Do you really believe that the Universe would not exist without us? — Janus

Well this is interpretation dependent — Apustimelogist

It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics — the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.

So, irrespective of what anyone else may believe, I am justified in believing there to exist a world external to myself, which I am a part of. If this belief is true (as I am convinced), it is an objective fact, not a subjective fact that is only true for me. It is an objective fact even if everyone else holds a false belief in solipsism. — Relativist

I am not arguing that it (idealism) means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one—one which, in Kantian terms, focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge.... — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p144

Truth is not subjective, although there are truths about subjective things. Objective truth: "The universe exists". — Relativist

So I surmise that she is making a case for religious practice, or having God in one's life, not an intellectual basis for establishing the alleged fact of God's existence. — Relativist

Not sure what you are trying to convey here. — Apustimelogist

Physicalism is not a reductive theory. It is a foundational theory that purports to show that the world cannot exist without matter or the physical components. — L'éléphant

I'm not arguing for physicalism — Janus

I suggest that the interference pattern is not caused by a physical wave — because, as we shall see, no conventional physical wave can account for the actual observations. So what the “wave” is, is one of the greatest conundrums posed by quantum physics, and the philosophical implications are profound. Let’s explore them.

So what's the basis for claiming the world is actually mind-dependent? Then we can analyze whether that is a rational belief. — Relativist

I see no basis to claim the evolutionary sequence was too fast or "explosive" to be due to natural processes. — Relativist

The review suggests that she doesn't actually make a case for God's existence. — Relativist

It doesn’t matter if you want to call it a hate rally or a Nazi rally or an authoritarian Lollapalooza. Doesn’t matter if you want to call the speakers unhinged or ill-mannered or fascistic. I don’t care what you call the Trumpian spectacle that unfolded at Madison Square Garden last weekend.

In this, the blessedly final week of the 2024 presidential campaign, that rally was only the latest s--t stain in a decade-long political career rooted in scapegoating and fear-mongering. After a decade of stoking fear and hatred, we have now reached Peak MAGA.

What started in the tacky atrium of Trump Tower with a rant about Spanish-speaking immigrants ends with a lame joke by a s--tty comic about Spanish-speaking Americans, with another speaker calling Donald Trump’s political opponent “the antichrist.” We’re ten years into the Trump Era, a decade marked by racist scandal upon sex scandal upon financial scandal upon criminal scandal.

To say that we’re numb to it all would be an understatement. Another woman came forward last week to allege sexual abuse by Trump (with a cameo by Jeffrey Epstein) this week and it barely got covered. She is the 27th woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault. Nobody cared. We expect these Trump scandals. Worse, too many Americans crave them.

When he or his surrogates attack Puerto Ricans or Muslims or Black people or legal Haitian immigrants or people from “s--thole countries;” when Trump sits down for dinner with a Holocaust denier; when he refuses to disavow David Duke’s support or when he elevates the bats--t and antisemitic QAnon movement; when he attacks trans people; when he spends day after day spreading lie after lie, he scrapes away, layer by layer, whatever used to pass for American civility until we are left here, a raw and unnerved people looking at our fellow Americans with suspicion and fear.

He did this.

In 2015, Trump’s initial candidacy was dismissed as the vanity project of a reality television star. That wasn’t an incorrect assessment, but it miscalculated Americans’ appetite for inauthenticity and vulgarity. It wasn’t that Trump was a reality star whose schtick translated to real America, it’s that real America turned out to be more of a reality show than we were willing to admit. The cruelty, interpersonal conflicts, and erratic personalities that fuel our addiction to bad TV has now become central to an entire half of our electorate.

The Madison Square Rally rally this week wasn’t an outlier, only a very special episode of The Trump Show.

It’s been ten f---ing years of this. If, ten years ago, as Trump mulled his candidacy, somebody had sat down to write a satire of what a successful Trump campaign would look like, it would have looked very much like the coverage of the actual event. Consider the following paragraph from the actual New York Times’ coverage: “David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris ‘the devil.’ Grant Cardone, a businessman, declared that the sitting Vice President had ‘pimp handlers.’ Sid Rosenberg denounced Hillary Clinton as a ‘sick son of a bitch’ for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi event at the same arena decades ago.”

That’s not even mentioning the fact that Hulk Hogan tried, and for a time failed, to rip off his shirt, the only Black speaker walking out to the song Dixie, and that the rally started with Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t read like a bad episode of Veep? (Actually, that sounds like an awesome episode of Veep but only because Veep is making fun of f---ing idiocy!)

