My problem is when people say that the observation, and observers, are different kinds of things from the things getting observed. I see no evidence for it and I a lot of problems that can arise. — khaled

I agree completely.

Our observation ontologically "creates" reality. That's just QM (at least the versions with collapse, MWI disagrees). — khaled

Yes, but does our observation create the content of that reality: the object and its properties? More specifically , is there a normative relation between the object observed and the subject observing it , such that the kbjsext can be understood as emerging as a variation on a subjectively constituted theme? This would be the organizing and constraining role of a paradigm in relation to what can appear as an empirical object. It seems to me that this kind of intrinsic constituting role for the subject in relation to what is ‘observed’ is missing from qm. Time,space , the content of the object with all its properties, don’t seem to be co-constituted by a subject , but independent of it.

Our observation ontologically "creates" reality. That's just QM (at least the versions with collapse, MWI disagrees). — khaled

Copenhagen also disagrees, in its original guise anyway. The wavefunction in Copenhagen is epistemological, not ontological. It contains the factual and counterfactual information about a system. Once a measurement is made, we can identify the factual term and discard the rest. This was called "wavefunction reduction" at the time, now it's known as "wavefunction collapse".

Even wavefunction ontologists who believe in collapse are still usually describing "universal collapse", i.e. the collapse is true for all observers. Observation may cause the collapse, but it is not a subjective collapse. If you spill the coffee, yes, it's you that did it and in effect you "realised" the coffee spillage, but it's still a universal fact with a physical explanation.

Bohm would also disagree, as is the case in any QM interpretation with no collapse mechanism (MWI, like you say).

We see the cup, so it has the property of being seeable, which we now know means that it is a configuration of bound charged particles. — Kenosha Kid

Is the existence of the cup dependent on mind(s) in any way?

(in principle, not a weird invitation) — Kenosha Kid

:sad:

Obviously I can't watch me experiencing a film. — Kenosha Kid

Sure, I agree with how you present this.

What about reading a novel, don't you observe images in your head? Or when you are lost in thought?

What wayfarer’s move does is turn the subject into a kind of object.
— Joshs

Please show me where I've done that. As far as I'm concerned that is what I've been arguing against. — Wayfarer

It sounds like your view of the subject is compatible with that of Zahavi and Michel Henry.

From a recent paper or mine :

“ Zahavi(2005) says he is among those phenomenologists who “deny that the type of self-consciousness entailed by phenomenal consciousness is intentionally structured, that is, a question of a subject–object relation”. “Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)

While Zahavi finds inconsistent support in Husserl's work for his model of minimal ‘for-meness', Zahavi appreciates phenomenologist Michel Henry's unwavering insistence that pre-reflective self-awareness is a non-ecstatic and radical other to object consciousness.

Zahavi (1999) approvingly paraphrases Henry:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

My argument is that construing the subjective dimension of experience as a pure self-identify turns it into precisely what Heidegger critiques as Cartesian substance and Husserl describes as res extentia, that a thing endure as itself over time. These are the pre-conditions for an object.

Is the existence of the cup dependent on mind(s) in any way? — RogueAI

A property isn't for a particular event. The single-objective-universe hypothesis has it that the cup has the capacity to emit light without the evolution of conscious observers, and, if provided with energy, will emit light whether it's seen or not.

But... putting aside minds for the moment, my view is that no photon is created that is not destroyed, that is: a photon's final destination is a boundary condition of its existence. From a panpsychist point of view, whatever that destination is, that is a conscious observer. So there's that.

Of course, I personally have no direct evidence of any cup that I am not seeing. If I look away, I cannot see it. The opposite of objectivism (in the above sense, not the Randian sense) is solipsism: the belief that only my conscious experiences are real. Solipsism cannot explain why the cup appears the same when I go back to it, or why it disappeared after I heard a meow and a crash. This is why the single objective universe is the best explanation for our conscious experiences. Science is the test of that: the hunt for exotic phenomena that puts that hypothesis through its paces (falsification, null-hypothesis).

What about reading a novel, don't you observe images in your head? Or when you are lost in thought? — Manuel

Yes, of course. I think that's evidence in favour of physicalism, not against. Physicalism can explain why we see things that aren't there, because physicalism casts experience as information processes by hardware (the brain).

Dennett talks about this. You read about, say, the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List (or was it yellow?) and you *see* that red coat, right? Where is it? It's not on the screen, you're not watching any screen, you're reading a book. It's not in the book, that's all black ink on white paper. If we cut open your skull and tear apart your brains, we won't find a little red coat, not before we're arrested anyway. So where is it? In your mind, but what does that mean?

