I see physics as being a heavy duty reduction. How can we describe time and material change on that most basic abstracted level of interactive forces? I have no doubt that atmospheres formed, earth cooled, rain fell and erosion happened long before humans appeared.

Of course having no doubt and being absolutely certain are not the same in my book.

I'd have to do away with qualia as well as manifest, "ordinary", human concepts. Scientific concepts, if they are "on the right track", attempts to show some aspects of mind-independent reality, but how to make sense of this, absent ordinary concepts and qualia, is impossible to understand.

I have to read much more of him to be able to say much, but I suspect Whitehead was onto something when he described the world as being one of processes not things, so some activity, some happenings occur absent us.

Why nature would bother with differentiation is very strange. It seems to me that nature, on all levels, tries to be as "lazy" as possible, so I don't know why it would bother to take different forms... perhaps it is more expedient to do so.

Quantum mechanics is more than a century old, but physicists still fight over what it means. Most of the hand wringing and knuckle cracking in their debates goes back to an assumption known as “realism.” This is the idea that science describes something—which we call “reality”—external to us, and to science. It’s a mode of thinking that comes to us naturally. It agrees well with our experience that the universe doesn’t seem to care what theories we have about it. Scientific history also shows that as empirical knowledge increases, we tend to converge on a shared explanation. This certainly suggests that science is somehow closing in on “the truth” about “how things really are.”

Alas, realism is ultimately a philosophical position that itself has no empirical basis. All we can tell for sure is whether a certain hypothesis is any good at describing what we observe. Yet whether that description is about something that is independent and external to us, the observer, is a question we cannot ourselves ever answer.

This, needless to say, is not a new conundrum, but one that philosophers have discussed for as long as there’ve been philosophers. But it is alive and kicking in the debate about interpretations of quantum mechanics today, as Jim Baggott reminds us in his new book Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics. — Sabine Hossenfelder, review of Jim Baggott's Quantum Reality

You can also find a video presentation of Baggott's launch of this book here. It has a particularly lucid explanation of the Bell experiments starting around 39:00.

I don't think there are settled questions in metaphysics - it belongs to the field. I'm essentially a Neo-Kantian or a Rationalistic Idealist like Cudworth or Chomsky.

Which means I accept most of what you say and argue for, though I have a different emphasis and concerns.

What I'm saying is that there is something external to me, which is the cause of my representation. Everything I access to, including physics, are appearances, but I add to it that there must be grounds which are non-representational "real", independent of me, which feeds into my ideal image of the world.

If I don't postulate a cause external to my ideas, then I have essentially a modified Berkelyianism, which I don't think is true.

There may be nothing real. That not were my intuitions take me.

Thanks! Good to hear.

What I'm saying is that there is something external to me, which is the cause of my representation. — Manuel

That is the argument that Kant elaborated in his 'refutation of idealism', which he added to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, after some of his critics compared his ideas to Berkeley's. So again I don't believe Kant's variety of idealism holds to anything like that 'the world is all in the mind', but that is how it seems often to be interpreted.

I certainly don't agree there is nothing real - that is nihilism, which actually has taken quite a strong hold in today's culture. Bu I don't believe anything like that. I believe that reality is of greater depth and extent than the objective sciences can grasp but I'm definitely not nihilist.

That is the argument that Kant elaborated in his 'refutation of idealism', which he added to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, after some of his critics compared his ideas to Berkeley's. So again I don't believe Kant's variety of idealism holds to anything like that 'the world is all in the mind', but that is how it seems often to be interpreted. — Wayfarer

Yes, there's an excellent discussion of this topic by whom I consider to be the best Kant interpretation (who incidentally Strawson recommended to me) Manifest Reality by Lucy Allais. She not only clearly establishes that Kant was a transcendental idealist, but also an empirical realist.

Cudworth says something very similar.

I certainly don't agree there is nothing real - that is nihilism, which actually has taken quite a strong hold in today's culture. Bu I don't believe anything like that. I believe that reality is of greater depth and extent than the objective sciences can grasp but I'm definitely not nihilist. — Wayfarer

I didn't have in mind nihilism at all actually, more like irrealism of the kind Goodman defends, that there are only "versions", various descriptions of the world.

I think I'm the opposite, as in, yes the sciences can grasp important and interesting and useful aspects of the world, but the richness is in our nature, not so much the world.

It's an interesting topic, that can become a bit technical.

‘Reality’ is a concept. Concepts require - as far as we know - a perspective. Therefore ‘Reality’ cannot exist without an observer.