I don’t know how many felony convictions the collected speakers had between them, but it was a lot. Why? Because sometimes the crooks win. Sometimes, the worst among us convince the rest of us suckers and losers that we’d be better off with them running the show. When people compare Trumpism to Nazism, it isn’t because we anybody thinks Trump is “literal Hitler” as his supporters like to say.

It’s because Trumpism displays the same hatred and buffoonery of the early Nazis with their bloviating, self-aggrandizing speeches and their cadre of big, dumb goons swinging fists in the streets. It’s because we recognize the same ugly impulses that compelled what was, at first, a minority of Germans to sacrifice their character and morality. It’s because we recognize the fear that caused good Germans to keep their mouths shut and the cold calculations that made powerful German industrialists look the other way at Nazi abuses, and which led them to ultimately collaborate.

It’s because we know that dehumanizing language about people eventually leads to the state dehumanizing people. Can’t happen here? May I refer to you to Trump’s plan to round up millions of people from their homes and put them in detention camps? May I refer you to the fact that a recent poll found that half of all Americans, including a quarter of Democrats, support such a mass deportation? What does that look like, exactly, when the National Guard goes house-to-house in neighborhoods across the country? I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.

When I sat down to write this column, I thought I’d try to keep it light. But you know what? This s--t is scary. It’s scary because we’re a week away from the close of this election, but I don’t think there’s an American out there who believes that this election will end quietly.

Drop-off ballot boxes are already exploding. Poll workers are being attacked. After one voter was told she couldn’t wear her MAGA gear into the polling station, she tore off her shirt, pushed the poll worker, and told the worker to “suck her c---.” JD Vance later tweeted about the woman, “what a patriot.”

That’s where we are. That’s who we’ve become over the last ten years. So yeah, it doesn’t matter to me what you want to call Trump’s rally or Trump’s movement. The name doesn’t matter so much as the human rot that feeds it. For decades, we’ve been wondering how much more divisive American politics can become.

Now we know. Hopefully next week’s election pulls us back from the brink. But what if it doesn’t? What if Trump wins? Conversely, what if he loses? What feels like the last straw often turns out to be just another straw. How many more straws before he’s broken America’s back? — Michael Ian Black, The Daily Beast

*1. Heisenberg later stated that "My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing" and that "Modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg
Note --- Is his "prerequisite work" good enough for you? — Gnomon

...the inherent difficulties of the materialist theory of the atom, which had become apparent even in the ancient discussions about smallest particles, have also appeared very clearly in the development of physics during the present century.

This difficulty relates to the question whether the smallest units are ordinary physical objects, whether they exist in the same way as stones or flowers. Here, the development of quantum theory...has created a complete change in the situation. The mathematically-formulated laws of quantum theory show clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts (such as 'it exists' - wf) cannot be unambiguously applied to the smallest particles. All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size, and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles. I cannot enter here into the details of this problem, which has been discussed so frequently in recent years. But it is important to realize that, while the behavior of the smallest particles cannot be unambiguously described in ordinary language, the language of mathematics is still adequate for a clear-cut account of what is going on.

During the coming years, the high-energy accelerators will bring to light many further interesting details about the behavior of elementary particles. But I am inclined to think that the answer just considered to the old philosophical problems will turn out to be final. If this is so, does this answer confirm the views of Democritus or Plato?

I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or — in Plato's sense — Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. — Werner Heisenberg, The Debate between Plato and Democritus

Did scientists "catch god with his pants down", or are they too far from the measured "forest" (quantum field) to clearly see the statistical "trees" (fluid/solid wavicles)? — Gnomon

It's a philosophical question that I don't trust philosophers to answer. — flannel jesus

Here's the thing, the angst-driven "What do I focus my attention on?" precedes everything. Even someone who represents naive physicalism, someone like say a "Dawkins type", someone who supposedly "only cares about facts", has to "care about" something, that precedes the "facts" that are deemed most important. — schopenhauer1

It does not follow that the properties of particles do not exist until measured. — Janus

We have anxieties foisted upon ourselves, mental disorders even, and then we have ANGST. It's reflected in literature going back to Egypt and Babylonia, ancient China, India, and anywhere where man could write more than a few thoughts down beyond the transactional. — schopenhauer1

If consciousness functions as a boundary administrator, formatting the picture of reality into the physical world of material objects with discrete boundaries in space and time, then there is the suggestion that at the QM scale on down to the Planck scale, an interval wherein, presumably, consciousness is not yet assembled, the state of the system is superposition. If so, then we can associate superposition with Kant's noumenal realm of things-in-themselves. — ucarr

My contention is that our perceptions provide a reflection of objective reality, not identical to it, but we can have success at uncovering additional objective truths about reality. — Relativist

