"the observer is the observed"

bogwalrus

It was a phrase David Bohm said in a book that i did not really understand.

I Finally found out what it is meant to mean.

While reading a marcus chown book in the quantum mechanics section the heading "We never observe a quantum thing, we observe ourselves"


He says we never really see a quantum thing like an atom or photon of light. What we see is its effect on some kind of detector or even the retina of our eye. What we observe, in other words, is not the quantum object itself but the record that the quantum object leaves on a large number of other atoms.

"A detector does not measure an exterior system directly,but rather, through an act of observation, changes the state of its own system"

He says that, " In the case of the eye, light falls on the cells of the retina and changes them-and it is these changed cells that the brain senses, not the light itself. We think we are directly observing light but we are in fact only observing it indirectly. it is ourselves we are observing directly."

You can see where he is going with this. Finally i have an answer to that nice sound byte "the observer is the observed".