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I wrote an OP on this - the Mind Created World. But it’s very easy to misunderstand what it means. We need an epistemological framework which allows for the distinction between reality and appearance - and that is something which scientific realism doesn’t provide. Kant provides it, in his phenomena - noumena distinction.

(I’ll say more later, not able to write more now.)

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Or, you can say the polio virus can cause paralysis. Now say what that exactly means. I think you will find that it does not exactly mean anything. — tim wood

The polio virus initiates the causal chain that leads to paralysis. That chain includes events like: the virus enters the body → the immune system fails to contain it → it infects motor neurons → tissue damage occurs → paralysis results. In that sense, the virus is both a necessary condition and the starting point of the process.

Isn’t that what we mean by "cause"? If we claim X causes Y, and consistently find through rigorous testing that removing X reliably prevents Y, then we’re justified in saying X causes Y — pending better evidence. Are you arguing for radical skepticism about causes?

Some clarification then. I use 'observer' to mean something like people, any entity which can gather information and attempt to glean its own nature. 'Measure' on the other hand comes from quantum mechanics, the most simple interaction between two 'physical' states, say a rock measuring rain by getting wet and getting a jolt of momentum from the drop. That's a measurement, but not an observation. — noAxioms

Ok, I can appreciate that. But in QM the 'collapse' of the wavefunction happens during measurements. If any physical object can cause a 'measurement' by interacting with any other physical object, then my point of the perspectives remain.

Yes, hence there being an incomprehensible quantity of worlds under something like MWI. You list a classical interaction, but the tiny ones are far more frequent. — noAxioms

Absolutely. MWI and RQM share IMO the same problem. They try recover a 'realism' of sorts at the questionable price of implying an explosion of the number of perspectives (though I believe that RQM actually isn't realistic if it doesn't postulate a 'veiled reality' that 'grounds' all the perspectives).

Go Copenhagen then. It's the point of that interpretation. There's no causal role of the observer in any interpretation except the Wigner interpretation, which Wigner himself abandoned due to it leading to solipsism. — noAxioms

Well, I do not generally use 'Copenaghen' as a term to describe my views, due to the fact that there are many flavors of 'Copenaghen'. Some of them are not even epistemic as they go too close to abscribing a causal role to mind/consciousness.

I am sympathetic to QBism and d'Espagnat's view of 'veiled reality'. But sometimes it seems to me that even these authors go too far. To me, the lesson we learned from QM is that we should be careful to take physical theories literally. In fact, there is a trend in physical theories since at least the formulation of special relativity. The mathematics becoming more and more abstract, the fact that if we interpret them as a faithful picture of physical reality it becomes stranger and stranger and so on.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that now we don't know better the physical world. I like the expression 'veiled reality' because it suggests that we can know something but we cannot know the precise relation of our knowledge and 'how the world really is' and, of course, that our knowledge will probably forever be limited.

Anyway, I believe that even in newtonian mechanics the question of perspective was present, with the notion of reference frames. It's clear what that notion means when one thinks about an observer which is at rest with respect to some kind of object. But the problem is: are these reference frames a way of talking about what an observer would observe/experience in a given situation? Or are reference frames the perspectives of physical object themselves ? And what a 'perspective' of a pen might be?
And what about the reality behind these reference frames? Is it describable by the physical concepts we made by trying to make a picture of our own observations? What remains when one 'takes away' everything perspectival (i.e. everyting that is perspective-dependent)?

IMO QM just made these questions more apparent and more pressing. But an analogous interpretative problem was even present in newtonian mechanics, in fact.

One issue with the Eleatic Principle is that it leaves out more than just abstract entities like numbers — it also excludes the kinds of structural constraints that actually make causality intelligible in the first place. Things like geometric, logical, or modal constraints don’t cause events, but they limit what kinds of events are possible. They’re not things we observe directly, but factors we come to understand through reason — deductively in some cases, inductively in others. So if we say that ‘only what has causal power’ is real, we’re bracketing those out. I think this is part of why, after quantum mechanics came along, scientific realism had to loosen its reliance on the idea of physical causation. The uncertainty principle and the shift toward probabilistic models made it harder to hold onto the idea of strict causal necessity, and we ended up with something more structural — and arguably closer to constraints than to causes.

The title of this thread is irksome. So you disagree with some idea, and that means *no one* really believes it? Come the fuck on.

Growing up, I heard so many Christians insist "nobody is really an atheist". I even once heard an atheist say "nobody really believes in any gods". Both of those statements are equally absurd.

