I quoted [Goldilocks Enigma] in support of my contention that there is no time outside the awareness of it. — Wayfarer

I realized the reason you quoted it, and ran more with the title since it had direct application to the issue brought up in the OP.

As for there being no time outside the awareness of it, that depends on your definition of time.
1) Proper time, which is very much physical and supposedly mind independent. This is what clocks measure.
2) Coordinate time, which is arguably abstract and thus mind dependent since coordinate systems are mental constructs. Coordinate time is that which dilates.
3) One's perception of the flow of time, which is very much only a product of awareness, pretty much by anything tasked with making predictions.

As for Davies demonstrating your claim, my comment seems appropriate: I feel that conclusions are being begged by what I read there.

Not sure I'll say this right... I thought a galaxy could be treated as one body when calculating it's gravitational influence. That one body being the sum of all the stars, and everything else, in it. So each star is part of that sum, and the galaxy would have a weaker gravitational influence without it. No? Or were you thinking of a lone start in intergalactic space? — Patterner

Yes, a galaxy has mass just like a star does, so it can be treated as a body in its proximity, but 60 GLY is not in proximity. The mass of a galaxy makes zero difference at that distance compared to the same mass that didn't form a galaxy, despite the fact that the galaxy masses somewhat less just like our sun masses less than the material from which it was composed. Those local differences in the gravitational field simply cannot propagate FTL.

I agree that physicalism
...
the structure of the physical world actually is similar to that of our reason and at the same time trying to affirm that math and logic are the products of our minds. — boundless

Physicalism necessarily requires mathematics to be a mental product only? I was not aware of that. Materialism, sure, but not physicalism.
I do agree that such an assertion results in circularity. Logic cannot be used to derive logic as an end product instead of something far more fundamental.

I am surprised that you made this point, actually. 'Two plus two' is a different concept from 'four'. Just because the numerical value is the same it doesn't at all imply that it's a tautology. — boundless

I do admittedly have trouble denying 2+2=4, but even that assumes some context, as does say the impossibility of a square circle. I can do the latter with non-euclidean geometry, and I can deny the former with say modulus arithmetic, or telling weird stories like 1+1=1 to depict the unity of marriage, or 1+1=3 to depict reproduction. Those aren't counterexamples, but rather examples to show that 2+2=4 requires context, and a context requirement seems like an awful big asterisk to the claim of the objectiveness of its truth.

Time-independent in the case of math and logic. — boundless

If it's a mental construct, it would seem dependent on time. I don't think it's a mental construct, so I'll agree with your assertion of it being eternal.

By exist, I mean having objective reality or being. I already defined what I mean by "I". — MoK

How can you be certain of that kind of existence when you have no access to an objective viewpoint? There are even some interpretations of our universe (as opposed to objective) that say that 'you' are in superposition of being and not being, but mostly the latter.

Your comment suggests a flirting with solipsism or BiV given the expressed questioning of 'other people'. — noAxioms

Yes, I can be a brain in a vat, or what I experience could be caused by a Demon.

Same thing essentially.

There is no argument to tell whether other people exist.

I go way further than that. There seems to be no empirical test for the sort of existence you define. A thing existing and the same thing not existing would have identical experience, similar to say the experience of a presentist universe vs experience of a block universe. So one is forced to draw conclusions first, and then make up your evidence from there, a process of rationalization.

@Wayfarer The bit from Davies is interesting, and seems to stem from his attempt to justify a claim other than a multiverse to explain the fine tuning:

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

No, by definition 'this universe' must contain observers, else it would be this one, but rather another one.
Quantum theory seems to hold no role whatsoever for an observer that is anything more than a system with which an interaction takes place.
If Davies is defining the necessity of observers as is stated, it seems this is begging his conclusion about the necessity of the universe being observed.

The apparent Linde quote is something which I agree, at least in part.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. — Paul Davies

Quantum cosmology is in its infancy since there is no unified theory to date. Time drops out only because the subject deals with the universe before time has separated from the other dimensions, before say gravity separates out from the other 'forces'.
The part with which I agree is the bit about time losing its meaning relative to the universe as a whole. He proposes two separate systems, a clock/observer, and 'the rest of the universe' except 1) there's no meaningful place to put that clock such that it still relates in any way to the universe, and 2) the 'observer' seems to serve zero role except to read the clock aloud to nobody.
Apparently the observer is asserted to serves more of a role than that:

Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. — Paul Davies

I don't see any of that following at all, but then this tiny context might have snipped out pages of stuff leading to this conclusion.

The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that.

Funny, I can.

I did some crude research, and Davies apparently suggests that the universe is self-organizing, meaning that certain physical principles naturally lead to complexity and, eventually, life. Life does not cause the universe, but nevertheless something bends the principles to this one optimal tuning.
He also toys with universal teleology, but that seems to require complexity greater than what the universe evolves, leaving unanswered the origin of this even greater complexity.

Complexity must evolve from simplicity, Anything else results in a Ponzi scheme

Thanks for the quote Wayfarer.

For a star 60 GLY away, they can see the same galaxy the we do, even if we can't see each other. Those are relations, just not direct causal ones. — noAxioms

Doesn't the gravity of each affect the other? — Patterner

The average mass density of the universe sets a sort of fixed curvature. Changes to that curvature, say the formation of a concentration of mass like a star, cannot effect something beyond its event horizon, ever. That would require gravitational waves (the carriers of the changes to the gravitational field) to move locally faster than c. A new star as close as 20 GLY similarly cannot make any gravitational difference to us (ever) compared to if that star had not formed. We will never see it. But it's within the visible universe this time, so the mass from which it is composed has had a causal effect on us, not true of the one 60 GLY away.

I agree there's ambiguity in the way I used "exists". Can you suggest a different term? I want to distinguish between the superset of past/present/future existents and hypothetical things that are not in that superset. — Relativist

Well I use 'measured' vs not, which divides events into two (not three) categories, which is roughly delimited not by a hyperplane of a present, but by the past light cone of the system event doing the measuring. That's a physical (invariant) division, not an abstract frame dependent one.

I can for sure tell that I exist, by "I" I mean a mind with the ability to experience and cause (I have an argument for substance dualism). I can for sure tell that change exists. Some changes are due to me, and others are not. What causes other changes is subject to discussion; it could be a Demon or it could be real people. So, for sure, we can say that something exists beside me, but I think we cannot tell for sure what that thing is beside me! — MoK

Well those things exist by some definitions/interpretations of 'exists' and of 'I' and not by others.
You didn't reference any quote, so not sure which interpretations you have in mind. Probably not the relational one I often speak of, since what you assert is not true under that. I certainly don't know how you're using 'exists' here, but I'm guessing 'that which I can empirically glean' or some such. Your comment suggests a flirting with solipsism or BiV given the expressed questioning of 'other people'.

I don't define 'exists' in a way that leads to any of the conclusions you draw, but that's just a different definition, not an assertion of the way things are.

Why must something be "relation-independent" in order to count as real? — Janus

Those are just two possible definitions of what it means to be real. I actually counted 6 or more such definitions. Most of the assertions about what is real vs what isn't use a definition that implies, if not explicitly, mind dependence.

We have no physical relation to such worlds.

I disagree. We share the same big bang perhaps. For a star 60 GLY away, they can see the same galaxy the we do, even if we can't see each other. Those are relations, just not direct causal ones.

The fine-tuning argument has never done it for me. I don't believe we can accurately calculate odds when the sample is but one.

Not an exact calculation, no, but 'stupid improbable' can very much be shown. Just not exactly how stupid improbable.

Come on. When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to understand? — Wayfarer

Probably not relativity or cosmology, but definitely chemistry and quantum mechanics since quantum effects are critical to nerve operation as much as it is critical to transistor operation.

Sure, the brain and other biological structures don't operate in defiance of physics but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone.

I disagree with this, but I lack the credentials to deny any claim that any biological primitive operates on non-deterministic physics (and by that, I mean that randomness is not amplified or otherwise leveraged anywhere).

OK, so the algae thing is relevant. I know for instance that photosynthesis is so comples that it requires something like quantum computing to implement, especially to have evolved in the first place. I know that trees talk to each other. They've measured it: A whole forest of veterans calming the younger ones about a scary event coming up in a few hours.

So algae operation has questionable physical explainability. That's a good start. They need to find out where the gaps are. That's pretty hard with chemistry since the intermediate reactions are hard to isolate.

Nothing in physcis either does that, or accounts for that. — Wayfarer

Nothing in physics is violated by that either. That physics operates at a more fundamental level than something complex like say 'mitosis' doesn't mean that mitosis necessarily not physical.
Yes, a physical description is much like a graph of air pressure over time. That's a full description. It doesn't explain 'music', (any more than does your take on it), but it very much shows music (as it exists in an auditorium) to be nothing more than physical. Similarly, you admit that biological functionality is physical despite a lack of satisfactory 'explanation', and yet you seem to assert that something non-physical is required to make it all work, despite that also not being explained.

People make up new theories which often make predictions about things that haven't been observed yet. — Apustimelogist

I toyed with bringing up such an example in my prior topic about predication. I am a software engineer. One puts out a functional spec, a document which specifies what the product does. That's a list of predicates of a nonexistent thing, a potential example of existence not being prior to predication..
This of course can be countered by arguing that the functional spec does not have any of the predicates listed, it just lists them.
Your example is about theories making yet-to-be-verified predictions (such as time dilation, which was eventually demonstrated). But before that demonstration, the predicate was already there. Predication does not depend on it being observed.

If, however, we do accept that mathematical and logical truths are eternal
...
This would mean that they are either fundamental in themselves (as say Penrose IMO suggests) or depend on something else that is also not contingent and eternal... — boundless

What do you mean by 'eternal' here? I have two definitions of that, and neither seems appropriate. I seem to favor the idea of mathematics being fundamental, but not all would agree.

There is a set of things that existed in the past, a set of things existing in the present, and a set of things that will exist in the future. — Relativist

Under presentism, yes. But you called all those 'existing', the tense of which implies 'currently existing'. That's what I was commenting on.
Many (most?) presentists don't consider future events to exist since it interferes with their typical assumption of free will. Far be it from me to put words in their mouths; I'm not a presentist.

Without a subject, there is no point of reference for spatial extension or temporal duration — Wayfarer

A point of reference IS a subject, just not one with subjectivity, although a point of reference does not alone define a coordinate system, so coordinate quantities like extension and duration are undefined.

But what about relativity!? You can do experiments which show the effects of things like time dilation related to clocks without requiring observers or perspectives or anything like that. — Apustimelogist

That's just geometry.

But those experiments don't do themselves — Wayfarer

They do actually. Physics is not something that happens only in labs or when people are watching. Epistemology of physics does, sure, but I don't think Apustimelogist was talking about epistemology.

It's actually a very simple idea: that natural numbers (and other such intelligible objects) are real, but not materially existent. — Wayfarer

Does this mean existent, but not in a material way? Because that implication is there, an equivocation of being real and existing. I point this out because there are those that very much distinguish the two, even if only by definition. Relativist detects the lack of the equivocation implied above.

I question Wayfarer's distinguishing between "existing" and "real" — Relativist

I have seen them used thus, as I have: Existing but not real or v-v.

If there are volumes of arguments about [reality of say mathematics], it must be a more important issue than simply one of the words being defined differently.

The other point is that mathematics seems to be ‘true’ in a way that goes beyond the objective. We usually think of ‘objective’ as meaning something inherent in the object, or at least independent of our perception. — Wayfarer

I've been kind of up front about my usage of 'objective' to mean 'not relative', but you're seeming to imply 'not subjective' here. A truth about an object (as if 'object' had any sort of objective meaning) seems to be relative to the object, which is fine for a predicate. Is 2+2 adding up to 4 an objective truth, or is it only relative to this mathematics we seem to have discovered? Maybe there's different mathematics where 2+2 is something else or is meaningless.

I remember going through a good tutorial on law of form, and it doesn't obviously get into numbers quite so fast, being somewhat more foundational than that.

But mathematics is often the means by which we define what’s objective in the first place—so in that sense, it seems to transcend the domain of the objective rather than just belong to it.

Point taken.

I’m not using ‘abstract’ to mean just 'mental' or 'subjective'—mathematical truths don’t seem to depend on individual minds. But it’s not clear that they’re part of the natural world either. That leaves a kind of philosophical gap: we trust mathematics to describe the real, but we’re not sure where mathematical truths themselves fit into our picture of reality.

Not sure indeed. The issue of descriptive vs. proscriptive comes to mind.

As a physicalist (more or less), I'd simply say that abstractions do not exist as independent entities in the world. — Relativist

I don't think you need to be a physicalist to agree with that statement.

Example: we can consider several groups of objects, each of which has 3 members - and from this, we abstract "3". 3 is a property possessed by each of these groups.

But what if numbers are more fundamental than the object. They certainly are in say GoL, where '3' definitely has causal powers, and 'objects' only exist if 3 does first. Of course, real numbers play far less of a role than do small integers.

This process is the basis of abstraction

The act of abstraction, sure, but abstract objects (like 3 itself, and not just the concept of 3) doesn't require an act abstracting.

For the physicalist, then of course abstractions like numbers can’t exist independently — Wayfarer

Why not? For the materialist, sure, but physicalist? Not sure exactly what defines a physicalist, but i thought it was something like 'mind supervenes on the physical'. It's a stance against mind not being fundamental.
My reply? Fundamental to what? Sure, I think mental processes are physical processes. That makes mind not fundamental, but there are still things that supervene on said mental processes.

We don’t derive the idea of “three” from objects; rather, we recognize objects as “three” because we already grasp the concept a priori. In that sense — Wayfarer

Be nice to know how it came about. If the concept is already grasped, then the roots of that concept go back further than Relativist's example. Perhaps tokens were grouped to match the count of something, but without knowing that there are 3 tokens. I don't think we'll ever know the early history of being able to count, but humans are not alone in the ability to do so.

The fact that 3 + 2 = 5 holds independently of any particular instance—it would be true even if there were no physical groups of five objects anywhere. — Wayfarer

The skeptic in me wants to doubt that, but how can it not be so? Does Platonism follow from it? It seems to come down to the issue of it being true implying its reality.

From your quoted bit:

By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — Quantum Mysteries Dissolved

So the dead/live cat is real, but not actual. The measured dead cat is actual. Cute, but the Wigner's friend experiment seems to challenge this unitary notion of a wave function collapse into 'actual'. I'd like to see their take on that.

This sounds a bit like a presentist who considers as "existing" everything that exists, has existed, or will exist - i.e. a 4-dimensional landscape for identifying existents. — Relativist

There are those that assert this? Seems contradictory for some event to be 'existing' and also 'will exist', which seem to be two different contradictory tenses for the same event, relative to the same 'present' event.

About the posts of @Apustimelogist

But when we get to the human brain, which is the most complex naturally-occuring phenomenon known to science, I see no reason to believe that it can be described in terms of, or limited to, physical principles. — Wayfarer

Despite there no single tiny bit having been found that doesn't operate under said physical principles. Sure, the complexity might defy unwilling understanding, but that doesn't justify any claim that it does something dependent on more than just physical interactions.

A purely physicalist view, however, is difficult to reconcile with the existence of abstract objects. — boundless

A problem with a materialist view perhaps, since only material things exist. A physicalist view only says that people are no more than arrangements of physical stuff. The view doesn't deny the potential existence of non-material things like forces and abstractions. At least that's how I distinguish materialism from physicalism.
Is mathematics abstract? That makes it sound like it's all mental concepts instead of anything objective, but I don't think you're using 'abstract' in that way here.

For instance, logical operations do not seem to be reducible to physical causality, which seems contingent.

Of course not. 'Physical' is a reference to our universe. If logical operations were physical, they'd be a property of this universe and not anything objective. Something in a non-physical universe (like GoL) could not discover mathematics.

Generally physicalists oppose platonism due to the fact that it posits an irreducible non-physical reality.

I'll let @wayfarer comment on that since I don't know Platonism enough to know what they assert.

If a mathematical structure is going to supervene on mathematical truths, then those truths are going to need to be accessible by far more than just reason, which sounds like a mental act or some other construct that instantiates the mathematics (such as a calculator). — noAxioms

It depends on what we call 'reason'. If by reason we mean the mental ability to make deductions, inductions, reasonings and so on, well, at least a good part of mathematical truths are accessible to our finite minds.

Being accessible to minds has nothing to do with the truth of them.

For one thing, the vast majority of real numbers are inaccessible to us. We only have access to countably many of them. Actual mathematics would not be thus restrained.

What else might you call 'reason'?

So, at least in principle, that intelligence could understand our mathematics. — boundless

Maybe it's us understanding some of theirs.

Well, to be honest, I don't think that conscious beings can be understood in purely computational terms.

Good to see that we don't agree on everything then.

But, I still don't see how it can be considered a separate world from the one where the simulation is run (unless you mean from the 'perspective' of the simulated 'entities', assuming that such a concept makes sense).

Difference of map and territory. There's the thing, and then there's a simulation of that thing. So while we can be simulated, by definition, we are not simulations.

Ok! Yes.

OK, you seem to grok that.

I need more of a mathematics background to give an intelligent answer to that. — noAxioms

The problem is, however, that if mathematical truths are independent from both our minds and all the contingencies of the world — boundless

How could they not be? I mean, OK, under idealism, mathematics is nothing but mental constructs. I get that, and there are even non-idealists that say something similar, but since they can be independently discovered, it seems more than just a human invention.

Contrast that with a god, who should very much be independently discoverable, and yet each isolated culture/tribe comes up with their own, none related to any of the others. That's huge evidence that it's all being invented, not discovered.

Plato himself for instance argued that they reside in a different level of 'reality', the reality of intelligible objects, accessible only from reason.

If a mathematical structure is going to supervene on mathematical truths, then those truths are going to need to be accessible by far more than just reason, which sounds like a mental act or some other construct that instantiates the mathematics (such as a calculator).

In recent times, Penrose popularized the idea of the 'three worlds', the physical world, the world of consciousness and the 'platonic realm'. All these worlds for him both transcend and relate to each other.

Great. 3 worlds on their own instead of each being stacked on the next.

I believe that mathematical platonism is right because it seems to me that mathematical truths are objectively true and independent from both the world(s) and our minds.

I agree with that bit, and perhaps the ontology can follow since such truth stands out from nonsense.

They can be known, so they are not 'nothing' (or figments of our imagination because they are independent from our minds) - they seem to have some kind of ontological reality.

I'm actually being moved by this reasoning, so yes.

The point would be "can a rational intelligence of any kind learn mathematics as we know it?". For instance, I read that some propose that a rational being that lives alone in an undifferentiated environment would not coinceive numbers.

I think not the point. Said intelligence would need to be presented with an environment where such tools would find utility. It need not be 'of any kind' for mathematics to be independently discoverable.

Well, you are assuming that our world can be simulated. — boundless

An approximation of it can be, yes. A classical simulation is capable of simulating this world in sufficent detail that the beings thus simulated cannot tell the difference. Another funny thing is that GoL is more capable of doing this than is our universe due to resource limitations that don't exist under GoL.

Anyway, if our world were a simulation, I would not consider it a separated world from that which runs the simulation.

A world is what it is, and a simulation of it is a different thing, sort of like the difference between X and the concept of X, something apparently many have trouble distinguishing..

An interesting question would be what is the relation between spacetime and the Hilbert space.

I need more of a mathematics background to give an intelligent answer to that.

Surely you can understand how unknown planets and unknown universes are on a different ontological plane? — Wayfarer

I sure do. A small fraction of the former are part of our causal past. None of the latter are, which makes a big ontological difference if ontology is based on us.

