Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Observer and the Observed

"It is not our job to put our heads in the sand. Our job is to learn to control these forces."

It's occurred to me lately that the story of Smearland is finally nearing completion. Most of the critical ideas are here, with one notable exception...

It stands to reason that if an observer can select an outcome, the same observer may be impacted by similar forces generated by other observers. And indeed we can find everyday accounts of people's behaviors being affected by the observations of unknown/unseen others, as well as scientific attempts to verify these effects via laboratory experiments.

Having a basic understanding of what it takes to select an outcome, I began to wonder what signals the observer might have access to that tell him that he is being observed. Could sensitivity to these signals be developed and exploited?

I've added some more links - take a look...