Red is a physical property. It tells you lots about the material that's emitting it. But even when we see it, there's no red in our retina, in the optic nerve carrying the signal to our brains, in the imaging centres in our brains or in the distributed memory of that red coat. What we have there is _representations_ of red things. 'The little girl's red coat' is a representation of a red thing, as is the network of neurons that encodes our memory of it and the particular electrical signal that carries information about it (obtained from the projection of photons from the screen onto the retina) to our brains. And what neuroscience is starting to figure out is how the red coat is represented in our consciousness.

In effect, we are never apprehending a red coat, only representations of a red coat, specifically that limited subset of representations of a red coat that is available to the part of the brain that's responsible for conscious knowledge (the hippocampus): knowledge about representations.

In what sense could we be said to be not separate from, for example, galaxies which are yet to be discovered? This would only make sense conceptually if a universal or collective mind were posited in which all the things and events we call the universe are thoughts or imaginings that our own experiences, thoughts and imaginings are "mirroring". In this view the essence of things would be ideal and physicality itself a manifestation of this ideality. — Janus

We have to get away from the whole notion of understanding and truth as mirroring , correspondence , representation, adequation to ‘ what is’ independently of us. Instead, we have to conceive of knowing as production , enaction. We don’t discover the world, we enact it. Let’s take a step back from empirical observation and start from the model of an organism
interacting with an environment. The older forms of Darwinism made this essentially a one-way street. The organism adapts itself to the constraints of the environment it finds itself in. The environment , however , is considered as independent of the organism. This is consistent with the idea that knowledge is the mirroring of an independent world. Newer interpretations of Darwin reject this one-way approach, arguing instead that what constitutes an environment for a organism is determined by the normative aims of its own functioning. What constitutes an ‘object’ for a creature is a function of what emerges as useful and relevant in the context of the organisms goals. We need to look at the empirical objects that emerge for the scientist in this way, not as dead independent self-identical things, but as what emerges for us out of the environment that we create in relation to our goals and purposes. What we discover , such as a distant galaxy , isn’t a thing sitting out there waiting for us to find it, but a useful component of our schemes
of interaction with our world. We only see something f as what it is to the extent that it serves a purpose for us, no what it is in itself cannot be separated out from the function it serves. What the ancients observed weren’t galaxies or stars or planets in the 21at century sense , but what had meaning in relation to their very different purposes.

all (apart from other animal) knowledge is human knowledge and thus cannot, by definition, be said to be independent of the human, and that there can be no absolute sentient being-independent knowledge; we are entitled, indeed bound, to say that much. — Janus

This is a reasonable summary of neo-Kantianism , or representational realism. I’d really love your take on this paper , which critiques this approach from a phenomenological perspective:

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

Here’s a snippet:

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition.

Husserl embraces a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and thereby dismisses the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different. “

A property isn't for a particular event. The single-objective-universe hypothesis has it that the cup has the capacity to emit light without the evolution of conscious observers, and, if provided with energy, will emit light whether it's seen or not. — Kenosha Kid

It sounds like you think the cup still exists if no one's observing it. I was going to ask if it's conscious, but you seem to answer that:

But... putting aside minds for the moment, my view is that no photon is created that is not destroyed, that is: a photon's final destination is a boundary condition of its existence. From a panpsychist point of view, whatever that destination is, that is a conscious observer. So there's that.

You're claiming that whatever a photon hits is a conscious observer?

Of course, I personally have no direct evidence of any cup that I am not seeing. If I look away, I cannot see it. The opposite of objectivism (in the above sense, not the Randian sense) is solipsism: the belief that only my conscious experiences are real. Solipsism cannot explain why the cup appears the same when I go back to it, or why it disappeared after I heard a meow and a crash. This is why the single objective universe is the best explanation for our conscious experiences. Science is the test of that: the hunt for exotic phenomena that puts that hypothesis through its paces (falsification, null-hypothesis). — Kenosha Kid

Solipsism can explain the behavior of the cup by positing that you're creating the reality you're experiencing (i.e., you're dreaming all this). It can't prove this explanation, but the "it's all a dream" explanation does explain why reality is the way it is.

Ah, so you follow the Dennett type of thinking. OK, got it. :up:

I'm in the Galen Strawson camp in this argument.

