How is the metaverse science? It's technology and a dubious one at that, if you have in mind Zuckerberg's version of it.

I perceive a tendency to conflate technology with science - it has some similarities, for example, much new tech would not be possible without scientific breakthroughs, but it does not follow that the technology itself is science, I don't think.

Science has no metaphysics. It is neutral in this regard. We choose, if we so wish, to add metaphysics to science. Everyone has a metaphysics after all, even if they dislike it.

a sad thought indeed. — Art48

Yes. However this thought does not arise when one is dead, IF we are correct in assuming that post-life is a similar state than pre-life. Death is "only" painful for the living who experience it of others and to people who are on there way out. But the actual "state", is not a reason to worry, I think.

It's not testable, reason can either accept or deny it (though it stretches credulity) and other theories can, in principle, produce similar results without relying on it.

Is it scientific? It's not clear. But it could be true, we just have no way to ascertain its veracity.

We don't know this. Reason may be a more or less affair, with sudden leaps in capacities due to the development of something like the language faculty (which animals lack, though they don't lack communication) and the emergence of self-consciousness.

Animals may have rudimentary reason, though less likely self-consciousness or reflection. But we cannot rule this out. Reasons can lead us to problems, sure, but they offer solutions to problems, which is rather helpful.

Likewise the laws of the world we imagine ourselves to be in now aren't necessarily the laws of reality on the whole.
We may be in a sub-reality. — Yohan

I'd say we don't know enough to determine whether the laws we study are or are not fundamental to the universe. So, not so much sub-reality, as representations. We seem to be locked away from "things in themselves."

I think the OP is a bit too long, I've done this before so, it's nothing personal. If you can make it more concise, then it should be easier to understand.

Going off on the title of the thread, sure, money is a fiction (illusion), but it's a real fiction, just like Harry Potter is a real character in the novel, or Winston Smith is an illusion in 1984.

Doesn't make it stop working as it does, until enough people change the way they perceive the value of paper, things will remain as they are.

You can't "literally" live in a simulation. — Yohan

This I agree with.

I'm not following the bit about the computer being linked with the mind. Does that mean that we are living in a videogame of some kind? You can describe life in many different ways.

Depends on the goal.

Empirical science is agnostic about metaphysics. You may occasionally hear the odd statement about being a "materialist" and even more rare, being an "idealist", but most scientists don't have a metaphysics - they probably don't even think about it, which is fine, the work they do does not require it.

I agree that the organ we take to be a brain, are what we - with good reason - take to be the source of experience. That's a representation. The thing is, I don't think it intelligible to suppose that experience "copies" anything. It represents, from rather poor stimulus, a very rich world. That's not a copy.

The topic here, as I understand, is that we are literally living in a computer simulation. There is no evidence for that at all. You could call the world we construct a "simulation". I think that terminology is rather strange. But, everyone is free to use these terms as they wish.

He mentions that our knowledge of the will is the closest approximation we have of the thing-in-itself, but it's not the thing-in-itself, itself, as it were. If you remind me, I'll post the relevant passage which is rather important, in my opinion.

That's the thing about this topic, there is no good argument for this at all. It was made up, now you see some fancy scenarios about the probabilities that we could live in a simulation because a sufficiently advanced civilization could do this, bla bla bla.

It has exactly the same weight as saying we are living in Einstein's dream, in another universe. How can you prove we are not? There's no way to do this. You can only say, justifiably, that I made it up - but it doesn't eliminate the plausibility.

Then again, we could be cells in God's body or anything else. But if you continue making up scenarios infinitely, as one can, you see that this is just a game with little value.

At least Putnam's brain in a vat, has uses about our mental capacities and the relation we have with the world. Simulation arguments don't even have any saving grace.

Interestingly - and while agreeing with you mostly about Zizek, he actually discusses this. It's an idea in psychoanalysis called fetishist disavowal: "I know very well, but...", (insert topic here). "I know very well that, human beings and most complex life on Earth will burn, but, how could it, given what I am seeing with my eyes right now..."

Just pointing this out, one of the interesting things I got out of engaging with Zizek for way too long, not all was wasted.