Yes, people out there really believe in a reality that isn't dependent on minds. Yes, other people out there disagree with that. Yes, people really do disagree with each other. The question shouldn't be, "do people really disagree with me?", obviously they do, the question should be "why do they?"

Don't be so arrogant to think only your beliefs are the ones that anybody truly believes. People believe all sorts of things.

In fairness to the OP, it presents quite a few arguments, and includes an academic paper on the topic. It’s not empty rhetoric.

I have no problem at least holding to a mind-independent view or notion or idea, of reality…..
— Mww

Cannot parse this. — noAxioms

You asked for a defense of a strictly metaphysical condition, re: the mind-independence of reality, which cannot be justified without sufficient criteria for the relation of the conceptions involved to each other.

By stipulating the kind of intelligence involved….you know, in this case, the human kind….and iff it is the case logic is the necessary determining condition for it, the relations determinable by that condition suffice as ground for the presuppositions upon which such intelligence operates and from which all else follows.

On the one hand, then, by saying I hold with a mind-independent view of reality, the only relation I need is apprehending the distinction between me and not me, which in itself doesn’t need any defense, insofar as the negation of it, is impossible.

Publicly defending the judgement (yes, reality is mind-independent), on the other hand, which is not the same as the constructing of it, which is merely my private thinking, requires I define the conceptions involved in order to validate their relation to each other, which I’m not inclined to do, for the simple reason no one is obliged to agree with them, in which case, and absent such agreement, my defense must fail.

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Ideas do not exist independently of the mind that has them. Rocks on the other hand do. — tim wood

Hardness and porosity do not exist independently of the rock either. So what is the point? Properties do not exist independently of the thing they are part of.

If we were to instead define being independent as being causally separated, then jorndoe provided the simple answer to that question:

You (decide to) call your dog, and it comes over: mind → world

Your dog comes over, making you happy: world → mind

So no, not independent. — jorndoe

So it appears that "independence" in the context of minds, their ideas and the world are not independent at all, in any sense of the word.

Let's say you have a compact disk of Mozart pieces. In a mindless universe, that disk is just a collection of particles assembled in a disk with a bunch of tiny pits. There's no musical information, right? But the CD also obviously contains musical information. Mind is fundamental viz a viz the musical information.

Or take a book about Sherlock Holmes. In a mindless universe, that book is just a collection of inks and pages. There's no Sherlock Holmes there. But that book also contains information about Sherlock Holmes which only a universe with minds could detect. — RogueAI

Are you saying that CDs, books and watches can come to be without their being a mind with intent to create them? If a mind went into creating them then these things cannot exist in a mindless universe, so your examples are unrealistic.

Take natural phenomenon, like tree rings in a tree stump. Is a mind necessary for the tree rings to mean the age of the tree, or are the tree rings representative of the age of the tree because of the causal process of how the tree grows throughout the year?

If some mass of molecules absorbed the light reflected off the rings and made some marks somewhere equal to the number of rings and then erased those marks for each ring in another stump, you'd have the age of the first tree when the second one began its life, no mind necessary.

The distinction with minds is that they possess intent, or are goal-directed. Information is everywhere but what information is relevant is dependent upon the present goal in the mind. It's not that there isn't information there. It's just that it is irrelevant to the current goal.

CDs and books contain information more than just the music and stories. They contain information about how and where they were constructed, their authors, the language they are written in and the level of understanding the authors have of the English language, the author's intentions, etc., all causal processes, that are there and ripe for the pickings if your goals were different than to just listen to music or read a story. What if you were a collector of CDs and books? You might organize them based on different types of information contained within them, not just the story or music, like the author, printings, publisher, etc.

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Not independent at least of the process via which they are implemented. — noAxioms

You can say that about anything, not just minds and their ideas. Rocks are not independent of the processes that makes them rocks.

You might say that ideas of rocks need rocks to exist
— Harry Hindu
Nah... My ideas of unicorns exist despite the typical assertion of the nonexistence of the unicorns. — noAxioms

I wonder if you could have the idea of a unicorn without having experienced the existence of horses and horns prior.

Your idea of a unicorn caused you to write the scribble, "unicorn" on the screen, and you can draw a picture of one too - all causal processes. Can your drawing (the paper with the ink marks) exist independently of your idea of the unicorn? I mean would that drawing come to exist if there if you had no ideas of unicorns?

