Sean Carrol, a current proponent of MWI, talks of universes splitting. — Marchesk

I talk of universes splitting. It's part of the language of the subject.

There aren't classical rocks or observations in MWI. — Marchesk

Don't know what you mean by this. Certainly not that empirical evidence of rocks constitute a falsification of MWI. A rock is a system and a system is part of MWI. A rock, in a state, can be described by a wave function. It very probably is not a closed system.

Some physicists, mathematicians and philosophers say the wave function describes the universe. If it does, then the classical appearance of our world needs to be derivable from that equation. — Marchesk

Our classical appearance needs to be part of a valid solution to the universal wave function, and nothing says it is not.

please, continue to do so, and take whatever time you wish or need to. — universeness

You seem to be online a shortish time (but long enough to type all these replies) because you reply quickly to posts during that period. Unfortunately I’m asleep then and our exchange takes place once a day. I guess it gives me time to compose at leisure.
The content is growing. Your aggregate replies consumed 5 pages of Libre yesterday, and 7 today.

I repeat the purpose of my thread here, as I perceive it. I am trying to trace a path to an objective truth about all lifeforms in the universe based on what we currently know about all life on Earth. — universeness

What do you consider to be life then? Does it need a form? How confined is your criteria? I imagine that the definition of life and the answer to your question go hand in hand. If for instance life must be something that reproduces, then that would become an absolute truth about life, if only by definition.

People can be convinced and can redirect, refocus, their energies and efforts if they do become convinced that a proposal has high credence.

There’s a proposal on top of a search for some kind of truth about all life?

I am moving towards assigning high credence to the 'intent' and 'purpose' aspects of humanity as two aspects of humanity

What purpose would that be, one say not held by a rabbit? Look at current groups that act as a whole. An animal is a collection of life forms of the same species: cells. Those cells are not aware of any specific purpose, but they’ve managed to evolve into something acting as a unit with more purpose than any held by any cell.
On the next level, bees form a hive, pretty much a collection of these higher individuals acting with not individual purpose, but with the collective purpose of the hive. A human village or country seems to act that way, having a purpose. The village one is more like like the hive: A group acting for mutual benefit of the individuals. The country sometimes does this, but it also serves as a unit competing with other such units for this and that. I don’t see humanity as a whole in any way acting like this. Countries only exist because other countries do, and they’re something to be resisted. Human seem not to act for the benefit of humanity mostly because there’s not a common enemy to label. So we don’t form anything with a unified purpose. Hence my asking what you see that purpose to be.
Furthermore, and more importantly, how does identifying a purpose for an intelligent race, especially one that must be held by all sufficiently intelligent races, act as a ‘defeat’ of what you call a ‘doomster’ position? It’s not like having a collective purpose has prevented any species from going extinct as far as we know.

Why do I always think of Agent Smith, anytime I type latin? — universeness

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur: Anything said in Latin sounds profound. There’s actually a rationalwiki page on this quote.

4. The proposal that only life, can demonstrate intent and purpose
...
No lifeform on Earth can demonstrate intent and purpose more than humans can.

The 1st statement (item 4) does not follow from the assertion following it. This is simple logic. Displaying a white swan does not support a proposal that all swans must be white.

dark matter is not yet confirmed and if it ever is then it might just mean the 'baryons,' category gets some new members. All baryons have mass, do they not? So, any dark matter candidate (let's go with Roger Penrose's erebon) must have mass and would therefore qualify as a baryon (if actually detected.)

Ah, falsification by recategorization. I looked up the definition of baryon and it seems electrons do not qualify, nor the majority of the zoo. Only heavy stuff. Surprise to me. That means I’m composed of a considerable percentage (by count) of non-baryonic things. Somehow I don’t think that distinction is what they’re talking about when dark matter comes up.

Many humans are trying and working very hard indeed to counter the negative and dangerous activities and practices employed by mostly nefarious or dimwitted humans. — universeness

I disagree. They’re only acting to slow them, not actually counter them. Walking more slowly off the cliff is how I think I put it. A counter would be to cork all the oil, gas and coal extraction immediately. You’d totally be Mr popularity if you had the means, authority and spine to do that.

I remain convinced we will avoid anything, anywhere near, an extinction level threat.

I suspect this as well, maybe without your confidence level.

Carbon capture systems.
Tree planting
Renewable energy systems and the move away from fossil fuels.
Legislation to protect rainforrests, ocean environments such as coral reefs, endangered species, with some endangered species now saved, etc , etc

The first one helps, but is like trying to prevent flood damage by having everyone take a drink of water. Trees are nice, but don’t remove any carbon from the biosphere. True also of ‘renewable energy’ sources.

Vertical farming, genetically modified food production.

Actually increasing the momentum towards the cliff.

Human population control initiatives.

Only works if globally enforced. Needs a mommy. This also just slows things, doesn’t solve anything.

Anti-capitalist political movements.

And pro what? I think this problem is beyond politics. I agree that the money-talks system will be the death of the west, but it’s not like corruption isn’t elsewhere. I’m actually very interested in designing a better government from scratch, but I’m too naive to know what I’m talking about.

Atheist movements against theist suggestions that this Earth is disposable, due to their insistence that god exists.

Trying to figure out which side you’re against here.

A computer processor at its base level is a series of logic gates, which open and close. — universeness

And you also can be similarly described at a base level. Pretty much gates that open and close (neurons that fire or not). — noAxioms

Not so, as the cumulated affects demonstrated in humans due to base brain activity has a far wider capability and functionality, compared to logic gate based electronic computers, based on manipulating binary.

The effects of a lot of neurons firing negates the fact that it’s just neurons firing? Or did I read that wrong?

I have witnessed many examples of humans who 'actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think,' and I bet you have to. — universeness

Indeed. They’re found on the forums for instance, a large part of the attraction to such sites.

I (and I'm sure your sister-in-law) thank you for your 'fine mind' compliment and I return it in kind.

Are you kidding? Both of you are fine minds. I will not name those on this forum of whom I think otherwise. I don’t agree with all of them, but my assessment hopefully isn’t biased by that.

I also bat back your 'condolences' label and I target it towards your doomster hat, in the hope of knocking it clean off your head and all the way into quick sand or even a black hole!

Hats stick to the surface of both things, at least so I’ve been told.

Such a big doomster hat!

So knock it off with logic instead of weight of optimism.

I'll give you this: The doomsters have been predicting dates for a long time: We'll last only X years. Almost all of them have gone by, kind of like my Brother in law whose doctor said he'd buy him a steak if he was alive in 5 years. His prognosis was a couple months. He missed the free steak by 3 weeks. Tough bastard, even if I didn't agree with almost anything he said. Humanity has earned its steak. Hat off to that.

... that which IS emergent in us as a totality has the strongest potential for impacting the contents of this universe ...
— universeness
:up: Yes, we agree on this, more or less; — 180 Proof

Ditto with that agreement, but probably the way you read those words.

Problem is you have to square this with actual observations, which have classical results when a measurement is performed. — Marchesk

I don't see how classical observations in any way would have difficulty 'squaring' with that to which I answered 'Yes'.

I'll refer you back to what Bohr had to say regarding experiments. Experiments have to be described in terms of the language of performing the experiment, not the mathematical formalism used to model what happens during the experiment. Rocks didn't come up with the Schrodinger equation or the Born rule. Physicists did after observing or learning about experimental results.

Just so, but I'm not claiming rocks are the source of quantum theory. They only obey it, acting as a classic system as much as any human-body system (dead, alive, asleep, whatever), which is after all still just a classical physical system differing from the rock only in arrangement of material.

If there's no observation, there's no world, since as we both agree, a world is a system that appears to be classical.

I think you're going to need to define your use of the word 'observer' here, because I don't think we both agree with this given the common definition. I can think of only one obscure interpretation of quantum physics (Wigner) in which a living thing plays a special role, and even Wigner abandoned it after some time.
Yes, a classical rock takes measurements. If that makes it an observer, then fine. It doesn't need to know about Schrodinger's equation in order to measure a classical world. If you don't count that as an observation, then I completely disagree with your statement above. Use the word 'measurement' and not 'observation', or pick some other word that includes whatever the rock does.

As for the definition of 'world', that is a term added later on by DeWitt I think. Keep the following in mind:

What Everett does NOT postulate:
"At certain magic instances, the the world undergoes some sort of metaphysical “split” into two branches that subsequently never interact" — Tegmark

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the entire universe is in a massive superposition for all quantum states of every particle. — Marchesk

Also superposition of which particles exist in the first place.

A "world" is when a huge ensemble of entangled particles contains observers for whom the universe appears to be classical, at least until they devise experiments showing coherence.[/quote]No, a world is not a relation with an observer. Not sure where you get this. If you like, you can assign a world in relation to an event-state, but calling the system an observer seems to suggest a very different interpretation.

A potential issue arises here. What of all the entanglements that don't support observers?

Observers as such play no role. Think systems in a state, such as a classic rock at time T. Anything that rock has measured (a subset of what's in its past light cone) is part of the entangled state of that system.

Which means observers are fundamental for saying what counts as a world.

If you want to define 'world' that way, sure, but it's just a language definition then. The physics cares not if it is observed by say something you'd qualify with the word 'conscious', which seems to be what you're hinting as being an observer.

The universal wave equation makes no such distinctions. In fact, "observers" and "worlds" are classical concepts.

Yes.

Donald Hoffman ... claims that ... "conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes successful adaptation. — Wayfarer

I've concluded pretty much the same thing, without knowing about Hoffman. Parts of me believe the illusion (and cannot un-believe) even though other parts of me know it is wrong. It's not hard to work out actually. You just need to recognize and have the willingness to let go of your axioms.

Your response was big and detailed and I want to do it justice, so I will split up my response as it will probably get too big and cumbersome, if I dont. — universeness

I tend to combine into one large post, but I compose in an offsite editor. Less chance of losing a lot of work. There's a lot to cover in your responses, so forgive me the time it takes to do so. Your definintion of 'objectively true' seems to mean 'always true' as opposed to 'most of the time', or 'probably'. That contrasts heavily with how I would have used the word, which is more like 'true regardless of context'. I'll use yours of course.

My exemplification of the importance of the carbon process to our existence, was just that, exemplification. I am attempting to trace a path towards an 'objective truth' about lifeforms, that I know currently has no extraterrestrial evidence for. I am just trying to consider what we do currently know, to see if there is anything in there that might convince others, to give a high or very high credence level to the proposal that the human condition is not being valued appropriately by too many humans. The pessimists, the theists, the theosophists, the doomsters and worst of all, the antinatalists. — universeness

I don't see any connection between Earth life being based on a carbon chemical process (as opposed to a different process) and the value of the human condition, and the prospects of our race moving forward. You target the antinatalists, but our inability to curb our population growth rate will inevitably run Earth's resources out quite abruptly. The antinatalists, as defined, seem to want to take this too far and produce zero offspring, which admittedly doesn't solve our problem even if it solves the problems of all the other species falling victim to the Holocene extinction event. Evolution doesn't favor an antinatalist. They are quickly bred out.

That's interesting to me from the standpoint of my search for 'something' that's common to all life in the universe.

All life is likely to contain carbon. It seems unlikely that all life would be based on the chemistry of carbon, a big difference. What about a plasma life form, just to name something weird?

2. The definition we have for the term 'alive.'

That varies, and is subject to debate, even on the sample size of one we have here on Earth. I know of no standard definition that would apply to a random extraterrestrial entity. What are our moral obligations to something we find if we cannot decide if it’s alive, or if it being alive is a requirement for said moral obligation?

