Davis Aurini - The Interface Between Science and Magic
Aired: 2026-05-06
Duration: 27:49


=== The Observer Effect Explained (14:09) ===

[00:00:09]  The interface between science and magic is the topic for this video.
[00:00:15]  I'm going to be discussing how you really can't have one without the other, despite the fact that we live in an era where so many people have become convinced that the universe is nothing but billiard balls, despite ongoing scientific discoveries contradicting that notion.
[00:00:37]  It's worth understanding how we got to this point.
[00:00:40]  We're just going to use prosaic reasoning for this.
[00:00:43]  We're not going to suspect machination.
[00:00:46]  We're going to leave it at manifest, for our present purposes, at least.
[00:00:53]  You see, the human understanding of reality and our place in it and how we interact with it started 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, with mathematical cults.
[00:01:08]  Now, mathematics is interesting.
[00:01:10]  Because the way that you discover a new mathematical theory is that you ask a question Are there infinite prime numbers?
[00:01:19]  Can you square the circle?
[00:01:23]  You ask a question, but the only way to properly answer it, it seems, is to do endless counting.
[00:01:31]  And then you sit around and you think about it.
[00:01:34]  You dream.
[00:01:35]  Maybe you do some mushrooms.
[00:01:36]  When suddenly a way of approaching the problem completely sideways occurs to you, and you're able to make a definitive statement.
[00:01:45]  On whether this thing is true or false, you start discovering infinite prime numbers, you discover irrational numbers, you find all sorts of crazy stuff.
[00:01:55]  And once you discover a mathematical theory, it's known, it's proven, and it never becomes unproven.
[00:02:05]  People like to look down upon the ancient Greek philosophers for sitting around and pondering the lotus instead of doing physical experiments.
[00:02:14]  But you have to understand where these guys were coming from.
[00:02:16]  In mathematics, It is literally studying the lotus how you come up with a new mathematical discovery.
[00:02:22]  There is no physical work you can do to achieve these ends.
[00:02:27]  And so, political philosophy, life philosophy, these things were very much based upon the same process sitting about, thinking, discussing, and arguing, as opposed to testing.
[00:02:41]  Now, these experiments of the mind eventually led to engineering.
[00:02:50]  And engineering is a little bit closer to what we call science these days.
[00:02:53]  We discover these mathematical properties, these ratios, the angles within a triangle, and we start applying them to building structures, to building bridges, to aqueducts.
[00:03:06]  And so we kind of wound up with a bunch of best practices based upon experimentation, but also developed through mathematics.
[00:03:15]  And only after that, only after we'd Really advanced in mathematics and start doing some amazing feats of engineering.
[00:03:26]  Only then did we start getting the idea of testing everything in the physical world through experiment, hypothesis, validation, cancellation, double blinding it, seeing what other people saw.
[00:03:40]  It wasn't until we had this groundwork of math and engineering that science came along.
[00:03:47]  You need that before you get to the next thing.
[00:03:56]  However, this leaves a massive blind spot in our present approach to reality.
[00:04:02]  And that blind spot is who is doing the watching?
[00:04:07]  Who is doing the scientific experiment?
[00:04:09]  We've become so laser focused upon the billiard balls that we forgot about the philosopher examining Platonic forms in the clouds.
[00:04:22]  And that right there, the observer, the one observing the experiment, that you, that you that is not your body, that you that is not your emotions, that you that is not your thoughts.
[00:04:41]  There before Moses, there before Adam, there was I, the eternal observer observing the experiments.
[00:04:49]  That is where magic exists, and it has a necessary interface with the science we perform.
[00:05:01]  So, in this video, I'm going to be digging in, and I ask you to bear with me.
[00:05:06]  I'm going to be digging in to the observer effect in quantum mechanics, a topic that is Grossly misunderstood most of the time.
[00:05:15]  It does sort of point to what I'm saying, but it's very much misunderstood, which is part of the reason I'm including it in this video.