The universe being ‘the totality of what exists’.

If it's defined that way, then there's not such thing as other universes by definition, at least not existing ones, and that's presuming that we're part of the universe as thus defined. Per my prior topic, I find no empirical test for that sort of thing.

I’m open to Penrose’s idea of the cyclical universe

Do you understand how it works, what the duration of all the prior ones were (as measured by one of our clocks), and how long it will take for the next one to happen? It is a cool idea, I admit.

In the past 100 years our knowledge of the universe has expanded by orders of magnitude. I find the notion of a multiverse intriguing - but I'm just an armchair physicist. However, much smarter people than I think it's worth looking into.

https://www.thescienceblog.net/is-there-scientific-evidence-for-the-theory-of-the-multiverse/

https://organicallyhuman.com/googles-quantum-multiverse-exists/ — EricH

Those are interesting, but pop articles written by people no smarter than you or I, writing about view of people who are indeed smarter in their field.

The blog article speaks of 'the multiverse theory' like it's one theory. It goes on to admit that it's just a blanket term for several unrelated actual theories, but much of the discussion still treats it as one thing.
At least 9 types have been listed by Greene: Brane, Cyclic, Holographic, 2 Inflationary, Landscape, 3 Quantum, 1 Quilted, Simulated, 4 Ultimate.
The ones with numbers correspond to Tegmark's 4 types. Some of the others come from string theory.
The bolded ones are mentioned in the blog.
It has interesting assertions like: "MWI posits that every time a quantum event happens with multiple outcomes, such as a particle being in one state or another, the universe splits, creating a new branch for each outcome."
Well it posits no such thing. The sole premise is this: "All isolated systems evolve according to the
Schrodinger equation". That's it. It posits nothing else. All the rest follows from that one simple premise.

The blog is cute, but I spot several errors, meaning it's either not reviewed or it is written for entertainment rather than accuracy.

The google-chip article is attempting to sensationalize what is essentially: More progress has been made in the effort of realizing quantum computing. What it claims is that it will somehow prove the quantum multiverse (MWI), meaning that a successful quantum computer will somehow falsify all the other interpretations, which is by definition impossible since they all make the same empirical predictions.

Still, it will be interesting to see how proponents of each of the other interpretations choose to spin a functional quantum computer, similar to the wiki page showing how each interpretation spins the Schrodinger's cat scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Interpretations

Interestingly, Bohmian mechanics isn't in there, and I thought it used to be. Was it removed? This is a significant hole in the page.

Well, the general term is matheamtical 'realism'. There are different variants. Platonists assert that mathematical truths are both independent from our minds and also from the world. — boundless

For one, I distinguish mathematics being objectively real, and mathematics being objectively true. The latter seems to hold, and the former I thought was what mathematical Platonism is about, but you say it's about being true. I am unsure if anybody posits that the truth of mathematics is a property of this universe and not necessarily of another one.

The main argument is that mathematical truths do not seem to rely on any kind of contingency.

Well I agree with that, and so does @Richard B given his last post.

Opponents of platonism question the possibility that such a 'realm of truths' can be known by us.

Being objectively true (and not just true of at least this universe) does not imply inaccessibility. The question comes down to if a rational intelligence in any universe can discover the same mathematics, and that leads to circular reasoning.

Well, to me [Conway's Game of Life] would be a subset of 'our world', wouldn't it? — boundless

Only a simulation of it. The things in themselves (all different seed states) are their own universes.
Funny thing is that our universe can be simulated in a GoL world, so it works both ways.

The relationality of physical propoerties for instance suggest to me that the way we carve the world into objects is in large part a mental construct. So, describing the world outside the context of observations with concepts that are being introduced to make sense of observations would be a leap that might have to be justified. — boundless

Totally agree here.

Here's an idea. Maybe the 'change' of my perspective is just an useful abstraction. 'My' 'observing perspective' is the same even when the description changes because I moved in my worldline. So, maybe any kind of perspective that physics tells about is an useful abstraction, which doesn't necessarily connect to something truly real.

A perspective seems to be a sort of 5 dimensional thing, 4 to identify an event (point in spacetime), and one to identify a sort of point in Hilbert space, identifying that which has been measured from that event. All these seem to be quite 'real' (relative to our universe)

So for instance, two perspectives of our friend in the box, one having measured up, and one down. Same event, different states with which the perspective is entangled, which is the different 'locations' in Hilbert space. I put that in scare quotes because it isn't a linear dimension like distance or something.

One way I've thought about the anthropic principle is simply to observe that it puts paid to the argument that the origin of life is a consequence of the fortuitous combination of elements, the 'warm little pond' theory of abiogenesis. — Wayfarer

That's one way. An extremely unlikely event, but no end of places and time for it it occur. Plenty of dice being rolled, so abiogenesis doesn't seem to be a problem at all.

And that's because the causal sequence that gave rise to those circumstances can be traced back past the formation of the planet, to the stellar transformations that gave rise to those complex elements,which in turn can be traced back to some specific characteristics of matter-energy that seem to have existed from the earliest moments of the cosmos.

Most of that has unlimited rolls of the dice, so improbability isn't a problem. The part in bold, if this is 'the one universe', only gets one shot, since those incredibly unlikely characteristics are the same everywhere, and that means you only get one shot at it.

Yes, having a theological conclusion already in mind, this anomaly was eventually used as evidence of design. Before that, it was the 'design' of all living things, but science kind of won out on that issue, so now the goal post has been moved to the 'designed' tuning. I think they're getting tired of conceding points instead of ever winning one.

But I think the argument that there might be uncountable further unknown universes doesn't amount to saying anything whatever.

People finally accepted uncountable further unknown planets. Why is this one so different?

I do agree that throwing up one's arms and saying 'everything exists' seems to dilute the concept into meaninglessness. To exist is to stand out, and nothing can stand out if there's no distinctions.

It seems neither of us has a satisfactory answer. I do my best, but my view very much borders on the one lacking distinctions. The question that kills me: Why does our universe seem so interesting? There are far more structures that are not interesting and yet have identical copies of me in it. If they are 'exist' (whatever that means), I'm probably in one of the uninteresting ones without knowing it. I have no answer to that one. Such is the consequence of not restricting ontology at all.

Do you think that '2+2 = 4' is a mind-independent truth? I actually think it is. — boundless

We both think that. I don't go so far as to say that I 'know that'.

That's why I lean toward some form of matematical platonism. It seems that mathematical truths are discovered, not 'invented', at least in part.

Right. I don't know a whole lot about mathematical Platonism, being unsure about the arguments for each side, and why 2+2=4 perhaps necessitates it or not.

I think I see what you mean. But then all the worlds would be mind-dependent. Not dependent on a particular mind. So we would have a pluarality of worlds that depend on their respective 'minds'.

Well, a plurality of worlds that don't depend on minds at all. A great deal of them would be unfathomable to us, but what, do they all exist? I came up with a world from Conway's Game of Life (GoL), which is very crude, 3D (2 space, 1 time), and arguable has 'objects'. Does an evolution of a given initial GoL state exist? It certainly is a world. That's what I mean by questioning where the line should be drawn (from what does it stand out?) Nobody has answered the question. I have only vague answers, none supported by logic. That's a great deal of the reason I'm not a realist.

It would be quite a coincidence that the world 'in the perspective of a pen' is describable in the same terms as it is 'as it appears to me'.

I'm not comparing it to how things appear to you. The pen is not conscious and nothing appears to it at all. But the pen has a causal history and thus measures (interacts with) that history, just as you do. So not as things appear to you, but how your entire causal history relates to you. Your mental processing of a fraction of those measurements has nothing to do with this causal relation, thus the pen and a random meat-wad are on ontological level ground.

So I'm using 'perspective' here in the same was as 'measure', just meaning physical interaction with environment. I confine 'observer' to something with mental interaction. I'm not asserting that a perspective is that, I'm just using the word that way.

I am not sure that Rovelli meant that. I think he meant that each observer when asks "what did you see?" to another will get an answer which is coherent with his observations. I don't think that Rovelli meant anything more than this. — boundless

But that's my take on that comment as well.

That's a good point, indeed. I need to think about this to give you a proper response. Hope you don't mind. — boundless

Thinking about stuff rather than giving a quick knee-jerk response is always a good thing. I'm often delayed in replying precisely because I'm looking up sites relevant to the response. It's not like I think I have all the answers already. I certainly don't.

In which case, they're completely irrelevant in any sense other than providing rhetorical elbow-room in which any claim whatever can be accomodated. — Wayfarer

If you equate 'irrelevance to us' as 'nonexistent to us', then sure, but those other worlds are relevant to the only viable models that explain certain things. I notice you don't have a solution yourself to say the fine tuning problem, perhaps waving it away as being somehow necessary, but without saying how it is necessary.
How do you explain the reality of whatever you consider to be fundamentally real (mind?)? Or is it 'it just is'? I ask because I think the relational view solves that problem, but only if you take it on its own ground and not mix it in with a contradictory view.

It's a way of avoiding admission of necessary truths, which suits your relativist arguments.

I think I proposed 2+2=4 as a sort of necessary truth. A whole lot of stuff falls apart if that isn't accepted.

Okay the way you frame it I tend to think the Universe contains time, which means there was no time prior to the existence of the Universe. In other words, if there is anything there is also time because things are necessarily temporal, and if there are no things then there is no time. — Janus

Pretty good summary, yes. To say 'there was nothing, and then there was something' implies that there was time in which more stuff besides time suddenly 'happened'. It seems a category error to consider the universe to be something that 'happened'. Again, opinion, but the opposite opinion is to posit the existence of something (a preferred moment in time) for which there is no empirical evidence, only intuition, and I rank intuition extremely low on my list of viable references.

You also seem to agree that there are things independent of minds. In which case you would appear to be one the "anybodies" who support mind-independent reality.

Except for the 'reality' part, sure. Mind-independent, sure. Relation-independent, no. I think in terms of relations, but I don't necessarily assert it to be so. I proposed other models that are not relational and yet are entirely mind-independent. See OP.

We have no relation to such worlds

Sure we do. It's just a different relation than 'part of the causal history of system state X', more like a cousin relation instead of a grandparent relation. The grandparent is an ancestor. The cousin is not. The cousin world is necessary to explain things like the fine tuning of this world, even if the cousin world has no direct causal impact on us.

How could we ever demonstrate that consciousness collapses the wave function

That interpretation can be shown to lead to solipsism, which isn't a falsification, but it was enough to have its author (Wigner) abandon support of the interpretation.

or that there really are hidden variables?

By definition, those can neither be demonstrated nor falsified.
They have proven that certain phenomena cannot be explained by any local hidden variable theory, but that just means that hidden variable proposals are necessarily non-local.

You assert that no alien intelligence is capable of coming up with that theorem? — noAxioms

Not at all, but there is no evidence of such. I mean ‘rational intelligence’.
...
To all intents and purposes, that refers to our minds, although I'm open to the possibility of other intelligent species in the Universe. — Wayfarer

OK, so you're open to there being others, but you don't see evidence of such, which just means that they're sufficiently separated to not notice each other. An that's just this universe, never mind other ones

And there’s also no grounds to entertain the idea of a universe with ‘different physical rules’. This is where your relativism/nihilism shows through. It underwrites the idea that there are no necessary truths.

So I outline, in first paragraphs of the OP, grounds to entertain the idea of worlds/universes with different rules. By the relational definitions I've given, those worlds (like any other world) do not exist relative to us by definition, but neither do we exist relative to them.
By the EP, worlds with say 2 dimensions of time exist. Worlds with zero dimensions of time don't exist. EP is not a relational definition.

What do you mean "the universe is self-observed"? — Janus

I mean that this world has evolved observers.

You say the universe contains time

That means that time is part of the universe, one dimension of 4D spacetime, consisting of all events including the ones with us in it. This is an opinion.

Some say that the universe is contained by time (they don't use that wording), in which case the universe becomes an object, created, just like any other object, and there's something larger that better deserves the term 'universe'. In this model, there was a time before which this universe was not observed from within. As an object, it is subject to being externally observed if you can find any consistency in that.

The question boils down to whether "if nothing is observed then nothing exists" is true.

It's true under any observation-dependent definition of existence. I'm exploring alternate definitions.

Why is the question not about if the apple has mind-independent existence?

Because the apple is observed. No, I'm not talking about something merely unseen, say the nearest star to our exact position, but on the opposite side of the galaxy. Most assume that exists.
The test should probe the boundaries, such as the live cat when the box opened turns up the dead one.
Instead, how about 'the nearest star 50 GLY away in the exact current direction of North'? That's a complete counterfactual and 'is not real' by most interpretations of quantum theory. And as always, how about the number 17? That's also one of my frequent examples.

I can't know that the other person describing the same thing I saw and the thing I saw are not both products of my imagination. — Patterner

OK, I took that from the evidence that each has language, something one doesn't have without interactions with others.

I say it does not exist because it is being observed. I say observing it is the means by which we know it exists, but it would exist if it was never observed.

That's the standard line, yes. The OP is full of challenges to not so much that, but our presumed nonexistence of stuff not observed.

Typically, the realist presumes (if not explicitly posits) a classical reality:
P1 There is one (mind-independent) reality, and we happen to observe it, there being no other reality to observe
Maybe that's an unfair strawman because I totally take that apart in the OP.
There need to be more mind-independent worlds, and not just worlds like this one but without people, but funny worlds with say multiple dimensions of time or something. We observe this one because this one is tuned for observation, and the vast majority of them are not.
So this brings up the problem of which worlds/things exist and which don't, and why?


I came up with some alternatives:
1) Existence is a mental construct only. There is no existence in itself, only the idea of it. Hence it can be applied at the whim of whoever uses the word, and the presumer of this existence is fooled into thinking it actually corresponds to something actual, like things are actually divided into existing ones and nonexisting ones.

2) Existence is not based on empirical evidence at all, but on some logical reasoning. Trick is to come up with that reasoning, and a few have been suggested in my prior post an in the OP.

Regarding the casual power of integers, 7 + 3. What caused "10" to exist in the mind of probably everybody who read that sentence?

Probably the symbols and their meaning as taught to said readers. Good question though. Suppose integers don't exist. Not saying they don't exist somewhere in our universe, but that they don't exist at all. Can 7+3 really add up to 10, or must they be instantiated somewhere first, like 7 oranges and 3 grapefruits in a basket of 10 citrus fruits.
This is an important question. Can 7 be itself (can it be say an odd number) if it doesn't exist? If 7+3 need not exist to add up to 10, then similarly, objective existence seems unnecessary for anything to be whatever it is.
I've asked this before, and many actually say that 7+3 do not add up to 10 unless the integers exist (and not just if 3,7,10 are all members of the set of otherwise nonexistent integers). I don't answer that way, and I say that the sum is 10 regardless of the ontological status of the integers involved.

We're talking about what seems to be objective truth here, and no some property of our universe.

Can you just assume there is such a model that you don't know about? — Patterner

I want a plausible model, even if I cannot know the correctness of it. Nobody can know if their interpretation of anything is the correct interpretation. That's true by definition.

But the mind can't know what that model is, because that defeats the purpose. Is that right?

I don't think so since the model would not require itself to be known, but neither does it forbid it.
That didn't come out right. The way that it actually is, does not require (nor forbid) a mental model to, by chance or good reasoning, correspond to this actuality.

You ask whether anyone really supports (I presume you mean believes in) a mind-independent reality. Do you believe anything existed prior to the advent of minds? — Janus

If existence is but an ideal (described in alternative (1) just above), then yes, the above suggestion would be true. Also, the universe seems to contain time, not be contained by it, so all of it exists equally, meaning the universe is self-observed, period. There's no before/after about it. Yes, the parts prior to the observation are the ones observed. Its the events after the observation that are not observed, so maybe it's those that don't exist under some mind-dependent position.

All that said, this topic is not about if the apple has mind-independent existence, its about what exists besides the stuff observed. If the answer is 'not much', then it sounds pretty observation dependent to me.

But the point about integers remains. — Wayfarer

Yes, I tried to convey that the point still stood.

the 'shrug, whatever' type.

I don't think so. I really care, and I want a model that lacks fundamental problems, but I'm getting nowhere. The relational thing works nice on paper, but it has problems of vanishing probability of the relations I perceive being actual perceived things instead of illusions, a sort of Boltzmann Brain problem. That's a hard one to get around, and it must be solved for the view to be rational.

But models are clearly mind-dependent in some fundamental sense.

The model itself is of course, but I mean that which it is modelled.

Einstein said once, ... '... I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.'
But this overlooks the point that it is something only man can know."

You assert that no alien intelligence is capable of coming up with that theorem? If not, what are you saying? It seems discoverable even by an intelligence in a universe with completely different physical rules.

If two minds that don't know each other, and don't know what the other is doing, independently go to the same place, and described it the same way, does that not mean there is something independent of either mind? — Patterner

That would be evidence of not-solipsism, but the fact said place is said to exist because it is being described by one or more observers makes its designation as such pretty dependent on the observation.

I am searching for a rule that defines objective existence in some way that doesn't depend on any observation of anything. The EP discussed in the OP is one way to do that, but surely there are others.
My relational definition is more restrictive than straight-EP, but it also works, and it doesn't require any explanation of how anything came to exist.

So, while it is true that integers lack causal powers, they nevertheless constrain the space of possible causal relations in quantum systems by defining the allowed states of the system. In this way, mathematics — and whole numbers specifically — shape the possibilities of physical reality. — Wayfarer

Yes, quantum theory seems to have a special relation with integers and not just real numbers like Newtonian physics.

The quote you gave seems to be pretty old, referencing the Bohr model of orbiting electrons like little satellites, deprecated a century ago for the more modern orbital model which still uses those integers, but doesn't suggest electrons going around in cute orbits with nice clean angular momentum like that.

One thing I've picked up reading your posts over the years, is that you're basically nihilist - kind of a 'soft nihilism', not harsh or cynical. 'Nobody knows for sure that anything is real.' It provides a kind of ultimate get-out-of-jail card for any argument or model, which can be nullified with a shrug, and 'who knows'? — Wayfarer

Well this made me dig a shallow pit into the nihilism thing since there's so many variations of it and some of it probably does apply to me. Yes, I see no use for non-relational existence. I see that in a Russell's teapot sort of light, posited by many but lacking any predictive power, also similar to the premise of a preferred moment in time, another very intuitive but empirically empty proposition.

So quoting wiki-nihilism page we get:
"There have been different nihilist positions, including the views that life is meaningless, that moral values are baseless, and that knowledge is impossible. "
This seems totally wrong. Life has meaning, moral values and knowledge. It just isn't absolute, it's all relative. I've not discussed it much, but morals seem to be a social contract, valid only within the society where the contract is valid. Being immoral means going against society and bearing their social consequences. Best example is it being immoral to shoot a German soldier surrendering, but not immoral to shoot a Japanese one. That one is a written contract, but often the rules are not written.

As for knowledge, 2+2 adding up to 4 seems to be pretty objective knowledge. Knowledge is not all relative.

Closer to home is this quote:
"In the field of epistemology, relativistic versions of nihilism assert that knowledge, truth, or meaning are relative to the perspectives of specific individuals or cultural contexts, implying that there is no independent framework to assess which opinion is ultimately correct. "
This is under epistemology, suggesting that what I know is relative to my perspective, to which I can only agree. But being an 'observer', it makes any knowledge of mind pretty observer dependent, and when querying ontology, all I see is relations, no absolutes at all. X exists relative to Y, but there seems to be no meaning to 'X exists'. My prior topic tried to address (question) the claim that X cannot be whatever it is unless it first exists, that 'being' depends on ontology. Perhaps that's the answer. Instead of stubbornly insisting that X can be itself regardless of its ontic status, maybe that very existence simply is X being itself. That's totally circular, but ultimately, everything is I suspect.

