Observer & Information
Knowledge, measurement, and the informational observer
Overview
The observer is, at its core, an information-processing entity: perceiving, encoding, storing, retrieving, and transmitting information about the world. In quantum mechanics, the act of observation is precisely the act of extracting information from a system, and this extraction irreversibly changes the system's state. The observer-information pair thus lies at the heart of epistemology, cognitive science, and the measurement problem — the question of how subjective knowledge relates to objective reality.
Central Tension
Does observation create information, or does it merely reveal information that was already there? Realism holds that information about the world pre-exists the observer's measurement; the observer discovers but does not create. Anti-realist and participatory interpretations of quantum mechanics argue that definite information comes into existence only through the act of measurement — that prior to observation, the system has no definite informational content. This tension is not merely academic: it determines whether the universe has a definite state independent of being known.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Does the observer create information through the act of measurement, or discover pre-existing information?
- Is consciousness necessary for information processing, or can unconscious systems be genuine observers?
- Does the measurement problem in quantum mechanics reveal something fundamental about the observer-information relationship, or is it an artifact of our current theory?
- Can an observer ever have complete information about a system, or does observation always introduce uncertainty (as Heisenberg suggests)?
Schools of Thought
The observer plays a constitutive role in bringing definite information into existence; prior to measurement, quantum systems exist in superpositions of informational states that have no classical equivalent.
The observer is the source of all information; the "external world" is a construction from the observer's informational content. There is no information independent of a mind to hold it.
The observer is always already in an informational relationship with the world — intentionality is the structure of consciousness as directed toward informational content. Observation is not extraction but encounter.
The observer is an information-processing node in a universal data flow; consciousness is what sufficiently complex information processing feels like from the inside. The observer is not special — just locally complex.
Information and experience are two aspects of the same reality; every informational process, however simple, has an experiential dimension. The observer is not the sole locus of information-experience — it pervades all of nature.
God is the ultimate observer and the source of all information. Human observers are finite knowers who receive information through revelation and investigation, but whose knowledge is always partial. Divine omniscience is the ground of all informational reality.
Synthesis
Observer and information together define the epistemological core of reality: what it means to know, to measure, and to understand. Whether the observer is a discoverer of pre-existing information or a creator of new information through the act of knowing, the pairing reveals that observation and information are not merely related but mutually constitutive — each is unintelligible without the other.