'If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.' — Wayfarer
That is a point made from outside experience. It is viewing humans among other phenomena, as paleontology would do, or as anthropology would do. — Wayfarer
think the fact that we all see the same things and can agree down to the smallest detail as to what we see and that our observations show us that other animals see the same things we do, suggests very strongly that these things are not just mental constructions. — Janus
Can they? Do dogs see trees? — Manuel
That we all agree down to the smallest part on how objects appear to us, simply tells us we are all human beings. — Manuel
Now we know that there is such a thing as time and space absent us, which are quite different from our intuitive understanding of them. — Manuel
Wayfarer won't agree with you about the human-independent existence of space and time by the way. — Janus
I keep emphasizing that there are two distinct meanings of 'mind-independent': a practical meaning and a metaphysical meaning, the latter corresponding to metaphysical realism.
The practical meaning refers to the fact that many things—trees, mountains, other people—exist independently of your mind or mine in the sense that they do not rely on our individual perceptions to exist. This is uncontroversial and consistent with everyday experience.
Metaphysical realism, however, illegitimately extends this practical sense to claim that the world-at-large exists entirely independently of all mind, as if it is fundamentally separate from the act of perception or any cognitive structuring. — Wayfarer
I keep emphasizing that there are two distinct meanings of 'mind-independent': a practical meaning and a metaphysical meaning, the latter corresponding to metaphysical realism. — Wayfarer
They don't bump into them, and they lift their legs and pee on them They don't try to climb them although they may use them to stand on the back legs and look up to see what's up there making a sound they are intrigued by. Cats climb them and birds land and perch in them. — Janus
Nothing inside of us could determine the smallest details of what is seen. What is actually out there determines what is seen. Otherwise, you would have to posit that our minds are all somehow connected. — Janus
How do we know that and yet do not know that there are structured configurations of energy which appear to us as objects? Wayfarer won't agree with you about the human-independent existence of space and time by the way. — Janus
How do we know that, by the way? — Wayfarer
Henri Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something – such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature – we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time. — Who Really Won the Bergson-Einstein Debate
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.
Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271
They don't bump into something. Cats "climb" something (as opposed to go up? or latching on?). Yeah, they surely do stand on something. We conceptualize it as a tree - we have that linguistic and alongside that, conceptual capacity to apply the label "tree" to this thing animals react to. — Manuel
If we never arose, there would still be something there. It must be assumed otherwise how could we exist at all? Something had to happen that led to us, which did not depend on us. — Manuel
By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “non-existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta
This, , is Waif's strong doctrine. If you press it's logic, he will deny it, stepping back to some merely transcendental reality.'If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.' — Wayfarer
It does not create the objective world, but then, what is 'objective' without there being the subject or observer for whom it is an object? — Wayfarer
I think the evidence indicates that atoms, protons and so on existed prior to us. — Manuel
Neuroscientists that deny the reality of neurones? — Banno
What does "structure" cover for you? Does it cover the shape of a thing or it's qualia or what? That's a bit unclear to me. — Manuel
Are they saying that it is not the case that "reality is real"? Do they deny the reality of neurones? How do they reconcile that with their day job?Cognitive scientists who understand the fundamental role of an observing mind. — Wayfarer
Nothing further to add at this point. — Wayfarer
Ah. Fair enough. To be clear "idealism" covers a lot of ground, as does "materialism". It's a matter of what one emphasizes, it seems to me. — Manuel
The basic and essential difference I see between the two ontological posits is that idealism proposes that mind/ consciousness/ experience is fundamental and materialism/ realism takes energy/ matter to be fundamental. — Janus
I think the fact that we all see the same things and can agree down to the smallest detail as to what we see and that our observations show us that other animals see the same things we do, suggests very strongly that these things are not just mental constructions. — Janus
In order to come to conceptualize ^tree^ we must first be able to see one. — Janus
(Referring to video 'Is Reality Real) Are they saying that it is not the case that "reality is real"? — Banno
Beau Lotto (what an excellent name by the way): Is there an external reality? Of course there's an external reality. The world exists. It's just that we don't see it as it is. We can never see it as it is. In fact it's even useful to not see it as it is. And the reason is because we have no direct access to that physical world other than through our senses. And because our senses conflate multiple aspects of that world, we can never know whether our perceptions are in any way accurate (an exaggeration in my view). It's not so much do we see the world in the way that it really is, but do we actually even see it accurately? (I think there are obviously degrees of accuracy but it's a rhetorical point.)