Another quote from the page:
"Mereological nihilism asserts that there are only simple objects, like elementary particles, but no composite objects, like tables."
That's totally my assertion, two topics ago
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15297/is-there-any-physical-basis-for-what-constitutes-a-thing-or-object
I didn't know there was a term for what I was observing (demonstrating) in that topic.


Comments on this post are encouraged because I'm trying to fit my relativism into more than just an epistemological stance. I don't care what I know, I care about a model of what is that doesn't depend on mind, which makes empirical evidence take a secondary role.

Can we talk about a 'realism' without 'ultimate truths' or the possibility to know them? — boundless

Realism can be relational. You can talk about it either way. 2+2=4 seems like an 'ultimate truth', but who can say for sure?

I'm not sure about what you are getting at. I would say that usually realism involves that the world can be known, at least in priciple, as it is independently of any perspective of any subject.

What I am getting at is the contradiction in your statement there. Yes, realism usually involves the world relative to which we interact. But that relation is precisely what makes its preferred existence mind dependent. Yes, an identical world except without any observers would arguably be more mind independent, but there would be nothing, even in another world, to label it 'the world' instead of just 'a world'. It's the preferredness of this world that makes it mind dependent. Take away that preference and it becomes mind independent, but it also drops the barrier to all those other worlds from equally existing, leaving open the question if there is still a barrier at all distinguishing what exists from what doesn't.

To exist means to stand out. This world stands out to us, making it a mind-dependent standing out. From what do these other worlds stand out?

But oddly enough I would say that if there are 'as may worlds as perspectives' then the presence 'mind-independent reality' is more difficult to defend.

Only if a perspective requires a mind, which I often emphasize to the contrary.

Some interpertations however claim that they are 'ontologically interpretable' (to use a phrase by d'Espagnat), in the sense that they can be read as providing a correct description about the world as it is in itself. — boundless

Tall claim, but I suppose most interpretations (maybe not copenhagen) can be read this way.

Rovelli is saying that each 'observer' can't go outside 'his' own perspective.

I'm not sure what it would mean to go outside one's own perspective. I have a lot of perspectives (any moment along my worldline), but those are all mine. Nothing prevents anybody from imagining what another observes, which is exactly what's being done here with Wigner's friend. Almost all thought experiments leverage imagined perspectives.

'He' will never find any inconsistencies because all data 'he' will be able to find will be consistent 'for him'. But if 'his' knowledge is limited by 'his' own perspective, then, he can't actually know what 'others' observe.

As you quoted Rovelli saying, he knows the other observes the same elephant.

If the friend is in superposition in the box, then the friend is in superposition of having observed up and down. There's no funny experience to that. It's perfectly normal to the friend and we are in such superposition at all times relative to anything that hasn't currently measured us. All this is very different than the friend observing his own superposition, which nobody does.

I can talk about the fork I used at dinner without meaning it's the only, or the preferred, fork. — Patterner

But you've measured many forks, but measured only one world. This leads some (not all) to conclude there is but 'the' one world, and if 'what there is' is defined as what is observed, then there is indeed but the one world, but that definition isn't a mind-independent one.

And I'll be in all kinds of troubles if someone asks what I'm doing this weekend, and I say, "I'll have to ask a wife."

So says the Mormon.

The universe I'm in may or may not be the only universe. But it's the only one I have any experience of. If I start talking about "a" universe, people will be confused. They'll probably stop me and ask what I mean by "a".

In a topic such as this one, I think not. Pragmatically from day to day interactions, yea, we all know what is meant by it, and few ponder how our observation of it makes it preferred to us, but not preferred.

I don't think they spring from nothing, for no reason. — Patterner

'Spring from' implies a time when the 'real thing' wasn't yet real, but time is there, so if it sprang, then it wasn't from nothing. I don't think our universe is contained by time.
The question I find unanswerable concerning realism is: "how does one explain the reality of whatever it is you consider to be real?". If a relational definition is used for 'being real', then the answer is simply 'because I relate to it'.
Do I relate to all those worlds I don't see? I think I do, because they're necessary for explaining what I see. That point is debatable of course.

Number 17 is not matter. Therefore, number 17 or the word "blue" can not be caused nor effect anything. — Athena

I didn't say either 'caused or was affected by anything. I said that some consider 17 to be something that exists (see platonic realism), and some don't. It existing due to being causal seems to leverage that Eleatic Principle discussed in the OP. 17 is part of mathematics, and some theories (Tegmark's MUH for instance) posit that universes supervene on mathematics, which would give 17 causal powers.

I would like to gracefully withdraw from this thread. I do not understand what anyone is saying.

No problem. Thank you for your questions and contributions.

New theory of entanglement - Persistence Theory, Bill Gianokopoulos — Wayfarer

Spent quite some time looking at it. There must be a more formal paper somewhere since this seems to be more a pop article written for the likes of me. Has a scientific paper been submitted and peer reviewed?
I notice the author seems to have little respect for relativity of simultaneity the way he describes 'instant' change of wave function at the other end of the pair from the measurement taken. He also very explicitly denies counterfactuals, which is weird considering this instant state change sounding like one.

Anyway, haven't real too far yet and I've no strong opinion if it warrants inclusion in a list of interpretations. Thanks for the link, and for one that isn't blocked.

I never realty understand these conversations. Before anything on the planet, possibly in the universe, existed that had even the vaguest hint of understanding of mathematics, there would have been any number of instances when groups of objects joined together. — Patterner

Not contesting that. What I am contesting is that it wasn't 'the universe' until those 'understanding' things designated it as such. Without said observation, it is merely 'a universe', not the preferred one.

In H.O Mounce’s Wittgenstein’s Tractatus An Introduction, puts it nicely when he says, “For the solipsist in wishing to deny the independent reality of the world, in maintaining that only he and his ideas are real, has the idea of his self as an object standing, as it were, over and against an unreal world. But when he realizes the confusion in this, when he sees that there can be no such object as he takes his self to be, the world reappears as the only reality in which his self can manifest itself.” — Richard B

That actually speaks to me, even though I think I'm interpreting these words in a different light than was intended.

Some time ago, I mentioned the distinction of the 'two truths' ... — boundless

I reference something like that all the time, separating pragmatic truths from the rational ones.

For instance, "The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west" is true in a provisional sense. But it also isn't true, right? We know that it is not a correct description of what 'really happens'.

In the right reference frame, it is what happens, but it's still a provisional truth in that frame. I don't think what you call 'ultimate truths' are frame or perspective dependent.

On the other hand, 'ultimate truths' would be correct statements that in some ways describe how the world is 'in itself'.

The bolded bit is such a perspective reference, and illustrates the point of this topic.

No, I was thinking also about what the Friend measured after he exited the box. — boundless

The friend is almost immediately entangled with the spin-measurement device, so he's going to match that every time, whether or not Wigner has measured the friend yet or not.

Rovelli actually brilliantly paraphrased his views like this: "More precisely: everybody hears everybody else stating that they see the same elephant they see. This, after all, is a sound definition of objectivity." ... Wigner hears his Friend stating he saw the same thing Wigner observed. But this is not a way, for Wigner, to go outside Wigner's perspective.

Interesting that Rovelli phrased it that way, but if it were not true, the view would be falsified. The statement is true of quantum mechanics and not just any subset of interpretations.

Note a definition of objectivity which isn't 'relation independent' nor is it 'not subjective', but rather it is objectivity defined in terms of intersubjective agreement. In the case of RQM/MWI, objectivity is being defined as mutual entanglement.
Using such a definition, I yield the factualness of the objective existence of the apple.

When Wigner and the Friend meet, their interaction is (also) a measurement. So, the state of the Friend is 'measured' by Wigner. Does this mean that the Friend loses his status as a 'perspective bearer'?

No, it just means that the friend event that Wigner measures is a different perspective than the Wigner event doing the measuring. That friend perspetive event cannot measure the Wigner event in question since said Wigner event doesn't exist relative to the friend event in question.

Note my use of 'event' here since each event on one's worldline is a different perspecitve.

Also, it makes the assumption that its truth is perspective-independent. — boundless

Quite the opposite. Where are you getting all this? — noAxioms
If I say that my knowledge is restricted to my own perspective, how can I claim there are other perspectives and there are no perspective-independent things? — boundless

Knowledge is not the same as truth. Sure, knowledge seems perspective dependent, which is why we don't know where the nearest alien intelligence is.
Maybe you define truth in a relational sort of way: It's true that the moon orbits Earth each 27 days. That's a relational fact, but not a fact.

Are you suggesting that Wigner isn't sure that the friend is like himself?

More or less, yes. Note that my point isn't about only RQM. But all models who claim that knowledge is perspectival.[/quote]RQM (like almost all ontic interpretations) doesn't treat any person different than another. It doesn't even treat pens differently than people.

But also note that our knowledge seems to be perspectival. Wigner can't 'see' the world from the Friend's perspective in order to confirm his belief that, indeed, the Friend is, as you put it, like him. This is so precisely becuase Wigner's knowledge is limited by his perspective.

This is philosophy of mind, which of course has no resolution. Sure, but we're presuming sufficient mind-independence to suspect one person's experience is functionally similar to any other.

Calling it 'the world' is already an observer bias. — noAxioms
Why? — boundless

The syntax suggests that this world exists to the exclusion of any other, all because it's the one we see. A far less mind-dependent wording would be 'a world' which doesn't carry any implication of being the preferred world.
My whole topic contrasts 'the world' with 'this world, among others', with the former implying mind-dependence.

Are you saying that a better distinction [of 'objective'] would be between "what is independent from any relation" vs "what is relation-dependent"? — boundless

Different, not necessarily better. Best to define how the word is being used up front when wielding it.

I'm going to arrogantly say very little and assume I've solved all the thread's problems.

1 ) Physical != preceded by an event, the timing of beta decay events is random, they only have a cause in an abstract sense rather than a preceding event sense. — fdrake

Almost all events are preceded by prior events. Not sure what that has to do with uncaused occurrences like beta decay. A few interpretations have it being a caused (determined) thing.

2) Preceded by an event != caused, even in how we use cause in explanations. People want to say things like "the tendency of a system towards its ground state causes...", even when that's not talking about a precedent event, it's talking about a "law" {an abstract generality} causing an event {a concrete particular}

OK, This seems to say that 'laws' don't count as causes.

3 ) Mathematised != determined, compare Norton's Dome in Newtonian mechanics {arbitrary rolling point} and any quantity associated with a distribution {anything that can be represented with a wavefunction has a wavefunction squared...}

Agree. The Dome thing is a wonderful example of an uncaused occurrence in Newtonian mechanics (which demonstrates that it isn't deterministic as claimed).

5 ) Measurement != thought, OP grants this, so already undermines the premise in the title.

Title is poorly worded, mostly due to lack of being able to express a correct one in a short line.

6 ) Physical != part of a mathematical model, like bouncing balls' amplitudes following a geometric decline only stopping in the limit.

Sorry Zeno :(

7 ) Physical != part of a physical theory - maths objects are parts of physical theories, but not physical in the same way as quarks and chairs.

But the quarks possibly supervene on maths objects. That doesn't make said maths physical in the same way, I agree.

8 ) Relational != causal - come on you lot, an electron's trajectory through space is related to is charge

An electron trajectory though space is a counterfactual.
You seem to be using 'event' differently than I. I use it to mean a point in spacetime, or possibly (more informally) a system state at a moment in time, also known as a beable.
The relational ontology I've been discussing is pretty dang causal in definition.

Not sure what problems you think were solved by these numbered assertions.

Which makes the 'unlikelihood' of our universe arising from random chance depend on the current models one may adopt or might come about within a hundred years or so of empirical stagnation. — substantivalism

Sure. Some models have good odds, and others have really low odds.

It's like how a skeptic will always find holes in the arguments I give to not drink bleach. . . alas. . . I still decide not to. — substantivalism

But the bleach thing at least has an argument, even if the argument isn't perfect.

... when I hear sounds they correspond to real frequencies and amplitudes in differential air pressure. You're suggesting that not even that kind of correspondence exists? — flannel jesus

As an entanglement relation, I would suggest it exists. Almost all our pragmatic models involve such a relation, even if the relation isn't recognized as such.

Consciousness causes collapse' is to be interpreted as a phrase though. If collapse is merely an epistemic oupdate of a conscious agent, I don't see anything controversial. Of course, if consciousness causes a physical change, then things are different. So, let's not confuse these two distinct interpretations. — boundless

Agree that your discussion about Wigner's friend was framed in epistemic term. So the friend sort of fills a role in that respect, even if a simple printer would have also served.

Only that, in their own perspective, there are no logical inconsistencies. For Wigner it is as if the Friend sees the same as he sees. But it cannot say what is truly seen by the Friend.

I don't know what you mean by 'truly' here.. — noAxioms

OK, I think I worked it out. You're talking about Wigner's opinion of what the friend has measured while the friend is still in the box. That's a clear counterfactual, and unless an interpretation is used that posits counterfactuals, there is no 'truly' about it. RQM does not posit counterfactuals.

For instance, the relational view expressed here still has to make the assumption that the 'perspective-bearers' have their existence independent from the perspectives. — boundless

No, not at all. Existence of anything is relative to that which has measured the thing, and so far, our 'perspective bearers' have not been measured. They will momentarily, but then they're not the perspective bearers anymore, they're the observed.

Also, it makes the assumption that its truth is perspective-independent.

Quite the opposite. Where are you getting all this?

If my knowledge is restricted to what I can know from my own perspective, how can I know that?

That seems tautological. Perhaps I'm missing the question.

The friend who notices spin up has a perspective, as does the friend noticing spin down. Those are two perspectives in superposition (relative to Wigner). Wigner knows this. What he doesn't know is which state things will collapse to relative to him when the box is opened. That part is a counterfactual. — noAxioms
Ok. But what about the ontological status of the two Friends?

According to RQM, their ontology relative to Wigner is a superposition of states. According to other interpretations, the ontology is different. Ontology seems to be a mental construct, a function of say one's choice of interpretation, but it also might be a physical mind-independent status, depending on which (if any) interpretation is actually the case.
That statement is on-topic, it being kind of why I brought this up. I do agree that the title didn't convey it well, but I couldn't think of a title that did a better job.

Also, he can't go outside his perspective, so what he can know is that he will never find inconsistencies. He can't in any way know that the Friend has his own perspective.

Are you suggesting that Wigner isn't sure that the friend is like himself? That Wigner cannot discard solipsism? I suppose that's correct, but it's not considered a valid quantum interpretation since it leads to zero knowledge of anything. Ditto with superdeterminism, a loophole in Bell's proof, but you still don't see it included in the interpretations list.

But you are still treating the pen as a 'perspective-bearer', i.e. something differentiated and something relative to which one can define a state of 'everything else'. — boundless

Yes. I am not using any of those words as something requiring a human or other 'observer' to be involved.

Futhermore, if one adopts a relational standpoint, one can't never know that they are valid.

Logical analysis is enough to know they're valid. You can't know that they're sound of course.

Concerning MWI:

But I am not sure that the 'preferred basis' is truly solved in a non 'for all practical purposes' way. — boundless

I don't understand that problem enough to have an opinion about how problematic it is or to critique any solution proposed or counter-critique.
I said I don't buy it for different reasons than it offending my delicate sensibilities (the argument put forth in the Bell paper linked by the most recent post by @Wayfarer.

A person is differentiated in a way that a chair isn't. I, as a conscious human being, have a private conscious experience that strongly suggests to me that I am differentiated enough to be a distinct entity. I would say that other humans are like me in this respect. This is also probably true for animals, assuming that they are conscious beings.
It suggests to you, yes. Physics seems mute about it, which is my take.
Again, read the topic linked, which gets into exactly where a human boundary is.
Any biological cell is more clearly bounded than is a person, but even it gets fuzzy in some ways.
A living thing can be discontinuous, as can information processing.
I don't think the point is particularly important to this topic.

— boundless

Bernard D'Espagnat distinguished two senses of objective. 'Strongly objective' is something that is independent from any cognitive perspective (a property of the 'world in itself').

Calling it 'the world' is already an observer bias.

'Weakly objective' is something that every cognitive agent can agree upon. Nothing weakly objective can be assumed to be strongly objective.

Terminology granted, but both seem to contrast 'objective' with 'subjective', as opposed to objective vs relational.
The first means it relates despite not being seen (like say the far side of the moon, at least until the 60's). The latter is more of a property: It's there period vs it's there relative to something else. 37 exists, vs 37 is a member of the set of integers. That's different than 'we both can count to 37'.
I kind of irks me that 'objective' has two distinct meanings here, both quite relevant.

But what is an idea, but an idea of something. Like a word, an idea, sitting in the mind, is about something "already there" before the idea of it was formed. — Fire Ologist

Often, yes, but sometimes and idea is of something not already there. Any fiction for instance.

I do not support "mind-independent reality?" But I must say I do not understand anything you said. — Athena

As I said above, the title is poorly worded. My focus is on those that posit a mind-independent reality (which is almost everybody except idealists), they tend to restrict their idea of what exists to 'this universe', calling 'the universe' instead of just one of many. Why is this one special? Because it is observed (by us) of course, which makes it pretty mind-dependent in my book.

Now how to convey that in a short title?

All of reality is a reaction to what is.

Reality is defined as 'what is' (or not), so not sure how reality is a reaction to itself.

All things are a matter of cause and effect.

The number 17 doesn't seem to be a matter of cause & effect. It's just a member of the set of integers. You might say it is but an abstraction, but I think it is far more fundamental than that.

Maybe individuating the JWST as 'a thing' is a mental imputation. — boundless

No argument here since I did a whole topic on that (2 topics ago). But similarly, you, as 'a thing' is also just a mental imputation.

Note that my point is that physical quantities are defined in a relational way from the start.

Again agree. While there are some objective constants, physical quantities and units don't seem to be among them.

Let's consider the Wigner's friend scenario, where the Friend makes an experiment in a lab which is locked from the outside. — boundless

Lock is unimportant. The hypothetical lab needs to be a box from which zero information can escape. We presume this, but in reality, such box would kill its occupants.

The friend, as described here, seems to serve no purpose since he simply reports what the device does, and the device alone would have sufficed. The friend perhaps only serves a significant role in the 'consciousness causes collapse' interpretations.

So Wigner observes a superposition state until the box is opened, at which point the wave function (relative to Wigner) collapses. Pretty straight forward.

Wigner is not 'entilted' to go outside of it and ask himself what the Friend, in the Friend's perspective is seeing.

You can always put another observer outside, perhaps outside a box containing Wigner and the inner box. What is demonstrated by doing this?

Assuming that the Friend also has his 'perspective'

As does the device measuring the (say) spin of some particle. The wave function collapses for both almost immediately upon this measurement. Wigner has to wait for his wave function (of the box) to collapse.

Still both of them do not actually know what the other truly observed.

Wigner knows when the box is opened. The friend might know everything right away. The box cannot let information out, but letting information in is allowed.

Only that, in their own perspective, there are no logical inconsistencies. For Wigner it is as if the Friend sees the same as he sees. But it cannot say what is truly seen by the Friend.

I don't know what you mean by 'truly' here. This is a relational view. There is no objective truth going on anywhere. Nobody notices anything weird.

