To understand the full implications of Wigner’s idea, scientists have dreamed up an observer that comes much closer to the original friend, albeit one that borders on science fiction. Howard M. Wiseman, director of the Center for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues imagine a futuristic “friend” that’s an artificial intelligence capable of humanlike thoughts. The AI would be built inside a quantum computer. Because the computations that give rise to such an AI’s thoughts would be quantum-mechanical, the AI would be in a superposition of having different thoughts at once (say, “I saw a flash” and “I did not see a flash”). Such an AI doesn’t exist yet, but scientists think it’s plausible. Even if they can’t carry out the experiment until the distant future, just thinking about this type of observer clarifies which elements of objective reality are at stake, and may have to be abandoned, in resolving Wigner’s paradox.
Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.
Compared with the at times insane banality of 2016’s Widening Income Inequality, with its Christmastime model train “Chuff-chuffing to their death […] many Jew-Jews” and air-conditioned daydreaming, So What (2024) is streaked with actual sadness, even if “Everyone thinks I am the finest and couldn’t be finer,” which Seidel displaces onto morning jackhammers and Manhattan’s all-hours ambulances. The man who can hardly be googled in anything but a suit seems almost mortal here, a creature of parents and experience, though the fond looks backward have a tendency to be their own joke.
As a rule, Stewart’s books emphasize that you need not own land, reside in the deep woods or trek to remote wilderness locations to deepen your relationship with nature; indeed, many of the most compelling stories in The Tree Collectors are based in urban spaces, backyards, and other surprising places.
From these interviews, Nussbaum fashions a compelling oral history, transforming the scattered highs, lows, and tipping points of a genre constantly in flux into a cohesive exploration of the invention, evolution and importance of the modern reality show.