Thanks for the examples and the reply. I don't have much to add to that.

You're claiming that whatever a photon hits is a conscious observer? — RogueAI

No, not me, panpsychists. I think consciousness is a capability of brains (and maybe other, similarly complex and malleable information processing systems). Panpsychists believe that consciousness is a property of _everything_. (I don't know if that includes photons and spacetime. I've never gone into it that deeply with one.)

Solipsism can explain the behavior of the cup by positing that you're creating the reality you're experiencing (i.e., you're dreaming all this). — RogueAI

Well no, it can't. Physicalism can explain why I don't see the cup on the table: there is a me-independent cup on the me-independent table knocked off by a me-independent cat. This explanation tells us that experiencing no cup on the table was the only possible experience I could have. Solipsism has no explanation for why I experience no cup on the table rather than any of the infinite other experiences I might have.

Solipsism has no explanation for why I experience no cup on the table rather than any of the infinite other experiences I might have. — Kenosha Kid

You experience no cup on the table because you're dreaming there's no cup on the table, and you're experiencing what you're dreaming. That's an explanation.

Also, you earlier stated that there is no "what it is like to be red". So if you go and do x and someone asks you "what was it like to do x?" do you understand what they're asking? Do you think it's just a language game going on?

You experience no cup on the table because you're dreaming there's no cup on the table, and you're experiencing what you're dreaming. That's an explanation. — RogueAI

That's not an explanation. It explains absolutely nothing about why I'm having that experience and not some other.

So if you go and do x and someone asks you "what was it like to do x?" do you understand what they're asking? Do you think it's just a language game going on? — RogueAI

I'd infer they're asking me what it was like to do x on that occasion. If I frequently do x, they're asking for a summary of my impressions when doing x, each of which might be quite different.

I watched Fight Club a couple of nights ago and I enjoyed it a lot less than I did 20 years ago. I'd interpret the question "What is Fight Club like?" as meaning my current view on it, which isn't what it was like to me 20 years ago. "What it is like to watch Fight Club" isn't a thing; "What it is like for me to watch Fight Club" isn't even a thing. In fact, "What it was like for me to watch Fight Club the last time" isn't even *a* thing, it's lots and lots of events.

That's not an explanation. It explains absolutely nothing about why I'm having that experience and not some other. — Kenosha Kid

OK, so instead of a dream, let's pretend this is a simulation, and you notice a cup in the simulation. Why am I seeing a cup? you ask. Because the simulation is programmed that way. Do you accept that as an explanation?

In fact, "What it was like for me to watch Fight Club the last time" isn't even *a* thing, it's lots and lots of events. — Kenosha Kid

This is unclear. Let's look at the following conversation:
"I went skydiving."
"What was it like?"
"It was scary and fun."

What part of that conversation is unclear or "not a thing"?

watched Fight Club a couple of nights ago and I enjoyed it a lot less than I did 20 years ago. I'd interpret the question "What is Fight Club like?" as meaning my current view on it, which isn't what it was like to me 20 years ago. "What it is like to watch Fight Club" isn't a thing; "What it is like for me to watch Fight Club" isn't even a thing. In fact, "What it was like for me to watch Fight Club the last time" isn't even *a* thing, it's lots and lots of events. — Kenosha Kid

Is the same true of the experience of a cup? Is there an intrinsic meaning of fight club , one that transcends time and context? Even for the author, screenwriter and actors? What about the physical recordings of the movie? Don’t they maintain their intrinsic self-sameness over time? But even so , their meaning must be experienced by a subject. Is my experience of the cup
the same as yours, or the same as my experience
of it a moment ago? Is the cup different than Fight Club? Is there an intrinsically self-identical object surviving the myriad changing perceptual experiences of it? This is what science tells us. It defines for us objects that move in space time that are what they are in themselves apart from their interaction with us, apart from the purposes they serve for us, apart from any of the varying contexts in which they appear for us. There is no doubt this way of describing the world has its uses, but can we then go back from the abstraction of the mathematical object to the original perceiving and claim to found the latter on the former? Or is the object in geometric space-time a useful but impoverished derivative of the acts of intentional constitution that produce such idealized abstractions as the mathematical object?

OK, so instead of a dream, let's pretend this is a simulation, and you notice a cup in the simulation. Why am I seeing a cup? you ask. Because the simulation is programmed that way. Do you accept that as an explanation? — RogueAI

The simulation hypothesis leads to a lot of other questions about our experiences. If we are living in a simulation, it does appear that it has been programmed according to what physicalists call physical law: a simulated moon will always orbit a simulated planet orbiting a simulated star according to Einstein's equations. Why? Because it must do so? Or because it is one of many possible simulations? Why do electrons have the same charge and mass and magnitude of spin?