This also means that under RQM (and, really, QBism and similar) Wigner can't even say that there are 'perspectives' other than his own with certainty.

The friend who notices spin up has a perspective, as does the friend noticing spin down. Those are two perspectives in superposition (relative to Wigner). Wigner knows this. What he doesn't know is which state things will collapse to relative to him when the box is opened. That part is a counterfactual.

Only positing something beyond the 'perspectives' can ground intersubjective agreement.

Where do you get this? Wigner subjectively sees up once box is opened. Friend sees up earlier than that, but it isn't intersubjective until they compare findings, so none of it is beyond anybody's perspectives. The agreement is grounded in empirical perspectives.

This implies that one cannot know what is 'beyond' one's perspective.

That I will agree with. It is an epistemological statement, not worded in an ontic manner. RQM is not about epistemology.

As I see it, there is nothing in RQM (and, really, also in QBism and similar) that 'Mars in the perspective of Y' and 'Mars in the perspective of Z' are the same thing. Y will never find inconsistencies.

Agree with the last statement, but not that the two perspectives (at different times, same place) are the same thing. Lots of changes can occur during those 20 minutes, lots of wave function collapses.

The problem with this IMO it is that we are 'anthropomorphizing' the pen.

I'm not. The pen has no awareness of that which it measures. The interaction definition has nothing to do with consciousness or people at all.

... But how the world appears to a pen

The world does not 'appear' at all to the pen. It just exists in some state relative to the pen. That's what I mean by a perspective. It's just a system state at a moment in time, a system capable of being affected by past events, so a vacuum state won't do.

Regarding MWI, ... I am not sure if the 'preferred basis problem' (i.e. how to explain in MWI that the wavefunction can be decomposed in a way to explain the appearance of the 'classical world') has been solved and, also, it's not clear to me how the Born Rule is explained in this interpretation. — boundless

Those are straight out of wiki. The former has arguably been solved. The latter as well, but arguably less so. Copenhagen doesn't derive it: It is just postulated up front. MWI could have done that.
Objective collapse interpretations also seem to do this. I can't think of one that derives it.
Apparently any counterfactual definition like Bohmian just postulates an initial state compatible with the Born rule, and from there it has foundational principles that preserve this distribution property.

But, yes, in a way the first 'objection' is not perhaps 'scientific' but simply philosophical.

That's a valid reason to prefer some other interpretation, but not a valid critique of it. The critique I quoted just above are valid critiques, and are or are not solved, depending who you ask.

Oddly enough, it is actually the closest physical theory to a 'ontological monism' that has been proposed (the universal wavefunction being only 'real thing' ...

Funny, but that's the part that makes me prefer another interpretation, not the stuff you listed above. See my response to Apu below.

If the division into physical objects is conceptual and doesn't reflect faithfully the structure of mind-independent world, how can we claim that we do have knowledge of the 'world beyond' our perspective? — boundless

We always build internal models, and while my model in some ways has correspondence to states in my world, I don't call my model 'knowledge' like it is some kind of accurate representation.
There is matter near me in my world and I cordon off a subset of that matter and designate it 'chair' despite the fact nothing in the physical world is a function of that subset.
Look at a person, which changes its component parts every second. Nevertheless, I designate a boundary to what I consider to be that person

Everything (not just humans) does this. It has pragmatic utility. This twig for my nest. My offspring as opposed to that of another. A molecule is about as close of a physical thing to an 'object' as I can think of. It has defined boundaries (most of the time) and has emergent properties that are not properties of the primitives which compose it.

But this still is based on some assumptions you make about the 'world in itself'. Assumptions that do not seem to be justified in light of scientific knowledge only.

Indeed. Even science makes such designations, again, finding it useful to do so.

How can you check that the description of the 'mind-independent world' actually matches its structure?

There's no exact match, and there's no check if by insane chance you got one actually right. The purpose of the model is not to be accurate. The purpose is to be useful, and to be useful, it merely needs to be accurate enough to predict what will actually be observed.

It seems a reasonable inference, yes, but can we have compelling reasons to assert that there is this correspondence?

The intersubjective agreement seems compelling enough.

from my subjectove perspective the issue is borderline close to "why is there anything at all?". — Apustimelogist

And lack of a rational answer to that question makes me ask a different question instead.

Nothing to do with bias, but a considered judgement. I'm one of (apparently quite a few people) who simply think that Everett's metaphysics (as this is what it was) is absurd. — Wayfarer

I don't doubt that, and intuition probably plays a significant roles for most. The view makes a hash of personal identity for instance, and that's a lot to ask some people to give up.

There's an interesting account of the genesis of Everett's ideas in a Scientific American article — Wayfarer

Thanks then for the snips because it wanted my soul to read it. Not money at least.

Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Which follows directly from the premise of the dissertation.

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object.

Hence personal identity bearing no resemblance to one's personal experience of identity.

The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome.

Really? Did Everett call them 'copies'? You never know how much liberty these SA columnists take in writing these articles. I'm just wondering what terminology was Everett's and what came from DeWitt (such as 'multiple worlds').
Quote from the Bell article says otherwise: "This is why we shouldn’t, strictly speaking, talk of the “splitting” of worlds (even though Everett did), as though two have been produced from one.". OK, 'splitting' is in quotes but 'worlds' is not. So yea, he used the word 'split'.

Another Bell quote:
"The many-worlds interpretation is distinct from the multiverse hypothesis, which envisions other universes, born in separate Big Bangs, that have always been physically disconnected from our own"
This is Tegmark's type II multiverse, as opposed to type III for MWI. Type II is the consensus solution to the fine tuning problem spoken of in the OP.

Bell apparently quotes Tegmark:
“The act of making a decision,” says Tegmark — a decision here counting as a measurement, generating a particular outcome from the various possibilities — “causes a person to split into multiple copies.”
Ouch. A decision has nothing to do with it since decisions are largely deterministic processes. Sure, quantum uncertainlty might eventually influence a choice, but then it was the quantum event, not the decision, that split the worlds. I like Tegmark, but man, he can make some really dumb things.
The graphics all over the Bell article page emphasizes exact this: A decision, not a measurement, splitting worlds.

According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.

[Citation needed]. The worlds can interact. If they are sufficiently decoherent, they can be treated as independent entities, but they never fully separate. The whole point of superposition is different worlds interacting with each other, but any measurement of such superposition states entangles the measurer with the system measured.
Hence the cat measuring the decay of sample and getting entangled with that system despite the fact that the lab device outside the box is not thus entangled with the radioactive system. He can in principle measure superposition of the cat state, which is the two worlds interacting. This has been done, just not with cats, but still with macroscopic objects.
Bottom line, I don't take SA's word for that statement.

Isn't it obvious that 'bifurcation' and 'branching' are in effect metaphysical postulates?

As would be expected from a metaphysical interpretation of any theory.

And that they're postulated in order to avoid the scientifically-embarrasing implications of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation', which Everett sought to challenge?

Do interpretations have scientific implications? They have metaphysical implications, sure.

What Everett avoids is wavefunction collapse — but what he adds is a multiplying ontology of parallel, and forever unknowable, worlds. That’s not an empirical discovery, but a philosophical wager — one many find less compelling than the problem it was designed to solve. Everett's view does solve the collapse issue, but so do others. Ensemble interpretation (Bohr, probably the oldest one) does not conclude collapse, but I don't know enough about it to see how that is the case. Maybe it just isn't measurement that causes collapse. Yes, Copenhagen had issues solved by MWI, but at the expense of a unique history, something which you apparently find important.

Philip Ball also has a critical chapter on Many Worlds in his book Beyond Weird, which can be reviewed here:

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all.

That article is open to read.
There is a universal wave function. It evolves by specific rules. In our spacetime, it evolves per some specific constants, but that's a local rule, not a fact. The rest are facts, but nothing like "Earth has a big moon", which seems to be what Ball doesn't like.
Facts become relative to the observers entangled with them. Break my heart, since that's what I've been saying all along.
Bell makes mistakes in his critique such as 'infinity of universes', conflating universe with worlds. It's one wave function, one universe.
"But Bohr and colleagues didn’t bring wave function collapse into the picture just to make things difficult. They did it because that’s what seems to happen. When we make a measurement, we really do get just one result out of the many that quantum mechanics offers. Wave function collapse seemed to be demanded in order to connect quantum theory to reality."
Everett did not in any way change what one expects to observe, yet this statement seems to imply otherwise. The interpretation would not have got off the ground if there was an empirical difference.

It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now.

Non-sequitur. It eliminates no such thing except a coherent 'we' doing the experiencing since, as I said, it does make a hash of personal identity. If he means that, then he should say it instead of saying something wrong.

I didn't read it all, but I'd like to. I think I've commented enough for noew.


I don't buy into MWI, but I don't find it absurd at all. It just bucks intuition, which is a known liar anyway.

Interestingly, RQM is listed as having collapsing wave functions, but the version I support does not. I guess my philosophical take on relationalism isn't exactly how Rovelli sees it. For one, he seems to harp needlessly on terminal states of worldlines, with no identity given to intermediate states. I don't take that approach.

Again, my point is that this issue is so abstract and we know comparatively little about thr universe works that I don't trust anyone's reliability in offering an explanation which is even close to correct. — Apustimelogist

Ignoring the issue is an option, sure. There are solutions (at least two), and some problems still have no solution, room for further study.
The goal isn't to 'know' how the universe works, but rather to find some valid ways that it might work.

Is a real steak not implemented in the physics of the situation? — flannel jesus

The comment was about the substrate on which the existence of a thing rests. Suppose for the sake of argument that our universe is mathematical and doesn't just appear that way. That means it could be simulated. Any mathematical causal structure (anything that evolves over some notion of time) can be simulated, drawing a distinction between the structure itself (real?) and the simulation of it (not real?).

So we have a simplified mathematical structure that includes a person and a dining room with a steak. The simulated steak is not real, but the steak in the actual mathematical structure is by definition just as real as a steak in this world which also happens to be running that simulation. A simulation being run somewhere else, but of this world, would include a steak which is designated as not real. The person eating the steak, simulated by anything or not, would not have any empirical way of telling if he's real or not.

I'm not suggesting that we're a simulation. I'm suggesting that since one cannot have access to a test of reality, does it really matter?

I hope I'll be able to answer you back tomorrow. — boundless

Looking fwd to it. Your answers have at least got me thinking and re-assessing.

Some of what I offer instead. — Banno

Anyone can grep a word from your posts. You see your hand and perhaps don't think about the rest enough to see the problems I tried to identity. Good pragmatic policy, but not one that holds water.

And yes, that identifies me as a Linux person.

Sorry, that wasn't my intention but I realize that I took the discussion too far. — boundless

Maybe not. You seem to argue the relevance quite well below.

The reason being that I actually don't believe it is meaningful to assign a perspective outside the mind.

There's no mind at the JWST, yet it has a perspective that no human has, especially given its far wider range of light sensitivity than our paltry 3 frequencies.

consider how we define and conceptualize physical quantities. Even those which seem an intrinsic property of a physical object is defined in relational terms.

Yes, any selection of units implies a relation to a standard. Physics seems to work without units, so unit selection would qualify as an abstraction. Charge is quantized, so the units there are arguably physical.

All physical quantities are measurable and this means that they are about how a physical object interacts with other physical objects. — boundless

I'll accept that.

If the above is true, then, this means that all physical quantities are relational, defined in a particular context and, ultimately, are not properties of only the given physical object. — boundless

I want to say no to this, but cannot, so excellent point. A property of an object would be a counterfactual.

Change the measurement context and you change the description (I think I am in full agreement with RQM here...).

Also think Heisenberg.

But now, consider. We have said that physical quantities are defined when a determinate context is specified. This means that they are perspectival. — boundless

OK, point taken on the perspective thing. My retorts to that are classical, and we're not discussing a classical universe.

RQM asserts that any physical object defines a 'perspective', a context in which it is meaningful to make a description of 'the physical world' according to its perspective. And it also asserts that, after all, there is nothing beyond these 'perspectives'. I find both claims problematic TBH. — boundless

Nothing beyond seems worded as a positive claim about a counterfactual: it being empty, as opposed to simply unmeasured. I don't approve of that wording.

The second one implies that we can actually 'go outside' the perspectives, and 'check', so to speak

Does it? Maybe you're saying what I'm saying. Q being unmeasured is not the same as a measured not-Q. Going outside requires a different perspective Z, and sure, from that other perspective, there are things available that were not relative to the first perspective Y. Findings of the new perspective in no way alters what exists relative to Y, and to say 'relative to Y there is something beyond' constitutes a counterfactual.

This would IMO contradict what RQM actually says. Denying something implies that it would be possible to affirm that thing. So, if according to RQM we have to define a perspective to make a description, we can't go 'outside' of it.

Y measures Mars, 20 minutes ago. While [the current state of the space where Mars should be, simultaneous with Y] is unmeasured, it does not imply that there's a reasonable probability that some subsequent measurement Z 30 minutes hence, that includes a measurement of Y, would find Mars to not be there. RQM has to support predictions in a way since predictability is something measurable.

I personally have no problem with a pen state as something defining a perspective.



Concerning the MWI thing (and no, I'm not an MWI proponent)

Let me ask you, if MWI is the solution, then what is the problem? — Wayfarer

Well, I believe that the point made here is that in MWI there is only one physical object which evolves deterministically. In a sense no interpretation of QM enjoys a similar simplicity at least here. — boundless

That's one answer.

I believe that MWI has its own problems, though. For instance, one can well argue that yes the above simplicity is true, but at the same time the universal wavefunction is an extremely complex object and most of its 'structure' is completely inaccessible to us. — boundless

Complex, yes, but that's only a problem if something more fundamental is being posited to be driving its evolution, a simulation being run or some such. As a pure mathematical object, no such problem is there. As for the restrictions to subjectivity, that's true even without MWI where we have access to only a tiny visible universe out of an otherwise infinite classical universe. We only have access to a well-tuned world and not all the other ones which lack sufficient complexity to be observed. Complexity is your friend here, without which there's be nothing to know anything.

The same goes for the incredible number of versions of 'us' that are of course inaccessible. — boundless

A problem why? Bugs your intuitions? Again, even a classical universe has said 'incredible number of versions of 'us' that are of course inaccessible'. MWI didn't invent this, it just put some of them spatially very nearby.


Many humans have a natural aversion to their world getting bigger. Wayfarer especially has this bias, which is why I can push his buttons by mentioning MWI. Apparently you also feel this aversion, being uncomfortable with other worlds, many of which are not observed at all, despite your assertion of a belief in mind-independent reality.
Think of when it was first suggested that those stars in the sky were actually other suns and distant solar systems. Ours was not the only one. The pushback on that was incredible, rendering extraordinary evidence to justify what was at the time an extraordinary claim. Much of the arguments against this finding are the very ones being expressed by both of you here. Intuition doesn't like big, but intuition is pretty much the last thing I listen to for philosophical topics. It's all lies that serve a very different purpose.

Put another way, if it turned out that MWI couldn’t be the case, then it would have to be admitted that …. — Wayfarer

Well for one, it would have to be admitted that the universe cannot be locally deterministic. No other interpretation allows that. They're either non-deterministic or they allow something like retrocausality.

I doubt that any of [the alternatives] would satisfy Einstein, however — boundless

Maybe. He didn't have Bell's proof, restricting what can be demanded of a satisfactory interpretation. He definitely expressed a preference for locality (relativity leans on it so hard) and determinism (the 'God does not roll dice' quip), but he probably didn't want to let go of his counterfactuals either, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Einstein might not have known that.

Consider a hurricane. It certainly seems a separately existing entity. ...
Is the hurricane a real 'object' or the 'hurricane' is more like a construct (or a 'model', if you like) that we use to make sense of what we are observing. — boundless

Is the hurricane a real 'object' or the 'hurricane' is more like a construct (or a 'model', if you like) that we use to make sense of what we are observing.

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object, i.e. a separately existing entity that truly is a part of a 'mind-independent physical world'. If these things are more like emergent features rather than objects, this would mean that the division of the 'world' into them is more like a conceptual construct. — boundless

I find 'separately existing entity' to be only an ideal, not anything physical. Discussed here if you're interested.
I would say that said division is a conceptual construct. It being that does not make the world mind dependent, on the division into objects is so dependent.

Assuming that it actually 'corresponds' to 'how the physical world' is 'in itself' is a strong assumption — boundless

No, talking about a weaker assumption, that it corresponds to something in the physical world, not that the concept is an accurate portrayal of the thing in itself.

So, maybe, we are encountering an antinomy here: on the one hand, positing a mind-independent world seems necessary to make sense of our experineces. On the other hand, however, there is no epistemic guarantee that our cognitive faculties can step outside from our perspective and give us a non-mediated knowledge of the mind-independent world. So, it seems that we are stuck in an antinomy here.antinomy — boundless

I see no antinomy identified, no contradiction in this description. That there is a mind independent world, and a description of the nature of it (however poorly matching) seem not to be mutually contradictory.

If an apple didn't have objective existence it wouldn’t be an apple. — Mww

Exists, sure. Objectively? Non-sequitur. It was of course discussed in my prior topic, so I won't go further here.

Another story indeed, in that I am not authorized to say what I don’t see doesn’t exist, while it being perfectly legitimate to say what I don’t see I don’t experience.

Positing unseen existence has explanatory power, but technically if it's only part of explaining what is seen, it doesn't shake off the mind dependency altogether.

All that being said, it must be the case that whatever the line is, it relates exclusively to, and is derivable only from, the subject inquiring about its establishment.

Not if it's not based on said subject's subjectivity.

The bald white guy eats a steak in the matrix, and talks about how he knows it's not "real". So most people can conceptually distinguish between real things, and experiences that seem like they're experiences of real things but in fact aren't. Right? — flannel jesus

But the steak has properties. Its existence is due to common consensus. Hence it has properties, predication, and all that. But this case is declared to be one of nonexistence, only because the mathematics of the situation ironically is being implemented by something more fundamental, as opposed to real things which are not implemented at all. No fire being breathed into the equations.

Somehow the ontology got backwards from what some people assert. Anyway, matrix is weird because it isn't actually a simulation, it is a VR, an artificial sensory stream fed into something not simulated, so in that scenario, the experiencer is more real than that which the artificial experience feed leads you to believe. What about an actual simulation? Is a simulated steak being eaten by a simulated bald guy not real?

For communication to occur (the primary function of language-use) it would do the speaker or writer good to understand the language understood by their listeners and readers, as well as the level of understanding of the language. — Harry Hindu

Which is why definitions are so important on these forums. For example:

And you have been using the parts as examples of what all is while appearing to fail to account for the mind as part of the whole as well.

How are you using 'mind' here?

If you are going to go for the "Hail Mary" to explain what all is

Not attempting that, lacking a ground of meaning for the question. All I see is relations, so all I ask is 'what is relative to X or to Y?' My claim in the OP might be expressed as everybody starting out with 'what exists relative to me', but somewhere while concluding that the 'me' isn't required for something to exist relative to something else, it is forgotten that it's still only a relation being considered.

And there may be other [explanations for the tuning problem] — Apustimelogist

There are indeed others, but are there others that fall under methodological naturalism?

The problem is considered real in the scientific community, despite your expressed apathy on the subject.

We appear to have two (at least) genera of cause in play.

1) Conceptual causes (CC), the invention by an observer that you think might correspond to an actual cause,
2) Actual causes (AC): in this case being the something that causes some change in some system. — tim wood

A cause does not necessarily cause a change. I mean, hairspray is intended to cause a hairdo to not change as much. I also don't like using a word in its own definition/description. I might hazzard: "AC is something that has influence over the effect state", but we seem to be using different definitions.

