Hi YHAOS! Sorry for my tardy reply; have been on a splendid vacation where excellent things happened, even when it rained. :^)
It happens I'm a great admirer of Bernard Bailyn. His Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and the Ideological Origins of American Politics are cherished volumes on my bookshelf.
You wrote: "the 'Observer Problem' is indeed a problem for the observer, and that the Universe not only has no problem with it, but in fact takes no notice of it. The Universe, like 'Ol Man River', just keeps rolling along, knowing everything and knowing nothing."
Deeply perceptive IMHO my friend.
"Ol' Man River" in this context is the totality of God-ordained Being. The "Observer problem" goes to epistemology: "What can we know about this Being, and how do we know it? And how do we know we know it?"
In short, we are dealing with questions of ultimate truth, and how truth can be accessed and understood by human minds. Fortunately, as we have been told before now in holy scripture, the "imago Dei" which is man, as the image or reflection of the divine, a creature of reason and free will, was set up in the beginning to understand such things.
Which understanding probably is the reason why systematic science arose only in the Western cultural tradition. If the East ever got a hang of it, is was only through cultural borrowing from the West.
But I digress. To get back to the point at issue: The Observer problem putatively is not restricted to problems in science, in particular to relativity and quantum theory, but is a fundamental issue in observations of our own space-time experience, a la Newton and classical physics.
I'd just have to agree that this is manifestly true, with ample historical backing evidence.
It was Laplace who indicated the full extent of the ambition of classical physics:
“The Marquis Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was known as the Isaac Newton of France. A brilliant mathematician and wily politician, he’s an almost perfect embodiment of the arrogance of the ‘Age of Enlightenment.’Well, that may all be well and good as far as it goes. But human beings fully live "in spirit" as much or more than they live "in matter." It seems Laplace, in consigning God and spirit to the ash heap of history, cut man down to sub-human level.“[For Laplace said:] ‘Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis … to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.’
“This mechanistic view was a dream of many, starting with the ancients who talked about the ‘music of the spheres’ as they envisioned the universe as a series of interlocking crystalline spheres spinning inside each other.
“[But it might be objected:] ‘This “intelligence” of yours, would it be the author of the universe, who I note you left out of your book Méchanique Céleste?’
“Hmph. I know what you’re driving at, sire, but I have no need of this … ‘God’ hypothesis.”
[Mon Dieu!] :^) [Ottaviani and Purvis, Suspended in Language, 2004]
Which, it seems to me, makes him a far less capable truthful "observer" than were he to be left with his original divinely-ordained legacy still intact, in faith and reason....
Thank you so much, YHAOS, for your beautiful essay/post!
Observation begins the moment we are born the first time, and is kick started on the second birth.. Some it seems have trouble shaking the observations of stage one trying meld stage one with stage two.. Not separating the two paradigms..
Because its certain there are two paradigms.. observed with two different organs(metaphor).. The relativity of Quantum theory is relevant to stage one, the relativity of stage two is still playing out and the relativity is in progress.. Changing daily even moment by moment.. for some..
Observology is quite an occupation.. The study of which can expand a persons abilty to observe.. Neat ain't it.. What a plan..
In my opinion, he is a most accurate and careful historian/historiographer.
"Ol' Man River" in this context is the totality of God-ordained Being.
Darn. I can't slip a thing past you. {8^)
"we are dealing with questions of ultimate truth, and how truth can be accessed and understood by human minds"
With us, is this not always so?
[Man, the] "reflection of the divine, a creature of reason and free will, was set up in the beginning to understand such things"
Yes. And my point being that Man is his own worst problem. To be sure, there are other features of 'the observer problem', but IMHO Man himself (his will) is the greatest of these.
"Which understanding [man, as the reflection of the divine] probably is the reason why systematic science arose only in the Western cultural tradition"
Or so was the thought in Judeo-Christian Western Civilization until recently when it has become fashionable to believe that Western Civilization can do better absent the Judeo-Christian part.