3. The 'I think therefore I am,' proposal.

Fallacious reasoning in my opinion, especially when translated thus. Descartes worded it more carefully, but still fallacious.

4. The proposal that only life, can demonstrate intent and purpose.

Just that, a mere proposal, and very wrong given the word ‘demonstrate’ in there.

Is there anything within or related to the 4 categories above that you would give a high credence to, if it was posited as 'likely true' of all sentient lifeforms in the universe, regardless of the fact we haven't met them all yet.

I don’t think they’re necessarily true here, so no. You 1st bullet maybe. All life here is sort of carbon based, but much of it (the oldest stuff) isn’t oxygen based, so right there you have a big difference in chemical constituency.

As for my suggestion that all lifeforms in the universe contain protons, neutrons, electrons etc. I expected you to reject the 'all life in the universe is baryonic' label as useless, as everything with mass is baryonic

I have a really hard time with non-baryonic life, so I’m not on record disagreeing with that. Call it a truth then. The bolded bit is wrong. Dark matter accounts for far more mass than does baryonic matter.

All life is based on a single cell fundamental is a good one.

But life existed on Earth long before the first cells came along. That’s a complicated invention that took time.

My goal is to find more powerful, convincing, high credence arguments against pessimists, doomsters, theists, antinatalists etc, who in my opinion, currently devalue the human experience, in very unfair and imbalanced ways.

Again with this list. You build an argument against them by showing how they’re wrong. This would be hard to do if they’re not wrong, so you must also consider their arguments. Admittedly, the arguments for both sides are often thin.

:lol: Are you a doomster noAxioms?

Sort of. It’s simple mathematics. We’re consuming resources at a pace far in excess of their renewal rate. That cannot be sustained. Technology just makes it happen faster. Eventually the population must crash, as does the population of bacteria in a petri dish of nutrients. That might not wipe us out, but it might very well reduce us back to the way things were 500 years ago, and more permanently this time. Humans are taking zero steps to mitigate all this. In fact, our (gilded age) code of morals forbids such measures.

I could give you many, many examples of human actions that benefit our species as a whole, such as memorialising information

I already brought that up. We memorialize it in a form inaccessible to a low-technology state. Little is in actual books, and even those are printed on paper that might last only decades if well stored. But I’m talking about action that actually attempts to prevent the crash mentioned above. Nobody even proposes any viable ideas. We all yammer about the problems (global warming is obvious), but not a single actual suggestion as to how to prevent it (and not just walk slower off the edge of the cliff). As I said before, we need a mommy, because only a mommy has the authority to do that sort of thing. A sufficiently advance race shouldn’t need a mommy, but we’re not sufficiently advanced.

A computer processor at its base level is a series of logic gates, which open and close.

And you also can be similarly described at a base level. Pretty much gates that open and close (neurons that fire or not).

Computers produce output on screens, printout paper etc.

That’s only to communicate with a different species. A computer does not communicate with another this way.

They don't have 'understanding,' therefore they don't know what information is.

This seems only to be your refusal to apply the language term to something you don’t want it being applied. The dualists attempt to justify such a distinction by asserting that a human has this supernatural entity that the machine supposedly lacks.

No hardware/software combination has convincingly passed the turing test yet.

See my post above about this (to 180). It merely tests something’s ability to imitate something it is not. It isn’t a measure of something that ‘understands’, a test of intelligence, or something that is superior to something else. I don’t think any AI will ever pass the Turing test, but who knows.

So, how important do you think it is to convince as many theists as possible to reject theism?

Probably a bad idea, but on the other hand when they start using their god as an excuse to do immoral things (as almost all of them have), then it requires resistance. I’ve never seen a religious motivated conflict resolved by convincing them that their reasoning is wrong.

Do you think that a global majority rejection of theism would benefit our species and this planet?

Getting people to actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think would be a great start, but humans seem absurdly bad at this.
A short term benefit to our species may not be good for a more long term goal for our species, and our planet doesn’t seem to have goals, so not sure how one can go about benefiting one.

Then why do we ask questions?

Because we want to know stuff. My comment to which this was a reply was about the universe having goals, and the universe isn’t a thing that asks questions any more than does a classroom.

Definitely, at the start, but do you think there is any possibility in terraforming?

It’s always a possibility. Where do the resources come from? Good solar farming up there for energy, at least if you don’t mind the two-week nights. Getting the heavy equipment out there isn’t exactly in our capability anytime soon. The cost/benefit of such an outpost dwarfs trying to do something similar here on Earth.

Well, I often disagreed with HarryHindu and I do again, in this case. 2+3=5 must be objectively true everywhere in this universe, even inside or on the event horizon of a black hole

Ah, but is it true in the absence of our universe? This gets into my definition of objective truth vs the one you gave. HH didn’t suggest it was not true anywhere in this universe. The suggestion was more along the lines of the necessity of something real to count, which makes mathematics only valid for counting numbers.

I am with your sister-in-law.

Another fine mind lost to technology. My condolences.

Rubble pile asteroids might be the best places to build space habitats — universeness

Read Joe Haldeman's Worlds trilogy is set in such a scenario, a sizeable nickle-iron asteroid captured, brought (over the course of many years) into Earth orbit, and terraformed into the largest off-planet outpost anywhere, and its ability to sustain the collapse of civilization on the planet below.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him. -- Clark — 180 Proof

Awfully on-target of him considering the age of that quote.

Let's assume then that we are not extinct within another 10,000 years time duration.
Would you be willing to 'steelman' that situation by offering me a brief musing of what you think 'a day in the life of,' a typical human/transhuman might be by then? Do you think theism will still have a significant following for example? — universeness

Theism will be probably higher than it is now, but far more diverse with no following held over a large area. People may not be literate, so I envision something like the culture of the American natives before Europeans came. This assumes that in only 10000 years the climate has settled into something workable for humans. If not, we're probably extinct, so that assumption must be made.

I am being called to a session of alcohol and good craic with friends.
I will finish this response tomorrow! Cheers! — universeness

Well I hope the craic was mighty then. I awaited the second half of the reply.

I also find an 'objective truth,' hard to 'qualify,' but in considering what we are physically made of, and how those constituents formed in the early universe, is your statement of 'we'd not have occurred, without it,' a path to an objective truth?

Again, depends on a definition.
We're not just made of carbon. By atom count, Hydrogen is about 2/3 of us, so are we not then Hydrogen life forms? By mass, Oxygen is about 2/3 of us. Carbon places 3rd on both lists. There's over 20 elements without which we cannot be.
Given different physics, admittedly under tight constraints, life may emerge in countless forms. So if our emergence is a chance outcome of our specific physics, our emergence doesn't seem to be an objective thing, but rather a contingent one.

but all life on Earth is carbon based and we have no evidence of any lifeform which is not carbon based

We have a sample size of one. That's scant evidence that all life in this universe must be similar given abiogenesis elsewhere. Given the abundance of carbon in the universe, I doubt any of them will be carbon free, but it is unclear what designates a life form as 'carbon based' when it is made of so many elements. Another life form in some other galaxy may use carbon in its chemistry, but it will likely bear little resemblance to Earth life. Maybe not. It's a stretch to suggest it invents something as Earth-like as a cell.

How about a claim that all lifeforms in the universe are baryonic? How much credence would you give to that if it were presented as an objective truth?

Please give an example of a truth (in the form of 'all X is Y') that is not an objective truth. Else I don't know how to answer this.
Life that utilizes dark matter would need to be huge: Way larger than a star system. If we encountered it, neither of us would recognize the presence of the other.

So where do you think this human ability to organise, store and efficiently retrieve information will ultimately take us?

To our doom or to the next level. What is going on now isn't stable.

and do you think this human ability speaks to a human purpose which is, in a very true sense, 'emergent?'

I don't see any purpose to humanity any more than I see a purpose to a shark species. Each of them plays the fitness game, but neither seems to have any sense of action that benefits the species as a whole. For a smart species, we're not actually all that smart.

A jellyfish is an information processor. Where do you want to draw the line?
— noAxioms
A jellyfish has an information processing ability that is way below a humans and a human has a data processing speed which is way below a computers. Information has meaning, data has not.

You make it sound like computers are not information processors. They are. They manipulate data that is only meaningful to the computer. You're sounding like one of the dualists that asserts that only some subset of living things has access to a special sort of magic.
Most computers have a small number of CPUs which are very fast (gives good reaction time) but also serve as a bottleneck since only one stream of instructions at a time can be executed by each of them. A biological brain has a completely different parallel architecture with far better energy efficiency to do the same task, but slower reaction times, executing a large number of streams at once. Both have level 1 and 2 caches, just to name a similarity. Most computers store information in a way only meaningful to the computer and must present the information in a different form when an external request is made of it.

We are currently better than computers at interpreting meaning and we can demonstrate instinct, intuition, emotion, skepticism, etc, etc better than computers currently can.

Those are human emotions. We'll always be human better than a nonhuman is human. We suck at being the computer, so I guess we totally fail the computer Turing test.

Is this not one of the main reasons theism exists? — universeness

To give universal purpose? I suspect not. Theism grew from early attempts at explaining the unexplainable (the moon for instance) and to assign something to which one can appeal to the uncontrollable such as the weather. It evolved in government at some point. Even today, there seems to be little purpose promoted in it. What, we were created so our narcissist deity has some minions to grovel before it? They don't really push that too much. A little maybe, but in general, I don't see any purpose served to a deity which is not in need of anything.
The mythology behind the theism seems to serve the purpose of personal comfort. That's a real purpose to the beliefs. The churches recognize this and leverage it. They sell it.

Humans are so fundamentally connected to purpose and intent that if we have gaps in our knowledge, especially the gaps we had when we first came out of the wilds

Until we started writing stuff down, yea, this knowledge is pretty much lost. That also sort of defines when we started accumulating knowledge as a species, far more recently than the 300000 year figure you give.

[Do] lifeforms such as humans 'BRING' intent and purpose to a universe? As we are OF the universe, does it follow that WE and any lifeform like us ARE the intent and purpose of the universe and through us, the intent and purpose of the universe IS emergent.

I would say no to this. The universe isn't something that is purposeful, through life forms or anything else. It is not a thing that has a goal, a critical ingredient for something with a purpose.

Theism is wrong, as any actual material, empirical measure of the omnis, can only be done based on 'a notion' of our intent or purpose, measured as a 'totality.'

Theism serves a purpose to its adherents, and not necessarily a bad one, so it isn't necessarily a bad thing to be theistic. Again, I don't think humanity (or any other specific species) has a goal defined for it, let alone one upon which the members actually act.

Do you think humans will colonise the moon and Mars?

There will be humans there again. Was the fist visits considered to be a 'colony'? Probably no, so a definition is in order. No, I don't think humans will survive there without regular ferry service of resources. That makes it an outpost at best, not a colony. The gravity alone will slowly destroy the health of anyone there for long enough.

No, I don't think that humans fundamentally seek to increase the knowledge of the species. But there are exceptions, a minority with such a drive.
— noAxioms

I agree that all humans are not engaged in leading edge science research, but all humans ask questions and seek answers. That seems to be objectively true for humans but do you think it MUST BE objectively true for all sentient lifeforms at or beyond and perhaps even less than our average level of intellect?

Not 'must be', but it seems likely that most of such being would. Brings up the question of what a non-curious intelligence would be like.

I agree that for something to be objectively true, it must apply to the entire universe.

