259

LESSWRONG
LW

258
ConsciousnessExistential riskInformation theoryInformation TheoryModest EpistemologyQuantum MechanicsRationalization

1

The Observer, the Atom, and the Probability of Meaning: A Young Mind's Attempt to Understand Existence

by Savelii
28th Jun 2025
3 min read
0

1

This post was rejected for the following reason(s):

  • No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. LessWrong has recently been inundated with new users submitting work where much of the content is the output of LLM(s). This work by-and-large does not meet our standards, and is rejected. This includes dialogs with LLMs that claim to demonstrate various properties about them, posts introducing some new concept and terminology that explains how LLMs work, often centered around recursiveness, emergence, sentience, consciousness, etc. Our LLM-generated content policy can be viewed here.

  • Insufficient Quality for AI Content. There’ve been a lot of new users coming to LessWrong recently interested in AI. To keep the site’s quality high and ensure stuff posted is interesting to the site’s users, we’re currently only accepting posts that meet a pretty high bar. 

    If you want to try again, I recommend writing something short and to the point, focusing on your strongest argument, rather than a long, comprehensive essay. (This is fairly different from common academic norms.) We get lots of AI essays/papers every day and sadly most of them don't make very clear arguments, and we don't have time to review them all thoroughly. 

    We look for good reasoning, making a new and interesting point, bringing new evidence, and/or building upon prior discussion. If you were rejected for this reason, possibly a good thing to do is read more existing material. The AI Intro Material wiki-tag is a good place, for example. 

  • Difficult to evaluate, with potential yellow flags. We are sorry about this, but, unfortunately this content has some yellow-flags that historically have usually indicated kinda crackpot-esque material. It's totally plausible that actually this one is totally fine. Unfortunately, part of the trouble with separating valuable from confused speculative science or philosophy is that the ideas are quite complicated, accurately identifying whether they have flaws is very time intensive, and we don't have time to do that for every new user presenting a speculative theory or framing (which are usually wrong).

    Our solution for now is that we're rejecting this post, but you are welcome to submit posts or comments that are about different topics. If it seems like that goes well, we can re-evaluate the original post. But, we want to see that you're not just here to talk about this one thing (or a cluster of similar things).

1

New Comment
Moderation Log
More from Savelii
View more
Curated and popular this week
0Comments
ConsciousnessExistential riskInformation theoryInformation TheoryModest EpistemologyQuantum MechanicsRationalization

The Observer, the Atom, and the Probability of Meaning: A Young Mind's Attempt to Understand Existence

A speculative essay on quantum observation, the nature of life, and the metaphysics of probability.

Introduction

I am a 18-year-old independent thinker from Ukraine, currently residing in Germany. I do not study at a university, but I spend my time thinking, questioning, and writing. I have no formal academic background, but I deeply care about ideas, existence, and the nature of reality. This is my first attempt to share my thoughts publicly.

I am not a scientist by training, nor am I affiliated with any institution. I am simply a young thinker—Dobrovolskiy Savelii—driven by a strange and persistent hunger to understand what it means to exist. I have no clear answers, but I have questions. Many of them. And I wonder if somewhere among the minds who read this, there might be someone who sees in my confusion a shadow of their own.

This essay is a personal attempt to weave together fragments from quantum physics, biology, and metaphysical speculation. What began as a conversation with a friend has grown into a quiet scream into the void. If you're willing to listen, here are my thoughts.

 

What Is an Observer?

What if our brain is itself a quantum computer, and consciousness the observer that collapses wave functions? Could observation be the fundamental act that gives shape to reality?

But then—what qualifies as an observer? Must it be conscious? Alive? A tree reacts to vibrations. Does that make it an observer? A bacterium evolves to resist antibiotics over generations. Is that not a response to the world?

Even a single atom reacts to forces. It follows the rules encoded in its structure. Does that mean the atom "knows" something? Can we say an atom observes? And if yes, is there anywhere that is truly unobserved?

 

Atoms and Information

Life, as I see it, is built upon information. Cells, viruses, fungi, animals—all persist because they carry, store, and adapt information. DNA and RNA are molecular scripts made from amino acids, themselves built from atoms.

But where does the information of the atom come from? If living organisms encode behavior through molecular chains, how do atoms "know" what to do when acted upon? Is there a language beneath even biology—a sub-biological syntax of reality?

Perhaps the atom too is part of an information field, a micro-unit of probability woven into the fabric of the universe.

 

Life as a War for Information

From a biological lens, life is an ongoing war over information. Bacteria mutate not because they want to survive, but because survival filters for the right mutations. Over time, entire lineages become better at resisting threats.

Survival isn't about individuals. It's about generations carrying forward structures that work.

Every cell is a living hypothesis.

 

Probability as the Fabric of Existence

Sometimes I wonder: does anything exist without a perceiver? Are waves moving through the void if no mind registers them?

This leads me to a paradox: if all life is observing, then everything is always observed. But what if there is truly nothing living—no observer at all? Does reality still exist then?

Perhaps not as we know it. Reality might be probability itself: a field of potential, uncollapsed and undirected until interaction forces a result.

And thus, perhaps existence is probability itself. Not one thing or another, not 0 or 1, but something in-between. Unstable. Unknowable.

 

Truth, AI, and Choice

If we asked two types of artificial intelligence—one built on bits, one on qubits—what is true in these reflections, each would likely return different answers. And we, as humans, would have to choose whom to trust.

But choosing a truth is not finding truth. It’s collapsing a probability field into a narrative.

Absolute truth, I now believe, is not a fact. It is probability—endless, unresolvable.

 

The Edge of Understanding

I think I've reached a dangerous place in my mind—a place where my desire to understand breaks the usefulness of understanding itself. I don’t think I’m insane, but I might be standing on that border, staring across.

These thoughts aren’t tidy. They might not even be coherent. But they are mine.

 

Conclusion: Why This Reality?

Why this timeline? Why now?

We created time to measure, but it isn't real in any absolute sense. So why is this moment the one I'm in? And what does it mean to even ask that?

Perhaps my question—"Where is now?"—can only be asked by a living mind. But that doesn't make the question any less strange.

Existence may be nothing more than a momentary interference in the probability field. Life may be what happens when the universe glimpses itself briefly—and forgets everything else.

I don’t claim answers. But I’d like to hear what you think.

 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I’d love to read your thoughts—critical or supportive. If nothing else, I hope I’ve offered something to wonder about.