@Xtrix I think society is too complex to single out one or two factors which we can use to explain our current situation. However, if we are forced into being simple, because otherwise we either factor in or factor out too much, then I'd say this is very much heavily related to the deregulations and massive power gains given to private corporations in the 80's, continuing to this day.

The problem with this is not so much the inequality per se (which is a problem, to be sure), but the extremely lopsided distribution of power. And given this imbalance in power, it is all too easy for the rest of the world, not belonging to .1%, to realize that they can change society if they make government actually do what they want.

To prevent this for happening, power will (and has) done everything to stay where it is. A tax on carbon? Mass transportation? A green transition? Are you crazy, if they get that, what else will they ask for? So, we get bombarded by distractions, disinformation and petty gossip instead of doing things that matter.

From this very broad picture, much can be derived. But, as I said, society is more complex than this, so there are too many factors to analyze to make this into a "theory" or explanation. The factors listed in the OP certainly are legitimate.

Going for round 2 here, to get a better understanding:

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

Novel:

Infinite Ground by Martin McInnes

This (quite long) essay, which I posted on another thread, is most excellent, and makes the issue rather clear, with plenty of evidence, but it has little to do with power, and is more related to the limits of understanding. You may want to take a look at the history involved in the collapse of the "mechanistic" worldview:

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/ChomskyMysteriesNatureHidden2009.pdf

Posting again here, the topic of the thread is interesting, putting aside the word "material". Is there an external world? Yes. But it's nature and our relationship to it is far from trivial.

In a way, our common sense attitude does not question this distinction much. This laptop here is external to me, so are these books. What's "behind" the eyes is internal.

But that distinction is extremely delicate, in my opinion.

PLA extends 'Taiwan encirclement' exercises; 'Drills will not stop until reunification'

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272446.shtml

No no, I mean, I agree with you. I don't think that they will invade - or I hope not at the very least. But one wonders, by doing these drills, are they not showing Taiwan and the US what could happen should an invasion ever take place?

It's a bit like showing your opponent your cards while playing poker. I have to think that the Chinese leadership would be aware of this type of thinking.

What they're doing now, is predictable. Even the bigger scale was predictable given the warnings. We have to see if they do something slightly more unpredictable, like sanctioning the governing party, not the whole country.

That might provoke a reaction by Taiwan. It's very very hard to sanction China like the did Russia. The scope would be enormous and would plunge the world into a total economic disaster, the likes of which we have not ever seen.

Good article, thanks for sharing. :up:



It's another variety of determinism. The difference being that this "superdeterminism" claims to show that even QM is deterministic in some sense.

I think appealing to physics for human choices is to fantastically stretch the scope of physics. By this logic, these people should be psychologists and solve all people's problems.

So far extensive military drills on large swaths of the island are underway. There are also some sanctions taking place, though I don't think it's hitting all sectors, that would directly hurt China.

The US should let China boast, and then it should blow over, come back to the status quo. This may be over soon, or the current party in Taiwan could be heavily sanctioned, and that could bring problems down the line.

We'll see.

show me the past and will show you a present event affirming something called past. the future and the present suffer the same fate. — Constance

Which is why it is helpful to think of time in terms of William James "specious present", that duration, perhaps 2 seconds or so, in which we combine the immediate future, the instant present and the already passing moment in time. Anything less than that is something which we aren't aware of consciously, at these levels we react unconsciously.

If you deny the future and past, you cannot make sense of the present, because it has already past.

The unconscious: it takes but a moment to see that ANY talk at all about the unconscious is self contradictory, for to speak of it is to bring it to consciousness, thus, the moment it comes to our lips, rises up to thought and language, it is conscious — Constance

Not really. We see, roughly, when photons hit the eye and react to the photo-receptors we have. We aren't conscious of this process. We become conscious of it when we study mammalian vision, but, aside from the discussions, we don't see photons, nor do we see how the brain turns this into images.

And there is plenty of study in linguistics than show that we cannot introspect into our language faculty. What we get in consciousness are fragments, not the process by which we get these fragments.

Until we get rid of this idea of "access to consciousness", we will remain stuck in philosophy of mind, because, as a factual matter, the vast majority of the things we do don't enter experience. But this should be rather obvious, requiring little times reflection.

