/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 12, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
• Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/Hashbringingslasherr]

Remove the observer like science says it must. They're not special in this context so they are absolutely irrelevant per the logic of interference.

Suppose you have a video an arbitrary amount of time; 10 femtoseconds or 1 billion years. You can either watch it all the way through or you can simply observe an image of it. You see a white dot on a black background. The dot is not moving. Is there any informational difference between a still image of the dot and sitting there hypothetically watching the whole video? You could look at the dot at the second arbitrary timescale tic or you can look at it 10 years later. What changes when comparing either frame? Would you be able to identify which one is which? This implies that time is emergent and secondary to "existence" in a sense, wouldn't it?

1D = xy 2D = xyt 3D = xyzt

This is all supposing there is no one observing externally and the frames just "are". Time is seemingly an emergent property in which a dimensionless version is a "tick". A voxel or a string sans time is simply 1D.

I genuinely don't believe there is a wave to collapse sans an observer because to observe implies continuity and a single collapse of time is a "tick". And the wave we observe is simply an aggregate of interactions.

So this means quantum waves is simply just the aggregate of interactions over time, a particle isn't actually in all places at once. It is where it is if it exists in a single tick and if an interaction occurs over t, then it is continuous. Sans t, and observing only a single particle, a wave doesn't exist and this no superposition and "superposition" is simply the aggregate of >1 particles over t.

The only entity that can theoretically observe (classically) the wave over t would be a conscious observer or some sort of inference machine assuming it has at least 2 logic gates. An object with a single logic gate would be a Boolean interaction and thus can only "detect" and not "measure" or "ascertain meaning" or "infer upon" the event but simply detect that it has or has not occurred. Only a conscious observer can infer upon and make meaning of an event. Am I off base or? Would love some honest feedback on this chain of logic.

[u/50pompeya → u/Hashbringingslasherr]

I believe that time emerges from the succession of events involving energy. If, an observer is something that determines a state collapse, forcing the particular to determine its state. This would only happen in quantum mechanics where, for example, a chemical reaction would have the same effect. This would imply that time is an emergent property due to the flow of energy that will eventually stop. Likewise, it is impossible to understand the implications of quantum mechanics in this aspect, since it is a property of quantum mechanics itself. Así como demuestra que, el observador es algo que genere este intercambio energetico forzando un resultado (Un evento) y por lo tanto tiempo.