I've been wording it as "effect state is a function of the cause-state" which seems to be the same thing. Whether a mind is aware of this relationship between these two system states or not seems irrelevant.
Humans want more direct correlation: They want to answer "How do I cause the weather to be what I intend" rather than "How do I cause the weather", the latter of which has a trivial answer: Impossible not to if you're old enough to not still be in the womb.

Of AC, on my understanding of the term, butone only, the without-which-not of the supposed event.

Hard to parse that, but you seem to say that a cause is something necessary for the effect state to be. That is not too far from the way I worded it. You also seem to indicate "one only" (my bold), which perhaps indicates that only one factor meets this definition. I certainly cannot agree with that, yet you seem to rely on this assertion when attempting to demonstrate that ACs don't exist.
I'm not sure why this distinction is important. Is not everything in our universe part of a causal network? Can you name one thing that isn't? Something supernatural perhaps, but even something like an epiphenomenal mind is affected by the universe, even it it cannot cause anything. It meets the criteria of the Eleatic principle, but not of the relational definition.
How about luminiferous aether? That seems to be a valid physical example.

I do understand that there's no 'action' as such, like a force that operates between the two particles. 'Spooky action at a distance' was, however, Einstein's expression. — Wayfarer

I don't think Einstein had yet abandoned counterfactuals at that point yet, so FTL action was the only alternative, and it defied the premises of special relativity. So yea, he described it in those terms.
It's too bad that he wasn't around for some of the more modern interpretations. I wonder what he'd say to something radical like MWI, radical at the time, accepted by some only decades later. But Einstein liked simplicity and symmetry, and MWI certainly is those.

But this is part of my point. Like you've started using analogies like this when it isn't really clear if this is even a fitting analogy because we just don't know enough. — Apustimelogist

We do know enough that it is on the order of many thousands of dice. It being possible is not the same as it being plausible.

these aren't interesting questions unless there is a kind of reasonable potentiality of an intelligible solution.

There is an intelligible solution. Read the OP.

You may ask why anything exists at all... clearly an example of a question where at least with what we know now does not have a reasonable, even conceovable solution.

There is a solution... but the solution has its own problems, and some of those are just as bad. I don't claim to have an answer here. I have weird ideas, but I know that there are holes in them just like the holes I see in the typically held views.

Minds are adept at formulating concepts, and matching instances to these concepts. — hypericin

Agree, but a more rational approach would be to match concepts to evidence instead of the other way around.

And while the relationship between concept and reality is not simple, it similarly goes too far to say there is no relationship at all.

In this case I will also agree, but my suspicions in this case are that while there is some correspondence, there's not a lot of it.

Thanks for the link.
Dangers aside, how exact does one go about training something smarter than its trainers?

They talk about the dangers of not being able to pull the plug on the thing after a while, but what the thing is truly benevolent and we still don't like what it suggests, what it sees that we cannot?
Will it even be a problem? I already see so many willingly slaving themselves to the machines since it offloads tasks that they otherwise have to do themselves. I suspect people will be pretty happy with their robot zoo keepers, at least until they decide the zoo serves them no purpose.

Task an AI with the design of the new way of things. What should be the goals of such a design? Humans are utterly incapable of even making that step, let alone finding a way to implement it.

Sorry for these large posts, but it's the only way I can keep track of which posts not yet replied to. I tend not to reply to posts prior to my most recent one.

In my understanding, a physical language per se is purely a communication protocol for coordinating human actions, that is to say physical languages per-se do not transmit information about the world from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener. — sime

So saying that the moon causes tides is not an example of physical language then.
This whole topic must use common language then.

Physical languages are de-dicto not phenomenological; otherwise their meaning would become relativized to the thoughts and judgements of a particular speaker which would hinder their ability to function as universal protocols.

They are relativized becasue one speaker might intend different meaning than another for a specific word. This is not true of computer languages, which allows (almost) no ambiguity. You speak of physical language as distinct from common language, and perhaps my assessment is only true of the latter.

That opinion , while apodeitically certain — Mww

Only in a relational sense, and the opinion wasn't worded as a relation, so I very much question it.
You cite LNC in defending this. How is the apple not having objective existence contradictory?

its negation is a contradiction, re: what I see is not what exists, or, what I see does not exist

Or 'what I see is only part of what exists'. None of those are contradictory without some assumptions in need of explicit identification.

That opinion [...] has to do with existence itself, without regard for whether such existence is mind-independent.

If the list of what exists is confined to that which is perceived, then it is perception dependent. To say 'what I see exists' is fine, but to say 'only what I see exists' is another story. Which is why I ask where the line is drawn between existing things and not.

I don't understand what that has to do with anything — flannel jesus

See just above.

And that’s pretty easy…..just close my eyes — Mww

Only some extreme forms of idealism support things going out of existence when out of sight. I'm not talking about actual sight, but any form of measurement at any time, not just 'in view by me, now', which is both solipsistic and presentist, neither of which is relevant to the topic.

The problem I see in RQM is that it doesn't seem to have a 'unifying' ground for these perspectives. Each physical object defines its own perspective and there is nothing in the theory that is assumed to be beyond that. — boundless

Funny, but I find that to be the solving of a problem, not the creating of a problem.

To say that there is nothing outside these perspectives is, in fact, inconsistent with the RQM claim that the world can be described only by assuming a certain perpsective. In other words, one of my problem with RQM is that it seems to make a claim that goes against its own epistemology.

It has epistemology? The view doesn't assign meaning to there being something sans relation, so saying "there is nothing outside these perspectives" is not meaningful.

Regarding MWI, it is in fact more consistent on this than RQM IMO.

Correct. It says what is, and maybe what isn't. It kind of says that everything is, or at least everything QM, which begs the question, why just that?

There is the universal wavefunction which is the unifying element (and in a sense the only real 'physical entity'). — boundless

There could be other entities. Calling them 'physical' might be assigning a property meaningful only to our structure.

I think that Heisenberg himself actually had an ontic interpretation of Copenaghen. At least, he talks a lot about interpreting the collapse as a way to actualize potentialities. And yes the act of observation 'actualizes' these potentialities. Not sure how this isn't a causal explanation of the collapse and how can it be interpreted epistemically. — boundless

Agree, that sounds like an ontic assertion on said interpretation. I certainly don't know my history enough to suggest who posited what back then. You seem to be more informed of the opinions of these pioneers.

The entire spacetime cannot be foliated in a unique way. — boundless

Not in any way at all. It can under SR, but not GR.

But still, the world we see with its frame-dependent values of physical quantities is perspectival, frame-dependent, yes?

No. What we see is physical and thus frame independent. A frame is but an abstraction after all. A location or a speed are not physical quantities, but abtract ones, so those are frame dependent. So my perspective doesn't change just because I happen to choose a different one, something I do effortlessly from moment to moment, from one context to another.

And I am not sure that reference frames are 'just' coordinate systems. — boundless

Under an absolutist theory, they're not. One coordinate system is the correct one, and the rest are simply wrong. It ceases to be an abstraction as it is under relativity.

For instance, it can be a way of trying to describe "how the world would look like to an observer in such and such situation".

A different perspective, so yes, a different way it looks. That would be frame independent.

To make a trivial example. Let's say that Alice is in a train that moves at constant velocity and Bob sees her from the station. The velocities that are relative to the 'reference frame at rest with the train' are actually the velocities that Alice would observe.

Yes, and if Alice changed her frame choice to that of the platform, she'd still observe nothing different, but she'd compute something different. Your opinion is otherwise, and I'm fine with that. You interpret the words differently than do I.

My point is more like asking: how your house look irrespective of any perspective?

I can show a floor plan, which is sort of a view without a perspective.

Most of this discussion is getting off topic, going on about frame dependency instead of mind-dependency of ontology.

But you are only aware of me in the same way you are aware of anything. I don't understand how you can question the nature of everything except other people when you access the nature of people the same way you access the nature of everything else. I mean, I could be a bot. Others could be p-zombies or androids, or aliens in disguise. — Harry Hindu

So what? I presume we share the same ontology, but none of that matters to the question of 1) what that ontology is, and 2) what else (unperceived) also shared that ontology.
'What you are' is irrelevant to the question at hand 'what all is?'.

So the question doesn't seem to be "DO they exist" rather "HOW do they exist". Are they ideas, physical, information, process, relationships, or what?

That's actually different than what I asked, but well put. I didn't see anything on that list that implied objective. 'Physical' is not much different than 'is part of this universe', but the word 'physical' probably can be used in other contexts.

The issue now is what measured the first system to get it all going — Harry Hindu

No, the subsequent states do the measuring. Nothing needs to be 'got going'. That's one of the advantages of the view is that it doesn't demand anything objective. Yea, it's measurements all the way down (and not up).

Is this different than saying it is information

Different than saying it, yes. Does not imply that it isn't all just information.

Is measuring a process? — Harry Hindu

I could spin it both ways. System state Y (a 'beable' if you want the term used for an event with extension) is a function of prior state X, which means that Y has measured X and X exists relative to Y. There is definitely a causal relationship between the two and evolution of system states is a process. The intervening states are therefore a process and the 'measuring' involves those processes. But Y is a state and isn't doing anything at all, so Y isn't 'measuring' or doing any other process. It's just in a state of having measured X.

But surely this is nothing to do with the reality outside our heads which is mind-independent — Apustimelogist

Who are we all talking to if not something independent of our minds? — Fire Ologist

I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning what is typically on our list of what exists and what doesn't. I'm not asking if the reality is mind-independent, but if our choice of ontology is one of mind independence.
I'm presuming the part of realism that says that the ontology of the apple isn't altered by any absence of perception. But my topic is about assertions of other worlds not existing because they're not perceived.

So what's the cause? — tim wood

There is no 'the cause'.

To say there are many is to say that no one of them is a cause.

Wrong. It's to say that no one of them is the cause.

So sacrificing an ox controls, say, flooding or typhoons or earthquakes?

Influences, which is in no way control, despite claims to the contrary.

Let's retry this: "cause" is an abstract concept used by an observer to account for an apparent connection between two events. Being the free invention of the observer, there can be no real connection between the cause and the events referenced. — tim wood

That's like saying that because I have a concept of you, if follows that you don't exist. Non sequitur. Yes, we have a concept of cause, and it very much might correspond to real connections between states. Such is the assumption of pretty much any non-idealist.

I have personally never understood the fascination with this topic. I has never bothered me that extremely unlikely things can happen. — Apustimelogist

Roll a 10000 dice. Any outcome that comes up is just as extremely unlikely as the next. So no, that's not the problem. The problem is that it came up 6's on all dice, first try. That is a problem. Not being bothered by it is the choice made by most, but that doesn't make it a problem not in need of solving if one wants a valid answer to 'why is reality like this?'.

That we notate something as existing depends on a mind to do the notation. With the weak anthropic principle, this means that worlds conducive to minds are liable to be notated, and worlds not conducive will not be notated. — hypericin

Agree to all, and I suggested something along these lines in my OP. Saying something exists (even saying it exists in a mind-independent way) is a notation being made by a mind.

But this doesn't have a logical connection to mind independent reality, itself. Both types of worlds may exist independently of minds, regardless of the fact that only one may be so notated.

No argument. Would you go so far as to say that there is no correspondence at all between the notation and the actuality of the situation?

For [Kant], the mind-independent world is not an observable object, but a regulative idea — a necessary conceptual limit. It’s not something we experience, but something we must presuppose in order to make experience coherent. The notion of a world ‘in itself,’ existing independently of all observation, is not something we encounter — it’s something we must presuppose in order to have coherent experience at all. — Wayfarer

But we're talking a realist view here where there are actually things in themselves, and not just ideas of them. You speak only of ideas, concepts, suppositions, notions.

The notion of a world ‘in itself,’ existing independently of all observation, is not something we encounter — it’s something we must presuppose in order to have coherent experience at all. — Wayfarer

Are we talking about an observerless world now, or just this world, but absent any observation? Sure, we don't encounter it, but for the reasons in the OP, we must posit them anyway, and for the reason you give: to make experience coherent.

So paradoxically, even the idea of ‘what is independent of mind’ is an idea we arrive at only through thinking about it.

I find no paradox in that at all.

Scientific realism tends to treat what is “really there” as that which exists independently of any observer — that is, what would still be the case even if no minds were around to perceive or theorize about it.

Yes, that's a pragmatic assumption that allows the science to work. But science knows at least enough to extend that treatment to far more than this world. On the other hand, it has no requirement to extend the treatment to things that are in no way related to our world.

And for all Einstein's impassioned polemic, the experiments which validated 'spooky action at a distance', and which were the basis for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, undermine the premises of scientific realism.

Spooky action has never been demonstrated. That prize was for showing the universe to not be locally real, but you're presuming it to show that the universe is not local.
BTW, Bell showed exactly that 60 years prior, and this latest effort was just better resolution, and for refinement of some very useful techniques.

Entaglement is very much used for secure communications, but no spooky action is ever utilized. No messages or assurances of security are received at superluminal speeds.

To exist might well be to stand in a relation to something else - perhaps this would be one way to understand Quine, for example. But to restrict the relevant relation to causation is overstretch. You are beginning to mix two distinct ideas of what it might be to exist. — Banno

Perhaps so. I had at least two ideas involving causation, one objective (Eleatic principle) and one relational (the ontology by measurement) that only works in a entangle/collapse model like QM offers, and a few really weird examples, with GoL not being one of them.
I had listed 6 ideas of what it means to exist in my other topic, and Eleatic wasn't even one of them.

What do you offer instead? Where is the limit of what exists? Where is the line drawn? Is your line in any way based on empirical input? Is your chosen line open to the sort of critique described in the OP?

"Here is a hand" works, but doesn't utilize a mind-independent notion of ontology.

What we see an emergent artifact of what exists, not *actually* the same thing as what exists. — flannel jesus

Consistent with the view I'm querying, yes. But most that I've interacted with seem to take the 'same thing' assumption, and while that isn't "because we see it", it gets awfully close.

Same questions as above. Where is your line? What puts something on your list of 'probably doesn't exist' besides human fictions? Maybe I am overstepping my assumption that even those that professionally think about such things fail to come up with a description of a mind-independent distinction between real and not.

what causes the dynamite to explode in my example from above. — tim wood

A vast majority of events in the past light cone of the explosion contributes to the cause of the explosion. You question makes it sound like there is one cause. A somewhat immediate cause might be the chemical nature of the dynamite stick, but all such sticks have that nature, and not all of them explode. So it is a necessary cause but not a sufficient one.

What passes for a cause is usually a description of an event that presumably, given the cause, will happen again.

Given no change to the prior state (of everything, not just this 'one cause') and given hard determinism, yes the effect in question will happen inevitably from that state. But few interpretations of physics support such determinism.

But certainly the description itself causes nothing. — tim wood

Agree, sort of. The dynamite would probably not be used to remove the stump if there was never a description of how dynamite could be used in that way. A description after the fact cannot be part of the cause of the described event because it's not part of the causal history of the effect event.

And that's at best. History is full of examples of "causes," accepted as such, which were nothing of the kind, many being finally understood as mere superstition.

Knowledge of causes and the actual causes are rarely aligned. Remember, the causal definition has nothing to do with epistemology, it has to do with causal power (in the case of the eleatic principle) of something, and not which specific causes were instrumental in a particular effect.

But if you're quite sure that causes are things ... — tim wood

Nope. Time seems not to be a 'thing', yet time inevitably causes our death.

then it seems to me you're committed to there being a time on planet earth when the violence of nature was controlled by sacrifices of various kinds.

Effected by, yes. 'Controlled by' makes it sound like a deliberate outcome was achieved by said sacrifices, in which case I have no idea how you get that from what I've said.

After all, they were taken at the time as causes.

I'm talking about actual causes, not claimed causes, the difference between territory and map respectively. You seem to be talking about only the claims, the map.
There cannot be for instance any practical prediction of subsequent events in the absence of causality in the universe containing the predictor. Can you think of a counterexample?

Let's suppose there's a condition C1 at time T1, and also a condition C2 at time T2. Now suppose you have a model/explanation/"cause" that for you accounts for C2 in terms of C1. — tim wood

This makes it sound all nice, neat and linear, as opposed to being a vast network of system states leading up to (deterministically or not) the C2 event. Sure, the condition C2 is a function of C1, but it isn't a function of only C1. I can think of exceptions. C1 is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, but 6 months prior to the hit. C2 is the extinction of say 75% of all Earth species at the time. That one is pretty dang linear, is not a counterfactual, and does not seem to depend significantly on other causes.

The polio virus initiates the causal chain that leads to paralysis — RogueAI

This is what I mean by it being typically expressed as a linear chain instead of just part of a network. Yes, the virus plays a critical role in this bit of causation, despite the fact that not all polio victims (such as my mother) get paralyzed. Benefit to it is that when I contracted a disease with similar symptoms (viral meningitis), she got me to a hospital pronto, preventing most complications.

We might call your account an account of a cause. But what is that but a description with at best some utility you think of as worthwhile - at best an idea. But in any case not a thing. — tim wood

You're asserting that the concept of a cause has no corresponding thing in itself? Sounds like the way I treat objective ontology, but I have a hard time agreeing with this one outside of straight idealism.

Excessive speed says the policeman. Faulty suspension, says the mechanic. Poor road design, says the civil engineer. Ice on the road, says & etc. — tim wood

Showing the faultiness of claiming one 'the cause'. Maybe not ice, which tends to prevent a car from rolling over.

Or from the same book, a man uses dynamite to remove a tree stump (possible, once upon a time). What, exactly, caused the dynamite to explode?

From the book referenced just above, the author observes that for Newton, some events had causes, others were the result of the operation of laws. — tim wood

That seems weird. Cannot laws be a cause? What causes water to bond like it does?

Anyway, your objection seems to be semantics. The simplest causal structure applicable to our world is simply that an isolated system described by a wave function, that system evolves according to the Schrodinger equation. That's pretty solid, and covers all the examples you've given.
The example I gave (GoL) had no Schrodinger equation, but the same rule applies: Any closed system evolves according to a different rule.
A cellular automation (CA, not to be confused by a simulation of same) is a classical example of causality, with each state being a function of the immediate prior state. Unlike classical Newtonian physics, the prior state of the CA cannot be determined from a given state. But the structure is causal, even if there is nothing fueling the progression from one state to the the next.

What does that argue? — Banno

A definition is only a definition and doesn't argue anything. But one can escalate a definition to a premise. Then it becomes an assertion, something subject to disagreement.
So 'exists' meaning 'a relation between a thing and that which is causally relevant to the thing' is a definition of how a word is used. But then without justification, one tends to presume that only things that exist relative to us via the relational definition above, have objective (and mind independent) existence, which in the case of this example, is self contradictory, and is a good deal of what I am trying to point out in this topic.

Likewise, 'my hand' expresses a relation, and that expression in no way confirms or denies the hand being 'real' or not, especially when 'being real' is obviously meant to leverage a different meaning than the relation of 'real to me'.

Yeah, the CD example wasn't that good — RogueAI

This comes from a comment about information being fundamental, but I don't think information deliberately put in place as communication between minds is what is being suggested as being fundamental.

I wrote an OP on this - the Mind Created World. — Wayfarer

I was actually thinking of quoting the OP of that topic in here since I disagree with the forced perspective you use in your example attempting to discredit a 'view from nowhere', something that actually can be done, but doesn't work well at all with a QM structure lacking counterfactual state.

