It's not conceding the point. — Wayfarer

Yeah, it is. You are now agreeing that there is more than just mind - that the mind does not created the world, but perhaps structures it. That's a step down from the mind-created world.

...any claims about the nature of the world contain an ineliminably subjective element — Wayfarer

Claims are made by minds, so of course claims involve minds. What is not justified here is the further step that says mind is a requirement for there to be a world at all.

This is the part were we agree that there is something external to the mind, and then you loop around and claim that we can only know about it using the mind.

Well, yes, but that is not idealism.

Whereas, even if humanity is a "mere blip" and "an accident", it is we who provide values, who decides what is worthwhile; and what is not, and that mind is the product of impersonal material forces does not detract from that value.

You seem to supose that unless humans have some special cosmic status or mind is foundational to reality, then human life becomes meaningless. That's textbook Naturalistic Fallacy.

Your reply to the novelty argument admits that there is something "external" to mind, conceding the point.

Your reply to the error argument either reduces truth to mere consistency or it also concedes that there is again more than just mind. If it reduces truth to mere consensus then it remains that there is no possibility for error - the truth is just what we agree to, and so this melds with the argument from consistency.

Your reply to the consensus argument is dependent on consistent "mental structures", which are the very things in question - how is it that we agree that we are discussing philosophy on an internet forum, unless we are indeed discussing philosophy on an internet forum, and there are things such as keyboards and screens and undersea cables and language in addition to our discussion.

The trick is to move past the realism/idealism dichotomy to see how we are embedded in a world that puts restrictions on what we (the plural is very much intended) can say and do.

There remains the problem of how idealism avoids solipsism. We know about other minds as a result of our interaction with them, which it precisely the same way in which we know about the world. IF you throw away a world outside of mind, you throw away along with it your access to other minds.

The admission that the fundamental particles of physics are not themselves physical? — Wayfarer

Where is the support for this pretence?

See the problem?

You’re sounding like a phenomenologist. — Joshs

Must you think in terms of 'isms"?

That success is our agreement.

It's the far-reaching conclusion - the chip, the theory, and all of the componentry of that experiment, are products of the mind - therefore...?

Do we conclude that everything is a product of mind - but then you say "I don't use the phrase 'consciousness creates reality'"; but you do "posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence" and "quantum mechanics really is magic".

You are expressing a sentiment rather than providing an argument - it's your account that is incoherent, not my response.

And in frustration at your lack of clarity my responses become increasingly uncharitable.

Perhaps we might proceed by looking for points of agreement. We both reject reductionism and scientism and those metaphysics that deny a place for mind at all. We both see science as not addressing the question of what to do.

You have a too narrow an interpretation of consciousness. You think it something inside your head, looking out. But the chip, the theory, and all of the componentry of that experiment, are products of the mind. — Wayfarer

The failure of that argument is I hope obvious to those reading on - whomever they are. You've expanded "consciousness" to include everything humans ever thought about or created, thus rendering the term useless. If you define everything as consciousness, then trivially, consciousness is all that exists. The ultimate ad hoc justification for a defeated hypothesis.

What I will say is that measurement is a conscious act. — Wayfarer

When, in the guts of the chip on which you are typing, a quantum tunnel sets off a current in a transistor, you are not aware of it. No one is. And yet the measurement has been made. You claim is false.

Your only out is to define measurement in terms of consciousness and then slide the goal post of measurement back to physical interaction.

If you're going to make a point, then make it. — Wayfarer

I have, here:

Some folk would have you believe that consciousness is what collapses the wave function. It isn't. The function is collapsed when measured. — Banno

You would jump from "measurement involves interaction between observer and observed" to "consciousness creates reality". There's a bit of a logical gap there. Bohr's anti-realism does not imply idealism nor that consciousness creates that reality.

What 'more'? — Wayfarer

This is where you back away from your own Mind-created world.

The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. — Wayfarer

So - let's solve that problem! — Wayfarer

See the reply to Joshs, above.

This:

Neils Bohr: “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world”. — Wayfarer

sits exactly in agreement with the view I've expressed, and contrary to your need for further metaphysics.

You are the one who wants to say more than is justified by the evidence.

We still need to explain why certain physical interactions produce definite outcomes while others maintain superposition. — Wayfarer

Not according to the Copenhagen interpretation. We have the calculations, they work with extreme accuracy, and nothing more is needed from an explanation. The Copenhagen interpretation denies that we need to explain the mechanism of collapse, that there's some deeper level of reality beneath the quantum description and that the measurement problem requires a solution.