In simple terms if there is no conscious being to conceive of differences then ‘reality’ has no meaning.

Whether life is more suffering than joy is up to you. In any case it is impossible to quantify, so such a judgement is down to disposition. — Janus

Of course, of course. We wouldn't want the whole world to find out the truth. Imagine what would happen? Some people can't be unplugged from The Matrix (they die instantly).

That is what is called into question by the 'observer problem' in physics. It is the exact reason why Einstein felt compelled to ask 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking?' It seems that at a fundamental level the supposition of 'mind-independence' no longer holds. That is the most philosophically challenging discovery of 20th c physics. It's why there's the many-worlds intepretation. — Wayfarer

All that interpretations owe their lives to a preferred interpretation: the Copenhagen interpretation. It was decided there that nature is intrinsically probabilistic. There were no objective reasons to justify this. It were some physics hotshots who settled the matter. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Ehrenfest,etc. Einstein wasn't even paid attention to. Well, he was of course, but the Copenhagen view got hold, and it's taught at universities. I remember asking about this, and the reply was not even to think about this. That settled the matter! But why should indeterminism rule? Look at all the interpretations it entailed. The only interpretation that sounds reasonable to me are hidden variables. Had that one become the standard, all other ones had been superfluous. The MWI would not have been there because collapse would have been an objective collapse. And the status of hidden variables wouldn't have been interpretative but ontological.

Tthe books I found most useful for this were Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality and David LIndley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. Note the references to 'battles' and 'struggles' - the battle really is about the status of scientific realism. What the observer problem tended to undermine was precisely the assumption of the mind-independent nature of atomic phenomena. in respect of the question posed by this thread, it was that discovery that undermined Einstien's instinctive scientific realism, by the implication that the act of observation somehow determined the outcome of the experiment. It became even more pronounced with Wheeler's 'participatory realism' - his 'delayed choice' experiment is completely counter to realist expectations (see Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?)

The Copenhagen Interpretation has always appealed to me, granted mine is only a lay understanding and that I don't understand the mathematical formalisms. But Kumar's book is really good on all of that, and I think it's pretty well regarded.

She not only clearly establishes that Kant was a transcendental idealist, but also an empirical realist. — Manuel

What benefit can there possibly be, in claiming to establish what has already been stated in the record?

Different interpreters tend to downplay certain aspects of his philosophy. Some don't particularly care for his idealism, others don't like to consider his metaphysical claims, some say he is a phenomenalist, or think things in themselves are merely a limiting notion, etc.

It's an interpretation based, at least in part, on arguing against why others have misread him in some aspects, such as Allison or Langton or Guyer, etc.

Same thing happened to Hume with regard to causality or to Descartes with innate ideas. If you read them, you see that a good deal of the commentary is very mistaken.

So the benefit is to show why idealism is necessary to Kant, as well as realism and things in themselves.

Ahhh....so she’s showing the non-believers how foolish they are. I can dig that.

Sometimes I’m too literal for my own good. Comes from being a virgoyankeebabyboomer, ‘nuff said.

:up: I was really into Whitehead a few years ago, and I generally agree with a process approach, as the idea of static entities seems to be merely a formal abstraction.

Yes, there's an excellent discussion of this topic by whom I consider to be the best Kant interpretation (who incidentally Strawson recommended to me) Manifest Reality by Lucy Allais. She not only clearly establishes that Kant was a transcendental idealist, but also an empirical realist. — Manuel

I touched on this earlier; I think Kant's idea makes sense if we consider it from the human point of view. So from that perspective empirical objects insofar as they are intersubjectively shared in a public world are real, and certainly not merely in anyone's mind. And from that standpoint transcendental "objects" are ideal insofar as they can only be thought about, but never encountered (except as empirical objects of course :wink:).

From a more "absolute objective" standpoint, the situation is reversed: empirical objects, as such, are mind dependent identities and so ideal, and transcendental "objects" are whatever is ultimately real.

It's something like this, yes, the exact details in minutiae may vary from person to person, Mww would likely bust out a sophisticated vocabulary here, but it's a very good formulation.

As I see it, the objects we encounter in everyday life are both ideal and real, they're ideal in so far as they become manifest to creatures like us, they're real in so far as everybody can see and interact with them and will be similarly affected by the objects.

I think that "things in themselves" ground objects - they can't be relational "all the way down". Substitute "things in themselves" for "structures", as you said the other day, and we essentially agree.