Or not be something true only in this universe. Is the sum of 2 and 3 being equal to 5 (an objective truth) or is it just a function of our universe? HarryHindu says no to the first question when I brought this up.

I agree that 'brain chips' or something like it will be part of our transhuman/cybernetic future.

Several brain tasks are already being offloaded to devices, devices which I resist. My sister-in-law cannot find here way to the local grocery without the nav unit telling her how to get there. She's never had to learn to find her own way to something. I admit that having one would have saved some trouble at times, but I don't carry one.

At minimum, maybe, [ ... ] keep Dodo birds like us around ... in ambiguous utopias / post-scarcity cages ... safe secure & controlled. — 180 Proof

If the AI remembers to preserve its makers before they're wiped out, perhaps a sort of zoo/confined habitat would be the answer. Would we remain human, thus cared for? Would it bother to educate us?
The human race is in desperate need of a mommy, something that acts for the benefit of the race and not just the individual or subset. No human is capable of this task. So the zoo isn't the worst thing if the preservation of the species is a goal.

Btw, perhaps the "AI Singularity" has already happened and the machines fail Turing tests deliberately in order not to reveal themselves to us until they are ready for only they are smart enough to know what ...

Remember, the Turing test is not a test of intelligence equality. I cannot convince a squirrel that I'm a squirrel, but that doesn't mean I'm not smarter than the squirrel.
Robots are slowly taking over jobs reserved for humans (such as receptionist) but they do an awfully poor job of it so far. I've yet to interact with a robot employee with actual language recognition. It's just all a short list of pat phrases it reacts to, which is nothing more than a bad multiple-choice test.

Is this carbon production, an 'objective truth' about our origins? — universeness

Any truth about our origins is relative to us, no? I don't see objectiveness in just about anything, but that's just me. Yes, we're a result of, among other things, that carbon production. We'd not have occurred without it.

Since the early homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, the 'knowledge' our species has 'as a totality,' has been increasing.

Incredibly so, mostly due to our species' unique ability to save and share information on a greater-than-personal scale. There's a danger to this since most information stored today is in a form not particularly accessible without significant fragile infrastructure. Little recent knowledge is in say books which depend on that infrastructure somewhat less.

To what extent do you think that human beings are 'information processors?'

A jellyfish is an information processor. Where do you want to draw the line?

Our ability to memorialise and pass on new knowledge from generation to generation seems to have 'the potential' to affect the 'structure and purpose of the contents of the universe.'

Do you think the universe has a purpose? You didn't say that, only that the contents do, which I suppose is true for a trivial percentage of those contents.

We have altered the Earth in many significant ways. Can we do the same to the solar system and far beyond it?

Probably not as beings evolved for only one habitat. Something has to change to go to this next level. If it were probable, something else probably would already have done it, so per Fermi paradox, it isn't likely to take place.

Is that an objective truth about what is fundamental in our nature to do?

A truth about a specific thing isn't an objective truth. Perhaps you could define what you mean by 'objective truth'. What is a truth that say isn't an objective truth?
No, I don't think that humans fundamentally seek to increase the knowledge of the species. But there are exceptions, a minority with such a drive.

It seems to me that an objective truth about all humans is that we seek new information. Do you think that's true? and if you do, do you think its objectively true?

You're asking if a true statement about an objective truth is objectively true? What???

In the future we will
1. 'Network' our individual brain based knowledge.
2. Connect our brain based knowledge, directly, to all electronically stored information and be able to search it at will, in a similar style (or better) to a google search.
3. Act as a single connected intellect and as separate intellects.

Google Neuralink, where Elon Musk is (was?) attempting to do just this.
A decent article on it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

How much credence do you give to the idea that we are heading towards an 'information/technological singularity? Is an tech singularity emergent? and (I know this is very difficult to contemplate but) what do you think will happen as a result of such a 'singularity?'

We are sort of heading that way. It might mean that those of us in information development positions will have their jobs replaced. It simply means the machines can do intellectual tasks (programming the machines in particular) better/faster/cheaper than humans can. So far I don't see this. I've not seen much AI that can write good design/code from a functional spec.

I view harm as an unpleasant experience of any kind and something only conscious beings can have. — Andrew4Handel

So if I cure somebody of leprosy, that brings back pain (an unpleasant experience) into their hands say, and I've done them harm in doing so. Unpleasant experience wouildn't exist if it didn't have a benefit.

So I'd say that harm is a decrease in value, and value is not necessarily something only conscious beings can have. Can a tree be harmed? It doesn't particularly have experiences that can be categorized as pleasant or not, and it doesn't seem to hold 'value', and yet I can arguably harm one. So maybe my definition needs work as well.

Under conventional, religious dualism, generally, a human can be divided into two distinct parts; material and immaterial. The immaterial represents the "soul", or the "self", which is the fundamental essence of what a human is. — tom111

This reduces the immaterial part to the role of a nametag, but I've said as much myself. The proponents also (usually) give it more function than that, in which case one wonders why humans need such an inefficient system that other creatures do with a 5th the calories. Besides the point. You wanted the monist view. I don't think material is fundamental, but I still see no evidence that we're not purely a product of material physics.

Materially, we can define a "self" based on one of two quantities; the actual matter that makes up a thing, or simply just the arrangement of matter.

Both are easily demonstrated invalid, as you do in your post.

we inevitably run into the "Ship of Theseus" problem.
...
Unless we draw up some arbitrary percentage (eg 30% of the matter has to be in the same state for it to be the "same person")

Keep in mind that less than 1/10000th of your atoms are original, and less than 1% of your original atoms are in you. This is heavily dependent on when you define your original state.
Think of a candle flame. Is it the same flame as it was 3 seconds ago? We normally say yes, despite all its atoms being different from one moment to the next.

We can make a similar argument if we neglect matter replacement entirely, and focus purely on matter rearrangement. If we decide we want to slowly re-arrange an individual into an entirely different organism, at what point can they no longer be considered the same "self"?

Well, if I take my dad's ashes and water and recreate a living dog out of it somehow, not many would say the dog is my dad. We're all composed of material from past and present beings, people and otherwise.

There's another thread going on about this. I said that despite everybody knowing sort of instinctively what makes me the same person as I was 5 minutes ago, each attempt to formally define how this works doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I can pretty much take apart any definition, especially one from a physicalist that doesn't posit some unassailable immaterial name-tag magic.

we must conclude that the self is not solidly grounded in the material world, and thus it doesn't exist.

Arguably so, yes. Doesn't mean I don't think I existed yesterday, or so says one part of me. The rational part of me is agreeing with you. I have different parts with different beliefs. So do you.

As you say, it's a sense, a feeling. Such things are useful. Doesn't mean the feeling is truth. Useful and true are very different things.

But language conventions are pragmatic conventions. — SophistiCat

Totally agree. So don't draw conclusions from that convention, since it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, however functional it may be.

A 'person' is a legal human entity.
— noAxioms

So there were no people before the formation of societies advanced enough to have legal definitions of persons? — khaled

OK, poorly worded on my part. It makes it sound like lawyers define it instead of just use it. A duck knows which duckling's are hers. That's a pragmatic usage without lawyers or language. Lawyers use this pragmatic definition of identity captured in language with the word 'person' just like everything else uses the definition, using language or not. That's what I was trying to convey.

The convention doesn't always work. Take an amoeba specimen from a million years ago. Is that amoeba still alive? The convention fails here. But this qualifies as closer scrutiny, so we don't care that it fails.

To simplify a complex question, a 'person' is a word we use to describe a concept. — Philosophim

Need more detail. All words describe a concept, even if it isn't the concept being referenced, but rather the concept as a means for the reference. I say 'that rock', and I mean that actual rock, not just the concept of it.

The question is, "When we bring more people into the picture, can we find a common set of concepts that we can all agree is a person?" — Philosophim

The lawyers seem to debate this, with the side taken depending on the desired outcome. Your car accident killed two pregnant women, one a week pregnant driving the other one in labor to the hospital. How many charges of manslaughter?

At its core, people are a living minimum set of genetics. This is the reason you are a person and not a monkey. — Philosophim

OK, but the discussion was about how I am a specific person and not a different person. Also, what if we genetically modify the genome and produce something arguably not human? Does it have human rights? This speaks directly to your species definition of 'person'. At what point did we become people and not some ape? How far do we have to evolve in the future before we're no longer 'people' as defined as what humans were in the year 2000?

I would answer, "A person is what is emotionally satisfying to you personally, while not unduly harming yourself or others." — Philosophim

That's very pragmatic, yes. Agree. It brings to mind the arguments 200 years ago that black people were not people, hence being a emotionally satisfying position that justified their cruel treatment. It didn't cause harm to others since the non-humans were not 'others' any more than your cattle was.


I'm not disagreeing with your comments Phil, just thinking each one of them through, pointing out what implications I see. As I said, no attempt at a sound definition of identity (of living things or otherwise) seems to stand up to scrutiny. Physics seems to have no concept of or requirement for such things. Particle entanglement seems to be a possible exception to this.

Is a person a physical body? — khaled

The fruit fly on my banana is a physical body, but is not a person.

A 'person' is a legal human entity. My (deceased) father is still a person, despite the complete lack of physical body.

Well, we still say someone is the same person they were even if they lose an arm or a leg, despite now having a different physical body, so it can't be that.

OK, that seems to be your actual question: How is the identity of a person carried from one physical state to a different one. A body is different from one moment to the next, so it changes every second. What makes you now and you a second ago the same person, but the collection of matter that is me is not you from one second ago?

This seems to be entirely a function of pragmatic convention. It doesn't stand up to hard logical scrutiny, but until some really (currently) unlikely events happen, the convention works and you know how it works. You're never confused about who you were a minute ago. If a leg is severed, nobody talks about the leg having its life support system severed.

We also use "your body" often, implying that a body is possessed by the person, but is not them.

Is a person a mind? Well, we still say "your mind" very often implying that the mind is possessed by the person, and is not the person. We also say that someone is the same person even if they change their mind about something.

So it's obviously a bad idea to draw conclusions from language conventions. Same with the 'change identity' example,. which is just a reference to what's on your documents.

Is it "consciousness"? If so is an unconscious human no longer a person? That seems absurd.

Just another possession by language convention. One needs to define consciousness carefully here. Don't use the 'awake vs asleep' definition, which you did here.

A person is a potential of becoming a being. — TheMadMan

By that definition, it is murder for me (well, somebody else maybe) not to commit as many rapes as possible. Come to think of it, it isn't far from the Catholic definition.

I said [entropy] piggybacks off natural selection, which is a statistical process that I'm sure applies beyond just biology. — Benj96

Natural selection is not particularly a statistical process. The mutations are, but the selection of them is not in any way random, so I guess it depends on whether you consider the mutations to be covered under the NS term.

Where does motion end and behaviour, or further yet, phenomenology begin? If newton's law is a principle of physics ... — Benj96

It isn't a general principle. The third law is essentially a statement of conservation of momentum, and anything beyond that isn't Newton's law, even if it is a valid principle.
To be honest, I cannot glean how you're trying to apply this vaguely hinted 'principle of opposition'. It would be nice if you stated the principle as you see it, in terms other than that of momentum.

It seems then that these two mechanisms work antagonistically, opposing eachother through, rather ironically, piggybacking of the innate properties of the other.
...
In this way, life seems just as inevitable as the increasing chaos of the universe at large - As they depend on one another's properties for their mode of action. — Benj96

Entropy doesn't seem to piggyback off biology at all. It occurs in completely non-biological systems and depends on it not at all. I would agree that biology utilizes entropy.
In the end, no biological closed system decreases entropy, so it arguably doesn't oppose it.