As an aside, I understand this to be the most nationalistic wing of Chinese media, so it might be an interesting source of info concerning what may happen:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/index.html

Yes. This can be candy to politicians and an excellent excuse to avoid other pressing political concerns, usually of the domestic variety.

But it's the US and China, I mean, any mistake here is a disaster.

As I understand it, if China attempted to invade Taiwan, it would take a rather long time to conquer it, given how substantial Taiwan's military capabilities are. But China wouldn't like to bark without biting too much. Looks bad for them, even though it's what most of us would prefer, that nothing happens.

We'll see these days what China does, aside from extensive military drills.

If you could provide some sources for the times China has warned WWIII with those countries mentioned, I would appreciate it. I do know that for them Taiwan is the "red line", and Tibet too, though this latter region is now more tightly under state control, as I understand it.

One thing is what Xi wishes, another is what he is able to do. Very different things. As far as two days ago, the White House was not happy with the visit to Taiwan and even FP magazine thought it was a bad idea.

As for the actual threat here for China? You're right, there isn't a threat per se, it's not as if Pelosi can grant Taiwan nation-state status in the UN or something, it's more the symbolism that can be interpreted as China not being able to control its one red line, with its dream of unification and whatnot.

In short, this visit is pure provocation. And we still should recognize that China could not take over Taiwan in a week, regardless of anything else. It's playing with fire just to see who has a bigger d***. Not good statesmanship, imo.

I don't agree. There is no need for provocation at this level, hell, even that dimwit at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman - for once - said that this was reckless behavior.

I don't like China's government. Doesn't mean it's smart to do these types of maneuvers. Taiwan has gotten plenty of help from the US, so there is no imminent threat of a take-over made by force, without an extremely bloody conflict. But then that would bring the US in, and we're at a stalemate.

Given population projections for China, I very much doubt they are going to dominate the world. The US has by far a much stronger military force. This being scared of China makes sense, for those countries that fall within China's reach. Not the US or Europe, or Latin America, etc.

For China? Unification. For the US? A way to control China's ambitions.

What is China going to do about it? We will find out soon.

:up:

All this could have been avoided if Pelosi hadn't planned this visit. As you mention, the relevant actors. especially China, must react somehow, otherwise they would look weak in the international stage. But what type of action they would take, is far from clear.

Very dangerous.

US Navy deploys warships east of Taiwan ahead of Pelosi ‘trip’

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/2/us-navy-deploys-warships-east-of-taiwan-ahead-of-pelosi-visit

Chinese fighter jets fly close to Taiwan ahead of Nancy Pelosi’s visit

https://www.ft.com/content/50f56242-2bd7-44c6-8878-a755ad1e3043

All solipsism is a form of idealism, idealism need not be solipsist at all.

Solipsism posits that only I exist and that everything else - crucially - other people, are a product of my mind. When I die, everything vanishes: history, politics, art, etc.

Idealism is often presented as a phrase that should be obvious, and one should have strong opinions about it as soon as once hears the word.

Nevertheless, there's are many types of idealisms: some claim that only perceptions exist (Hoffman) , other claims that we can only see appearances, but that a world absent these exists (Kant), yet others posit that we are all part of one mind (Kastrup), or that something remains in the world which is not mental (Schopenhauer). And so on.

It often means that only ideas exist, or that the only thing we can know are ideas (Locke, Hume) or that mental stuff is fundamental, or that the only thing that counts as "real" are those things which trigger our innate dispositions (Descartes, Chomsky).

But idealism is much broader, and arguably richer, than solipsism, which varies mostly (if not exclusively) on intensity: only my life exists, only the past day exists, only the present moment exists, etc.

EDIT: I should mention, the philosophers listed may be argued to belong in other characterizations, this is a unsophisticated form of presenting versions of idealism.

I just finished my first Krasznahorkai. Satantango.

Wow.

I look forward to his other novels now.

It's terminological by now. Descartes discovered things (Cartesian coordinate system) as did Kant with the nebular hypothesis.

Locke based important parts of his Essay in direct reaction to Newton, so did Hume.

Do you consider Hume's arguments concerning causality to be explanatory or descriptive? A bit of both?

Did Plato not anticipate certain aspects of cognitive science in his Meno? This can be argued endlessly.

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy dealing, in part, with descriptions. Epistemology attempts to develop theories of knowledge, etc.