I think there is something non-relational to objects, that is not revealed in the physics we do. If we all suddenly vanish, and that tree out there remains, it hard to think that all that remains are a "bundle of particles".

I think there is something non-relational to objects, that is not revealed in the physics we do. If we all suddenly vanish, and that tree out there remains, it hard to think that all that remains are a "bundle of particles". — Manuel

I agree, and I think there certainly seem to be real "levels" of being and interaction. There is the atomic level, below that the "quark" level, and above it the molecular and cellular. At each successive level, there seem to be emergent processes and interactions which cannot be explained in terms of the levels below.

So we identify all these cellular processes going on in the tree: photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration, micorrhizal symbiosis and so on. Plant cells appear to similar to our own except they also have cellulose cell walls which animals cells don't. Plant cells do have mitochondria, just as animal cells do, so there would seem to be a real commonality there.

In any case the point is that I think it is a mistake to think of any level as being "more real" than any other, because of the reality of emergent properties that cannot be explained in terms of the lower "levels".

In my view, the crucial issue in respect of absolute objectivity is that of the nature of time and space. Kant denies that these are 'given in themselves, independent of our sensibility' (CPR A369).

In his chapter on time, Kant says that 'Time is not something which subsists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination, and therefore remains, when abstraction is made of the subjective conditions of the intuition of things. ....Time is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensuous, that is, so far as we are affected by objects), and in itself, independently of the mind or subject, is nothing.'

Likewise, 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves, and would remain, even though all subjective conditions of the intuition were abstracted.'

This mitigates against the claim that the planets, for example, retain an objective position independently of observation in any absolute sense. In other words, it challenges the 'there anyway' attitude typical of common-sense realism.

Now listen to the first five or six minutes of this CTT interview with Andrei Linde. (Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.) Robert Lawrence Kuhn is asking Linde why it is that he believed it was necessary to consider the role of the observer when applying the Schrodinger equation to the Universe as a whole. I won't try and paraphrase his answer - it is very clearly given in the interview - but it seems to me to provide support for Kant's philosophy of the nature of space and time. (Linde also discusses the issue of the existence of the Universe prior to any observers around 6:30.)

Yes, exactly. I speculate that, a being with more acute senses and intellect than us could perceive how physics leads to biology "up" to qualia.

We don't.

I'm guessing there could be possible sciences, say, in between physics and chemistry, and between chemistry and biology that we can't engage in. It's kind of a freak accident of nature that we should be able to do any science at all, not to mention rational enquiry into other areas of life.

Something essential to survival probably had the hidden benefit of being able to do science, as a by-product of a mutation, like maybe language leads to math, which leads to physics.

Yes, exactly. I speculate that, a being with more acute senses and intellect than us could perceive how physics leads to biology "up" to qualia. — Manuel

I guess it's possible. Although I have to say I am skeptical because to my way of thinking the idea of qualia is just the notion of how things "feel", how experience feels, to us, and I don't see any way that subjective feeling could be directly accessed by scientific observation. We all access our own subjective feelings constantly, at least when we pay attention; they constitute our very life, and I think the best way to "explain" them (I think 'express' or 'evoke' is a better term since the feeling itself, as opposed to the conditions that allow for the feeling, cannot really be explained in any scientific sense) is via the arts, and most discursively, poetry and imaginative literature.

That's true and my speculation may be totally wrong, things could simply emerge. Granting that, I must point to how counter intuitive this is, which says nothing about its being true or false. I doubt most rational people would deny that animals have qualia too, there own way of interacting with and dealing with the world. They obviously lack the capacity for science.

So somehow, we develop a system which tells us some things about the mind-independent world, yet it tells us almost nothing about what we directly are most acquainted with. Yet it's been through our experimental engagement with light that we've made remarkable discoveries.



I think we should now say that spacetime is what exists, and is what is given to us by virtue of being cognitive creatures.

Sure, location depends on a human being, this is kind of like the whole paradox of asking where's "up" and "down" in space, there is no up and down. But bring in a human being, then they immediately understand where up and down are.

I don't have a problem with that. I would have to grant other living creatures with experience too, at least those creatures that seem conscious to us, say, a dog or a dolphin. Once you have that, you have a world, properly speaking.

Sure, what Lindei says in that interview is interesting, and obviously speaks to my rationalistic idealist tendencies. But all I'm claiming is that there is something there, independent of us.