You seem to misunderstand the OP. I'm not suggesting that mind causes the existence of things, but rather that the minds cause the concept of existence of things. Whether that concept corresponds to objective fact is an open issue. People tend to assert the existence of things perceived. (They're presumed to exist) because they are perceived, but I think you're reading it more as They're presumed to (exist because they are perceived). The latter is the idealism I'm not talking about. — noAxioms

Then you're talking about solipsism if you are emphasizing the uncertainty of an external world.

I'm not sure if the mind causes concepts. The mind is composed of concepts. Minds certainly do cause the existence of things, like books, CDs and rockets to space.

More to the point, are 'you' in the past, and per the reasoning quoted above, the answer is yes. A relational view is described there, and Rovelli (from Relational Quantum Mechanics) says that a system at a moment in time does not exist since it hasn't measured itself. It can only measure the past, so only prior events exist relative to a measuring event. — noAxioms

Sure. It takes time for the light signals that enter my eye and interpreted by my visual cortex. Everything we see is in the past and the further away it is the further in the past it appears (other stars and galaxies). Classical physics seems to do better at explaining the time difference. How does a system that doesn't exist measure itself?

Well, not being a presentist, I would word such comments more in B-series. Any particular brain state includes observation of past states, binding those states into a meaningful identity. I (some arbitrary noAxioms state event) have but one causal past (a worldline terminating at said event), but no causal future since no subsequent state is measured.

This is quite different from a more classical presentist view where only current state exists (all unmeasured, all counterfactual), and the past is but a memory, not real. — noAxioms

Yet memories define present and future interpretations of sensory data. They are what allow us to make predictions. In a deterministic universe, which you seem to be describing, the past, present and future are all informative of each other. We can determine the past by observing present facts and predict the future by observing present facts and integrating past facts. You would need to explain how we are so successful at making predictions (much better than random chance) and implementing them in the world.

BTW, minds do not come into play with either definition. Your example involved a mind, but it didn't need to. — noAxioms

Sure. Minds are but one kind of process in the world. When talking about any process we are talking about causation and information. Minds are not necessary for either, but can be part of both. It just depends on what process we want to talk about.

These are ideas, not things. Being ideas, they exist as ideas. As ideas they may be inspired by the rock, but are nothing to or for or with the rock. This isn't difficult. What is difficult is sorting out the truth of the matter from the way language uses it, and language can be a great misleader. But that's why we're all here at TPF, to dig out the truth of the matter. — tim wood

Then what is the rock? Just another idea?

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The idea of a rock is an idea. As to what the rock is apart from ideas is not easy to say. But that there is something seems clear. — tim wood

Yeah, something there that has the properties of hardness and porosity, among others that allow us to distinguish it as a rock instead of a chicken feather.

It's contradictory to assert that we can claim that ideas can be of rocks, but not of the properties that make the thing distinguishable from other things. Are the differences between a rock and chicken feather an idea of something independent of your mind?

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If I may enter in this debate about rocks, there is also the problem of how to define a 'physical object'.

Yes, one can distinguish a rock from a chicken, but how can one assert that the rock is an 'individual entity'?

With living beings, I suppose that one can consider them as distinct entities, but with inanimate composite objects the distinction seems more difficult to make. So, in a sense, no, the rock isn't an idea. But in an important sense, I would say that it probably is an idea, indeed. The way we 'carve' the world into physical objects seems to be in part mind-dependent.

Is a chair an unique entity? Are the parts of the chair distinct entities from the chair? Or is the identification of the chair or its parts as different 'things' a mind-dependent construct?

Are you saying that CDs, books and watches can come to be without their being a mind with intent to create them? — Harry Hindu

There's a small possibility of that, yes. Boltzmann Brains and whatnot.

For can we really entertain the idea that the realist is conceiving the world as existing independently of his senses? — sime

Existentially dependent? The mind is doing the conceiving; self-reference; solipsism. Admit it. ;)

So it appears that "independence" in the context of minds, their ideas and the world are not independent at all, in any sense of the word. — Harry Hindu

It's just because our minds are parts of the world. Partaking in the world means dependencies of sorts.

Let's suppose there's a condition C1 at time T1, and also a condition C2 at time T2. Now suppose you have a model/explanation/"cause" that for you accounts for C2 in terms of C1. — tim wood

This makes it sound all nice, neat and linear, as opposed to being a vast network of system states leading up to (deterministically or not) the C2 event. Sure, the condition C2 is a function of C1, but it isn't a function of only C1. I can think of exceptions. C1 is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, but 6 months prior to the hit. C2 is the extinction of say 75% of all Earth species at the time. That one is pretty dang linear, is not a counterfactual, and does not seem to depend significantly on other causes.