[00:05:25]  Not only is it useful for the point I'm making, this is going to be my final statement on the observer effect because it drives me up the wall.
[00:05:33]  And people, it's misunderstood in a very understandable way, but it's still being misunderstood.
[00:05:40]  So this is going to be clarifying what it actually is while also using it.
[00:05:44]  To point out that observer and observed, that ontology and epistemology are two halves of the same coin, and that magic and science are fundamentally interrelated while being complete opposites of one another.
[00:06:03]  The goal is to give you a contextual framework, because I'm assuming that, like me, you've been born into this materialist billiard ball universe of a culture, and so believing in magic is extremely difficult.
[00:06:18]  And if you don't believe in it, it will never work.
[00:06:23]  And so we're about to dive into it, but one last thing.
[00:06:25]  If you watch this video to the end, I promise you that in the days and weeks to come, you are going to notice your own latent psychic ability asserting itself, becoming more effective, and you will see changes in your life.
[00:06:42]  So on to part one.
[00:06:45]  The observer effect, the double slit experiment, the nature, Of light itself.
[00:06:53]  Now, the original observer effect, or sorry, the original double slit experiment, it was an experiment designed to test the question of whether light is a particle or a wave.
[00:07:06]  There was a fellow by the name of Thomas Young that did the experiment back in 1801.
[00:07:12]  And what he did is he took a board and cut two narrow slits through it.
[00:07:20]  Now, if light were a particle, Like a bullet, for example, what you would expect to see is two bands on either side.
[00:07:30]  Right?
[00:07:30]  If you were firing bullets at a wall that had two holes in it, if you were firing a machine gun at it, you'd expect most of the bullets are going to hit the first wall, but the ones that go through and hit the second wall, you'll see a double pattern.
[00:07:44]  One went through the left hole, one went through the right hole.
[00:07:47]  Alternatively, if you have a pool of water and you send waves, waves of energy up and down through the water towards two slits, well, that one wave source, which is propagating out in circles, is going to reset when it gets to the hole.
[00:08:05]  And now you'll have the two holes being two waves propagating.
[00:08:10]  And when you have two waves, they interfere with each other.
[00:08:13]  Sometimes they're twice as strong, sometimes they're twice as low, and other times they cancel out.
[00:08:18]  This is known as an interference pattern.
[00:08:22]  And so Jung performed the experiment and demonstrated that when light went through these two holes, he got an interference pattern.
[00:08:30]  Ergo, light is a wave, leading to speculation about the luminous aether through which light created the waves that we saw.
[00:08:42]  A century later, physics moves on, science moves on, and Einstein and Maxwell Planck had been working.
[00:08:53]  On the beginnings of quantum theory.
[00:08:57]  And what they argued was that energy, particularly electromagnetic energy, has a smallest viable unit.
[00:09:08]  The way they demonstrate this eventually was they proved it by 1923, but essentially it's the photoelectric effect.
[00:09:17]  Think solar panels.
[00:09:19]  An electron, you might remember from high school physics, it exists within electron shells.
[00:09:26]  It's in the first shell.
[00:09:27]  Or it's in the second shell.
[00:09:28]  There's no medium space that it can be in.
[00:09:31]  It's in one or the other.
[00:09:34]  And since when you fire light at a metal plate, you get electricity flowing off of it, that means you're exciting electrons.
[00:09:44]  And so the energy is either below the threshold or above the threshold.
[00:09:51]  Think of it like the question is light analog or digital?
[00:09:57]  And what they demonstrated.
[00:10:00]  Was that light is digital?
[00:10:02]  It comes in discrete chunks, packets, quanta, thus quantum mechanics.
[00:10:15]  In other words, it's a bullet, not a wave.
[00:10:21]  So, what are we to make of this prior experiment where it acted like a wave?
[00:10:26]  Well, a few years later, was 1927, Davison and Germer finally.