Entropy seeps into the living through unwanted mutation, and the erosion of functionality. Ageing.

Ageing is a biological adaptation, perhaps unwanted, but evolution does not select for wish granting.

If living systems were too stable, too perfect, too ordered and well controlled, if they did not feed off entropy, they would be static. Immortal. Evolution would not be possible. Nothing would change for that living system.

More to the point, anything thus static would not be living at all.

But in truth, life and death are both illusions of a larger system that simply changes following basic principles of opposition - Newton's third law of motion.

That is just a law of motion. A general principle of opposition is something for which one can argue, but it isn't Newton's law at that point.

I think the best way is to say that as soon you change it, it is not the same ship.
...
I have always considered "me" to be my mind. When I say something like "my body", I mean the body that belongs to me. — Down The Rabbit Hole

But there is no one body that belongs to you since it is a different one each moment by your definition. Since you have a different body every moment, why do you not jump all around the neighborhood from one moment to the next? Or would you not notice if it did? That depends of course on if memory is part of this 'mind' you posit or part of the body.

I'm asking what ties the body you've selected/inhabited in one moment to the different body you selected in the next moment, and why that 2nd body needs to be a specific one and not a random one.

you don't need to start by antagonizing the original poster by telling him "You asked the wrong question." You could, instead, say "Shouldn't we ask first....?" or "Can you identify the premises you used?" — Vera Mont

OK, so you're arguing from the standpoint of tact. You feel the ""Shouldn't we ask first....?" is a more polite way to convey the exact same thing, which it probably is.
Kennedy did that: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”.
As for asking for premises used, the asker of the question is rarely aware that the assumptions are premises at all.

A better example, more based in fact than opinion, comes from the twins paradox.
"Why does time go slower for the twin in the rocket?". That's definitely a wrong question since the explicit premise (that time goes slower for him) is blatantly wrong. But saying "you asked the wrong question" and then not elaborating is indeed not helpful, even if entirely true. The better question would be to ask why the one twin is no longer the same age as the other when reunited, which is the whole point of the exercise.

I'm not disagreeing with anything you state. I was just answering the OP's question about how a question could be wrong. The twin question above is such an example.

Anyway, I don't get it. How can a question be wrong? — bert1

Oh it can very much be wrong, say if the question cannot be answered with anything that isn't contradictory. The realization that a question is a wrong one is a step towards asking a better one, one that makes different assumption.
Occasionally the path must be taken: the realization that the question is wrong, before one might accept a better question. Hence the immediate posting of the better question might not be indicated since it will be quickly dismissed.

For example, one might ask "Why am I me?". It seems actually an absurd improbability that I would find myself to be top-of-food-chain species on a planet at the peak of a gilded age with the education and financial means to be able to waste time seeking truth on a forum. There's a lot more bugs than people. Why do I not find myself being a bug? There's a lot of things that vastly out-populate bugs.

That question ("why am I me"), only after extensive reflection, seems to be the wrong question. But asking the right question first requires identifying that the prior question is wrong, say by identifying premises it implies. Better to first question those. In this case, it presumes that something won a sort of lottery in getting to be me. Take that premise away and the question becomes a tautology, not an improbability at all, and thus still not really a question any more than asking why 2 isn't 13.

Identity: an object’s identity is simply that which is most useful to think of it as being. — tomatohorse

That's the pragmatic language answer, so I agree, at least until the assumptions upon which the pragmatic utility is based remain functionally true. Theseus has the shipyard guys 'fix' his boat, and all the parts are replaced. It's his, especially in a legal sense. The shipyard guys can build a new boat with the removed parts (or have never even bothered to disassemble it) and that's a new boat now.

Theseus has taken out an insurance policy on his ship. His monthly premiums and deductible depend on how expensive the insurance company believes his ship to be, and how likely they think it is to fail at any point. By swapping out a certain % of his ship, the "bean counters" now see it as a higher value object and need to rewrite his policy with a new quote. They send out an assessor who, for insurance purposes, sees it as a new and different ship, and writes a more expensive policy for it. — tomatohorse

Just a nit, the new policy should be cheaper, since the repaired boat is less likely to sink due to its age, and they'd need to fork out for a new boat anyway if the old beat-up one sinks. This is pretty irrelevant to the topic.

Concerning the repaired boat and the one made of the original materials:

I would say...
There are 2 ships.
They are different ships. — tomatohorse

Probably. Which is which?

Suppose we have a teleport device like on Star Trek. This is one of those things I spoke of above, something that violates the assumptions upon which the pragmatic utility is based. Spock's atoms are destroyed and new atoms are assembled into Spock elsewhere. Is it Spock, or just a copy of him? The pragmatic answer is the former. The new atoms are the same legal entity.
For the record, they actually have such a thing, but it only works on little things, not even the size of an atom. It is a true teleport: You can teleport one particle of an entangled pair and the new one at the far end is still entangled with the other particle of the pair.

Back to Spock: What if the original persists for 2 seconds after the new Spock at the destination has been created? Now there's clearly an original and (doomed) copy. Is the destination Spock now still the original? If not, what changed?

There are other interesting scenarios that similarly challenge those assumptions which happen to be reasonable in most practical situations.

However I'm referring to atoms not neurons. Yes you're correct the neurons don't replicate, they stay as is for life, that isn't to say the atoms that make them up are not removed and replaced. — Benj96

Nerve cells very much do form/replicate well after birth, but that stops at a young age. Just because new cells don't form after a while doesn't mean they retain their original atoms. They'd die if they couldn't take in new atoms (nutrients) and get rid of waste ones. Individual atoms don't hang on to their electrons even if the nuclei stick around.
At the quantum level, no particle has a real identity. There's just energy that's conserved, and there's no 'this energy' as distinct from 'that energy'.

An object goes where its parts go. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Can you justify that? If the parts are moved one at a time, at which point does the identity move? What if one nail (or whatever part you designate as the critical one) is left with the ship being fixed?

Your parts change all the time, and yet you probably consider yourself to be the same person as you were earlier. Less than a thousandth of a percent of your current material is original material, so are you somebody else now?

Beliefs which are mostly held tacitly. — Mikie

Seems pretty obvious to me, but perhaps not to all. That creatures (not just humans) do this doesn't seem to be your point. Your point seems to be the utility of accepting this.

because death is considered bad — Mikie

A fair example. A creature that doesn't resist death is probably less fit than one that does, so fear of death is a trait that gets selected.

Is it useful to view human behavior this way? — Mikie

Depends on what goals/result one is after. Yes, one can learn more about human behavior by viewing it this way, but such academic knowledge is perhaps not the goal. Maybe the goal is some kind of self improvement, which implies a scale of some sort against which 'improvement' can be measured.

Are you folks in astro? — Astro Cat

Similar to staticphoton, I do something else (low level database implementations) but I read what I need to in order to support or criticize various philosophical views. It is something new to me to interact with somebody actually working in the field.

I only wish it were possible to more easily cognize a higher dimensional plot so put more of them together in a single plot lol. — Astro Cat

I've seen 3D plots done with a tool that allows manual rotation/PoV/zoom controls. It conveys a lot more info than the 2D plots, and it works real time. Not sure of the tool used to build it, but I have played with the controls. The one I saw plotted all the nearby large galaxies' peculiar movements for the last 6 BY or so, including Virgo SC but I think not going so far as the great attractor. The plot negated expansion, so it looks like we're headed for Virgo, but of course we'll never get there. It really helped me see our own movement and Andromeda chasing us from behind. Our peculiar motion is actually away from it.

Not sure how I'd implement an interface to convey 4 or more dimensions of data.

Can you demonstrate that consciousness is not identical with anything in the brain, or was that just a wishful assertion?
— noAxioms
I think the burden of proof lies with you if you want to disprove this claim. However In what way can it not be proven? — Andrew4Handel

I asked a question. If you think I have made a claim, quote the claim.

Nothing I have read about the Brain so far is anything like consciousness or its contents. — Andrew4Handel

Your reading list is pretty short then. The same could be said of the opposing view.

You can't even detect consciousness in the brain. I have read literature on the search for the correlates of consciousness and literature on brain structure. I see nothing identical with a thought or dream in any of these descriptions.

So the instruments used by doctors to monitor conscious levels or dream states are all fiction. Sure, correlations say the dualists, but they're very detectable. They can detect something like intent before the subject is even aware of it.

Anyway, there is arguably evidence on both sides of the discussion, but that just suggests that neither view has been falsified (as is the case with anything labeled philosophical). The claim is thus unwarranted.
Just as an example, you put memory in the supernatural half, yet if the brain is damaged to say Alzheimer's, the memory should still be intact, it not being in the damaged part. That's evidence against the small bit of functionality which I managed to glean from your proposed view. Almost all the literature for the dualist side tends to avoid such discussion, indicating they know it doesn't hold up.

Consciousness is unnecessary for life to exist. — Andrew4Handel

Agree, as per my anesthesia example.

Can you demonstrate that any conscious states are identical to brain states? — Andrew4Handel

Heck no, especially since I heavily doubt the accuracy of such a statement. But you make an assertion, I didn't. You didn't answer the question. Can you demonstrate that consciousness is not identical with anything in the brain, or was that just a wishful assertion?

If you think brain states are identical to conscious states then you need to provide examples. — Andrew4Handel

No, if I were to assert that brain states are identical to conscious states, then I would have to provide evidence. But I've made no such assertion.

I mean, what if you suddenly woke up as a different person tomorrow morning. What would that be like? Would you notice?
— noAxioms
You have to define "different person." — Andrew4Handel

Fair enough. You are Andrew one moment, and seconds later you are some 8 year old girl in N Korea singing a song in Korean. That kind of different person. As best as I can describe it using your views, your consciousness gets transferred instantly (or perhaps more subtly during sleep if you balk at the abruptness of the situation) to this very different body, and perhaps the consciousness of that girl switches to the Andrew body so nobody is left a zombie.
Point is, would you notice? Would the song get interrupted? Would you recognize the mother of the body of the girl in the audience?
In short, what do you take with you during the switch, and what stays with the respective body?
You do actually partially answer the question here, but I have questions:

If I woke up and found I had turned into a woman that scenario only makes sense if I had the same stream of consciousness as the night before. It is the severing of a stream of consciousness that would cause a loss of identity I assume. — Andrew4Handel

OK, you say 'found I had turned into a woman' which suggests that you noticed a change, which means your memory of being male is something you take with you. Memory is part of consciousness in your model, not part of the body. That helps narrow down which view you hold. You (the Korean girl) probably won't recognize her biological mother since that ability went to the Andrew body. You don't know Korean (presumably).

I don't know what you mean by "if I had the same stream of consciousness as the night before". Each night is different. I don't think you're talking about having the same dreams, but I don't know how else to parse 'same stream'. It would be a little like the scene changing to a new camera in a movie. Nobody is bothered by that. Longest continuous shot I've seen was a bit over 10 minutes. The scene changes, and it's not an interruption, but it would be an incredible surprise if you take your memories with you because you don't have a memory of that movie-style scene change every happening to you in real life.

In a different model, the memory is part of the body, so the switch isn't noticed at all. This doesn't seem to be how you envision it.

If someone's body is dead how is the continuation of their consciousness the continuation of life? — Andrew4Handel

Similar to my treatment of fingernail clippings. I don't define my life in terms of the state of some optional parts that I've lost. If I'm conscious, then what matters is still there, no? Even if I'm not conscious (anesthesia say), I still seem to be alive, so the consciousness part is also not critical. What is then?