I'm quite skeptical of forming such far reaching connections between math and "real life", not because we don't use it, most of us do in some form of another, but I don't think geometry, say, can tell us much about complex things like human relations or governments - they are as far apart as possible, concerning the difficulty involved in understanding such things.

Which is not to say that, for example, thinking about triangles has no use in philosophy. Descartes showed, convincingly I think, that we impose the image of a triangle on top of very imperfect data. It's an example of an innate idea. Plato did a similar thing back in his day.

But triangles are among the simplest things we can conceive. Comparing that to a government is like comparing an microbe to a blue whale.

Nevertheless, again, I am limited in what I can say here, it's not my area of expertise at all. These are very general comments.

How frequently will James Webb be releasing images? I know that a new one came out, concerning some purple-ish looking galaxy.

But since the initial release of these batches of images, I haven't seen many more. I can't seem to find a date for such image releases. Anybody know about this?

When Carrol asked about physical laws, Azzouni stated that just because we can generalize some of the world in science doesn't mean there has to be an explanation for why the generalization works. It may be brute, and we have to live with the problem of induction. — Marchesk

I don't think this type of reasoning is persuasive. Even if we admit brute facts, they have to be brute because of something - a property, a law, a feature - of the universe causes this to be brute.

We may lack the cognitive capacities to figure out why such generalizations work, that can be granted without much problem. But I think there has to be a reason, otherwise, anything goes - because there are no reasons why this should be a brute fact as opposed to something else. It's a brute fact in virtue of the reason it is the way it is.

His argument against the necessary consistency of arithmetic is that this is only necessary as syntax, and going beyond that is to import meaning into the formalism. — Marchesk

When I speak of math, I'm out of my league. But it is misleading to say that the consistency of arithmetic is a "syntax". Natural language has quite different properties than a good deal of math. In fact, we may have derived out ability to do math through language. Or maybe not. To say it is a "syntax" is to use a metaphor that doesn't help.

And why is Sean Carrol so on board with this kind of radical nominalism if he thinks the wave function is real and describes many worlds? — Marchesk

It's a good question, I should listen to the entire podcast sometime. In general it seems to me that many modern day philosophers are not sympathetic to universalist arguments. I think they should be evident, otherwise, science doesn't make sense, nor would we share virtually identical manifest images of the world.

Great post.

Well, the point of an election is to see which candidate ends up with the most votes. That takes into consideration those who do not vote. If, in effect, one does not see a practical difference in voting, then I do not see why it shouldn't be considered a political position.

Although I understand the sentiment behind, I do not agree that voting should be made compulsory. It should be something people would want to do.

Sure. Though liking math is something that few people are intuitively attracted to.

One interesting question that arises as a follow-up to yours is, what is math? What does it study? Some structures. It's nebulous territory, hence the appeal of Platonism, which at least tries to give some coherence to the existence of math.

But, you should ask one of the mathematicians here, like jgill or others, who could help you out much more than I ever could.

Sure. We are typing on a keyboard and looking at a screen, you can touch it after all, your fingers don't go through it.

We should keep in mind that we are speaking about different levels of existence. When we hear that there is a lot of "empty space" in atoms, we are talking about nature observed from a very particular point of view.

What's a good description in one view, will not always be so on another view. Perhaps the one exception that looks to me to apply to all aspects of reality is temporality.

That is, we might be better off in thinking about objects as particular phases of events, than anything else. But, people have different views on the issue.

like a result of mine from 1991 that was recently used in a paper on decision making in group environments. — jgill

Very cool. Congrats man, well deserved! :clap:

Not at all, thank you for the correction.

Quick question, for my benefit: does this applied math give us insight into the nature of the world?

I mean, Pi and mathematical formulas belong to mathematics. Applied math, the kind the gives us theories, usually belong to physics.

Single celled organisms are still with us, in some form or another, for 3.7 billion years. We have been around as is, roughly 100,000 years. Most creatures more complicated than simple organisms die off completely.

The more complex the creature, in terms of biological complexity, organs, never mind self-consciousness, the less likely it will be around to pass on its genes. Intelligence may be a mistake, meaning, not good for survival in general - we may happened to have lucked out of extinction.

I think that's entirely plausible given the evidence we currently have of life on Earth.