The polio virus initiates the causal chain that leads to paralysis — RogueAI

This is what I mean by it being typically expressed as a linear chain instead of just part of a network. Yes, the virus plays a critical role in this bit of causation, despite the fact that not all polio victims (such as my mother) get paralyzed. Benefit to it is that when I contracted a disease with similar symptoms (viral meningitis), she got me to a hospital pronto, preventing most complications.

We might call your account an account of a cause. But what is that but a description with at best some utility you think of as worthwhile - at best an idea. But in any case not a thing. — tim wood

You're asserting that the concept of a cause has no corresponding thing in itself? Sounds like the way I treat objective ontology, but I have a hard time agreeing with this one outside of straight idealism.

Excessive speed says the policeman. Faulty suspension, says the mechanic. Poor road design, says the civil engineer. Ice on the road, says & etc. — tim wood

Showing the faultiness of claiming one 'the cause'. Maybe not ice, which tends to prevent a car from rolling over.

Or from the same book, a man uses dynamite to remove a tree stump (possible, once upon a time). What, exactly, caused the dynamite to explode?

From the book referenced just above, the author observes that for Newton, some events had causes, others were the result of the operation of laws. — tim wood

That seems weird. Cannot laws be a cause? What causes water to bond like it does?

Anyway, your objection seems to be semantics. The simplest causal structure applicable to our world is simply that an isolated system described by a wave function, that system evolves according to the Schrodinger equation. That's pretty solid, and covers all the examples you've given.
The example I gave (GoL) had no Schrodinger equation, but the same rule applies: Any closed system evolves according to a different rule.
A cellular automation (CA, not to be confused by a simulation of same) is a classical example of causality, with each state being a function of the immediate prior state. Unlike classical Newtonian physics, the prior state of the CA cannot be determined from a given state. But the structure is causal, even if there is nothing fueling the progression from one state to the the next.

What does that argue? — Banno

A definition is only a definition and doesn't argue anything. But one can escalate a definition to a premise. Then it becomes an assertion, something subject to disagreement.
So 'exists' meaning 'a relation between a thing and that which is causally relevant to the thing' is a definition of how a word is used. But then without justification, one tends to presume that only things that exist relative to us via the relational definition above, have objective (and mind independent) existence, which in the case of this example, is self contradictory, and is a good deal of what I am trying to point out in this topic.

Likewise, 'my hand' expresses a relation, and that expression in no way confirms or denies the hand being 'real' or not, especially when 'being real' is obviously meant to leverage a different meaning than the relation of 'real to me'.

Yeah, the CD example wasn't that good — RogueAI

This comes from a comment about information being fundamental, but I don't think information deliberately put in place as communication between minds is what is being suggested as being fundamental.

I wrote an OP on this - the Mind Created World. — Wayfarer

I was actually thinking of quoting the OP of that topic in here since I disagree with the forced perspective you use in your example attempting to discredit a 'view from nowhere', something that actually can be done, but doesn't work well at all with a QM structure lacking counterfactual state.

But in QM the 'collapse' of the wavefunction happens during measurements — boundless

Given an interpretation with collapse upon measurement, yes. QM theory doesn't say anything about it, and some interpretations don't require any measurement, such as ensemble interpretation.

If any physical object can cause a 'measurement' by interacting with any other physical object, then my point of the perspectives remain.

Agree.

MWI and RQM share IMO the same problem. They try recover a 'realism' of sorts at the questionable price of implying an explosion of the number of perspectives (though I believe that RQM actually isn't realistic if it doesn't postulate a 'veiled reality' that 'grounds' all the perspectives).

Agree and disagree. Sure, lots of perspectives, and I don't mean just hundreds. RQM says 'real' is a relation to any one perspective event, none of which is itself real. That makes a lot of sense to me. MWI says there is but the one closed wave function, and it is real, not in relation to anything. That's a lot of real perspectives (more than just the infinite perspectives of the Newtonian world where there is no bound to the number of places/events from which an observation can be made.

The big part with which I don't agree is any of that being a problem. OK, I have an issue with how one might explain the reality of whatever one considers to be objectively real, but that problem is one of any sort of realism, including idealism and 'God made it'.