[00:10:34]  Managed to build a photon gun, a light source that would send the smallest viable amount of light, a photon, through it towards the double slit.
[00:10:50]  And here's where things started getting weird.
[00:10:54]  The light can't get any smaller than this, it is, in effect, a bullet.
[00:10:58]  And if you're shining it at the two holes, you'd expect that you'd get the two lines on the other side.
[00:11:08]  After all, each photon that impacts on the third wall, or the far wall behind it, impacts somewhere specific.
[00:11:18]  One photon comes out, one photon is received, and we know exactly where it is received.
[00:11:26]  But that's not what they got.
[00:11:29]  When they fired one photon at a time, they still got an interference pattern.
[00:11:36]  It was statistically distributed.
[00:11:38]  So, most of them would appear in the largest band.
[00:11:41]  A smaller number would appear in the next two bands, less than these two bands, etc.
[00:11:46]  But when you fired a thousand of them in a row, you got an interference pattern once again.
[00:11:53]  It was as if, even though you were firing the photons one at a time, it was as if they were interacting with the other 999 photons that were fired over the length of the experiment.
[00:12:08]  It's spooky.
[00:12:11]  It's about to get even spookier.
[00:12:16]  We had one photon going out.
[00:12:17]  It was definitely one photon.
[00:12:19]  And we had one photon on the receiver screen.
[00:12:22]  That was definitely one photon.
[00:12:24]  And it has to go either through the left hole or the right hole, but it's acting like it's a million photons at once, interfering with one another until it gets to the far screen.
[00:12:35]  Okay, so what if we put a photon detector on one of the two slits?
[00:12:45]  All of a sudden, we started getting two bands as if they were bullets.
[00:12:51]  Not just when they went through the slit with the photon detector.
[00:12:55]  You know, they go through slit A, photon detector turns green, and then you get a bullet pattern over there.
[00:13:02]  Even when it didn't turn on because it went through the other hole, you still got a bullet pattern.
[00:13:08]  It's like the photon knows we're watching it.
[00:13:15]  That is the observer effect.
[00:13:18]  That when you examine particles that are acting on the quantum scale, when you examine them, they act like bullets.
[00:13:26]  They act like particles.
[00:13:29]  When you don't examine them, you let them do their own thing, they act like a probability waveform.
[00:13:36]  As if the one photon going through predicts all of the infinite number of ways that it could go through these two holes, and it's an infinite number of photons going through, it finds the probability and it picks one of those.
[00:13:49]  When it hits the final screen.
[00:13:53]  In between the photon gun and the receiver wall, it's not a photon.
[00:14:00]  It's an infinite number of photons interacting with one another on a probability scale.
[00:14:11]  Now, this is where most descriptions of the observer effect end.

=== Perception Alters Reality (08:08) ===

[00:14:18]  They assume that, oh, so it's my conscious observation.
[00:14:23]  Which altered the nature of the universe.
[00:14:29]  No, not exactly.
[00:14:30]  It was the photon detector that altered the nature of the universe.
[00:14:37]  In fact, between the photon detector and the little LED light that turns green when it detects a photon, and the light being received by your eyes, seeing the green light, interacting with your optical nerve, firing off neurons in your brain, you get what's called a von Neumann chain.
[00:14:58]  Of collapsed probabilities.
[00:15:03]  But nowhere in the von Neumann chain do you find 203 electrovolts of consciousness.
[00:15:14]  There is no five pounds of awareness or 343 joules of perception.
[00:15:26]  Observer is not a scientific concept.
[00:15:34]  Even though you can't have a scientific experiment without an observer.
[00:15:41]  So, what this experiment, what the observer effect is really pointing towards, is not that your conscious observation alters the nature of reality.
[00:15:52]  That's what most people say it means, but that's not what it's saying.
[00:15:55]  What it's saying is we thought observers were outside the system.
[00:16:05]  Imagine scientific experiments.