Sure, you can reply (if you would, which I don't think you would, or am not clear) that how can we say there is something independent of us, if we are the ones postulating it? I can only say that I can't render metaphysics intelligible if I don't postulate something external to me, that has powers.

But as for location, or universes and all that, I don't have a problem with what you're saying.

Linde seems to be saying the opposite; that spacetime is independently real.

Something essential to survival probably had the hidden benefit of being able to do science, as a by-product of a mutation, like maybe language leads to math, which leads to physics. — Manuel

I don't think anything in Darwinian theory provides a necessary explanation for mathematics. A general explanation, yes, in the sense that h. sapiens evolved to be able to count and abstract, but the only rationale Darwin provides for it beyond that is in terms of adaptation, 'what works' from a survival p-o-v.

A Fabulous Evolutionary Defense of Dualism Clay Farris Naff

Linde seems to be saying the opposite; that spacetime is independently real. — Janus

He makes the case for the role of the observer.

I don't think anything in Darwinian theory provides a necessary explanation for mathematics. A general explanation, yes, in the sense that h. sapiens evolved to be able to count and abstract, but the only rationale Darwin provides for it beyond that is in terms of adaptation, 'what works' from a survival p-o-v. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. We don't even know why certain things were selected. We can say retroactively, that X thing helped for survival, but that may be false. In terms of cognitive faculties, we don't really know why we have the ones we do.

It's only that now, we could say that something adjacent to the capacity for mathematics was selected, for some reason, which led to our capacity to do theoretical science.

Needless to say most life by far, consists bacteria, with no need for much of anything by way of mental processes.

This essay by Richard Lewontin, is most interesting:

The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer

https://langev.com/pdf/lewontin98theEvolution.pdf

I can only say that I can't render metaphysics intelligible if I don't postulate something external to me, that has powers. — Manuel

Could you explain why?

If I don't postulate something in the objects that is not created by me and my cognitive capacities, then the only option I have left is that everything depends on my mind. This would mean that before we as human beings arose, there was literally nothing at all.

Secondly, if everything were dependent on mind, I don't see what prevents me from simply introspecting any object in perception and know all the truths about it. As in, I think of a stone and merely by thinking about it, I'd know what minerals made it up, I'd know that it's made of atoms, etc.

I could also introspect and know everything about human psychology, etc. But if I say, I think there is something in the world which does not depend on my mind, then I can say, that there was something here before me, that I do not know what that stone is made of, I do not know much about human psychology by introspecting, etc.

If I don't postulate something in the objects that is not created by me and my cognitive capacities, then the only option I have left is that everything depends on my mind. This would mean that before we as human beings arose, there was literally nothing at all. — Manuel

Isn't it possible that you're eternal and you just forgot?

Secondly, if everything were dependent on mind, I don't see what prevents me from simply introspecting any object in perception and know all the truths about it. As in, I think of a stone and merely by thinking about it, I'd know what minerals made it up, I'd know that it's made of atoms, etc. — Manuel

Again, maybe you can do that, but you don't remember how.

Well, if you have in mind anything like certainty, then all rules are off. I mean, it seems as if the only consistent "hard nosed" attitude is to be a hardcore solipsist, as in I know I exist now, in the "specious present", and that's it, anything before or after, like, 3 seconds, could come out of anywhere, and then anything is possible.

But if we go on to try and be a bit more systematic with our impressions and experiences, we begin to form a picture of the world, such that yesterday at this time I was doing so and so and tomorrow I'll be doing so and so in the morning. It's a story, surely very misleading in some respects, but something we just do.

I just meant that solipsism is conceivable. Maybe the concept of self would break down if there's nothing else. Why call it "my mind" if there are no others? And what is "mind" if there's nothing mindless to compare it to? But isn't that the same problem any kind of monism faces?

It is. But that's the thing, almost anything is conceivable (if not everything), but that leads to stuff like the simulation hypothesis, which makes no sense at all. It is conceivable, of course, but other intelligent beings would have to be really, really bored to do such an experiment.

Well, we speak in terms of "my mind" and "my body", but one should be careful in thinking that "my" and "mind", in the phrase "my mind" refers to two different entities an "I" and a "mind", it's one thing.

As for monism, yes, metaphysical monism has the problem. We have experience and we have non-experience (rocks, tables, wood, particles), but they all belong to the same world. So far as I know, I can't think of something that's better than dual-aspect monism, meaning same world.

Or, if you are an eliminitavist, you can say consciousness is an illusion and try to argue that really, there is only non-experiential stuff, but that's irrational in the extreme, to me.