Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 89 of 171
Observer-independent and observer-relative facts
Searle makes a distinction between observer-independent features and observer-relative features. Observer-independent features are things like gravity, mass, chemical bonds,48 the solar system, and mountains. These things exist even in the absence of human minds. Observer-relative features are things like the United States of America, that football is a game with eleven players per side, and that a green piece of paper with cultish imagery and “twenty dollars” written on it is money. These things require a society of conscious agents believing in them to exist. A rough-and-ready test for whether or not a fact is observer independent is this: Could it have existed if there had been no conscious agents at all? Whatever we might call it in our physics, the gravitational attraction between the Earth and moon exists whether or not we as conscious agents exist. But Searle points out an important consideration. The existence of consciousness itself is an observer-independent fact. It is an objective fact about the world that consciousness exists, and that attitudes exist. As I have mentioned, there can be no doubt that I am conscious and experiencing things even if, as Descartes argues, the only thing that we cannot doubt is the act of doubting. Hence his famous proposition “I think, therefore I am.” Therefore, in a strange way, the existence of observers is observer-independent.