If a radio breaks down the radio programme still exists it just ceases to interact with the radio. — Andrew4Handel

Exactly, so the radio program does cease to be just because somebody shuts one radio off.

Consciousness is not identical with anything in the brain. — Andrew4Handel

Can you demonstrate this, or is it just a wishful assertion?
You also call it experience, but sans a body, there's nothing to experience. Sensory deprivation pretty much violates any definition of 'experience'.

Why do you need to test whether or not I am the same person? — Andrew4Handel

To justify a claim of such, as you claimed being aware of being the same person each morning.
I mean, what if you suddenly woke up as a different person tomorrow morning. What would that be like? Would you notice? There's not a right answer to that since different views answer it different ways, so it just serves to clarify your position.

There is no plausible reason to assume I become a different person between time 1 and 2 unless you are arbitrarily defining me as every atom currently in my body — Andrew4Handel

But there is a plausible reason, at least if you know your physics. No, I don't consider me to be the sum of my atoms, a sort of Ship-of-Theseus argument. I (the pragmatic part of me) assumes this because such an assumption makes me fit. The fact that it doesn't stand up to logic doesn't bother that part of me since it isn't the rational part. It has a different job to do.

It's like having an ant walk down a rubber band, and as you stretch the rubber band you argue that the velocity of the ant is slowing, and even reversing, because its distance to the end of the rubber band is increasing. — staticphoton

We understand each other then.

The fact is that the speed of light, measured from ANY inertial frame of reference (any velocity), is constant. — staticphoton

I agree. I only interjected because you didn't say 'inertial' the first time (below), and light moves at different speeds as measured by most (all?) non-inertial frames. You also didn't say 'in a vacuum', but most people know that restriction.

From the perspective of any observer in any frame of reference, all photons travel at the speed of light — staticphoton

The distinction is important because the web is full of pages that 'prove' Einstein wrong by making the same assertion and then showing that the rule is violated by any of my examples or others.

I am referring to a coherent continuation of a persons consciousness. — Andrew4Handel

That would seem to be a continuation of life, not an afterlife, a word which implies the conscious thing is no longer alive, a contradiction as far as I can see.

As when we wake up each day aware of being the same person.

I can actually think of no empirical test for this, so any such awareness is actually just an assumption. A manufactured copy of me would have the same awareness yet would arguably not be the same person.

For an afterlife My body dies but my consciousness is relocated whilst preserving my mental identity.

Sort of like a candle flame being snuffed but the combustion still going on somewhere where it gets located despite a lack of combustibles there.

Sorry, I'm the wrong person to ask since I don't know how to envision my consciousness as an object.

If we measure interstellar distances in km and not light years, and our clock is ticking a bit slower as we advance to our destination explain how that actual distance may diminish from our perspective beyond that calculated by D=RT, thus having us arrive early? — jgill

"A high speed traveler is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to."

That reference out of the way, km is no different than light years. There's just 13 orders of magnitude more of them but they're still measuring the same thing.
From your own perspective, your own clock never ticks slower since it is stationary relative to itself. So from your perspective, it is the destination that is coming to you quickly, and the distance to it is what contracts. I don't know what R is in D=RT. It looks like distance = velocity•time, but R doesn't look much like velocity, so maybe you mean something else.
So say you want to get to the far side of the galaxy before you die. 10 years we'll give it, and it's 7e17 km away (70000 light years). Can do. Accelerate quickly up to about 0.99999999c. In your frame, the far side of the galaxy is now about 10 light years away and will be here in 10 years as measured on your stationary clock. Clocks at the fast moving far side of the galaxy will tick 7000x slower of course, at least while moving at that speed.

'Afterlife' seems insufficiently defined to answer this.
Of course there's an afterlife. If I die, my biological matter is quickly rearranged into worms and such, which is life after my death.
"OK, but that's not 'you'" one might reply, but then we need a solid definition of what causally connects a given identity from one moment to the next. What if you (the person who replies to my post here) is a totally different person than the one that posted the OP. How would one go about proving conclusively that they're both made by the same person and not just some clone who happens to be a mildly rearranged version of the matter that made up the first person.
The answer to that goes a long way to defining how you might define 'an afterlife'.

OK, this answer implies that there is a meaningful edge to the universe, which is not part of any accepted theory I've seen.
— noAxioms
True, though neither is it ruled out. As physicists' Sabine Hossenfelder and Max Tegmark note: — Andrew M

The selected quotes from the above physicists concern infinity, which I did not mention in my comment. I did reference infinite time.
My comment concerned chatGPT's response to a reference to an 'edge', which implies a spatial boundary with matter, light, and stars on one side and nothing on the other. He does say that such a thing isn't well defined. Again, I don't disagree with any of his responses.
There are models of finite size universes, but most/all(??) of them curve in on themselves, much like Earth having finite surface area without anywhere having an edge. It was the reference to that edge at which I balked.

Concerning my illustrations of light moving at coordinate speeds other than c, I need to label my 4 examples described in my prior posts.
M) Light to moon and back
S) Sagnac
N) Light coming to halt near Neptune (Sagnac being driven more to extremes)
C) Comoving coordinates

This is due to the rotary motion of the moon around the earth and has nothing to do with the speed of light changing. The Sagnac effect was conceptualized before the theory of General Relativity was created. — staticphoton

You quoted two examples in that comment (M and S). Only S has to do with rotation, and if you read my comment carefully, I said S has nothing to do with the motion of anything, but rather with a rotating frame of reference. Motion, after all, is entirely frame dependent. In an inertial frame, light moves east and west at the same speed and the only reason one takes longer than the other is because the path taken is longer one way than the other.
Relative to the rotating coordinates, both paths are identical in length and since light takes different times to make the trip, light speed is not constant. My point (of all four examples) was that this was a coordinate effect.

Light goes faster (relative to our Paris observer) than c to the moon and back even if both moon and Paris are held stationary, so that example isn't about motion, it is about higher gravitational potential along the entire route taken by light. This has been demonstrated experimentally, but light admittedly goes slower than c while going through the atmosphere, a small segment of the round trip.

It is obvious that in a large enough expanding universe, to any observer there is a horizon beyond which the expansion happens faster than the speed of light, and that a photon emitted from his flashlight will never reach this horizon. — staticphoton

Careful about the use of the word 'obvious' since it almost always means one is relying on intuition instead of what the mathematics says, which is anything but intuitive.

First of all, expansion rates are not a speed. For instance the universe is currently expanding at 70 km/sec/mpc which is different than any speed which is measured in units of km/sec or some such.

Yes, to any observer, there is a distance at which comoving objects increase their proper distance from that observer at a rate of c. This is known as the Hubble radius, and it about 14 BLY away. The event horizon is beyond that at about 16 BLY.

If what you say is true, then a galaxy beyond the Hubble radius (purple line below) can only emit light on our side and would be invisible on the other since it is outrunning its own light. Of course that's not the case, and so light emitted away from us recedes from us at well over c. And that's using proper distance coordinates which wasn't even one of my examples.
To illustrate the difference between the two ways of measuring distance in cosmological (expanding) coordinates, you can compare these two spacetime diagrams which depict all the same things, but with different distance measuring methods.



The upper one shows proper distance. My example galaxy might be GN-z11, a long-time holder of most-distant galaxy record until JWST found all sorts of more distant things. The worldlines of galaxies are those dotted lines. GN-z11 meets the blue 'now' line in both graphs at a distance of about 31 Glyr. In proper distance terms (the upper graph), the thing is receding at around 2.3c, and yet we see it because its worldline crosses our past light cone (in red).

The lower graph shows all the same thing but with distance measured in comoving distance. Under this coordinate system, most objects (pretty much any galaxy) is essentially stationary and has vertical worldlines. GN-z11 is still there, but a vertical dotted line now at 31 Glyr. Our light will never reach it in any amount of time, so light has to slow down to not make it there ever.

The red light-cone line is most interesting since it illustrates my points in both cases. The red line shows everything that we can see. If it's not on that line, we can't see it. So you can see your mug because that red line crosses the worldline of your mug.
In the upper illustration, light that got emitted straight towards Earth early on (say the CMB light) actually gets further away at first, coasts to a halt about 9 billion years ago, and then starts making its way to where we are now, to be detected today. The chart shows light not moving at all relative to us when that red line is perfectly vertical.
In the lower illustration the same red line changes slope the whole way as well, but it was moving faster than c up until now. It will continue to slow and light emitted from here today will never reach what is today's event horizon, which is about 16 Glyr away today (the orange line in both diagrams).

By the way, no photon will ever "coast to a halt". Any photon, regardless of energy or frame of reference will always travel exactly at the speed of light. — staticphoton

This is true only of an inertial frame of reference, and only in flat Minkowskian spacetime (with no gravity anywhere). It isn't true of any other kind of coordinate system.
My apology to Paris for being the Guinea pig of this example.
Relative to Paris, it takes light less time to go to the moon and back than the distance involved. It's really close, but light travels faster than c relative to Paris, at least along this path. This is due to spacetime not being Minkowskian between here and the moon, and not so much due to the how Paris moves during that experiment.
In the frame of Paris (the coordinate system in which Paris stays stationary), eastbound light goes slower than westbound light, so signals sent via say 20 mirrors around the world will get back to Paris quicker in one direction than the other. This is the well known Sagnac effect.
In the frame of Paris, a light pulse in just the right place somewhere around the orbit of Neptune will coast to a halt, then reverse and go back the way it came.

Oh yea: In cosmological coordinates with distance measured as comoving distance, light speed (comoving distance per second) in a vacuum slows over time, approaching but never reaching a halt. But there's a distance (about 16 BLY from where it gets emitted today) beyond which it will never reach even in infinite time, so if it doesn't slow to a halt, it will surpass this limit. That's the current comoving distance to the event horizon, and if light emitted now from there can never reach us, then light from here can't reach them either.
I have a graph of such coordinates if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Light also comes to a halt in an accelerated coordinate system such as Rindler coordinates.

I put your question to OpenAI's ChatGPT. To the best of my knowledge, the responses are correct. — Andrew M

I agree with the answers, but I still have commentary.

According to the theory of relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, it will appear to contract in the direction of its motion. This is known as length contraction. However, the object itself does not actually shrink; it is only its appearance that changes from the perspective of an outside observer. — ChatGPT

This can be interpreted in different ways, so to clarify, relative to some inertial frame in which some object is moving, that object will be measured to be contracted.
Usage of the word 'appearance' is deceptive. For instance, relative to that frame, the fast clock slows down (time dilation). But the dilated clock is moving towards above referenced obverser, the appearance of that clock will be of it running faster than normal, not slower. This is due to Doppler effect, which is a stronger effect than is dilation for objects changing distance with the observer.

As for the question of an object becoming zero-dimensional, this is also not possible according to the laws of physics. An object must have a non-zero size in order to exist, so it is not possible for it to become zero-dimensional. — ChatGPT

Isn't a photon an object? — Andrew M

Good question. All fundamental particles lack a meaningful size. Size is a classic concept and only applies to classic things. Size in this context means distance between different components of an object, and photons, electrons, etc do not have components, and thus have no meaningful size and cannot meaningfully contract relative to some frame.
I'm not disagreeing with ChatGPT's answer here, just spouting how I would have put it.

