Here's something interesting to play around with, provided you have and can find the 'business end' of a laser. Also, check out the accompanying article from this month's issue of Scientific American.
The gist of the article is this - "How particles behave can depend on what information about them can possibly be accessed... By removing information about things that have happened, a quantum eraser seemingly influences past events."
When we are thinking about that sentence in Smearland, we are thinking in terms of what the observer can see at the moment and how that process is impacted by what the observer has seen previously and the knowledge that the observer has which generates expectations about what s/he should be seeing.
The fact that we can see this effect at all should be telling us NOT that the world out there is incomprehensibly strange, but that our ability to interface with whatever the ultimate state of reality is (conscious experience) has some interesting limitations. (Are they limits that can be transcended? Absolutely.) What would happen if we looked at this effect from the perspective of what is going on inside the observer, and used these perceived limitations to work backwards to something that might be an essential component/substrate of conscious experience? One big question to ponder - Why are we incapable of perceiving matter in its smeared state?
Other questions to think about...
Would it be possible to replicate the same kind of quantum erasing if the only information that needed to be 'erased' existed in human memory? (Yes.)
Is there any good reason to think that the nature of the memory enneagram containing the information about a particle might be substantially different than the nature of the enneagram containing information about a larger object or event? (Nope.)
