probability, observer and speculating "existence"

Boy, am I going to get in trouble for a title like this entry's... but this is the kind of stuff that flows through my thoughts when I've been working too much and sleep deprivation denies my brain the energy to cling to my usual collection of standard worries...  and why not end 2010 with a bang!

I'm fascinated by the following aspects of life, according to a number of sources...

• All substance is composed of mostly nothingness. The ratio of particle to the space it occupies is staggeringly unbalanced.
• Quantum physics explains the smallest particles as waves of probability.
• For these things to exist, there must be an observer.

So my thoughts on this have come this far. If you play a game of traveling as an observer of your own life and you speed by the faces of people you've met or walked past, your children as they grew up, the silly arguments you've add, the places you've been to... all blurring as you pass them, what is it that you're really experiencing besides a collection of memories? And how could it be different if you have the ability to re-wind and start over again?

It seems that these are all probabilities that you observed and, in the process of observing, also participated in. It's no wonder why life seems more and more like a dream to me.

But, if you keep digging and thinking about all of this as probability, then life starts to feel less like something tangible and more like a continuous experiment of unconscious messing with probabilities. Combinations of probabilities. Combinations of observations. It's not really like there are a bunch of universes ("multiverses") out there (or in here). It's more like there are all these (floating equations representing) probabilities and you as the observer are making them real. Making them "feel" tangible. So rather than thinking of all of this as an infinite set of what's out there. It's more like everything is being generated as we observe.

All of this brings up the "soul" thing or "consciousness" as one of those fundamental "what is it" questions. Why? Because it's this observer thing that quantum physics says must exist for things to exist. It somehow implies that a soul has special ranking, almost as though it's outside the definition or occurrence of probability. An analogy might be the patterns you see of iron filings when under the influence of a small magnet. The patterns are the assemblages of probabilities. And the magnet is You, the consciousness. (That imagery feels pretty powerful... but it feels more like an influence or steering of probabilities and not just a passive observer roll. Is the observer by definition an actuator?)

I have no authority on this topic. I'm not a mathematician. But I do love how the many topics of physics opens (and throughly energizes) my mind. And as the explanations of things these days gets wilder and wilder, I don't think there's anything wrong with letting a bit of intuition and subconscious rumination have its day. The math helps to illuminate a conundrum. But as our math and its conundrums continue to stack up over time, our ability to go back to our imaginations for speculative interpretation becomes all the more critical to create a sense of things we can conceptually grasp.

As fantastical as the concept of "god" seems, it's actually nothing compared to what this life (you, me, existence) is really all about. My intuition is screaming that.