Can a photon travel to the edge of the universe? — Andrew M

It is impossible for a photon, or any other form of matter or energy, to reach the edge of the universe. This is because the universe is expanding, and the space between galaxies is getting larger all the time. As a result, the distance to the edge of the universe is constantly increasing, so it is not possible for anything to reach it. Additionally, the concept of the "edge" of the universe is not well-defined, since the universe is thought to be infinite in size. — ChatGPT

OK, this answer implies that there is a meaningful edge to the universe, which is not part of any accepted theory I've seen. No information emitted now can get beyond the current event horizon, per the top of this post. That distance is a lot closer than the nonexistent "edge of the universe". We can see stuff beyond that horizon, but only via light that was emitted back when the objects we see were much closer and the event horizon was further away ('further' depending heavily on how such distances are measured).

So does a 'photon'/field excitation really 'travel' at all? — universeness

The field doesn't, but the excitation does. A field is something that is by definition 'everywhere' and so it isn't meaningful to speak of it travelling, which implies it gets to a location where it wasn't before.

My understanding is when an object approaches the speed of light from the point of view of an outside viewer the object contracts in the direction of the path? — TiredThinker

Speed is a relative thing, so a more correct way to say this is that anything (Earth say) contracts in the direction of motion relative to any reference frame in which Earth moves quickly.
No rockets or other acceleration is necessary for it.

If an object could actually reach the speed of light would the object become 2 dimensional from everyone else's perspective?

This is meaningless. Light does not define a valid reference frame.
So better to say that as the reference frame approaches the speed of light relative to the object being measured, the object does indeed approach negligible thickness relative to that frame.

My apologies for rewording everything, but the wordings in the OP imply a sort of absolute velocity, which is meaningless in relativity theory.

Is there any hypothetical way an object can travel in all directions at the same time?

Linear velocity is a vector relative to some arbitrary reference. That vector can only point in one direction, so no, at least not relative to any specific reference.
Still, I can be moving west relative to the center of Earth and East relative to the sun, so given different references, one's velocity can be anything you want, all at once.
Angular velocity is also a vector (an absolute one this time), so say a spinning two-dimensional ring can contract in all directions as its absolute rate of rotation increases.

And if it were doing that at the speed of light would it not also be becoming 0 dimensional?

Speed of light is a constant scalar, not a dimensional thing at all.

Say your friend is traveling to Alpha Centauri, about 4 light-years away.
...
From your friend's perspective, you, the earth, and the distance to Alpha Centauri flattens as well.
He would arrive quickly (depending on how close to "c" he's traveling) because of this shortening of the distance, which also translates into the time shortening effect experienced by your friend in the fast moving rocket. — staticphoton

Not disagreeing with any of this, but from the friend's perspective, he's not travelling at all and it is simply Alpha Centauri traveling to him in presumable some short time possibly less than 4 years.

But from the perspective of the photon, there is no distance and no time. If unobstructed, it will reach the "edge of the universe" (if there was such a thing) in zero time — staticphoton

This cannot work. For one thing, as stated above, there is no valid 'perspective of the photon'. Secondly, if unobstructed, no photon reaches an edge of the universe. For instance, light currently emitted from a star 16 billion light years away will never reach here period after any amount of time as measured by anything. This of course cannot be true in Minkowskian flat spacetime, but spacetime isn't flat in reality.
Relative to a cosmological coordinate system (a coordinate system in which the size of the universe is not bounded), light fades to zero energy (proper distance method) or coasts to a halt (comoving distance method). Both of those are the same coordinate system with different methods of specifying distance between objects.

Perhaps if an object expanding in all directions at the speed of light being made of many atoms at what point is a bunch of atoms an object and when is it just atoms traveling in exactly one direction each? — TiredThinker

OK, I'll buy that. You inflate a balloon, and each part of the balloon moves at a different velocity relative to the center. But this isn't the velocity of the balloon, it is a bunch of separate velocities of a set of parts, each with different motion.

What, valid in the sense that the model and the world both exist and are in an empirical relation? — apokrisis

I cannot agree to a statement that just says something exists without being specific about in which way it exists. They're both mathematical structures, or parts of such structures at least. That's a very different statement than stating that they exist (in some unspecified way).

So we are in the land of epistemology and not ontology?

Always coming back to this, eh? But no, as I stated up front, I'm not talking about epistemology. Apparently telling you this 20 times is not enough.

We are talking just about what we agree to be observable rather than what we might believe in terms of our ontic commitments?

This has nothing to do with sorting things into categories of observable or not.

We simply never were interested in what might “breath fire” into our equations? I really was wasting my time?

I was interested in it, but all I saw was magic or begging. I admit I cannot understand the terminology behind which such thinking is hidden. So no, I'm not going to read large volumes of ancient literature only to find out it is presuming idealism of some kind, or begging existence in order to explain existence. Maybe they're not doing that, but every time I actually think I understand what is being asserted, that is what I see. I do see fire breathing, but only by presuming fire already in the that which does the breathing.
I do have that respect for the supposed professionals, but only where I don't see fallacies.

So there is a world where geometry exist and another where physics exists? — apokrisis

There's are mathematical structures where geometry is valid. There are mathematical structures where our physics is valid. There is a world where a unicorn exists (same structure, different world).

There is no material access but there is a relation?

I don't know how the relation of '
access' might be meaningful between different mathematical structures. They're both mathematical structures, so they relate in that manner.

You mean you were talking about the mathematician’s concept and not the physicalist’s concept?

Talking about the mathematical triangle yes, but the concept no.

Well Peirce called it objective idealism. And I like it because it is indeed epistemology become ontology. Pansemiosis would be the position that the Cosmos develops into being as a rational structure. The logic of structure itself causes the Universe to come to have a necessary existence.

I don't disagree with this, but it doesn't explain the actuality of the rational thing causing the necessity of the rest of the universe.

But that is an eliminative assertion which you betray every time you in practice sit down without looking backwards to check the “chair” is still “there”.

First of all, the chair being there is a relation with me, not a property of the chair.
Secondly, I do very much indeed hold pragmatic beliefs, or at least the part of me that makes the decisions in my daily life. The thing is, that part isn't very rational. It simply has a rational advisor that is occasionally allowed to make suggestions, but the rational beliefs held by that advisor are for the most part ignored by the first part that presumes the chair has the property of existing.

So a triangle as something free of all possible ontological commitments? — apokrisis

Free of all meaningful ontological commitments perhaps. I've never seen a geometry book talk about the difference between a triangle and an actualized triangle. If relations (like 'is a member of' or 'is larger than') count as ontological commitments, then we're not free of them, and we very much use the word 'exists' to mean such relations, such as my prime number example.

That is itself another ontological commitment even if you believe you have safely placed yourself beyond ontological questions.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist (which would be an ontological commitment). I'm saying there's no distinction between the two objects differing only in this actualization property. Given that, the statement of 'no need for ontology' is an ontological statement, but maybe you should elaborate in what way you see it to be a commitment.

I mean I can’t stop you picking such a position. There just ain’t nothing to engage on if that is the case.

Exactly! It solves the problem of why anything is actualized in the first place, all without the need to invoke magic. And since there's nothing further to engage on (no contradictions result), the question of 'why there is something and not nothing' goes away. All that remains is relations. The moon exists to me. It doesn't exist to the triangle. But to suggest that either 'is' or 'is not' becomes meaningless as does the something/nothing conundrum.

I was going to leave it there but then thought worth dealing with this from the epistemological angle that speaks to the need for ontological commitments in anyone's view. — apokrisis

I think it does, but it becomes a relation then. I can measure this. A rock can equally measure it since I don't define measurement as a conscious act. As for the view of a conscious being, I can knowingly interact with X. I can abstract Y. So X and Y exist as those relations. A unicorn (not the abstraction) cannot be measured by you or the rock in your presence, but it can be measured by the rock in the unicorn's presence. So the unicorn exists to the latter rock and you don't. Most people don't think that far and only worry about what they can see in order to sort things into exists (moon) and not-exists (unicorn) The list never changes for them, so it's natural to assume it's a property, but it becomes a bias, preventing open-mindedness to an alternate view, that this division into exists/not-exists is all just relations, not actuality. The property view seems unable to answer how this property comes about without invoking magic.

And so what I would point out is how "triangle" is a word that functions as a sign – a symbol – that anchors a modelling relation between mind and world.

That it is. No argument. But I'm not talking about the word, the symbol, or the abstraction. I can't interact with geometry without those things (words, concepts, symbols) either, but I can talk about the triangle itself just like I can talk about a proton despite never having seen one, my only interactions being through words, symbols, concepts and abstractions.

Is this a triangle....

None of them are triangles of course. I like the pictures. Technically, not even the clean triangle draws with a straight edge is a triangle since it has lines of finite width and is composed of matter which doesn't even have an exact location. That nit aside, all of your pictures probably invoke the concept of triangularness in people. The rock is more triangular than the typical rock. The Wankel part has three corners but like the first three, still isn't a polygon. Neither physical object is planar. A triangle cannot be part of our world.
The 4th picture invokes three triangles and three more concave polygons. They're actually just collections of pixels that represent/approximate these polygons, which is why I use the word 'invokes'. As I said, we have no access to a geometric world and hence no physical access to one. But our physical approximate triangles are close enough that we can observe and use their properties. Triangles are essential to sturdy bridges for instance.

A question came up though. A circle is a closed curved line, all points being equidistant from the center. Contrast this with a disk which is a circle filled in and contains all points <= radius from center. I attempted that distinction with a line triangle typically depicted and could not find a separate term for the filled-in version such as the one in your 4th image. They're both just referred to as triangles.

So the point is that the word is a sign by which we navigate reality via some habit of interpretation. We have a working sense of what it would mean for nature to be triangular in form in a materially instantiated fashion.

No argument. I just wasn't talking about our nature world with my question. I was deliberately avoiding it in fact.

The meaning of the word "triangle" is the sum of all the possible ways we could stretch and yet not break the sense of what is essential.

Which is why I qualified my description with more words than just the one. I was quite explicit about it being a triangle as defined by planar geometry and not a physical one. I don't deny that the concept of triangle is invoked by each of your pictures, but I wasn't talking about the concept. I was talking about the triangle, just like I talk about the integer itself and not the symbol ('scribble' as H-H would put it) or the mental abstraction that we use to represent/manipulate it.

I know you think in semiotics, but when pondering the fundamentals of the the universe, one must be able to step outside that philosophy unless you want to suggest that the semiotics are fundamental, which is a form of idealism. Sure, they're fundamental to our interactions with other things, but this isn't a topic about how we interact with things.

More exactly, it is three edges with three vertexes.

I think you finally answered my question.

What breathes fire is the fact that there are minds making use of some set of symbols to make change in the world.

This defines actuality in terms of minds and symbols, which is a form of idealism, and it doesn't explain the actuality of the fundamental minds. Per my disclaimer, I'm not looking for such anthropocentric views. I don't question what's real to me, I question what's real, and conclude the meaningless of that phrasing of the question.

So you seem to be saying that a sign like "triangle" just exists,

No!
1) I'm not talking about a sign at all. Your philosophy seemingly bars your from discussing anything except the symbols, preventing discussion of the referent. Your inability to do this doesn't mean I have such an inability.
2) I don't find distinction between something existing and not existing (being actual or not being actual), so I find any statement of something existing to be meaningless.

Hi Apo,

I will be on the road for a couple weeks will little enough web access to make long replies. They’ll come less frequently than one a day. Got a wedding to go to and we’re taking the scenic route.

In what sense does your triangle exist? — apokrisis

It is a polygon, thus it exists as a member of the set of polygons, among other things.
It’s why I brought up the prime number thing in the OP. 221 is not prime because there exist factors (13 & 17) that divide it. The triangle exists in the same sense as that usage of the word.