Alva Noë on how our reality projects into our nervous system. However paradoxical it sounds, if we think of ‘what is visible’ as just what projects to the eyes, we see much more than is visible. Let me give you an example. I walk into a room and there's graffiti on the wall - and imagine it's graffiti that I find really offensive. I look at it, I flush, my heart starts to race, I'm outraged, I'm taken aback. Of course, if I didn't know the language in which it was written, I could have had exactly the same retinal events and the same events in my early visual system, without any corresponding reaction. Much more shows up for us than just what projects into our nervous system.
Donald Hoffman on if our senses are telling us the truth. Our senses are making up the tastes, odors and colors that we experience. They're not properties of an objective reality. They're actually properties of our senses, that they are fabricating. By ‘objective reality’ I mean what most physicists would mean, and that is that something is objectively real if it would continue to exist, even if there were no creatures to perceive it. Colors, odors, tastes and so on are not real in that sense of objective reality. They are real in a different sense. They're real experiences. Your headache is a real experience, even though it could not exist without you perceiving it. So it exists in a different way than the objective reality that physicists talk about. So it was quite a stunning shock to me when I realized that it's not just tastes, odors and colors, that are the fabrications of our senses and are not objectively real. Space-time itself, and everything within space-time. Objects, electrons, quarks, the sun, the moon, their shapes, their masses, their velocities, all of these physical properties are also constructions (compare Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung', representations.)
Frank Wilczek on how we perceive color and sound Scientific knowledge of what light is shows us that our natural perception leaves a lot on the table. The human perception of color is limited by the principles of quantum mechanics. It's interesting to compare the human perception of color, to the perception of sound. When you have two pure tones together, like a C and a G a simple chord, that's a fifth. If you hear that, you can hear the separate tones, even though they're played together and you hear a chord, you can also sense the separate tones.
Whereas with colors, you have two different colors, say spectral green and spectral red and mix them. What you see is not a chord where you can see the distinct identities preserved, but rather an intermediate color. In fact, you'll see something that looks like yellow. It's as if in music, when you play to the C and a G together, instead of hearing a chord, you just heard the note E the intermediate note.
So at this most basic level, we don't represent even the information we're getting in any accurate way. And the reason is because it was useful to see it this way. So what are you are seeing is the utility of the data not the data. Evolution by natural selection has shaped us with perceptions that are designed to keep us alive. So if I see a snake, don't pick it up. If I see a cliff, don't jump off. If I see a train don't step in front of it. We have to take our perceptions seriously, but that does not entitle us to take them literally.
Daniel Schmachtenberger on perception, choice making, and navigating reality. A perspective on something defined by perception is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. I can look at the object from the east side or the west side or the top or the north side or the inside, microscopically, telescopically, they'll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. So there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about almost any situation.
What this means is that reality itself is trans-perspectival. It can't be captured in any single perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken. All of which will have some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fish eye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion. Why does this matter? The ability to take multiple perspectives, to see the partial truth in them, and then to be able to seam them together into something that isn't a perspective it's a trans-perspective capacity to hold the relationships between many perspectives in a way that can inform our choice-making is fundamental to navigating reality well.
This is due to the fact that matter, or energy, whatever term you choose, signifies only an idea. — Metaphysician Undercover
If we take two people, point them to the horizon in a particular direction, in an active situation, and ask them to make a sentence about what they see, they will undoubtedly make different statements. — Metaphysician Undercover
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