Well, I do not generally use 'Copenaghen' as a term to describe my views, due to the fact that there are many flavors of 'Copenaghen' — boundless

That's because some have tried to rewrite it as an ontic interpretation from its roots as an epistemic one. So I urged going with the epistemic roots and not what came later. All of science, and the theory itself, can be expressed as what we can know and predict, and to hell with how it actually works under the covers.

Some of them are not even epistemic as they go too close to abscribing a causal role to mind/consciousness.

Which is true for epistemology, no? Don't see that isn't mind dependent.

I am sympathetic to QBism and d'Espagnat's view of 'veiled reality'. — boundless

Fine then. I am pretty in the dark about those.

In fact, there is a trend in physical theories since at least the formulation of special relativity. The mathematics becoming more and more abstract, the fact that if we interpret them as a faithful picture of physical reality it becomes stranger and stranger and so on. — boundless

Maybe it's just showing us that our intuitions are what's being shown to be stranger and stranger. How it really works has no obligation to be something we're comfortable with.

Anyway, I believe that even in Newtonian mechanics the question of perspective was present, with the notion of reference frames. It's clear what that notion means when one thinks about an observer which is at rest with respect to some kind of object. — boundless

Careful. A reference frame is just a coordinate system, an abstraction, and requires neither any object nor observer to be stationary in it in order to be valid. No coordinate system foliates all of spacetime (it can under Newtonian), so any theory that posits an frame that is physical (and not just abstract) necessarily must choose which parts of spacetime are not part of the universe at all.

But the problem is: are these reference frames a way of talking about what an observer would observe/experience in a given situation?

No. The experience of any observer is not dependent on an abstraction, and is identical from frame to frame, even under non-relativistic theories. These different frames only cause different calculations of coordinates to be made.

What remains when one 'takes away' everything perspectival (i.e. everyting that is perspective-dependent)? — boundless

Don't get you. You mean why does my house look different from the back than it does from the front? Should it not?

One issue with the Eleatic Principle is that it leaves out more than just abstract entities like numbers — it also excludes the kinds of structural constraints that actually make causality intelligible in the first place. — Wayfarer

Maybe. If all causal structures are based on mathematics, and mathematics is based partly on numbers and their inherent relations, then it can be argued that numbers have the causal properties required to meet the criteria of the principle.
Maybe not, in which case one might find the principle unsatisfactory.

The uncertainty principle and the shift toward probabilistic models made it harder to hold onto the idea of strict causal necessity, and we ended up with something more structural — and arguably closer to constraints than to causes.

I cannot disagree with this.

The title of this thread is irksome. So you disagree with some idea, and that means *no one* really believes it? Come the fuck on. — flannel jesus

No, but in discussing ontology in my prior thread, I found not one contributor that put forth something that wasn't essentially 'what exists is what we see', which is too close to 'because we see it'. I was looking for something more objective than that, so the topic title here was specifically worded to push the buttons of those who wanted to suggest otherwise.

Yes, people out there really believe in a reality that isn't dependent on minds.

I know that, but is it a rational belief, or only a rationalized one? I got few who attempted to justify the position before, so I'm trying to pry it out here by explicitly challenging the claim. I want a discussion. I'm not asserting that the position is necessarily wrong.

The question shouldn't be, "do people really disagree with me?", obviously they do, the question should be "why do they?"

That is the question, but had I worded the title that way (instead of a veiled claim), would I get an answer? Didn't work last time when deliberately poked my stick at something else (said EPP) that I felt to be unjustified.

The answer to 'why do they?" seems most often to be 'didn't think that hard about it'. Belief seems synonymous with faith. I don't care about what position one holds, but interrogation of any mind-independent belief seems almost always to turn up to be in fact a belief in something mind dependent.

You asked for a defense of a strictly metaphysical condition, re: the mind-independence of reality, which cannot be justified without sufficient criteria for the relation of the conceptions involved to each other. — Mww

What I'm looking for is justification for calling the belief to be one of mind-independence. Of course, being a metaphysical opinion, one cannot demonstrate that opinion to be the case. I am just looking for an opinion of mind-independent existence of something that actually holds up to the claim of being mind-independent, and that means something other than "what I see is what exists".
The closest I can get is a full multiverse theory. All possible worlds exist, not just this one. Perhaps not just ones based on quantum mechanics, opening the doors to other structures. This tends to over-bloat the 'exists' list to the point where it isn't distinct from its lack, and it has real problems that need solving, such as why our universe is 'interesting' if there's so many more existing universes that are not interesting, but still contain you.