[00:16:07]  Imagine them like a big pinball machine, right?
[00:16:11]  An exceedingly complex pinball machine locked behind glass.
[00:16:15]  And we've got a few controls on the outside.
[00:16:18]  We put a quarter in, a ball appears.
[00:16:20]  We pull the puncher, the ball flies up.
[00:16:23]  We can move a couple of the paddles around.
[00:16:25]  We can tilt the machine.
[00:16:30]  And we've been drawing all of these.
[00:16:34]  Inferences, these conclusions, repeating these actions again and again, seeing how the ball moves around inside the pinball machine.
[00:16:45]  And what the observer effect does is it makes us realize that we are not outside of the pinball machine, we are part of the pinball machine itself.
[00:16:58]  That this observer that's doing the scientific experiments is also part of the experiment.
[00:17:06]  That this reduction of the universe into nothing but billiard balls, well, it turns out we also are billiard balls.
[00:17:13]  So, what the heck's going on there?
[00:17:19]  This is the question of epistemology versus ontology.
[00:17:27]  Epistemology from the Greek to know, and ontology from the Greek to be, the nature of being.
[00:17:38]  Who remembers the fourth law of the Kabbalion?
[00:17:44]  All is polarity.
[00:17:47]  Epistemology, the things that we know, and ontology, the things that we are, are two halves of the same coin.
[00:18:01]  They're the north and south pole of a magnet that seem completely opposite, irreconcilable.
[00:18:11]  Where is the observer in scientific notation?
[00:18:14]  It's completely excluded from the entire scientific method.
[00:18:18]  The idea being that anybody can perform the experiment and will get the same results.
[00:18:22]  You don't even need an observer.
[00:18:25]  Except without an observer, you don't have the experiment.
[00:18:30]  Nobody's doing science at all if nobody's at home.
[00:18:42]  Epistemology, the world of it, the world of thou.
[00:18:48]  Ontology, the world of I, me, we.
[00:18:56]  Perception itself, and that which is perceived, are like the north and south poles of a magnet.
[00:19:04]  You can hold the magnet in your hand, and there's these invisible lines of force going through the magnet and around the magnet.
[00:19:15]  The observer.
[00:19:17]  Is one side of the magnet, the observer effect is the other side of the magnet.
[00:19:26]  And this realm of ontology, this realm of pure being, this realm of mathematics, where we started with all of this, sitting around and pondering until you can approach the infinite from a sideways direction to discover something new about it that you could never do through experimentation.
[00:19:46]  You can never prove that pi has infinite numbers.
[00:19:51]  By calculating pi, because there's always more numbers to discover.
[00:19:57]  You have to prove that in a different manner.
[00:20:01]  That's where ontology exists.
[00:20:04]  This is why the Pythagoreans were a religious sect.
[00:20:09]  And this is where magic exists.
[00:20:15]  It's not contradictory to epistemology.
[00:20:18]  There are things we know about the world, there can also be things we know.
[00:20:23]  About ourselves, and if we know things about ourselves, about our perception, we can alter that in the same manner as we can alter the physical world.
[00:20:39]  This is where it starts to come together into something useful.
[00:20:44]  So, when it comes to altering the physical world, maybe you have Grug the caveman who's trying to move a large boulder, and his punk teenage liberal son comes along.
[00:20:58]  And says, hey, Dad, instead of trying to brute force the large boulder, what if we got a stick and a small boulder and we levered it out of position?
[00:21:12]  So many easy, funny little tricks that you do to alter the physical world.
[00:21:21]  Pretty basic.
[00:21:22]  Pulleys, levers, maximum force on a small area.
[00:21:30]  You keep experimenting.
[00:21:31]  With those little improvements on pulleys and levers and ideas.
[00:21:37]  And a few thousand years later, you've got Notre Dame Cathedral.
[00:21:42]  If you went to Grug the caveman and showed him Notre Dame, he'd say, that was magic.