And again, if any interpretation is a consensus amongst physicist, it's the Copenhagen interpretation.

Quantum mechanics works perfectly for making predictions, but it doesn't tell us what's really occurring when superpositions become definite outcomes — Wayfarer

Hang on - that word, "really", ought set one's teeth on edge. The fact is that Quantum Mechanics does tell us what will occur as the result of a superposition, with extraordinary accuracy.

Your sentiment for a deeper mystical account is not an argument. Least of all is some form of idealism required.

While "grammar is a product of the mind", it is also embedded in the world. Rather than being forced to choose between realism and idealism, we might reject the framework that juxtaposes the two. The world is our successful interpretation and communication within our forms of life.

Someone raised the question above : "what is a measurement?" The English word "measure" comes from Latin "mensura', and mensura derives from the root "mens-" meaning Mind*1. — Gnomon

You've misread your own reference. sure, mēns (“mind”) is from PIE *men- (“to think”), but mensūra (“to measure”) is form from PIE *meh₁- (“to measure”).

Measure dervives from Meh, not Mens.

, .

We differentiate between what is believed, understood, thought and so on, and what is true. We do this becasue sometimes what we take to be true is unfortunately not true. We are mistaken, or we are in error, or we are deluded.

It's common for folk with idealist tendencies to confuse what they believe, understand, think etc. with what is true. Folk who think the world is inherently mental phenomena are going to have difficulty differentiating between mental phenomena and the world.

So they might say things such as that "the act of observation seems inextricably connected with an experimental result", and in a way of course this is true - to understand an experimental result requires a mind, after all. To understand that the rock falls requires a mind.

But it would be a mistake to think that therefore the rock could not fall unless there is a mind present - that the rock's fall is inherently a mental phenomena.

That we cannot talk about the way the world is without thereby conceptualising it with our minds does not imply that there is no such world without our so conceptualising it.

There is the ontological truth, that the rock falls. There is the epistemic truth, that a mind holds it to be true that the rock falls. This distinction is what permits us to be mistaken as to how things are.

Physicists are not trained in theories of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Yep. If consciousness were central to physics in the way you suppose, wouldn't physicist be the "go-to" for explaining consciousness?

Again, in the Nature survey, the data is as follows:

Does a measurement require an observer?
Yes, and they must be conscious: 9%
Yes, but consciousness is not relevant (and an 'observer' can include
interaction with a macroscopic environment): 56%
No: 28%
Not sure: 8%

The supposition that there is a consensus amongst physicists that consciousness is an inherent feature of the physical universe is a fabrication. 84% of physicists reject the idea that consciousness is necessary for measurement.

You've always seem to me to avoid it only by an appeal to mysticism or changing the subject.

Even accepting Bergson's distinction between time and duration - and I don't see that we need do so - the problem remains that things cease to exist when we are "unconscious". That problem is not resolved.

Ideas to me are irreducible mental events. — MoK

A pretty sketchy notion.

Indeed. We can detect consciousness. That's why we differentiate between some's being asleep and awake...

And we differentiate between doing something consciously and unconsciously - driving to the local shops being the usual example.

It's a problem for solipsism generally. And Idealism has a great deal of difficulty avoiding solipsism. If to be is to be perceived then things cease to exist when unperceived; including, it seems, other people.

Hence solipsism.

Is that a third way?

The clincher is the dynamic between a complete, incorrect account and an incomplete, correct account. I'm advocating the latter, and it seems you are, too.

I hadn't noticed this thread. But I covered much the same topic in my thread Two Ways To Philosophise.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia. — Banno

The trouble with a complete picture is that it tends to be completely wrong.

You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words. — Astorre

That's the analytic approach at work. Thanks for indulging me.

It might well be a language issue, since my reservation rests on that word "revealed". Something is revealed that it is already there but hidden, and comes to be seen. The letter is revealed by opening the envelope, the body revealed by removing the clothing, and so on. But a microscope does not have a hammerness that is revealed by using it as a hammer...

I think you have just shown how the terminology can spiral out of control very, very quickly when talking about the phenomenon of consciousness. — I like sushi

Thank you. That's what I'd hoped. To my eye this shows the incoherence of such talk. So mucht he worse for phenomenology.

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, — Astorre

I don't know how to make sense of that.

Is your suggestion that hammerness is a potential or opportunity or modus inherent in a microscope?