Of course there's more about reality than we truly understand at this time, and I believe it likely that there are aspects of reality that we will never understand. But just because we don't understand everything about the way the natural world works does not imply there is something unnatural at play in the world. To argue that would be an argument from ignorance. — Relativist

It's not true that homo sapiens are the only organisms that think logically. At its core, logical reasoning entails remembering cause-effect relationships. Many animals exhibit behavior that entails multiple steps to achieve an objective. This is basic logical thinking. — Relativist

I say that Armstrong's type of philosophy is hanging on to the remnants of the Christian belief in divinely-ordered nature, sans God, which was replaced with the scientist.
— Wayfarer
It's not "hanging on" for the sake of hanging on. It wouldn't make sense to deny the existence of laws of nature just because past natural philosophers identified them as laws ordained by God. — Relativist

Regarding a case for God, I'd be interested in hearing more — Relativist

I get what Kant was saying hundreds of years ago, but we've learned much more about the brain since then. — Philosophim

My point is that the set of properties that emerge are objectively present — Relativist

there's nothing about the application of logic that is inconsistent with physical mechanism — Relativist

We interact with the world to survive. Successful interaction is dependent on our pattern-recognition capacity which enables us to distinguish types of objects and activities. — Relativist

Empiricism in science leads to theories, established by abductive reasoning. By extension, we can abductively conclude there are laws of nature, on the basis that this best explains the success of science. — Relativist

Quantum physics observes what appears to be a statistical "glitch in the matrix" — Gnomon

Yes. As is everyone else. Do you think you die when you go to sleep? — Clearbury

Objects are made of these particles, and each particle has a well-defined set of properties. The existence of these particles were deduced, not perceived by the faculties of our "phenomenal awareness", but over time - their existence has been confirmed through measurements in particle accelerators. So tell me in what sense is this NOT objective reality. — Relativist

A new person does not emerge in me every morning.... — Clearbury

The evidence is much stronger than any religious point of view. — Sam26

Computers demonstrate that logic can be mechanized, so I don't understand what you see as a problem. — Relativist

What's the problem with the way Armstrong appeals to physics? (i.e. the basis for believing there exist laws of nature). — Relativist

When Armstrong refers to "laws of nature", he's not pointing to scientific theories and equations in textbooks. He's referring to something ontological. Physics may approximate the law, or describe it in terms meaningful to us, but those descriptions and equations are not the law. The law is the physical relations that exist between (or among) types of things (a type of thing is a universal). — Relativist

I cannot literally know the early universe, but I can metaphorically know it. — RussellA

Armstrong's physicalist metaphysics could be wrong (perhaps the mind isn't physical, or perhaps there are no actual laws of nature), but the same is true of any metaphysical system that has been, or ever will be, proposed. — Relativist

I think the only thing that a physicalist framework struggles with is theory of mind. — Relativist

If physicists can't unequivocally demonstrate which interpretation is true, then certainly a philosopher isn't well-positioned to figure it out for them — Relativist

The problem isn't Trump, it's a badly patched system that enables Trump to happen. — Christoffer

Why is it even possible in the first place? — Christoffer

I believe that there is some element of consciousness in most if not all living things. I also believe that consciousness is at the heart of reality and that all of us ultimately come from this core consciousness. — Sam26

US democracy has been eroding for a long time now. — Christoffer

If democrats are so sure that Trump and modern republicans have been infiltrated by fascists and that democracy is threatened, that the constitution is threatened. Then what exactly are they doing about it? — Christoffer

Even when someone like Trump do things that in any other previous political era would lead to almost political and societal ostracism, it just makes him stronger — Christoffer

What Armstrong is doing is acknowledging a distinction between the actual laws of nature and the academic discipline of physics. Physicists endeavors to uncover laws of nature, and is likely correct in many cases, but ontology is not dependent on them getting everything exactly correct. Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation seemed to be a law of nature for quite a long time, but in fact - it had an error, one that was corrected by Einstein's theory. The law of nature didn't change, but the law of physics did change. — Relativist

The state of affairs of a quantum system is perfectly describable as a Schroedinger equation. In that respect, the quantum system evolves in a strictly deterministic way over time. — Relativist

When Armstrong refers to "laws of nature", he's not pointing to scientific theories and equations in textbooks. He's referring to something ontological. Physics may approximate the law, or describe it in terms meaningful to us, but those descriptions and equations are not the law. The law is the physical relations that exist between (or among) types of things (a type of thing is a universal).

So when I said that laws of nature are necessarily natural, if naturalism is true, I was specifically referring to laws as something ontological, not descriptive. — Relativist

The essential element of his ontology is that every thing that exists is a state of affairs (a particular with its attached properties and relations). Even quantum fields, or strings, fit this framework. — Relativist