Originally Posted By: abacus9900
Would we have to have a human being acting as observer or could we use something else?


This is the crux of the matter, isn't it? If we insist that the observer be human, then we are a step closer to saying that nothing existed before humans were around to do the observing.

On the other hand we might extend the role of observer to possible pre-human observers: God, Boltzmann brains, intelligent cosmos etc etc, but it all seems to reduce to what we believe.

There never was nothing.