[00:21:49]  Giants must have built it.
[00:21:50]  A giant sky hook came down and dropped that steeple on top because there's no way anybody physically lifted all those stones.
[00:22:00]  Except they did.
[00:22:02]  Easy little tricks that you get pursuing the physical sciences.
[00:22:11]  And it's no different when it comes to the mental sciences, to magic.

=== The Mental Science Trap (05:22) ===

[00:22:27]  So I work, I've mentioned this before, I work as an applied alchemist in Alberta's oil and gas sector.
[00:22:40]  Rhythm, vibration, pressure differentials, that's what I do there.
[00:22:50]  Hard work that pays fairly well.
[00:22:58]  And it tends to be very long hitches.
[00:23:00]  I'm usually gone for a few weeks when I'm working.
[00:23:06]  So, when I'm going out to the field, there's two ways that I could look at this.
[00:23:13]  I could look at this and see well, I am signing back up to be a slave for a few weeks' time.
[00:23:22]  My schedule's not my own, my time's not my own, my outfit is not my own.
[00:23:29]  Everything is being dictated towards me.
[00:23:32]  I am effectively three weeks a slave.
[00:23:39]  A well paid slave, but a slave nonetheless.
[00:23:45]  Or, or I could say to myself, me and the boys are gear enough to go out into the deep wilderness to find that precious substance which is needed.
[00:24:03]  For society to continue existing for 24 more hours.
[00:24:08]  That we are risking life and limb on a dangerous adventure to achieve the essence.
[00:24:19]  Both of those stories are true.
[00:24:25]  But which story I choose to believe in?
[00:24:34]  Is going to have a massive, massive effect on the outcomes.
[00:24:44]  One of the reasons that we do mental hygiene, that we do personal inventories, that we re examine the lessons we learned in our childhoods is because we can learn very bad lessons.
[00:25:01]  We can interpret things the wrong way, and we can repeat.
[00:25:04]  That destructive pattern ad nauseam until we re examine it and flip the script.
[00:25:19]  So, just the same as Grub the caveman learning to use a simple lever, if you start applying this regularly in your own life, if you start manipulating, controlling where you're looking, what you're perceiving, what part of the story are you in?
[00:25:38]  Your life sucks?
[00:25:40]  Well, maybe you're in the part of the story at the beginning where the protagonist is getting beat down.
[00:25:46]  That's not so bad then.
[00:25:47]  It means that you're going to have a happy ending.
[00:25:49]  Just got to keep grinding.
[00:25:57]  Imagine doing that for thousands of years, the way that we've been doing simple levers.
[00:26:07]  The result, if you want to be dismissive and tell me that Notre Dame isn't magic, I'll go right ahead.
[00:26:15]  But imagine having that much control over your reality through simply manipulating your own perceptions of things.
[00:26:27]  And one final concrete example.
[00:26:29]  Of how perception alters reality.
[00:26:31]  At the start of this video, I promised if you watched all the way through that your psychic abilities would begin manifesting more strongly, that you'd become more effective.
[00:26:43]  I have, in fact, shown you some examples of how you could do that.
[00:26:48]  But the reason I said that was to instantiate a placebo effect in you.
[00:26:56]  Even though I'm telling you it's the placebo effect, it's still going to work on you.
[00:27:01]  You are going to become.
[00:27:03]  More aware of yourself and of others around you, what they're more complex than the hologram behind their eyes, behind their motives.
[00:27:14]  You're going to see clearer and you're going to become more effective just because I'm telling you so.
[00:27:20]  And finally, I said, what if we'd spent thousands of years studying how to manipulate the psyche to achieve better outcomes?
[00:27:31]  What might that look like?
[00:27:33]  Oh, here's the second question.
[00:27:38]  What makes you think people haven't been doing exactly that?
[00:27:44]  Cave, cave, deus, di det.
[00:27:48]  This is Birini.