In order to expand the present discussion from the point of view of the scientific community rather than the philosophical one, I am including excerpts from two sources. I would particularly recommend reading the entire Discover Magazine article about John Wheeler's work. (link provided)
From: Quantum Mind
By Arnold Mindell
Jung in his article "Answer To Job (found in his Collected Works) tells us that God, in essence, needs humanity and the unfolding of human life, to become conscious. This is what physicists like John Wheeler have discovered. An observer today is partially responsible for generating the reality of even the beginning of the universe! A symbolic picture of the universe looking at itself can be seen below. (see attached thumbnail) This is a sketch from Wheeler's 1979 lecture about Einstein, in which Wheeler showed the universe as a sort of being with a tail and an eye. The tail represents the early stages of the universe that is later promoted to concrete reality by means of its own self-consciousness, which itself depends on that unfolding reality.
Excerpts from:
Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?
Eminent physicist John Wheeler says he has only enough time left to work on one idea: that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well
by Tim Folger
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun...tart:int=0&-C=
…Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself— and building itself. It's not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe…
…Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler's idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge…
…"You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it," he says. "That's the same Schrödinger cat question. And my answer would be that the universe looks as if it existed before I started looking at it. When you open the cat's box after a week, you're going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. You can say that the cat looks as if it were dead or as if it were alive during the whole week. Likewise, when we look at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it were there 10 billion years ago."…
…Linde believes that Wheeler's intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects…
…"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words— it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."…
Linear Mode