These are the same questions physicalists ask of the single objective reality too. I don't think there'd be any significant difference if the simulated universe always obeyed physical laws.

However if I am the only player, or if the simulation glitched or was patched, we'd end up with the kind of seemingly uncaused and/or irregular behaviour I was talking about earlier. If we ever saw such a thing, something else other than physicalism might have to be entertained.

This is unclear. Let's look at the following conversation:
"I went skydiving."
"What was it like?"
"It was scary and fun."

What part of that conversation is unclear or "not a thing"? — RogueAI

I didn't say it was unclear; in fact I specifically worked through how I'd interpret such a question.

I think I'd be typical in interpreting that as "what was it like the last time you went skydiving," not "what is skydiving like" generally. But skydiving isn't a single experience. There's the nervousness in the build-up, the overcoming of one's fears to jump out of the plane, the sense of falling, the rush of air in your face, perhaps disorientation, exhilaration, more fear that your parachute might not open or will open twisted, the jolt of the parachute opening, the view you have from the air, the feeling of hitting the ground, the awkwardness of getting clear of the chute, the happiness of having done it, the memory of all of the above.

The next time I go, I'm a different me, having a different parachuting experience, perhaps in a different place. The nervousness beforehand, the fear of jumping, etc. will all be different. The thought of the parachute not opening might not occur to me. I might hurt myself as I land, end up a sprained ankle. I might be in a bad mood that day.

I can have different kinds of memories of different parts of one skydiving "experience" because it's not one experience, and I might have very different individual experiences the next time.

I can summarise this. "Skydiving is great if everything goes okay," but packed behind all of that are a bunch of different, sometimes conflicting experiences.

Yes, but does our observation create the content of that reality: the object and its properties? — Joshs

Yes that’s what I meant by “ontologically”. It is the most popular interpretation of QM, that the wave function somehow “collapses”. And “collapse” isn’t just is “finding out” where the electron “really was all along”, it is literally the electron changing from an undefined wave to a defined particle.

Time,space , the content of the object with all its properties, don’t seem to be co-constituted by a subject , but independent of it. — Joshs

How do you explain what happens in a double slit experiment. If all the electrons are “really somewhere” we just don’t know where then why is it that they ACT as if they’re “really everywhere” until they are observed and collapse into being “really somewhere”.

I don’t know what “constituted by a subject” means. We don’t decide where the electron appears, but without observation, there is no electron, just a quantum wave (or quantum soup as I like to call it).

Most interpretations of QM as far as I understand don’t have it be that electrons are “really somewhere” bumping into each other, but what is “really there” is quantum soup, until something takes a look, then it collapses, ontologically, to electrons bumping into each other. We know this because quantum soup looks different when going through two slits than when electrons go through two slits.

Copenhagen also disagrees, in its original guise anyway. The wavefunction in Copenhagen is epistemological, not ontological. — Kenosha Kid

Yes I know it’s not the only interpretation. But I don’t understand epistemological interpretations. And I thought they were the minority with ontological being more popular.

Even wavefunction ontologists who believe in collapse are still usually describing "universal collapse" — Kenosha Kid

I didn’t say the collapse wasn’t universal. I have no clue whether or not it is. Nor do I particularly care much to research it right now.

I don't agree with a lot of that, but I appreciate the time you put into those responses!

Yes I know it’s not the only interpretation. But I don’t understand epistemological interpretations. And I thought they were the minority with ontological being more popular. — khaled

I'm not sure any more tbh. But Copenhagen is the original, and that has an epistemic wavefunction, i.e. it represents our knowledge about a system, not the real system itself. You're probably right that this isn't the default position it once was. MWI seems very popular, and recent Wigner's friend experiments suggest a more observer-dependent collapse.

