (Springer 2017)). As a tribute to the “participatory universe” idea put forward in the late 1970’s by John Archibald Wheeler, he proposes to call “participatory realism” this general way of dealing with the thorny issues of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. This article presents an approach I call “co-emergentism”, which combines participatory realism and the hypothesis that abstract structures constitute the fundamental level of reality. In every day life, we experience the first-person perspective of being a conscious agent (with intentions, goals and at least apparent free will) in a community of conscious agents, embedded in a physical world that obeys strict (yet probabilistic) laws with implacable regularity. Co-emergentism proposes that, within the infinite, mostly chaotic and lawless “Maxiverse” of all abstract possibilities, abstract structures that correspond to conscious agents “resonate” with each other, and with abstract structures that correspond to stable, regular physical environments. This process delineates coherent domains within the space of all possibilities, and insures that most conscious observers that are sophisticated enough to run essay contests about the fundamental nature of reality find themselves in worlds that are surprisingly large, long-lived and extremely regular.