But in QM the 'collapse' of the wavefunction happens during measurements — boundless

Given an interpretation with collapse upon measurement, yes. QM theory doesn't say anything about it, and some interpretations don't require any measurement, such as ensemble interpretation.

If any physical object can cause a 'measurement' by interacting with any other physical object, then my point of the perspectives remain.

Agree.

MWI and RQM share IMO the same problem. They try recover a 'realism' of sorts at the questionable price of implying an explosion of the number of perspectives (though I believe that RQM actually isn't realistic if it doesn't postulate a 'veiled reality' that 'grounds' all the perspectives).

Agree and disagree. Sure, lots of perspectives, and I don't mean just hundreds. RQM says 'real' is a relation to any one perspective event, none of which is itself real. That makes a lot of sense to me. MWI says there is but the one closed wave function, and it is real, not in relation to anything. That's a lot of real perspectives (more than just the infinite perspectives of the Newtonian world where there is no bound to the number of places/events from which an observation can be made.

The big part with which I don't agree is any of that being a problem. OK, I have an issue with how one might explain the reality of whatever one considers to be objectively real, but that problem is one of any sort of realism, including idealism and 'God made it'.

Well, I do not generally use 'Copenaghen' as a term to describe my views, due to the fact that there are many flavors of 'Copenaghen' — boundless

That's because some have tried to rewrite it as an ontic interpretation from its roots as an epistemic one. So I urged going with the epistemic roots and not what came later. All of science, and the theory itself, can be expressed as what we can know and predict, and to hell with how it actually works under the covers.

Some of them are not even epistemic as they go too close to abscribing a causal role to mind/consciousness.

Which is true for epistemology, no? Don't see that isn't mind dependent.

I am sympathetic to QBism and d'Espagnat's view of 'veiled reality'. — boundless

Fine then. I am pretty in the dark about those.

In fact, there is a trend in physical theories since at least the formulation of special relativity. The mathematics becoming more and more abstract, the fact that if we interpret them as a faithful picture of physical reality it becomes stranger and stranger and so on. — boundless

Maybe it's just showing us that our intuitions are what's being shown to be stranger and stranger. How it really works has no obligation to be something we're comfortable with.

Anyway, I believe that even in Newtonian mechanics the question of perspective was present, with the notion of reference frames. It's clear what that notion means when one thinks about an observer which is at rest with respect to some kind of object. — boundless

Careful. A reference frame is just a coordinate system, an abstraction, and requires neither any object nor observer to be stationary in it in order to be valid. No coordinate system foliates all of spacetime (it can under Newtonian), so any theory that posits an frame that is physical (and not just abstract) necessarily must choose which parts of spacetime are not part of the universe at all.

But the problem is: are these reference frames a way of talking about what an observer would observe/experience in a given situation?

No. The experience of any observer is not dependent on an abstraction, and is identical from frame to frame, even under non-relativistic theories. These different frames only cause different calculations of coordinates to be made.

What remains when one 'takes away' everything perspectival (i.e. everyting that is perspective-dependent)? — boundless

Don't get you. You mean why does my house look different from the back than it does from the front? Should it not?

One issue with the Eleatic Principle is that it leaves out more than just abstract entities like numbers — it also excludes the kinds of structural constraints that actually make causality intelligible in the first place. — Wayfarer

Maybe. If all causal structures are based on mathematics, and mathematics is based partly on numbers and their inherent relations, then it can be argued that numbers have the causal properties required to meet the criteria of the principle.
Maybe not, in which case one might find the principle unsatisfactory.

The uncertainty principle and the shift toward probabilistic models made it harder to hold onto the idea of strict causal necessity, and we ended up with something more structural — and arguably closer to constraints than to causes.

I cannot disagree with this.

The title of this thread is irksome. So you disagree with some idea, and that means *no one* really believes it? Come the fuck on. — flannel jesus

No, but in discussing ontology in my prior thread, I found not one contributor that put forth something that wasn't essentially 'what exists is what we see', which is too close to 'because we see it'. I was looking for something more objective than that, so the topic title here was specifically worded to push the buttons of those who wanted to suggest otherwise.

Yes, people out there really believe in a reality that isn't dependent on minds.

I know that, but is it a rational belief, or only a rationalized one? I got few who attempted to justify the position before, so I'm trying to pry it out here by explicitly challenging the claim. I want a discussion. I'm not asserting that the position is necessarily wrong.

The question shouldn't be, "do people really disagree with me?", obviously they do, the question should be "why do they?"

That is the question, but had I worded the title that way (instead of a veiled claim), would I get an answer? Didn't work last time when deliberately poked my stick at something else (said EPP) that I felt to be unjustified.

The answer to 'why do they?" seems most often to be 'didn't think that hard about it'. Belief seems synonymous with faith. I don't care about what position one holds, but interrogation of any mind-independent belief seems almost always to turn up to be in fact a belief in something mind dependent.

You asked for a defense of a strictly metaphysical condition, re: the mind-independence of reality, which cannot be justified without sufficient criteria for the relation of the conceptions involved to each other. — Mww

What I'm looking for is justification for calling the belief to be one of mind-independence. Of course, being a metaphysical opinion, one cannot demonstrate that opinion to be the case. I am just looking for an opinion of mind-independent existence of something that actually holds up to the claim of being mind-independent, and that means something other than "what I see is what exists".
The closest I can get is a full multiverse theory. All possible worlds exist, not just this one. Perhaps not just ones based on quantum mechanics, opening the doors to other structures. This tends to over-bloat the 'exists' list to the point where it isn't distinct from its lack, and it has real problems that need solving, such as why our universe is 'interesting' if there's so many more existing universes that are not interesting, but still contain you.

There's a small possibility of that, yes. Boltzmann Brains and whatnot. — RogueAI

Utterly relevant to what I just said, and yes, to the drawing as well. Certain models of reality cannot be the case and simultaneously justified with any empirical evidence due to that problem.

On the one hand, then, by saying I hold with a mind-independent view of reality, the only relation I need is apprehending the distinction between me and not me ... — Mww

I'm not questioning that distinction. I'm questioning where you draw the line between the existing not-you thing and the non-existing things. That's a different distinction than the one you seem to be referencing.

The remainder of your post got into that, rendering it a matter only of opinion, which seems consistent with my findings.

Hardness and porosity do not exist independently of the rock either. — Harry Hindu

These are ideas, not things — tim wood

Hardness is not a physical trait, only a concept? I would not concur.

I wonder if you could have the idea of a unicorn without having experienced the existence of horses and horns prior. — Harry Hindu

A matter of a level of creativity I think, to imagine something not based on the parts immediately at hand. Yea, a unicorn is hardly a stretch.

I mean would that drawing come to exist if there if you had no ideas of unicorns?

Unlikely but possible, a drawing (or even paper) existing sans intent.

Then you're talking about solipsism if you are emphasizing the uncertainty of an external world.

Not at all. That world relates to you as much as it does to me. But confining our declaration of reality to that mutually shared world is what I'm bringing into question.

I'm not sure if the mind causes concepts. The mind is composed of concepts. Minds certainly do cause the existence of things, like books, CDs and rockets to space.

How does a system that doesn't exist measure itself?

A system state does not measure itself. Subsequent system states measure it, yes, true even under Newtonian physics, although I don't think this relational spinning of ontology was seriously considered back then.

In a deterministic universe, which you seem to be describing

Causal, yes. Deterministic? If all that exists relative to X is in the past of X, then it is fixed history, so yea, I suppose the word ;deterministic' can be used to describe that. Ditto for eternalism where all states exist, even if one state does not uniquely determine the subsequent one (which is what most mean by 'deterministic').

You would need to explain how we are so successful at making predictions

That's what brains and memory is for, as you indicated. All that works without need of a preferred moment in time.

When we talk about things being real, the paradigmatic cases are chairs and rocks and the screen on which you are reading this text. Or "This is a hand". — Banno

Yes, that's utilizing the pragmatic definition, but such a definition is necessarily confined to the entity finding utility in the definition, illustrating my point that such definitions are dependent on said entity, which presumably has something that qualifies as mental processes.
To reach for objectivity, one has to abandon the mind-dependent paradigm. The suggestion of a causal entities is floated as one way to go about it. I tend to go for examples not too close to what most of use would choose, so an example of a causal structure is Conway's Game of Life (GoL). It describes a 2D space+1D time structure where each 2D state is determined from application of its 'laws of physics' to the prior state. That makes it a causal structure. So an 'object' like a glider exists by such a causal definition, and yet you won't find one on your coffee table.

I should have that as exists-to-me. That might signal that the existence referenced is not existence qua, but instead existence-to-(a someone). — tim wood

a something, not a someone. Yes, it is a relation, and there can be no necessity of a 'someone' if it is to be mind independent. So yes, presuming such a relational definition, you get this:

And that leaves the question of existence itself - does the stone exist?

The question is meaningless with the relational definition, so a different meaning is implied by that usage. Does it exist? Does it matter? Would 2+2 not equal 4 if the 2's lacked existence? Must fire be breathed into the equation for it to be fact?

And this gets Kantian.

Which sucks because what little I know of Kant is his idealism, which seems off topic for a discussion of mind-independence, but what do I know of what Kant might contribute?

As a practical matter of course the stone exists. In some sciences the presupposition is that the stone exists, And in some other sciences, "exists" and "stone" might have to be defined as terms of art.

That practical usage is a relational one, despite most missing that there's a relation implied. I'm trying to go well beyond that practicality. I don't thing the existence of the stone is any sort of illusion. The true nature of it is hardly classical like it's treated, but classical treatment is quite pragmatic. The stone relates to me, and typically that is simplified to objectivity. Why not?

I've evolved - no cleverness on my part, just through reading - to an understanding that there is no such thing as a cause — tim wood

Physics being causal and there being 'a cause' are different things. Got some examples? I mean, a butterfly yawns in Brazil and a hurricane happens 3 months later. Had the butterfly not yawned (like they even can, I know...), the hurricane would not be, but other ones would Is the butterfly the cause of it? Heck no, but it contributed. Is there one cause of the storm? Is there one cause of the murder? Of course not. Does that mean that the guy that shoved in the knife isn't responsible? Probably not.

Maybe I'm off track and your example can let me know what is mean by their being no such thing as a cause.

You argue it does not exist? — tim wood

The stone stands out to me, so it exists to me. But that's expressed as a relation. Most people's concept of existence is a relation, even if they don't call it that.

Kindly make that argument clear and explicit. I myself distinguish between ideas and (material) things, both real — tim wood

So do I, to the point where at any point I want to reference the idea, I will say 'perception of X', 'concept of X', or whatever.

If ideas are real then how can you say that they do not independently exist? — Harry Hindu

Not independent at least of the process via which they are implemented.

You might say that ideas of rocks need rocks to exist — Harry Hindu

Nah... My ideas of unicorns exist despite the typical assertion of the nonexistence of the unicorns.

I have no problem at least holding to a mind-independent view or notion or idea, of reality, given a particular set of presuppositions, those in turn given from the kind of intelligence supposed as immediately in play. — Mww

Cannot parse this. Are you speaking of the intelligence making the presuppositions? Would that be you? Is reality dependent on your suppositions?
How is a presupposition distinct from a supposition?

If it isn't idealism then it must be some form of panpsychism. — Harry Hindu

You seem to misunderstand the OP. I'm not suggesting that mind causes the existence of things, but rather that the minds cause the concept of existence of things. Whether that concept corresponds to objective fact is an open issue. People tend to assert the existence of things perceived. (They're presumed to exist) because they are perceived, but I think you're reading it more as They're presumed to (exist because they are perceived). The latter is the idealism I'm not talking about.

Minds are not fundamental. Information is. — Harry Hindu

:up:

What do we take away from all this? Perhaps that ontology runs backwards. The existence of a causal thing is not objective, but rather works backwards from the arrow of time. Future measurements cause past measured events to come into existence, at least relative to the measurement done. And by 'measurement', I mean any physical interaction, not a mind-dependent experiment does with intention. Such a definition would be quite consistent with the Eleatic Principle, no? — noAxioms

Sure, but what about your mind? Is your mind in the past? — Harry Hindu

More to the point, are 'you' in the past, and per the reasoning quoted above, the answer is yes. A relational view is described there, and Rovelli (from Relational Quantum Mechanics) says that a system at a moment in time does not exist since it hasn't measured itself. It can only measure the past, so only prior events exist relative to a measuring event.

Based on what you are saying, another's observation of your brain would be in the past, but your mind, for you, is in the present. — Harry Hindu

Well, not being a presentist, I would word such comments more in B-series. Any particular brain state includes observation of past states, binding those states into a meaningful identity. I (some arbitrary noAxioms state event) have but one causal past (a worldline terminating at said event), but no causal future since no subsequent state is measured.

This is quite different from a more classical presentist view where only current state exists (all unmeasured, all counterfactual), and the past is but a memory, not real.

If you're going to make an argument for causal systems being real — Harry Hindu

Eleatic Principle says that all causal states are real. The principle has an objective wording, not the weird backwards-arrow causal ontology described by the paragraph quoted.

BTW, minds do not come into play with either definition. Your example involved a mind, but it didn't need to.

If you're saying it's backwards then you are saying that complexity is fundamental and simplicity arises from complexity

No, no complexity required at all. Just causal interactions.

Frege wrote:

If we want to emerge from the subjective at all, from the realm of ideas, we must conceive of knowledge as an activity that does not create what is known but grasps what is already there. — Basic Laws of Arithmetic, 23 — J

Quite agree with this. Grasping what is objective truth. Does it being fact imply that 'it is already there'? Do the phrases mean the same thing?

Not so sure about McCarthy's quotes

1. There is an objective reality, independent of, but accessible to human knowledge. — J

If it's objective, there's an incredible lot more of it that the tiny spec accessible to humans. So I cannot agree with this statement, or that it follows from the Frege quote. Natural sciences seem to be only relevant to our world, not objectively relevant as is the case with mathematics.

Here's what I would not defend:

1. A use of the term "objective" to mean "out there in a timeless, changeless way that is not only independent of how human consciousness pictures it, but also somehow identical to it." (Frege probably did believe this.)

If reality isn't out there in a timeless way, then it is contained by time, a larger reality than 'all of reality', which seems very contradictory. Time seems very much to be a property of this world (and any other causal structure). Intuition might say otherwise, but truth is not the purpose of intuition.

The problem here, in my opinion, is that if every physical object is taken to qualify as an 'observer' (which seems to be implied by your assertion that any physical interaction is a measurement), then the number of 'perspective' is probably to high. — boundless

Some clarification then. I use 'observer' to mean something like people, any entity which can gather information and attempt to glean its own nature. 'Measure' on the other hand comes from quantum mechanics, the most simple interaction between two 'physical' states, say a rock measuring rain by getting wet and getting a jolt of momentum from the drop. That's a measurement, but not an observation.

If QM could be in principle be applied at all scales, if you consider, say, the fall of a pen on a table, the 'perspectives' are incredibly many. — boundless

Yes, hence there being an incomprehensible quantity of worlds under something like MWI. You list a classical interaction, but the tiny ones are far more frequent.

Personally, I prefer to interpret QM epistemically, in which case there is no 'causal' role of the observer. — boundless

Go Copenhagen then. It's the point of that interpretation. There's no causal role of the observer in any interpretation except the Wigner interpretation, which Wigner himself abandoned due to it leading to solipsism.

However, it might mean that there is a limit of that we can know about mind-independent physical reality. — boundless

I'm not too worried about not knowing about it. But positing that only the parts that we know are all that exists is what makes such a premise in an observer-dependent definition of existence.

I do believe that positing a mind-independent reality is simply necessary to do science — boundless

Positing that the stuff we see is mind independent is indeed necessary to do science. But positing that all of reality is confined to the stuff we see is what I typically see in assertions of what exists. It's a very pragmatic way of looking at it, but not an objective way of looking at it at all.

First we have to consider the meta-metaphysics of "mind-independence"; should mind-independence be understood to be an existential claim that the world literally exists independent of the senses? Or is mind-independence merely a semantic proposal that physical concepts are definitionally not reducible to the senses? — sime

You see the distinction then, articulating it in a different way than I had.

Let's say you have a compact disk of Mozart pieces. In a mindless universe, that disk is just a collection of particles assembled in a disk with a bunch of tiny pits. There's no musical information, right? — RogueAI

A CD player will still produce the air vibrations of the music. Nothing will be around to interpret those patterns as music though. Tree falls in forest. Ground shakes, as does air, but it that making a sound?

What about numbers? — RogueAI
What about them? A number is an idea. — tim wood

I think there is a thing in itself behind the idea. Sure, isolated minds can independently come up with the same mathematics (unlike any God story), so that's pretty hard evidence of it having more existence than just a shared idea.

As if causal processes were clearer than the chair on which I sit. — Banno

I think they are clearer. OK, the chair affects you personally, but I cannot conceive of any observer sans some sort of causality being involved. For as old as the definition is, I find it to be elegant and still applicable.

Most other philosophers who see any worth in SR or GR seem to motivate the notion that the central lesson to be learned from said theories is their strong emphasis on causality defining many familiar notions. — substantivalism

Causality has been defining most of those familiar notions a lot further back than those theories. The eleatic principle dates back to the Greeks.

Yes, Simultaneity is conventional under SR, an abstraction, not anything physical, even if the convention uses causal means. That did change from the physical simultaneity that was presumed before, and is still presumed under presentism.

Classical physics is completely fine with conceptually expanding their ontologies or metaphysics to accommodate unseen entities which possess no casual import.

Hmm, like what? The existence of a preferred moment in time? What else? I can think of more, but the list gets more hand-wavy the further you go. What's classical physics got to do with it? What has post-classical physics taken away that classical allowed? It seems like post-classical actually added more to the metaphysics, not taken it away.

Is gravity curved because it can only be modeled with curvature?

Gravity is curved? You mean a model where gravity is explained by curvature of spacetime? There are alternate models to that, so your 'only' doesn't hold.

Why would time seem to pass more quickly in a more objective frame? — Metaphysician Undercover

Under realist physics, time seeming to subjectively pass faster or slower seems to be a function of boredom vs productivity and has nothing to do with where you are or how fast you're going.

Under idealism, there's nothing with which to compare one's own perception of time passage.

Just classical existence realism. — substantivalism

Both presentist and eternalist views fit in with that, so I'm fine with it. 'Realist' is an adjective, so one can be realist about one thing and not another. Said Berkeley idealist is realist about mind for instance, but that is admittedly not the classic realism of <the matter I see is real> (which sound an awful lot like idealism to me).

The eleatic principle you mentioned above is a very mind-independent worded principle:
"only entities with the capacity to cause changes or be affected by them are real"
But the only literature I can find that references this principle ignores what it says and drags in their mind-dependenct biases. See the paper by Colyvan, which seems to be about half the hits on a google search of the term.

rabid berkeley idealists.

Very often any view different from your own looks rabid.

As there is not definite future or past. . . THEY DON'T EXIST under presentism remember.

Quite the opposite. The terms 'future', 'present' and 'past' are only ontologically meaningful under presentism, the view that divides all events into those three categories. There being no such division under eternalism, all events share identical ontology. Hence the lack of tensed verbs when discussing the view since tensed verbs make reference to something that the view does not posit.

As for past and future events existing, they do under some versions of presentism (I listed maybe 5 flavors above) and not under other versions. The 3D version says only present events exist and the others do not. There is just space and the current state of matter, which evolves in place.


Derailments aside, the topic was supposed to be about absolute frames and presentism. Under said realist view, presentism seems to require absolutism, and absolutism directly contradicts the premises of special relativity. That doesn't make either view wrong, only mutually incompatible. SR premises can be reworded in an epistemic manner instead of ontic, and then the contradiction goes away.

