So what's the big idea?

The day before yesterday I was flipping channels and I saw a news guy - Dylan Ratigan I think - talking about quantum mechanics, he said something, like he said it was a factor in things, what we want to be true coming true. I don't remember it exactly, but it sounded like the psychological definition of magical thinking, which is something you hear from the media a lot when quantum stuff comes up, and its very unsatisfying to me.

Now I'm as crazy as the next guy, and I partake in my share of magical thinking. But magical thinking is not what the big idea is, far from it. magical thinking asserts a connection between thoughts and outcomes that is simple, knowable and known: If I speak of the devil he WILL appear. If I don't knock on wood, bad things WILL happen. This has little to do with the big idea, and presenting it as such diminishes the big idea, because people know that's false: Believing we are right does not make us right, and that is proven every time we have ever been wrong, every time we have ever gotten up in the dark in the middle of the night and tripped over something we didn't believe was there.

To do justice to the big idea, you need to hold the core concept in stripped down purity: A system which is affected by observations of it. No wave particle duality, no new age shit, just that. Examples of such systems:

1) A wide receiver goes out for a pass, glances to his left to see if he can cut across the field. At the moment he does this, the quarterback sees he is not looking at him, and that causes him to throw the ball to another player, who runs across where the wide receiver was looking with the ball.

In this scenario, the system the wide receiver was observing (a part of the game) was changed by the fact that he chose to look at it: If he had not chosen to look at it, the quarterback would have thrown the ball to him. Very simple.

2) A girl searches for her site on Google using some term, to see how high her page ranking is. Google's page ranking algorithm tracks her search, and raises her site's page ranking for that term because because she clicked on her own site.

In this scenario, the system the girl was observing (Google's site index) is changed by her observation (search) of it. Again, very very simple: the act of observation effects the thing observed. No frills, no magic.

So that's it. That's all of it. Not all of quantum mechanics, there's non-locality and entanglement and the way observations effect things seemingly magically, not through classic cause effect like the systems we intuitively think of things in, and all the math and yada yada. But none of that science of very very small things is what I am talking about, because in the end this is all very simple and applies to our lives. I've said this before: 1) You can't see the whole game while on the playing field (no determinism) 2) any move you make to observe a part of the game you didn't see before changes the game because 3) EVERYBODY AND EVERYTHING is in the game. That's it, very simple philosophy. Quantum mechanics merely hints at the fact that at the most fundamental levels the universe acts a bit like Google's page ranking system... It hints that these are not emergent phenomenon made out of lots of moving parts, these are fundamental phenomenon. Creation through observation is how the universe rolls, yo. And its as banal as your desk, there is nothing weird or mystical about this.

SO WHAT? WHAT NOW?

So magical thinking doesn't work, that's actually the key. Maybe that pass to the other guy resulted in a touchdown last game, but this time it results in an interception. Maybe Google's algorithms detect the next time she goes to that site that she is probably the owner, and doesn't increase its page ranking, but resets it. Outcomes are unpredictable, often unknowable. But at the same time, maybe there are trends. Maybe the player goes back and watches videos of himself, or maybe the coach is watching. He says : "You've got to keep your eye on the ball out there" because he has observed the trends, he has observed the results of his player's observational patterns. And because of this, he can make suggestions of a new type: not what to do when you see something happening in the game, but how to see things happening in the game, how to look.

And this, my friends, in all its simplicity, is the big deal. Its the big deal because its simple, not in spite of it. Its the kind of simple that permeates all life, that can't be beat no matter how you stab at it, how you try to kill the beast. And its an open secret, people know it. Eric Schmidt let the cat out of the bag recently in his own way:

Schmidt says that the next evolution will be search that will happen (“with your permission”) without you even having to ask. For example an inquiry about weather is really asking “should I wear a jacket?”

Simply, this is Google stepping up and playing the role of coach to the wide receiver: They aren't making decisions about where you looked and how to present it, they are making decisions about where you should look that would be optimal for you.

I've now mentioned Google twice, but this is not about Google. I wish this was about some techno-widget on the horizon, its not. Its about ... its about.. well, I don't know how to say this, but this is where it gets weird.

stay tuned.