Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.
Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?
A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality
As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in
The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.
But subjectivity
is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.
Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,”
a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.
Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.
In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for
Science headlined “
Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as
loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject
solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message,
science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem
The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...