Much simpler to just say that someone might use a microscope as a hammer. Drop all the hoo-ha.

It depends on how you interpret what he was saying alongside what it appears he actually meant. — I like sushi

Obviously.

So, did the clock on your wall keep moving while you slept, or was there a leap from when you closed your eyes to when you opened them again, no time passing - nothing exists, just things leaping ahead as if time had passed?

Indeed, there would be no period of unconsciousness, since time is a part of the world that supposedly ceases to exist "while you are unconscious"...

There could never be a period in which you are not conscious.

C.G. Jung once said that the world only exists when you consciously perceive it. — Jan

Back to this. Was he right?

Did the world cease to exist last night while you slept?

What would happen if you were to pretend that it had? If you insisted that events that others claim occurred while you slept did not occur, becasue nothing existed while you were asleep?

How would others treat you?

Would any advantage accrue to you from this exercise? Any at all?

I’m not ‘proclaiming’ anything. — Wayfarer

Sure.

The graph isn't embarrassing, as indeed is pointed out repeatedly in the comments. The results from this small survey are not too far form the results in the bigger Nature survey I cited above. (thirty odd compared to 1,100). The Copenhagen interpretation hold steady in both.

To be fair, neither survey included your option, "It's magic".

...this is a philosophy forum... — Wayfarer

That doesn't validate a leap into proclaiming what is mere speculation.

nobody understands quantum physics' — Wayfarer

If you stopped there, we would have little disagreement.

But in a few posts you will be leaping beyond the obvious truth that we only know stuff with our mind, to the mind created world; to mind not just being an outcome of the way things are, but the reason that things are this way.

Now you may be right; but the evidence available does not support your certainty. And there are conceptual difficulties you have yet to overcome.

It's you who goes past Feynman's aphorism.

Calling it magic is not explaining it. But calling it magic might lead one not to look for a better answer.

Why make the leap to calling it magic? Why not just say: "I don't know, but I will try to find out..."

Sure. Someone will be along soon to remind us of the other three Aristotelian causes, and claim to be agreeing that efficient cause is but one and so not the whole of explanation. We also have logical structure, linguistic and semantic relations, normative and evaluative judgements, Constitutive rules... "counts as", emergent properties... And so on.

Sure. Nor is it answered by Indian mysticism.

, - to be sure, the account is not settled. There is room for discussion and compromise, and the answer may only be decided by experimentation.

However there are those here who, for their own reasons, will pretend that the issue is settled, and in favour of consciousness being needed to collapse the wave form.

In the Nature survey cited above, only 9% of physicists will agree with them.

Now will come a series of arguments aimed at discounting the view of collapse as measurement, beginning with

↪Banno But are can only be validated by observation a posteriori. — Wayfarer

Note that this is a seperate point - the simple truism that we can only know how things are by looking at how things are. It ignores the difference between somethings being true and being known to be true. A common bit of antirealist rhetoric.

That seems right. — Janus

Cheers.

The mechanistic model is a great example of a case taken far beyond it's context. We seem to understand how causation functions in a game of billiards; the picture gains such a hold on us that we presume the same sort of causation is at work in thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics or psychology or sociology or even ethics.

...revealed... — Astorre

Ok, so you are saying that the hammerness is already there in the thing, logically prior to the use as a hammer; and that the use brings out the hammerness.

Why not go the whole hog and say that there is no "hammerness", no property of being a hammer already there; but that what happens is that we decide that it counts as a hammer, basically for our own purposes. That there is no "hammerness already there in the thing".

Hammerness is just an example — Astorre

Sure.

Does hammerness inhere in the hammer, or is it something we attribute to the hammer?

Is hammerness a permanent, even essential, part of the hammer, or is it something we do with and attribute to the hammer?

Examples of measurements without consciousness:

• A photon hitting a photographic plate and causing a chemical reaction
• Cosmic rays interacting with particles in space
• Radioactive decay triggering a Geiger counter in an empty room
• DNA mutations caused by radiation

Each collapses the wave function. None involve consciousness.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y

I did. You speak of "Hammerness". I don't think that helpful. You have the "hammerness" being "revealed" by its use. Better to drop "hammerness" all together and just have that thing being used to hammer as our reason for saying that it is a hammer.

It's not revealed, since that implies that it was a hammer apart from it's use as a hammer. Better to say attributed.

We include that in the set of hammers. It isn't in the set of hammers apart from our so including it.

Some folk would have you believe that consciousness is what collapses the wave function. It isn't. The function is collapsed when measured.