Reply #25: But do you see the assumption in that?

[napoleon_in_rags]

if no one looks at a moon orbiting a small planet orbiting a red dwarf in an isolated, lifeless system, it still exists.

I'm asking that you realize that is an unprovable conjecture. For in order to prove it exists, you must see it, or see some effect of it. You must produce some evidence. And this means having it interact with an observer, and create a change in that observer, or a system that is later observed by the observer. Its an old philosophical truth that the universe we observe could be created on demand for our perceptions, we can never know because our perceptions are our only means of knowing. In the past we dismissed this with Occam's razor, but the quantum stuff tells us that there may be some merit to this line of thinking.

My point is this: The truth is that big things are only the summation of lots of small things. What a nation does, for instance, is only what the sum of its citizens does. So how we can separate the macro scale from the micro? Isn't that like saying that what happens to America has nothing to do with the behavior of its citizens? Or how the ocean behaves has nothing to do with the properties of water and salt atoms?