There's a small possibility of that, yes. Boltzmann Brains and whatnot. — RogueAI

Utterly relevant to what I just said, and yes, to the drawing as well. Certain models of reality cannot be the case and simultaneously justified with any empirical evidence due to that problem.

On the one hand, then, by saying I hold with a mind-independent view of reality, the only relation I need is apprehending the distinction between me and not me ... — Mww

I'm not questioning that distinction. I'm questioning where you draw the line between the existing not-you thing and the non-existing things. That's a different distinction than the one you seem to be referencing.

The remainder of your post got into that, rendering it a matter only of opinion, which seems consistent with my findings.

Hardness and porosity do not exist independently of the rock either. — Harry Hindu

These are ideas, not things — tim wood

Hardness is not a physical trait, only a concept? I would not concur.

I wonder if you could have the idea of a unicorn without having experienced the existence of horses and horns prior. — Harry Hindu

A matter of a level of creativity I think, to imagine something not based on the parts immediately at hand. Yea, a unicorn is hardly a stretch.

I mean would that drawing come to exist if there if you had no ideas of unicorns?

Unlikely but possible, a drawing (or even paper) existing sans intent.

Then you're talking about solipsism if you are emphasizing the uncertainty of an external world.

Not at all. That world relates to you as much as it does to me. But confining our declaration of reality to that mutually shared world is what I'm bringing into question.

I'm not sure if the mind causes concepts. The mind is composed of concepts. Minds certainly do cause the existence of things, like books, CDs and rockets to space.

How does a system that doesn't exist measure itself?

A system state does not measure itself. Subsequent system states measure it, yes, true even under Newtonian physics, although I don't think this relational spinning of ontology was seriously considered back then.

In a deterministic universe, which you seem to be describing

Causal, yes. Deterministic? If all that exists relative to X is in the past of X, then it is fixed history, so yea, I suppose the word ;deterministic' can be used to describe that. Ditto for eternalism where all states exist, even if one state does not uniquely determine the subsequent one (which is what most mean by 'deterministic').

You would need to explain how we are so successful at making predictions

That's what brains and memory is for, as you indicated. All that works without need of a preferred moment in time.

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A definition is only a definition and doesn't argue anything. But one can escalate a definition to a premise. Then it becomes an assertion, something subject to disagreement.
So 'exists' meaning 'a relation between a thing and that which is causally relevant to the thing' is a definition of how a word is used. But then without justification, one tends to presume that only things that exist relative to us via the relational definition above, have objective (and mind independent) existence, which in the case of this example, is self contradictory, and is a good deal of what I am trying to point out in this topic.

Likewise, 'my hand' expresses a relation, and that expression in no way confirms or denies the hand being 'real' or not, especially when 'being real' is obviously meant to leverage a different meaning than the relation of 'real to me'. — noAxioms

To exist might well be to stand in a relation to something else - perhaps this would be one way to understand Quine, for example. But to restrict the relevant relation to causation is overstretch. You are beginning to mix two distinct ideas of what it might be to exist.

Again, the argument is that "here is a hand" is much clearer, and more direct, than any notion of causation.

I found not one contributor that put forth something that wasn't essentially 'what exists is what we see', which is too close to 'because we see it'. — noAxioms

What we see an emergent artifact of what exists, not *actually* the same thing as what exists. But even if it was what we see, it seems like YOU are making the logical leap of "because we see it", not the people who you are talking to.

To exist might well be to stand in a relation to something else - perhaps this would be one way to understand Quine, for example. But to restrict the relevant relation to causation is overstretch. You are beginning to mix two distinct ideas of what it might be to exist. — Banno

Perhaps so. I had at least two ideas involving causation, one objective (Eleatic principle) and one relational (the ontology by measurement) that only works in a entangle/collapse model like QM offers, and a few really weird examples, with GoL not being one of them.
I had listed 6 ideas of what it means to exist in my other topic, and Eleatic wasn't even one of them.

What do you offer instead? Where is the limit of what exists? Where is the line drawn? Is your line in any way based on empirical input? Is your chosen line open to the sort of critique described in the OP?

"Here is a hand" works, but doesn't utilize a mind-independent notion of ontology.

What we see an emergent artifact of what exists, not *actually* the same thing as what exists. — flannel jesus

Consistent with the view I'm querying, yes. But most that I've interacted with seem to take the 'same thing' assumption, and while that isn't "because we see it", it gets awfully close.