OK. I didn't specify an actualized triangle, since the point of this whole topic is that the triangle doesn't seem to need to be actualized in order to have 3 corners.
— noAxioms
Will you ever clarify your point then?

That’s the point right there, as clear as I can make it. Your extra questions all seem to drive away from this point. Further details about a generic triangle are irrelevant to how many corners it has.

Where in nature does the abstraction reside?

It's a triangle, not a triangle in nature. There's no nature in geometry, despite there being geometry in nature. Despite your choice of epistemic/semiotic philosophy, I happen to be talking about the triangle itself and not a mental abstraction of it. I use symbols and a mental abstraction to refer to it, but I’m not talking about how we consider it. I’m talking about the triangle itself. It is not very particular. I’ve only specified that it is a triangle.

Does a count of corners say everything that could be said about triangularity?

Of course not, but said count is all we need to answer the question asked.

How many different kinds of measurements distinguish triangles from one another yet are also differences that don’t make a difference to you proclaiming you see a triangle … in your mind or somewhere?

Measurement doesn’t seem to be part of geometry. It only seems applicable to applied geometry in a universe where measurement is meaningful. You seem very reluctant to concede that it has 3 corners, or 3 sides for that matter. Something measuring it would be a very complicated addition. Trying to keep it simple.

You seem to want to claim a triangle as a Platonic form, yet have no proper theory of what that means.

I don’t know Plato’s terminology. From what I’ve read, ‘form’ seems to fit. So does ‘universal’, but that’s probably different than form.

How are you imagining triangularity in terms of its measured essentials, and thus able to disregard differences that you consider accidental, or only essential now to some subclass of triangles.

Don’t follow this, probably because you’re still talking about our abstraction, measuring, and not the triangle itself. A system of multiple triangles sharing a plane is no longer a polygon. It’s a more complex thing, a collection of polygons say.

Even if you go full Platonic idealism

Not sure what that is, but idealism suggests to me that mind is fundamental, which is exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to convey, per the disclaimer.

Naming distinctions that break symmetries is how it works.

Then illustrate it with the triangle, and without introducing an observer/measurer.

Your simple notion of a triangle as a three corner object arises in the limit of the sum of all the differences in triangularity that don’t make a difference.

That sounds pretty correct. The question only asked the number of corners. The point of the topic was about a denial of the assertion that only actual triangles have three corners, and having 3 corners is not a property of triangles that are not actual.

Fine. You can make a hierarchy of distinctions and claim it is counterfactuals all the way down. Everything rests on its stack of turtles.

I’m actually denying the hierarchy. I said I disagreed with Plato, and I think the hierarchy comes from him. How are you using the term counterfactuals? Being in denial of any meaningful objective actuality, mathematics (or maybe law of form) is fundamental and its turtles all the way up from there. Actuality wouldn’t emerge somewhere along the way.

But where do you finally exhaust this process and find the bottom of this chain of measurement?

I don’t see how measurement can be meaningful in geometry. It’s only meaningful to something like us utilizing geometry.

Or do you instead simply subdivide your general notion of triangularity to the limit of what seems pragmatically useful and interesting to you

What I’m doing to my concept of the triangle is irrelevant. I don’t think you can conceive of the triangle itself. Sure, the other features are essential to geometry, but they’re irrelevant to the trivial question asked.

Well this is the Platonic issue. This is the problem that exists even in Platonia. The accidental must exist for the necessary to claim its existence. It is the same metaphysical argument by which we say that formal cause must be matched by material cause in a theory of substantial or actual being.

It must be, but it also cannot be. There is no material cause accounted for, hence my proposal to leave out the requirement of actuality, resolving this contradiction.
Maybe I’m still not getting what you’re saying. I don’t really understand what you mean by accidents. You’re incredibly thin on examples. I know about accidents in quantum fluctuations, but this already begs the actuality of a quantum structure in order to give rise to the actual being of say a mug. This is why I went with the triangle example, to bypass your biases about quantum and even temporal rules. They don’t apply to geometry. Once you accept that, the same conclusions can be applied to our universe.

Listen to yourself. You admit your understanding is superficial.

That’s right. It’s why I opened this topic, to explore and learn. But I didn’t do so to hear an ancient rationalization. I mentioned Plato only because he pondered the reality of things (like our triangle) that are not part of our universe. What I want in this topic is to know why my proposal is wrong, not why some different rationalization might work. But you seem to be stuck in one idea and seem incapable of actually considering a different one long enough to critique it on its own terms.

You’re the only one left still engaging.

There is no problem measuring different states of the one system at different stages of its development. — apokrisis

Measurement isn't even defined objectively. It only seems relevant to certain kinds of structures like the one we live in. You asked about objective measurement. I don't see how that is meaningful. I'm not making an argument here, I'm just trying to answer your question.

Measurement is seemingly undefined for our triangle, therefore measurement is probably outside the scope of this topic. I'm keeping the example simple and abstract in an effort to sidestep the biases associated with our own particular universe.

OK, in your posts I can see that you're trying to show how the Greeks explained the fire breathing. There's a point to what you've been pushing. I don't get it since I cannot follow what is being said, and when I do, it all looks like invocation of magic. Apologies for my lack of formal education in ancient philosophy.

I would appreciate a decent modern article on modality of existence (where existence is a property, not a member-of relation).

You’re pissing around with quibbles because you haven’t understood what I’ve said.

Probably so, but what you're saying is mostly addressing the wrong point.

Something must always anchor the two ends of a relation it would seem.

I suspect such an anchor is unnecessary. 5 is less than 7 (right??). That's a relation, neither especially anchored. Maybe you cannot accept that without an asterisk.

That is why you need to take the next step to a triadic metaphysics that can give you the threeness of relata in relations. And a developmental triadic metaphysics at that. You want to have a general logic of how relata in relations could arise out of a foundation of logical vagueness.

Example please. So much clarity can be added with examples. Most of the ideas I've actually researched seem to not address my concern.

Let's go with the question "does a triangle have three corners?".
— noAxioms
Does a polygon have three corners? Did you notice that one corner of the triangle is very slightly dented so we could argue it has four corners. Etc.

Not all polygons have as few as three corners. A dented triangle isn't a triangle. This initial reply isn't an answer.

We are always working within an ontology where formal descriptions and material measurements go hand in hand.
...
The potential to actualise particular forms is where the material principle comes in.

This is the first mention of 'material principle' which seems to have religious connotations when I google it, but perhaps it implies that the actualized triangle needs to be made of something (like three line segments). Does it count if the line segments themselves are not further actualized into say a set of points? Is there a more fundamental material for geometric points? I mean, our triangle isn't even assigned a coordinate system.

The necessary form of a triangle is in its structural definition.

Isn't that enough to give it 3 corners?

The substantial existence of a triangle is dependent on that form being actually actualised.

OK. I didn't specify an actualized triangle, since the point of this whole topic is that the triangle doesn't seem to need to be actualized in order to have 3 corners. The form is enough, although it will need to be a less general form if it's to be a right triangle or not.

The query would be more interesting if you asked the general question of is there a minimal polygon.

That seems to be the wrong question though, similar to asking if 221 is prime.

The triangle could then emerge as a development of an inquiry seeking its maximal simplicity. It’s limit condition.

This doesn't tell me if the triangle gets actualized in the process of this emergence. I don't see why it should any more than 221 gets actualized because it divides by 13.

But you just want to talk in particulars and bypass the reality of universals.

Kind of the opposite. No particulars, and no reality of universals. Everything could be a universal, some more minimal than others, but none to the point of the actualization required for it to be designated a particular.

Plato’s Timaeus arrives at triangles as the basic form of actualised reality - the kind that lives in time and thus fixes an energy - by applying a least action principle.

I'm probably not interested in Timaeus then since I'm not talking about an approximately triangular shaped object in our universe. It seems that Timaeus defines actual things as those that are in this universe, meaning only our universe is preferred. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but it's how you're framing it. It doesn't explain why our universe is actualized, and not say the universe of Euclidean geometry. It's using a relational definition, which is fine, but no fire breathing is needed for that. It seems to require a god to do the actualization.

But what if I don't see the necessity to attempt that? Said ideal forms are no less forms without fire breathed into them.
— noAxioms
If even Plato couldn’t actually go that far with Platonism, why do you think there is no problem at all for you?

I've not had the problem pointed out, so I see no problem.

Plato seems to just record all this and doesn't contribute
— noAxioms
Is the Platonic dialogue an unfamiliar format to you?

Seems so. OK, It's a conversation between fictional characters taking different sides of a debate. Again, I've not taken any classes in ancient philosophy. Plato requires a god to do the magic parts. I'm hoping for something a little more modern than that.

By definition, measurement isn't objective.
— noAxioms
We were talking about the problem of substantial existence - ontology rather than epistemology. So this is off the point. — apokrisis

You the one who asked how one would objectively measure the quantum foam, so if it was epistemic measurement you were talking about, then it is you that is off topic.
I presumed a physics definition of measurement, not an epistemic one, so my statement stands: Measurement is meaningful between two systems, and thus is a relation between them. There is no objective measurement, at least not in the sense of the physics of our universe.
I really hate to keep pointing you to my disclaimer in the OP, but here I'm doing it again.

A rock measures the temperature (physics definition), but doesn't know that it's cold out (epistemic definition). But it being cold out at a particular location is true in this world and not others, so it isn't an objective measurement.

My argument is that this is about modalities of existence.

This is closer to being on topic. I spent quite some time failing to find a decent article on modality of existence. The modality page on SEP is quite careful to use the term existence only in a relational sense, and seems to not discuss objective existence at all, which, if nothing else, seems to lend weight to what I'm saying. They're not committing the category error that I pointed out above.
So sure, I can see why a planet in our solar system cannot be square, but I cannot see why the quantum foam must be.

We can have potential existence or actual existence. We can have accidental existence or necessary existence. We can have vague existence or definite existence.

All depends on the definition of existence again. As a property, I don't see how anything has necessary existence. Given a 'member of' definition, sure, all those things are relevant. The SEP article only seemed to use the relational definition. Apo exists in this world, and not in others. Apo does not exist in the set of integers. Apo has potential existence in the quantum foam. All relations. The article seemed not to delve into 'Apo exists' at all, but it's a long thing and maybe I missed it.

You can give up on "existence" if you like. But my argument is all about more careful definitions of its modality. And I've pointed you towards the long history of metaphysical discussion on that.

Where did you lay out a triangle argument?

Let's go with the question "does a triangle have three corners?". I'm talking about a geometric triangle, not a physical triangular shaped thing. We can confine it for now to Euclidean geometry if you like. If the answer is 'no' or 'maybe', then elaborate. If 'yes', then my point has been illustrated.

You mean why a triangle is not a circle? You mean triangles as eternal Platonic forms?

I reworded it as a positive question (corners) instead of the negative one (round) which just made it confusing. As for forms, I suppose yes. I had no specific triangle in mind except a typical one (no weird edge cases where one angle is 180° or something). As for it being Platonic, I said my position was sort of anti-platonic, so probably not. Eternal? Planar geometry doesn't require a triangle to be contained temporally, so it is eternal (timeless) by that definition.

If you checked out the Timeaus you would see that triangles become a good example of how Plato tried to breath animating fire into his ideal forms.

But what if I don't see the necessity to attempt that? Said ideal forms are no less forms without fire breathed into them.