Do you agree with any of that?

We don't know how time passes. — Metaphysician Undercover

We don't even know if it passes, so yea, I agree.

Doesn't relativity indicate that the time experienced is unique to the spatial conditions of the individual?

Relativity says the opposite: First postulate is that physics (including the experience of anybody, anywhere) is frame and location independent. Time is thus experienced identically for everybody. If this were not so, you could identify a more objective frame by the experience of time passing more quickly there.

If it's true that one's experience is frame dependent, then relativity is open to blatant falsification.
Of course, from an idealist PoV, flow of time is all that is experienced, and the rest is fiction.

I wonder if time isn't the thing we experience — flannel jesus

Depends on one's definition of time. I can think of 3 kinds right off, and proper time is the one experienced. The others are coordinate time (computed, not experienced), and the flow of the present (zero empirical impact).

I don't think you can have an experience in just a snapshot of existence. — flannel jesus

That's an interesting topic in itself. Experience seems to be a process, not a state. A process is at minimum a change of state over some finite time. The issue of Boltzmann brains gets into this, where you don't so much hold beliefs, but you hold memories of beliefs (same thing?).

Existence CANNOT wait to be decided. — substantivalism

In a classical universe, this sort of thing might work, but our universe is not classical, and the vast majority of interpretations of physics do not have things/states existing until after measurement. Photons for instance seem to only exist in the past. Interesting problem for the presentists, but they get around it.

Look up 'principle of counterfactual definiteness' (which says pretty much what you just said) and then note how very few quantum interpretations accept this principle. Bohmian mechanics is the only well known one that does.

we cannot just say that nature doesn't know what things there are until the time when you do observe it. Before it's observed, during, and after nature should always give an answer on this if we demand its objectivity.

This is trivially falsified. I cannot demand of nature to tell me the state of some event that has 'happened' but is further away that light could travel in the elapsed time.

... nature 'knows' instantaneously what things exist and what things don't WITHOUT delay.

Anthropomorphising nature, and per the first paragraph above, no it doesn't.

Nature doesn't have to wait for you to get light from andromeda to say whether it exists

That's because its presence in the past has been measured, and it's kind of a big thing to somehow have vanished in that small time, so its existence now is highly probable.

... when the light is emitted. . . when it travels. . . and when it finally gets to your eyes. . . IT ALWAYS STILL EXISTED.

Yes. Light has classical existence, but the universe is not classical. Photons do not have classical existence. The one is a probability thing, just like 'Andromeda is probably still there, as is the moon.

. while light is emitted. . . travels. . . and gets to your eyes is also objectively answered.

Subjectively actually. Empirical data yields subjective existence, not objective. The former is a relation, as in your 'being a part of the same reality' relation.

Hasn't Eternalism also given itself numerous other unsolvable problems? — substantivalism

Can you name some? Can you name some for presentism? Neither works for M-U because he's an idealist and both are real interpretations of time. Eternalism not being compatible with it isn't a falsification of eternalism any more than the validity of eternalism being a falsification of idealism.

That's right, I do not experience you listening. — Metaphysician Undercover

I cannot think of any view that suggests that you would. I may have suggested that you experience the time during which I was listening instead of being stuck experiencing only the time that you are talking.

And to determine what I am experiencing at the same time (simultaneously) as you listening requires principles of measurement.

You misunderstand. I am not asking for a determination of when that time is, only that you must inevitably be simultaneous with it at some point, unless you are skipping over swaths of time
Let's say you are on Earth an I am on Mars, 15-light minutes away. You speak a short message. I get it anywhere from almost instantly to a half hour later. Unless you doze off during that half hour, you're going to experience the time during which I am listening to the message.

Oddly enough, under presentism, that half hours is a proper half hour, not an actual one. There is no way to know how long it takes for an actual hour to pass since one does not experience the actual flow of time, but rather one experiences proper time, same as what clocks measure.

I'm arguing that physical you does move along a number line; it's called the timeline of your personal history — ucarr

The correct term is 'worldline', and I am everywhere present on it, and thus it is not something along which I move. Yes, that is an example of physical extension, and there are examples of physical motion. The part I'm denying is numbers supervening on physics instead of the other way around.

You're saying quantum fields are mind-dependent? — ucarr

I don't recall saying that, but if the existence of the world in which those fields apply is grounded in human presence in that world, then yes, they, like the rocks, seem pretty mind dependent. I meet few realists who go beyond that bias. Tegmark is one, but he goes to the extent of 'everything exists' or maybe 'everything possible', which is a problematic stance.

Quantum fields are measured.

They probably wouldn't be posited if they were not measured, yes.

I should've written, "If it's a necessary premise that cannot be justified - as with a first-order system - it's axiomatic.

Hence the axioms of mathematics for instance. Without careful selection of axioms, mathematics as a tool would be pretty useless. So better written, yes.
I don't find EPP necessary. 'We need to do something about that asteroid headed for us' works just fine without adding 'only if it objectively exists' to the end. We can see the asteroid coming. It shares the same objective ontology as do we, and exactly what that objective state is doesn't seem to be relevant to the situation at hand.

This puts you fundamentally at odds with science because all scientific theories are axiomatic to the extent that they cannot be proven.

Science doesn't depend much on a specific stance on metaphysics. It pragmatically uses a definition like E4, even if E4 is mind dependent, because science is all about knowing and predicting, which is also mind dependent.

If it's true nothing can be asserted prior to existent mind (MPP) ...

That would be EMPA (existing mind precedes asserting, and also MPA: mind preceding asserting). Predication (a rock being massive) is different than a mind noting a predication. Hence the rock can be massive sans mind (MPP false), but it still takes a mind to conceive of predication (MPCP). This is per my OP where concept of X needs to be explicitly distinguished from X.
None of MPP, MPA, nor MPCP specify an existing mind. It just say mind, which may or may not exist depending on definitions chosen.
I accept MPA and MPCP, and EMPA only with EPP, but not MPP. It seems logical that mind would precede any mental constructs.

Anyway, the bold part of your argument begs the conclusion, so the demonstration says no more than: "If EPP is true, then EPP being false entails a contradiction".

Where is yours?

I'm not making a positive claim. A negative cannot be demonstrated, only falsified by counterexample.

If you doubt the objectivity inferable from social interaction, then you've fallen into solipsism.

You mistake a relation for objectivity. Social interaction establishes a common relation. I'm totally fine with a relational (finite domain) definition of existence, even if EPP doesn't hold under it.

You do exist in Moscow because your residence in ¬ Moscow, if true, is a fact in Moscow.

OK, but you're changing domains to say that, and the existence of something in one domain is not always a fact in another. What about something that resides on a planet near the star Deneb? Its presence there is not a fact in Moscow (it might be under some non-local interpretation of QM where retrocausality is allowed). That example is one of a more disjoint domain, and they get more disjoint than that. The thing residing near Deneb has predicates, and yet said existence is not factual in Moscow. For that matter, Moscow is not factual relative to the described thing.

You suspect general existence has the ontological status of numbers.

You should quote where you think I said or implied that. The bit about the existence of existence seems pretty circular to me.

Why do you think position non-causal?

I don't.remember saying it was.

In Eternalism of ANY other variety — substantivalism

Eternalism has varieties? It seems to have but one: The lack of the premise of a preferred moment in time. All events share the same ontology. I was unaware of variants of that.

To exist physically is to be in this spacetime and not to be is to. . . not exist. That relation (or grounding) is something you don't have to call a physical causal relation but rather a special spacetime connection but it seems like semantics to me.

I'm good with the definition, but it isn't objective. It's a relation to our spacetime. Under presentism, it usually means being grounded in the present: To exist physically is to be currently in this space. There are variants of this, such as asserting that some (or all) of the other events exist, but are in some way not preferred.

In either situation you have things which exist, tons of things, and you need to somehow link them together on the same playing ground (tenselessly or not).

They're linked by existing simultaneously.

There has to be some grounding even in Eternalism that makes all these things exist even if that is a tenseless relation.

You grounded this existence by having a location in spacetime. That's enough. That wording carries no requirement for causality at all.

What's outside spacetime?

You make it sound like a location, like spacetime is bounded, has an edge beyond which is something else, even if a void. That model doesn't work.

Further, any proposal of separate physical objects interacting has to either make use of action-at-a-distance

That they do. I make a phone call. You pick up, a reaction to my action. Hard to deny action at a distance. But it taking time is also hard to deny.

So how does reality keep track of it still being there when not interacted with? What grounds it?

What not being there? Nothing vanishes in either model. Under presentism, my dialing of the phone no longer exists at the time that your phone is ringing. Is that your issue? That's is as it should be since your phone ringing while I'm still typing in the number would constitute retrocausality.

It's possible that while that interaction takes place that the other thing could cease to exist or change in such a manner as to not be identical with it.

Yes. I can get smote by a meteor, and your phone will continue to ring. Life is harsh.

You don't seem to have any examples of necessity of instant causality over a distance.

My present is the time of speaking. Your present is the time of hearing. — Metaphysician Undercover

You make it sound like you're stuck in a moment, and never experience the later time when I am 'listening'. I think your idealism is getting in the way of what is an interpretation of a non-idealistic model.

Presentism requires absolutism, else simultaneity would not work. — noAxioms
Are you sure about this? — Metaphysician Undercover

No actually. I can think of an exception: A solipsistic view would use its past light cone as the hypersurface delimiting past, present and future. It means nothing exists except what you see. Addition of a second observer makes this not work.

Relativity divides events into 3 categories relative to a given event: Past (including the light cone), future, and other (any events space-like separated from said given event. Relativity of simultaneity is valid only within this space-like region.

Is there any presentist precept which dictates that my present must be the same as your present?

A non-solipsistic attempt. Given a block and a moving spotlight for each person, defining not a hypersurface of simultaneity, but simply a worldline, you could indeed have multiple spotlights that are time-like separated, but then all the events would have to be real (no growing block), so the spotlights would be epiphenomenal minds, sort of like a movie film being run through multiple projectors in different rooms rather than having multiple copies of the film. I wonder if any theater has ever tried that.

Why would a thing here have the same present as a thing over there?

First of all, what model are we talking? Growing block? Just 3D universe? Spotlights on a 4D universe? The idea you propose works with some of those and not others.

The fundamental problem of presentism is that it cannot support any type of simultaneity, because it is based in the subjective experience of the present, which is inherently unshared.

I don't see why one present cannot be shared. There is one 3D state, and everybody experiences their spatial location in it. Why doesn't that work? (Not that I support presentism, but I've not seen a falsification of it)

If, for example, I assume to be able to speak to you, I must allow that the present in which I speak the words is distinct from the present in which you hear the words

The time of speaking and time of hearing are different, yes, but both those times are 'the present' when they occur, for everybody.

It's just spatialized metaphor to talk about time. — substantivalism

It may be metaphor, or it may be actual extension, measured in meters and everything. That's apparently a difference between realism and instrumentalism.

Well. . . how does one make sense of the present? What is its nature besides mere postulation? How can I MAKE that thing over there PRESENT to me?

OK, you seem to be talking about instant causality rather than spooky action. Nobody posits that. It is quickly falsified.

If you are say, a relationist, who only allows for physical relations to give meaning to both 'being simultaneous with' or 'spatial separation' then in either case if you want to say two things exist in the same moment is tantamount to saying they casually interact with each other neigh instantaneously.

No, it is not tantamount to that at all. Causality (per locality at least) moves at light speed at best. I cannot talk instantly to somebody on Mars. Takes a long time. Phone calls don't work. Not sure why you're proposing otherwise.

If you are fine with espousing some doctrine of the vacuum or void of nothing residing between atoms then the only way you can 'link' two distinct objects as pegs on the same board is if they are interacting with each other at a distance.

Nobody suggests that except you apparently.

... I.E. to exist is to be able to or actively be interacted with.

Actively interacted with, sure, but not instantly. Interaction takes time.



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It's because of [W.L.Craig's] belief in God and his philosophical attempts to bolster it. He is pretty transparent on that. — substantivalism

I don't think Craig believes in God any more than does Trump. He's paid a lot to say otherwise, but I think Craig would strive for more valid arguments if there was belief since he's very smart and cannot fool himself with his own fallacies. The guy simply knows how to separate sheep from their money.

Remove any one of these links in the chain and the purposeful life of a sentient being collapses into non-functional incoherence. — ucarr

Not discussing purpose of life though.

Has anyone established the point of contact that proves the intersection of material and immaterial states of existence coherent and functional?

Dunno. Who posits such a point of contact?

You're saying quantum fields are mind-dependent?

A field has no location or bounds and is thus not the same category as an object.

If it cannot be justified, then it's logically deemed axiomatic..

Wow, we think so differently. I find it unnecessary precisely because it cannot be justified.

In your examination of predication without existence, your supposition there's non-existence that supports predication means you are able to demonstrate a non-existent thing performing some action, or expressing some state of being.

No, it doesn't mean I can demonstrate it any more than your premise can be demonstrated.

Go ahead and establish your non-existence while being something or doing something.

But I do exist, by the usual reasoning, and it is even justified. It just isn't objective. That's the part that holds no water.

Partitioning existence into definitions that support or deny existence won't work because that would be simultaneous existence and non-existence, and we've agreed the two modes are mutually exclusive.

We do not agree. I don't exist in Moscow, but I exist in some other town. No contradiction there.

How does thinking occur in the absence of body, brain and mind? — ucarr

You think binary computing machines are self-willed info processors?

No, not any more than I am self-willed into one.

But an empty existence is quite different from the lack of objective existence. — noAxioms
If lack of objective existence equals non-existence, then I agree.

I meant empty objective existence is quite different from the lack of objective existence. Lacking objective existence doesn't imply lack of other kinds (relational say) of existence.


All that aside, I was referred to an interesting bit about the Eleatic Principle, which seems on-topic.
It says "An entity is to be counted as real iff it is capable of participating in causal processes".

Of significant note, it says 'counted as real' which is support for my notion that existence might just be a concept without a thing in itself.

The principle as given is mind-independent, but only applies to causal structures. So the states of Conway's game of life exist, but 14 does not. That game and our universe might supervene on numbers and mathematics, but it is a gray area as to whether such supervention constitutes participation in causal processes.

I found an interesting article that attempts to justify it, but it dismisses other causal structures by several references to 'the world', a very anthropocentric assumption that this world is somehow special over other causal structures, violating the wording of the principle taken from that very article.

I may open a new topic on this.

"moving spotlight" may have a 4d view of the universe as a whole, but still a 3d view of the present moment, just like presentism, right? — flannel jesus

The present is 3D in all forms. I have heard of 2-state presentism where the prior state exists until the subsequent state fully exists. A simulation is this form of presentism. Moving spotlight says all events exist, but the spotlight determines which of these are at the present. Interestingly, the spotlight can move in either direction, and even jump around. Growing block logically seems to forbid that.

You can even have 4D spacetime with very limited temporal extension, say 12 hours each side of the 3D present. So the immediate past and future exist, but the more distant past and future do not.
$5 says you cannot name who/where that is suggested.

I consider 'moving spotlight' to be a form of presentism - maybe you could call it "weak presentism", because instead of it saying "the present is the only thing that exists", it's saying "every time 'exists' in some sense, but the present ESPECIALLY exists, exists in some unique elevated way".

It very much is presentism, but I agree that it gets you two (three?) kinds of existence. The model works really quite well for epiphenomenalism sort of like watching a first-person movie. You (the experiencer external to the universe) can jump in anywhere you want, experience a life, rewind, fast-forward at will, but with no volition to change the plot of the story. The whole movie reel exists, but the one discreet frame under the projector light exists harder.

Time travel makes a little sense with personal moving spotlight. Not so much with the others.

With the number line collapsed to a theoretical point in space of zero dimensions, there is no distance between one number and any other number. You can't move along the linear space of the number line. — ucarr

You make it sound like a number line is something that physical I move along. I don't buy that for a moment.

Why do you claim the chemical bonding of elements (Na + Cl = NaCl (salt)) into a compound is not physical?

It being an object (compound in this case) seems to be an ideal. Physics seems to have no mind-independent test for where an object is bounded, per the topic I linked. It is off topic for this ontology discussion. You posted to that other topic. Re-read if you're interested.

Your body, as a point of reference (a location in space), determines your frame of reference, viz., your context.

This contradicts your description of my going to the kitchen, which utilizes an abstract choice of frame different from the one determined by my body.

Yes, [existence is] axiomatic precisely because it cannot be justified. I have a strong aversion to assuming things for no reason. — noAxioms
So, you seek to contradict your own belief existence is axiomatic?

It's axiomatic to others, not to me, per stated aversion to such axioms.

If you're independent of existence, you can't posit EPP.

You seem to be doing that just fine. Positing things is easy. Justifying them not so much.

How does thinking occur in the absence of body, brain and mind?

An information processor need not be implemented by what is considered to be a biological body, brain or mind. The 'mind' word seems to reference the information processing itself rather than the hardware implementing the process.

How does thinking occur in the absence of egg, sperm and fertilized egg?

I don't think sperms and eggs and such do a whole lot of thinking. Sure, people do thinking. I only fail to accept the necessity of any objective ontology to them.

I assume all of these absences as part of independence from existence. This with independent defined as "not a part of."

Even this assumes that there is such a thing as 'objective existence', perhaps completely empty as the nihilists suggest. But an empty existence is quite different from the lack of objective existence.

The "absolute frame" is known as "absolute time", and this is quite different from presentism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Different yes, but not so different. Presentism requires absolutism, else simultaneity would not work. But absolutism doesn't require presentism of any form. An absolute frame can be 3D space or a block.

Remember too that LET and SR are both special models that do not model the universe, so any absolute frame in the real universe cannot be an inertial frame since such a frame cannot describe the universe. It took over a century to generalize the absolutist premises, but it has been done, The theory denies things predicted by relativity such as black holes and the big bang.


Straight up presentism is 3D, but other forms like growing block and moving spotlight are 4D models. All are absolute.

Only things exist in the paper thin present. — substantivalism

This seems to presume a 4D model, with time being extended, but only one moment in time being the present. Sounds like a moving spotlight model.

If they are postulating an absolute present. . . I.E. a way of giving an absolute simultaneity. . . then aren't they a presentist? — substantivalism

If they posit a present, then obviously they're a presentist. But if they merely posit absolutism (LET for instance), that come with absolute simultaneity, but does not necessarily imply a preferred moment in time.

Presentism, by most accounts is something different from claiming an absolute present. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem to differ. How are these two distinct? Can you give an example?

I don't think that the universal aether theory proposed by Lorentz was capable of providing for absolute simultaneity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course it requires absolute simultaneity. That comes with any absolutist theory.

Not unless you inevitable added in action at a distance in some form. — substantivalism

What does action at a distance have to do with any of this? It seems to be a quantum concept, not an interpretation of time issue.

quote="substantivalism;981431"]... William Lane Craig famously seemed to be in favor of it but with a growing block theory of time?[/quote]
Not sure why he wants growing block. What purpose is served by an existing past? Evidence? Not needed by anything. Why nonexistent future? That probably feeds his notion of free will, despite the posited onmiscience serving the exact same role as an existing future.

Mind you. Craig is not known for putting together valid arguments. They just have to sound good enough to confirm the biases of his paying audiences.

Try to do a calculation with the number line collapsed to a theoretical point in space of zero dimensions. Whether on paper, or on the ground, can you do it? — ucarr

Effortless actually since I utilize a number line in almost no calculations. They're handy for graphs though.

When you count objects, you're counting objects with distinct positions in space.