Same questions as above. Where is your line? What puts something on your list of 'probably doesn't exist' besides human fictions? Maybe I am overstepping my assumption that even those that professionally think about such things fail to come up with a description of a mind-independent distinction between real and not.

what causes the dynamite to explode in my example from above. — tim wood

A vast majority of events in the past light cone of the explosion contributes to the cause of the explosion. You question makes it sound like there is one cause. A somewhat immediate cause might be the chemical nature of the dynamite stick, but all such sticks have that nature, and not all of them explode. So it is a necessary cause but not a sufficient one.

What passes for a cause is usually a description of an event that presumably, given the cause, will happen again.

Given no change to the prior state (of everything, not just this 'one cause') and given hard determinism, yes the effect in question will happen inevitably from that state. But few interpretations of physics support such determinism.

But certainly the description itself causes nothing. — tim wood

Agree, sort of. The dynamite would probably not be used to remove the stump if there was never a description of how dynamite could be used in that way. A description after the fact cannot be part of the cause of the described event because it's not part of the causal history of the effect event.

And that's at best. History is full of examples of "causes," accepted as such, which were nothing of the kind, many being finally understood as mere superstition.

Knowledge of causes and the actual causes are rarely aligned. Remember, the causal definition has nothing to do with epistemology, it has to do with causal power (in the case of the eleatic principle) of something, and not which specific causes were instrumental in a particular effect.

But if you're quite sure that causes are things ... — tim wood

Nope. Time seems not to be a 'thing', yet time inevitably causes our death.

then it seems to me you're committed to there being a time on planet earth when the violence of nature was controlled by sacrifices of various kinds.

Effected by, yes. 'Controlled by' makes it sound like a deliberate outcome was achieved by said sacrifices, in which case I have no idea how you get that from what I've said.

After all, they were taken at the time as causes.

I'm talking about actual causes, not claimed causes, the difference between territory and map respectively. You seem to be talking about only the claims, the map.
There cannot be for instance any practical prediction of subsequent events in the absence of causality in the universe containing the predictor. Can you think of a counterexample?

What do you offer instead? — noAxioms

:rofl:

Some of what I offer instead.

Where is your line? What puts something on your list of 'probably doesn't exist' besides human fictions? — noAxioms

I don't understand what that has to do with anything

Given an interpretation with collapse upon measurement, yes. QM theory doesn't say anything about it, and some interpretations don't require any measurement, such as ensemble interpretation. — noAxioms

Ok for the ensemble. And yes, many interpretations do not involve collapse. I had to be more precise. Anyway, I would say that 'standard QM' has collapse but it is completely silent on how to interpret it.

Agree and disagree. Sure, lots of perspectives, and I don't mean just hundreds. RQM says 'real' is a relation to any one perspective event, none of which is itself real. That makes a lot of sense to me. MWI says there is but the one closed wave function, and it is real, not in relation to anything. That's a lot of real perspectives (more than just the infinite perspectives of the Newtonian world where there is no bound to the number of places/events from which an observation can be made. — noAxioms

The problem I see in RQM is that it doesn't seem to have a 'unifying' ground for these perspectives. Each physical object defines its own perspective and there is nothing in the theory that is assumed to be beyond that. To say that there is nothing outside these perspectives is, in fact, inconsistent with the RQM claim that the world can be described only by assuming a certain perpsective. In other words, one of my problem with RQM is that it seems to make a claim that goes against its own epistemology.

Regarding MWI, it is in fact more consistent on this than RQM IMO. There is the universal wavefunction which is the unifying element (and in a sense the only real 'physical entity').

That's because some have tried to rewrite it as an ontic interpretation from its roots as an epistemic one. So I urged going with the epistemic roots and not what came later. All of science, and the theory itself, can be expressed as what we can know and predict, and to hell with how it actually works under the covers. — noAxioms

I think that Heisenberg himself actually had an ontic interpretation of Copenaghen. At least, he talks a lot about interpreting the collapse as a way to actualize potentialities. And yes the act of observation 'actualizes' these potentialities. Not sure how this isn't a causal explanation of the collapse and how can it be interpreted epistemically. Bohr was more careful. I guess that 'Copenaghen' was a quite diverse field of interpetations even in the earliest days (which is of course normal).
Not that I am against metaphysics tout court, but it goes beyond what QM says.