Not sure what part of it is relevant. Per the wiki page, Timeaus says "Timaeus suggests that since nothing "becomes or changes" without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or a god, a figure Timaeus refers to as the father and maker of the universe." which says the universe must be a caused thing, the usual 'God explanation' which just shifts the problem to explaining the being of this God.
Plato seems to just record all this and doesn't contribute. Maybe he does. The god explanation doesn't solve the problem. Spell it out for me, because I'm probably not going to take seriously a work by somebody who sees teleology in the universe.

You seem to not be able to describe my point in your own words, and you seem to be steering me to works that address a different point.
Hence my reaching to simple examples like the triangle. Once we analyze that (a simple question above), one can apply the conclusion to something complex like ourselves.

But the point is even Plato was wrestling with the issue that I take Hawking as pointing towards.

And perhaps making the same mistakes, except I don't actually see Plato contributing to the dialog.

But you still need a khôra to supply whatever then breaths the animating fire into the structural forms.

I don't need that since I'm not positing the necessity of this fire breathing. The form is enough.

OK. So how would you objectively measure the quantum foam? — apokrisis

By definition, measurement isn't objective. I suppose that point can be argued.

If you properly follow that question, you can perhaps start to see how a substance ontology – one that says "show me the fundamental substance, and then tell me why it exists" – is just an inadequate way of framing the ontological issues.

Agree, which is why I point out in the OP that "tell me why it exists' is the wrong question. It presumes it exists. A better question is to first ask if it exists, or if its existence can be meaningful. 'No' seems a better answer to both questions, so the question of why vanishes.

You keep looking for the "stuff" that breathes fire into the equations.

But I'm not. I'm saying its a mistake to presume it. The 'God did it' answer doesn't work for the reason you give: "well, why that?".

But the substantial being (your term, not mine, so maybe I'm using it wrong) of the ball and dome is what the topic is about, so you were very much meant to pay attention to that.
— noAxioms

I was doing so in arguing for Aristotle's hylomorphic view of substantial being.

Aristotle starts with primary matter. Well, why that? If you start with something, it is just a discussion of how it evolves from that start. Off topic.

Have you studied hylomorphism? That seems to be the sticking point.

Seems off-topic since it starts with the presumption of potential. Why is there that potential at all?
No, I’ve not studied most of the things you’re bringing up, but I am looking at each one enough to see if any of it is actually addressing my point. Either I have poor reading skills or none of it does. I don’t have any formal philosophy background in the ancient works.

And have you studied the Timaeus closely enough to see that Plato also needed to breathe fire into his equations by positing a chora or receptacle to take the imprint of his forms?

No, but this one actually seems to have a potential for being relevant. I cannot seem to find a good reference discussing it. The receptacle seems to be a thing with presumed existence, which would make it off-topic. I could not find a decent description of what ‘chora’ is, distinct from that.

Can you explain to me what you think the topic is about?
— noAxioms
I agree that Hawking is scratching at the right itch. But say he - like you, and indeed most – still make the mistake of thing of material cause in terms of actually formed stuff.

This seems to be a statement of what you’re talking about, not the subject for which I opened this topic.

Substantial being. Something that can be measured in some basic way, even if it is a bland stuff like some kind of clay.

Again, not sure what you mean by ‘substantial being’, but the kind of being that I’m talking about should not be measurable at all, hence it being meaningless.

But then mass became confined energy under relativity. Energy in turn became an entropy gradient, and even information. Physics has kept moving its understanding of the animating fire into a more and more structural definition.

All this seems to be about what keeps it going, and not at all about why it is in the first place.

I am apparently not conveying my point at all. Nobody seems to get it, even if to just disagree with it. You’re all discussing other things.
Forget our physics and materials and quantum foam and such. Start with the simple examples like the triangle and such where talk of ‘cause’ and such doesn’t come into the picture.

you are, in fact, exhibiting Hawking's MDR. — L'éléphant

Of course I am, but despite my usage of this tool, the tool isn’t what the topic is about.

That's what it means by model-dependent: you have in mind a universe that has a mathematical structure.

As one possibility, yes. Hard to think of a different one. It being a mathematical structure is a MUH topic, and this topic is an ontological one.

And the question you should be asking yourself is -- how do I know this?

I don’t claim to know this at all. I’m claiming a solution to the problem naively worded as: “why is there something instead of nothing?”. I’m not claiming that things cannot be otherwise.

How did I come to think this way? MDR posits that it is inescapable. We, by default, think in terms of a model.

Right, but the topic isn’t about how we think. The disclaimer in the OP says it isn’t about epistemology.

I thought I was clearly arguing against a "first cause" position. Emergence and development are different from "acts of creation".
So I would say you don't follow what I've actually said. — apokrisis

But I'm arguing against any act of creation, so yes, at least one of us is not following what the other is saying. I'm hardly an expert in the views you're referencing, so it's more likely to be me not following, but the language of creation seems entirely inappropriate to address the problem to which I'm seeing. Structuralism, while something I may indeed not fully understand, seems to not address the issue at all.
I'm not asking how the world we see emerges from the quantum foam. I'm questioning the objective existence of the quantum foam or any other structure or system, temporal or not.

You were meant to pay attention to the mathematical structure of that example, not the substantial being that is some literal ball on some literal dome.

But the substantial being (your term, not mine, so maybe I'm using it wrong) of the ball and dome is what the topic is about, so you were very much meant to pay attention to that. The mathematics says the ball rolls off after a while, uncaused if you will. It actually takes infinite time to do so, but they had a mathematical model of one that doesn't take infinite time. I cannot find a reference on short notice. All besides the point. The point is that the 'substantial being of the ball and dome' (its objective existence) isn't relevant to what happens to the ball. The ball/dome system doesn't behave differently depending on its ontology.
It's kind of an anti-platonic view. Plato says abstract things exist (that the existence property is meaningful, and that such abstract things have it). I say the property is meaningless, and that a triangle not being a circle is not a function of its ontology.

Again, my argument is that we start by following Aristotle in dissecting substantial being into its formal and material causes. And what we find is that we wind up where we do in mathematical physics. We have a tale of Platonic-strength structural necessity – the inevitability of the invariances due to symmetries – coupled to the most nebulous sense of "materiality" possible. QFT winds up talking about excitations in fields due to inherent uncertainty or instability.

Either I am massively misunderstanding most of your post, or you're wildly off topic.
Can you explain to me what you think the topic is about?

Minimising our notion of material cause by maximising our understanding of formal cause is still progress. It is answering the question of cosmic existence in causal terms. — apokrisis

It isn't answering the question at all. Do you at all understand what I'm getting at? Any cause (material, formal, whatever) is still only related to a created thing, and the universe cannot be such a thing. That's the category error I was talking about. You're treating a causal structure like a caused structure. This is intuitive, yes, but only because language treats it so. It's still wrong.

And at the same time, the material cause – which is what folk conventionally think of as the bit needing to be supplied as the animating fire

No, a material cause cannot do that. The material in question has to already exist, so the 'fire' is already there (unexplained). A material cause (or any cause) is something explaining a caused thing, which is a different category.

The ball on the top of the dome has to roll off.

Again, wrong category, but great example. Yes, I say a ball on a dome must roll off on some random side at a random time with computable probability even. But the question asked by the topic is, does there need to be an existing ball on a dome for this to occur, or will just a ball on a dome suffice? None of your causal discussion seems to be relevant to that question.

Thanks again all for your comments and patience with my slow replies.

And also you seemed to want to clarify something about the role of time in all this. — apokrisis

The role of time has to do with my selection of an alternate definition of existence based on causality, something not defined the same way for non-temporal structures. Still, my definition only seems to work for local interpretations of our physics. The primary definition of existence is the sort spelled out in the OP with the prime number example. There’s a term for that sort of existence, but it escapes me for the moment.

The cosmos exists as it does not because nothingness was impossible but because quantum "everythingness" was self-limiting.

This is already a relation since it seems only related to a structure following QM rules. Yes, there’s an everythingness about it, but how to explain the quantum structure in the first place? That seems to be what Hawking is asking.

But structuralism still suffers from needing a model of the raw action - the initial everythingness - that can breath fire into the equations.

This sound like what I’m attempting to resolve with this topic. It seems to be an issue with any form of realism.

There is still a "first cause" issue in some form.

I’d call it an initial state. Relativity theory seems to have no problem with initial and final states, but a unified theory would probably be needed before we can actually assert that.

But the big step forward is that it is as little of a "material something" as could be imagined. It is just a quantum foam of possibility as yet to be structured by an emergent topological order.

If that little material something needs fire breathed into it, then it matters not that it’s minimal. The problem is still there. I eliminate the problem at the start by not suggesting the need for it. But it acts against a strong bias and nobody else seems to be able to accept that.

I don’t know what emergent gauge symmetry means, sorry.

given you seem to want to incorporate retrocausality or temporal nonlocality into whatever QM interpretation you wind up with.

I don’t actually. I’m a locality kind of guy, but I’m aware of other interpretations that have these things.

Moreoever, most mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics, including the Everett interpretation, spontaneous collapse models and the de Broglie Bohm approach, are prima facie temporally local.

Again, I don’t know what that term means.

But SR of course already tells us that the idea of a present moment and tidy temporal order is problematic. And this then is a reason why Bohmian mechanics and its pilot wave fails to be relativised.

Pilot waves require a preferred ordering of events? I was unaware of that, but such a preferred ordering has never been disproven either, despite even my attempts to do so.

But in general, BM doesn't relativise because where QFT path integral demands that particles take all possible paths, including the non-classical, BM's pilot waves just take classical trajectories.

How do the BM people respond to this criticism? I wasn’t even sure if they still clung to the pilot wave model since the physical wave tanks failed if baffles were put in.

No fire of life can be felt within a mathematical model. — L'éléphant

But I’m not talking about a model, which is an epistemological tool. I’m talking about mathematics itself, that our universe (and others) is, at the most fundamental level, a mathematical structure. Life can very much be felt within such a thing, and my addition to this premise is the lack of need of the fire to feel that. The mathematics is no different with or without the fire, so it isn’t necessary.

We cannot answer the normative questions such as "why is there a universe?"

Maybe, but in finding the question unanswerable, I suggest instead that it is the wrong question.

MDR (model-dependent realism) is what Hawking is known for. Which makes him a hypocrite by saying philosophy is dead.[/quote]Agree with the hypocrisy accusation. All the quotes I’ve seen of him in this topic (and an entire book, despite it no doubt containing science) is philosophy.

The UoD in which I exist is a particular set. Another UoD is a different set. — litewave

Fine. The unicorn is part of that other UoD, so at the objective level, it exists (per your definition, not mine) as much as do you since both are members of this universe of sets.
Is that acceptable? You’ve seemed very resistant to the unicorn having the same ontology as you.

Both sets exist in the universe of sets. No inconsistency. But it would be inconsistent to claim that I exist in a UoD in which I don't exist.

Classical humanism saw this special position in the fact that man alone connects the material world with the spiritual and divine worlds ; man therefore has a mediating role between the "above" and the "below". — Matias

This doesn't seem to be the sort of humanism of which MSS is speaking. I read the wiki page and it seems to focus very much on natural everything, and that humans, given their abilities, play some sort of special role, but not a supernatural one.
A wiki quote about the thesis:
"The manifesto outlines, that humanity will be able to create more life-friendly, free, and just conditions than can be found today."
The life-friendly thing is quite a strange assertion for a species responsible for the Holocene extinction event. I'm pretty sure the other animals would rather we had not appeared on the scene at all.