I don't agree with a lot of that, but I appreciate the time you put into those responses! — RogueAI

Yeah, enjoyed talking to you, Rogue.

reply="khaled;553477"]

Most interpretations of QM as far as I understand don’t have it be that electrons are “really somewhere” bumping into each other, but what is “really there” is quantum soup, until something takes a look, then it collapses, ontologically, to electrons bumping into each other — khaled

I don’t know what “constituted by a subject” means. We don’t decide where the electron appears, but without observation, there is no electron, just a quantum wave (or quantum soup as I like to call it). — khaled

Constituted by a subject means all we first perceive are
undetermined phenomena with no particular order or pattern to them , just sensations ( not yet colors or sounds , since these are already more advanced constructions), that never repeat themselves. Then we gradually come to see a flow of events , such as the changing perspectives of a visual scene , as interlocked , and we come to hypothesize these correlated events as aspects of a single self-same object. But it doesn’t become a stable ‘it’ for us until we correlate its changing appearances with the movement of our body in relation to it , how it changes predictably in response to the movement of our head, eyes , body. It only becomes an empirical object when we correlate our private experience of it with that of other persons, who have their own vantage on it. Then our own perspective of it changes to just an aspect of ‘the’ empirical object for all of us. As you can see, from this vantage there is. thing primordial about an electron . It is a highly complex concept.


And this is an object than no one actually sees. It is an abstraction, just as the personal object for me is an abstraction composed of a flow of events. We never actually attain the ‘object’ , not because the thing in itself is out there inaccessible to us, but because there never was a thing in itself, just the appearances that are construed by us in more and more complex and abstract ways through intersubjective science. This is what I mean by the electron being a construction. It is founded in our subjective constitution of objectness, coupled and elaborated by our intersubjective rendering of it as empirical object. Just as the empirical object is an abstraction, so is the space time within which such abstractions ‘move’ . Displacement in space only makes sense if we presume a self-identical object.

So it seems to me that qm doesn’t want to get rid of the ‘real’ space time grid and the concept of movement as displacement in space. It can’t do this because it still believes in the primordiality of the self-identical object , even if that object needs us to look at it in order for it to appear.

If you hold that QM is not a physical theory, then we don't have the same language. — Kenosha Kid

Quantum mechanics is a physical theory, but the nature of theory is never a matter for physics. It's the true nature of the wavefunction which is at issue - if it were cut-and-dried, there would be no competing interpretations.

It sounds like your view of the subject is compatible with that of Zahavi and Michel Henry. — Joshs

My view of the subject that the self/mind is unknowable (although not in the way the 'new mysterians' mean it.) That's why I referred to the Bitbol paper, 'It is not known but it is the knower', a principle articulated in the Upaniṣad, which he references, which is rarely referenced. I see it as a fundamental but mostly neglected epistemological principle. (See this passage.)

I’ve listened to many of his videos, and learned a lot from them, but I think he’s weak on the philosophy. // Like, at around 1:59 he briefly describes Bohr and Heisenberg's contention that the 'act of measurement causes the experiment to settle on a particular result' as 'a kooky idea'. //

It was inevitable, it seems, that this thread eventually fell to the base level of poorly done quantum mechanics - 'woo" seems to be the going term for it.

Ideal opportunity for you to come in and make brief snide comments. Isn't that what you most enjoy about this forum?

Well, not most enjoy. But it's right up there.

It was inevitable, it seems, that this thread eventually fell to the base level of poorly done quantum mechanics - 'woo" seems to be the going term for it. — Banno

I know you aren't talking about O'Dowd. He knows more about QM than you ever will.

In a debate over materialism vs idealism, the implications of science can't be ignored. And since the discovery of quantum physics, those implications seriously threaten materialism. What if Victorian science had discovered, as it hoped, the 'fundamental building blocks of reality'? Instead what happened was the discovery that the act of observation was somehow inextricably linked to what was being observed, on a fundamental level. It is a truism that a century later, still nobody really knows what it means. That's why there's a profusion of 'interpretations'. If that isn't relevant to philosophy, hard to see what would be.

So - a lot of later philosophy wants to ignore this - to say 'well, it's all too difficult to spell out in plain language, leave it to the scientists'. But few of the scientists have much knowledge of, or interest in, the philosophical implications (with exceptions.) Many of them are employed to produce outcomes, hardly any to wonder about what it all means. But there is a large and growing literature on it, not least by philosophically-literate scientists (not least Werner Heisenberg himself.)

Just google the phrase consciousness creates reality and scroll through the various papers and articles that this brings back. No, that doesn't prove that 'consciousness creates reality'. But it does certainly show that it's a serious subject of discussion in physics and philosophy. And it should be! In the absence of the Democritean atom, of 'atoms and the void' fame, then what foundation can philosphical materialism stand on, without simply becoming an appeal to scientific method (which is what usually happens.)

So you didn't watch the whole video, huh?