Maybe it's just showing us that our intuitions are what's being shown to be stranger and stranger. How it really works has no obligation to be something we're comfortable with. — noAxioms

I don't disagree with that. It might well be that our intuitions are completely wrong. In fact, I find the 'trend' of physical theories as becoming 'more and more counter-intuitive' as fascinating: that is the physical reality looks more and more mysterious. While this can be frustrating, it is also awe-inspiring for me.

I have developed a quite 'pragmatic' or even 'phenomenological' view of physical theories, where I think that interpreting them as attempts to make a 'literal description' of 'how the world is' can be a problem. I tend to think that they are first and foremost very powerful tools for predicting observations and describing the regularities in phenomena (and also incredibly useful for practical applications). 'How the world is beyond the curtain' is probably something that physics cannot 'reveal' to us. It's a reason for awe to me as I said before: even physical reality is 'richer', in a sense, than what we can imagine.

Careful. A reference frame is just a coordinate system, an abstraction, and requires neither any object nor observer to be stationary in it in order to be valid. No coordinate system foliates all of spacetime (it can under Newtonian), so any theory that posits an frame that is physical (and not just abstract) necessarily must choose which parts of spacetime are not part of the universe at all. — noAxioms

I had newtonian mechanics in mind. But IMO even in relativity a similar point can be made IMO. The entire spacetime cannot be foliated in a unique way. But still, the world we see with its frame-dependent values of physical quantities is perspectival, frame-dependent, yes?

And I am not sure that reference frames are 'just' coordinate systems. For instance, it can be a way of trying to describe "how the world would look like to an observer in such and such situation". They can also have a clear practical, phenomenological meaning (although I believe that some coordinate systems in relativity can't be interpreted in this way).

No. The experience of any observer is not dependent on an abstraction, and is identical from frame to frame, even under non-relativistic theories. These different frames only cause different calculations of coordinates to be made. — noAxioms

Yes and no. To make a trivial example. Let's say that Alice is in a train that moves at constant velocity and Bob sees her from the station. The velocities that are relative to the 'reference frame at rest with the train' are actually the velocities that Alice would observe. With respect to the station, velocities are different from the ones that those observed by Alice. Yes, you can calculate them even from the station's reference frame, but to me the reference frames here have also a clear phenomenological interpretation.

Don't get you. You mean why does my house look different from the back than it does from the front? Should it not? — noAxioms

No, that's not my point. My point is more like asking: how your house look irrespective of any perspective?

In my understanding, a physical language per se is purely a communication protocol for coordinating human actions, that is to say physical languages per-se do not transmit information about the world from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener. Physical languages are to my mind, analogous to software written in a high level computer programming language, which per se is not meaningful until compiled via additional rules that are external to the language, onto a particular CPU or GPU. Physical languages, like high level programming languages, are useful as universal protocols because they do not specify their "compilation rules". And this is what it means to say that physical language isn't a phemonological language.

Physical languages are de-dicto not phenomenological; otherwise their meaning would become relativized to the thoughts and judgements of a particular speaker which would hinder their ability to function as universal protocols. Hence the semantics of physical languages are realist and this semantic characteristic of physical languages is often mistaken for a metaphysical assumption, or worse a "hard problem" of consciousness, for the phemonenological independence of physical language is in fact a hard feature of any useful communication protocol.

On the opposite extreme, a purely phenomenological language is analogous to a bespoke machine code language that is only recognized by a unique CPU with an unknown architecture. In both cases such private languages might be reverse engineered into the common parlance of physical language or a high level programming language respectively, but it should be born in mind that the assertability conditions of such private languages are not publicly known in advance, nor publicly controlled - unless such languages and the hardware they are executed on are publicly conditioned. This situation is of course the case for designed machine code running on a manufactured CPU, but much less true of the psychological dialects that people think in, since psychological conditioning is only crudely and sparsely conditioned by public input.

Ordinary "common" language is in fact an aggregate of semi-conditioned but generally divergent psychological dialects; compare the "optical redness" of physical language - whose assertibility conditions are strictly public and non-phenomenological, to ordinary "redness" whose assertibility conditions are an open-ended mixture of public and privately decided rules that vary somewhat from speaker to speaker.

In my understanding, a physical language per se is purely a communication protocol for coordinating human actions, that is to say physical languages per-se do not transmit information about the world from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener. — sime

With this start, I didn't think I was going to be impressed with where you were going with this. You surprised me though, and I'm now a step towards agreeing with you. Extremely interesting perspective.