I could count the number of times the light blinks. 3 blinks, all in the same physical space. I don't conclude that 3 has a physical location from this.

When two objects in space become one object in space

Two objects becoming one seems to be an ideal, not anything physical. I did a topic on it here. You seem to have commented on that topic.

You imply your body holds no distinct position in space. Please explain your denial.

My body has extension. It is physically present at events (events are physical) but the spatial location of those events varies from frame to frame, and frames are abstractions. So for instance you talked about me going to the kitchen, but maybe the kitchen goes to me when I need a drink. It changes location, not me, since I am at all times 'here' (also an abstraction). Anyway, I said I knew what you meant.

A book, when read, is the extreme opposite of isolation.

Yea, but I didn't say anything was reading it. It's in isolation we said.

Existence has no explanation.

And here I am looking for one. Yes, it's axiomatic precisely because it cannot be justified. I have a strong aversion to assuming things for no reason.

The set of real numbers is uncountable, but its members, even its irrationals, are individually mappable to material things, as in the case of pi.

Pi is definitely early on the countable list. It is easily expressed with a couple characters. Most numbers cannot be expressed at all. I cannot, by definition, give an example.

Can you stand independent of existence while you make your study of it?

Sure. Just don't posit EPP.

Your volition balks at the assumption, but your ability to balk establishes your existence.

I don't assume that. I said it in the OP. 'I think therefore I am' is a non-sequitur without EPP. But 'I think, therefore I decide Io posit that I am' seems to work far better. There is no fallacy to that, just as there is no fallacy in saying "'I balk, yet I decline Io posit that I am'. It becomes a personal choice instead of a logical conclusion. There is a pragmatic utility to making the first choice, but logic seems not to forbid the second choice. As you said, it's an axiom, an assumed thing, not something necessarily the case.

Show me the number 14 doing something mathematical without reference to its distance in space from another number. — ucarr

I think there are entire math text books that never once reference 'distance in space'. The ones that do are probably using an example from physical space (like the length of a rod) rather than spatial separation of numbers.

My example was about counting objects, like nuts on one's hand. There's no 'space' between 13 and 14 when doing that. It's just the difference between one more nut being there or not.

When you say, "Numbers (as concepts) probably came...from roots of positive integers." does "roots" in your context mean something other than a mathematical root, such as 2 is the square root of 4?

No, I mean the earliest usage of numbers, when humans first came aware of them and began assigning symbols (holding up fingers?) to them. Visualization of number lines came thousands of years later. You seem to only be able to visualize numbers this way.

Let's suppose you sit in a chair before your computer when you read my posts to you. Do you have a unique position within the space where you read my posts?

Actually no, but I know what you mean. You're describing physical space.

Something in total isolation (not possible) has no meaning.

If we're talking about a symbol, then sure, a symbol in isolation is meaningless. But an encyclopedia in isolation does not seem meaningless, even in the absence of something that knows what the symbols mean. The meaning is there and can be gleaned.

So in this change of stance, things don't exist because they're material, but rather things are material because they exist, kind of destroying any distinction between the two words.
Is material also matter? Are you asserting that 14 consists of atoms or something? Are larger numbers made of more material? What color is 14? Is a square square material but a round square is not, or are both material? — noAxioms

I notice that you did not answer this question, instead telling me about things that we both agree are physical. I don't think that the count of nuts in my hand is physically present at mostly to the far right of a police lineup, even if there is a reference to the number there.

The vast majority of numbers cannot have a physical representation since there are countable many ways to represent numbers, but the reals are not countable.

Don't bother with trying to answer the question, "Why existence?" It's a brute fact that can't be analyzed. This is another way of saying, "Existence is insuperable."

Exactly. I've noticed that. I question it. Everybody else just assumes it, calling it 'brute fact' despite the lack of justification. The nature of it seems very different than what most assume.

There can be no mixing of the two modes because the attempt to do so annihilates non-existence

Mixing it also seems to annihilate existence, leaving you in neither state.

Firstly, you present a segment of an infinite series, which is all anybody can do; this because an actual infinite series is a limit forever approached, never arrived at. Secondly, notice I say, "supposition" of an infinite series of negations of presence with neither beginning nor end.

But I was supposing an infinite series. Clearly I cannot post each element since there is a posting limit on this forum. But the supposition is there.

As I go on to explain in my paragraph above, existence is insuperable to sentients because consciousness assumes existence

Yours might. Mine is not making any such assumption.

although we easily infer you're probably making a predication about a subject.

I would consider it to be noticing a predicate, not making it. Not that I can't make a predicate. I can paint a car, and subsequently the car has the predicate of being a different color.

Numbers derive their meaning from their representation of points in space. — ucarr

Numbers are independent of space. Number lines are an abstract way of visualizing them. Yes, it is a space of sorts, hence the x being greater than y sort of thing. Numbers (as concepts) probably came not from space, but from counting of objects, thus from roots of positive integers. The rest came later.

Numbers are not necessarily linear, but complex and quaternions are still arguably representable by space. Space seems to represent numbers more than numbers seem to represent space. Just my thoughts. These are not assertions.

Without connection to a unique position,14 is merely two meaningless shapes juxtaposed

14 is never a shape. You're instead referencing a numeral (symbol), not a number (a quantity maybe). Don't confuse the two.

nyone with knowledge of basic math will know exactly where you stand on the real number line whenever 14 predicates you there. This physical reality is universally true.

I disagree that either 14 or a number line is anything physical.

Existing things, being a part of general existence, an insuperable context, possess temporal material forms. These forms possess presence and meaning. Presence is the ability to hold a specific and measurable position materially. Meaning is the context of every position relating it to the real number line.

The meaning of number 14 places it within a context which gives it 13 and 15 as its integer neighbors.

Yes and No. Yes: a relation and a predicate. No: I am cautious about the distinction of 14 meaning something and being something. I would have chosen the latter. The numeral (as a symbol) means something. Again, thoughts, not assertions.

14 – placing you in a specific position in context of the real number line – is a material thing that articulates a predication of position, a material reality in the context of existence.

So in this change of stance, things don't exist because they're material, but rather things are material because they exist, kind of destroying any distinction between the two words.
Is material also matter? Are you asserting that 14 consists of atoms or something? Are larger numbers made of more material? What color is 14? Is a square square material but a round square is not, or are both material?
Anyway, I know of nobody that has published any such suggestion. Sounds made up.

Non-existence – a supposition of an infinite series of negations of presence with neither beginning nor end.

Existence – an infinite series of affirmations of material presence with neither beginning nor end.

About these, what about the case of a finite series of affirmations or negations of presence, or a mixed series, finite or not. Does the thing exist or not? It just seems like you left a lot of cases not covered by these two definitions which are supposed to handle any case.

For instance, I have an infinite series for all displacements from arbitrary origin X:
{...,
ucarr not present at X-13,
ucarr not present at X-12,
ucarr is present at X-11,
ucarr not present at X-10,
ucarr not present at X-9,
ucarr not present at X-8,
...}
That is an infinite series of negations of presence with neither beginning nor end, and one affirmation of material presence. Therefore you don't exist by your definitions above.

E4 Existence is part of the objective state of this universe

So it's a predicate then? States of something are predicates. 'apple is ripe', 'Santa is fat'. Universe is existing.

1.02
Did I win? — unenlightened

1.4, but only because I tend to reply to multiple comments in one post.

And no, I do not win, because I'm sure there are some with ratios greater than 3, and they're terrible contributors for it. Joe comes in, makes an interesting OP (gathering 20 replies), but Joe never comes back and tends his topic. I see that a lot.

If [...] you make a hard separation between cognition (acquiring knowledge and understanding by reasoning from sensory input), and the physics of objective reality, then that puts a big difference between your view of reality and mine. — ucarr

1) Not a hard separation because I consider cognition to be a function of said physics. A dualist might make such a hard separation.
2) There is not 'physics of objective reality' since the physics we know is the physics of only this universe and not others. There are no objective physical rules. So reword as 'physics of this universe', and leave off the word 'reality' entirely.
3) I have no particular 'view of reality' since the word has different definitions in different contexts. I tend to use the word in an epistemic sense, and epistemology has little to do with ontology unless ontology is defined in such terms (E2, E4).

I don't believe there exists such a hard separation between the two. In my view, E2 and E4 are not polar opposites.

Agree with both. In fact, I see little difference between E2 and E4 to the point where I wonder if they should be separately listed. The mind dependence is very explicit under E2 and only implicit under E4. That seems to be one significant difference.
Another difference: E2 seems more presentist. If humans go extinct, then nothing would exist under E2, but under E4, Earth is presumed (by humans now) to endure beyond the time of human extinction.
E2 is not necessarily idealism where only concepts exist, and not actual apples and such, but the reality of an idealist probably still falls under E2.

My simple explanation says, "cognition is a mental activity emergent from the elementary particles that make up the physics of the brain. If one holds this view, then there's nothing perplexing about claiming, "All temporal things material and emergent from the Standard Model - such as the human brain - are only known about and understood by means of the abstract and reasoning mind."

OK, that's pretty straight up E4. If you took out the reference to the standard model, it would be more inclusive of other universes with different physics but still with what could be considered 'temporal things material'. It excludes non-temporal things like 14 or triangles or round squares.

Regarding E2 and material emerging from the mind

Not emerging from mind, but nevertheless asserted to exist precisely because it is perceived. This part is also true of E4.

There's a strong link between definitions and theories. Can you cite an example of a definition and a theory both viable and contradictory?

I cannot think of a statement that is worded as both a definition and as a theory. A definition simply says how a word is being used in a particular context. A theory is something that makes predictions, is testable.

You think general existence an empty predication suggesting the need for its de facto abandonment. I think mind-independent reality a second-order emergence of abstract reasoning, itself an emergent property of brain activity.

I can agree with both, and I don't see any conflict between the two statements. You're saying that mind-independent reality is but a concept, with no ding-an-sich associated with it. I cannot argue against that. It would explain why I don't identify as a realist.
But I do not put mind as fundamental as would an idealist. That constitutes being realist about mind, which seems entirely circular.

The mistake made by most seems to be forgetting that all these relational definitions of reality are still relations. The relation is most often implied, but it's still there. Being implied, it is forgotten, and one presumes, totally unjustified, a sort of objective (E1) existence. E1 is truly mind independent (as is E5), and it simply does not follow from the above lines of reasoning.

This chain link of connections confines mind-independent reality within the mental architecture of cognition. We can theorize about what it might be like, but our closest approach to it finds us still standing firmly within our physics-dependent cognition grounded within the Standard Model.

Well, your definition might be thus mind-grounded, but I'm reaching for something less anthropocentric than that, and yes, one can conceive of such things, even if you personally choose not to.

MPP is no article of faith

MPP seems to be a principle. Acceptance of MPP (like acceptance of any other philosophical principle) is very much an article of faith, and MPP leads to idealism, a complete denial of any distinction between a thing and the concept of a thing. Acceptance of MPP contrasts heavily with the assertion of mental activity being emergent from particles doing their thing.

If this is true, then clearly all notions of mind-independence are thoroughly mind-dependent.

Even if it's not true, all notions of anything are mind-dependent simply by any reasonable definition of ;'notion'.

If MPP is dependent on EPP,

Oddly enough, it isn't.

You allow yourself to flow between opposites while charging me with self-contradiction for doing same.

Indeed, because I consider the opposites as premises, one at a time, and you assert opposites to both be true at once, typically existence being grounded in perception, and existence being grounded in material law of this universe.

Why is it okay for you to use both E1 and E2 and not for me?

I don't ever combine those. They're not compatible. E2 and E4 are subsets of E5 and E6 so there is a bit compatibility with some combinations.

I am not since nowhere am I discussing mind. I keep batting away all your comments talking about concepts instead of the thing itself. — noAxioms

This is part of our trench warfare; herein we're slugging it out. In response to your batting away, I keep batting away your supposition we can do otherwise than talk about concepts of things.

The literature is full of realist distinctions between the concept of a thing (apple say) and the apple itself (ding an sich). Your comment seems to take the stance, without justification, that there cannot be such a distinction, the position is necessarily wrong .You say you ground existence in material thing, yet here you seem to deny material, and only acknowledge the concept of material. This seems contradictory.

I am admittedly becoming moved to the position that 'existence' is nothing but an abstraction, something made up by thinking entities to separate that which in some way pertains to their interaction with their environment and that which doesn't. God exists. Why? Because God is meaningful to whoever says that. But my search for existence beyond the concept seems to not be productive. Maybe there is no mind-independent ontology. Not to say that mind creates existence (idealism), but it creates only the concept of it. Human cognition still supervenes on matter, but the existence of matter is nothing but a label pasted onto it.
I'm not asserting all that, but I am definitely considering it. Existence being not mind-dependent, but nevertheless a mental product, like any other conception. So not 'I think, therefore I am', but "I think, therefore I decide that I am'. Does that make sense?
EPP, as stated in the OP, sort of implies such an abstract definition of existence by saying that existence is conceptually prior to predication, instead of saying that existence is prior to predication.
EPP is arguably true given such a definition, but I also might arguably find a counterexample to that. Jury still out.

The ontological status of numbers is a topic too complex and undecided to make it a good example in our context. For example, numbers represent points in space.

Numbers are part of what can be used to identify a point in space, but they do not themselves represent such points. Your wording makes it sound like all numbers constitutes spatial references.

There's no easy evaluation to a definitive ontology of numbers.

If ontology is nothing but an abstraction as I described just above, then the ontology of number is simply a matter of personal choice. The ongoing debate about say anti or pro-Platonic-existence of numbers is a debate simply between two different choices being made, with no actual fact to the matter either way.

Claiming the number 14 causes EPP to fail is jumping to an unsupported conclusion.

I didn't say it causes EPP to fail. I said it causes EPP to fail given a definition of existence grounded in material. 14 is not a material thing, so it doesn't exist by that definition. But 14 is even, so it has predicates. Therefore EPP is wrong given E4. If you think that logic is invalid, you need to specifically point out where. EPP might hold given a different definition of existence, so I make no claim that 14 causes EPP to fail.

Simple reasoning makes it clear that if cognition is emergent from objective reality, then mind is emergent from objective reality. — ucarr
You think cognition and objective reality equal?

No, mind and cognition, the two words compared in your fairly tautological statement above. For purposes of this discussion, I find them to be synonymous.

My statement about objective reality and mind follows the form of Objective Reality → Mind. Mind → Cognition. In consequence, the mind's cognition, examining objective reality, sees its dependence upon the environment of nature, which is objective reality.

Mind is not objective (unless asserted to be so, which makes it grounded on that assertion, a contradiction). Objective reality cannot depend on nature since there is no objective nature, no objective laws. Other universes have different laws. Even differenter universes don't even have what could be considered 'laws'. Objective existence cannot be grounded in anything more fundamental since any such grounding is a restriction of domain.

The whole of cognition - which includes social consensus - is a form of mind-dependency. — ucarr

Agree. Some realists would probably not agree, but I am (for that and some other reasons) not 'some realist'.

Inference beyond empirical experience, or pure reason, is the most extreme form of mind-dependency.

With that I do not agree, but given that 'by choice' definition I explored above, all existence is mind dependent, EPP is backwards, and no form is more or less extreme than any other.
Your assertion above actually kind of holds for existence grounded in material.

Nothing in existence, as it is rendered to the understanding

Mind independent existence is in no way necessarily 'rendered to the understanding'. There are definitions of existence where this simply is not the case.

Why do you think the pursuit of super-symmetry is called the theory of everything?

Because it combines all theories of this universe (a limited domain), not that it in any way describes all domains. ToE is a cute catch phrase, but no theory will ever describe everything.

Since the wave function is measured and thus it is the subject of an action upon it (measurement), how can the action be prior to it?

What you call 'measurement' is an effect, not an action. The latter word implies intent. So does 'measurement' or 'observer', which is why I shy from using it rather than something like 'interaction'. There is no significance of mind or intent under E5, and these comments were made in context of E5.

When you say, "...measurement is what collapses a wave function..." you're talking about an observer doing a measurement, such as an experimenter calculating with Schrödinger's Equation.

Told you those words carry that connotation, but no, there is no role of an experimenter in any of quantum theory. Human involvement is necessary for epistemology only, and has no effect on how physics works.

This unless you think calculating with Schrödinger's Equation can be done without an entity doing the calculation.

There are interpretations where said equation is ontic, and ones where it is but abstract. Quatum theory does not say. 'Calculating' is something that requires some sort of information processor, but 'calculating' has not effect on what happens, 'observed' or not.

You had a mind in the womb. Did you make predications in the womb? — ucarr

I made my mother nauseous, so I guess that counts as making a predication.

You don't use IFF unless you mean bi-conditional relationship which is X ↔︎ Y.

It means if and only if, and I very much use it in a one way relationship. X being part of the cause of Y in no way implies that Y is part of the cause of X. That would be retrocausality.

Temporal predicates imply the S-MPP (Standard Model Prior to Predicates).

There are plenty of other temporal relationships that in no way involve the standard model, so this is false.

Any predication implies existence of mind;

Not talking about idealism.

The earth is emergent from the singularity.

I asked for Earth's location relative to existence, not from the singularity. And where is Earth relative to the singularity? Can you point in the general direction of the singularity, perhaps give a rough estimate how far Earth is from it?

You make my point. Your talk of mind-independent things is a contradiction because it assumes perception while denying it by definition.

You need to review what it means for something to be mind-independent.

In making this argument, you assume existence doesn't exist because you assume its lack of a measurable position.

No, I just think it's a category error-, but under E4, all existing things have a location (except the singularity, which is why it's a singularity). With any other definition, I can think of plenty of potentially existing things that don't have a location. But you were talking about E4 with this comment, so my request of it's location is valid.

Rather than worry about this, let's first define what you think 'existence' is, that it would meaningfully be something that exists or not by whatever definition you choose.

If the ontology of the independent thing doesn't depend on it being thus examined by mind, and you know that by definition, and thus you know it by mind, then claiming its independence from mind is a contradiction.

Non-sequitur. I agree with all but your claim of a contradiction. Maybe you should rewrite as a more formal argument. Mind-independence doesn't mean that nobody is thinking of a thing, but you seem to be proceeding as if this was the case, as evidenced by the following nonsense statement:

Possibility of perception by an audience destroys mind independence because you can't know this about a mind-independent thing.

You seem to think that mind-independent existence depends on the lack of mind, but any dependence on say lack of perception would make it very much mind dependent since it would be exactly the lack of perception that defines its existence.

You can only state things about the concept of Pegasus.

Perhaps you are thus impaired, but I am very explicitly am talking about something else, per the disclaimer in the OP.

Barring that, we're back to:

How are you able to state facts about things independent of your mind? — ucarr

I can use E4 definition and suggest that some rock masses one Kg, and use my perception to verify that. Is it fact? Maybe the rock is an illusion, but it remains an empirical fact about a rock that has mind-independent existence per E4. It being mind independent means that the rock would still mass 1 Kg even if I wasn't there to perceive it.

Metaphysics is nowhere defined as any kind of cognition or grammar — noAxioms

Explain how your quote denying any connection between metaphysics and cognition

You'll first have to quote where I made this denial.
I left the part you bolded, which I presume you take to be such a denial, nowhere is there a denial of any connection between the two, only a denial that no standard (not one you deliberately made up) definition of the word defines it as any kind of cognition. The study of metaphysics certainly involves cognition, and the definition quoted does not deny that, and the study of cognition itself has certain metaphysical elements to it. Dualism vs physicalism is arguably a metaphysical issue (and arguably not).