Observation is an act of consciousness. If there was no one around to observe a thing ‘be’, which state would it lie in? This is the age old question of ‘if no one is around to hear the tree fall in a forest’, did it fall?
What is doing the observing? Well… Me. And what’s ‘me’ – my body? In a purely mechanistic point of view, our bodies are these exquisite, perfectly constructed machines, better than any robots we’ve been able to build (yet). The very way our bodies are built (let’s continue with this robot analogy) ultimately determine what we see. Rods and cones in our eyes give us sight and colours, certain sensory pads in our hands give us touch, taste buds arranged a certain way give us taste. This machine we live in essentially determines how we automatically interact with the multiplicity of stimuli that bombard us from the world since the moment we’re born.
If you’d like, you’re built as an FM frequency radio and therefore just ‘pick up’ electronic signals from the FM world due to the way you’ve been tuned.
Light reaches our eyes, which interpret it as particular colours – but these colours are not absolutes. Trees only appear green to us because they reflect every other colour but green (remember that high school physics class with the glass prism rainbow?). They absorb the rest. So we can’t really say that trees are ‘green’, can we…? And their leaves only feel solid in our hands because our hands are built to feel solidity out of whizzing motion.
The world that surrounds us essentially exists as different bundles of energy. If our bodies were wired differently, we would see it differently. If you were tuned as an AM radio, you’d be seeing the world in a completely new and different way. And like outlined above, when we observe this world or even think we are going to observe it, it instantly shifts form.
What a slippery place to be.
I think that the below example illustrates this in a magical way:
The plants in Craig Burrows’ photos look like something plucked from an alien planet, sprouting wild shades of violet, pink and green. But the plants, and the colors are real.
It’s the result of a cool trick of nature. All plants reflect light. Leaves reflect green, and flowers reflect red, or yellow, or whatever. But plants also fluoresce, which means when they absorb ultraviolet light, they emit longer wavelengths visible to the human eye. It’s the same thing that happens with a black-light poster. “The flower literally glows,” Burrows says.
(Source of images: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/craig-burrows-fluorescence-plants-glow/?mbid=psocial_atlasobscura#slide-9)