I wonder what he'd say to something radical like MWI, radical at the time, accepted by some only decades later. But Einstein liked simplicity and symmetry, and MWI certainly is those. — noAxioms

:rofl:

Let me ask you, if MWI is the solution, then what is the problem?

There is an intelligible solution. Read the OP. — noAxioms

And there may be others but imo we don't know enough about the universe to give any a substantial construction. There are some cases with theories or ideas where I think there is good enough reason to put it out there and advocate it with reasoned arguments or evidence. For me, I don't think this is one of them. For this particular case I much prefer being conservative; albeit, it is also conforming to my intuition that I don't think unikely events inherently need an explanation. In some contexts maybe they do, but there is no context here for me to make that judgement imo.

Every thing behaves differently than other things. This does not make living beings special. We are merely talking about degrees of complexity, or causes, of some behavior of some thing. There is an "inner" and "outer" to everything. Open an box to see what is inside. Peel an orange to get at what is inside. Open a skull, and well you get at what is inside - a brain, not a mind. It would seem to me that you, as a living being, would subjectively think of yourself as special, which is a projection of your self-preservation. — Harry Hindu

I disagree. Yes, things behave differently. But how they behave is important.

A washing-machine certainly has a behavior different from a car. But neither of them seem to me to be 'more' than their parts, at least when you consider the interactions.
A hurricane is certainly an impressive feature that is 'identifiable' for various days, can cause a lot of damage and so on. But it's an emergent feature in the atmosphere.

Striving (with awareness of not) for self-preservation implies that there is a meaningful distinction between the 'living being' and 'what is different from it' and that the living being behaves like a separate entity from the outside in a way that a hurricane doesn't.
To me living beings are the best candidates to be individual entities. They are certainly composite objects but their overall behavior suggest to me that they are 'more than the sum of their parts'.

Living and especially conscious beings do not seem to be reducible to their components in a way that other emergent phenomena are. With conscious beings you also have the fact that each conscious being has its own private experience, which strongly suggest that there is a real difference between 'it' and 'everything else'.
In both cases, they do not seem to be 'weakly emergent', to use the usual philosophical jargon.

This seems to coincide exactly with what I am saying. Any individual entity or system it is part of is dependent upon arbitrary goals in the mind. One simply changes one's view by either looking through a telescope or microscope, or by changing one's position relative to the object being talking about. When on the surface of the Earth, you are part of it. You are part of the environment of the Earth and actively participate in it. Move yourself out into space and the Earth becomes an individual entity because you cannot perceive all the small parts and processes happening. They are all merged together into an individual entity, but only if you ignore that the Earth is itself influenced by the Sun and the Moon. The question is, which view is relevant to the current goal in your mind? — Harry Hindu

But if this is true then I do not see any solution outside an ontological monism in the sense that there is one real entity and distinctions are ultimately illusory or that there is no 'entity' at all (there are only appearances of beings, distinctions etc but ultimately, there are entities). In both cases, all distinctions are cognitive illusions.

While I can concede that this might be true for non-living objects, I think that living beings are not completely reducible to their components.

I think they do capture mind-independent information though. When you see red, it is generally related to actual structure in the world that is being communicated to. Same with sound or smell, albeit there is probably a lot of nuance. And if toy think about it, all I see is color, or "shades" so in some ways I think color an't be any more remarkable subjectivity-wise than anything else we see. Its more difficult to articulate a deacription about color though, which I think may be part of why it often gets special attention philosophically as a kind of paradigmatic example of qualia. — Apustimelogist

Yes, 'qualia' might well be about mind-dependent objects but they are certainly not mind-independent objects.

Anyway, there is still the second sense of 'mind-dependence' which we are discussing here. In your example, are we to consider the toy as a distinct entity? Or is it an emergent feature which appears to be an entity on its own?

If it's just an emergent feature, completely understandable in terms of its parts and its interactions, separating the 'toy' from 'what is not toy' is a convenient fabrication of the mind. After all, it this is true, why positing a 'toy' at all? Ultimately, there is no 'toy'.
So, in a sense, objects can be as 'subjective' as 'qualia' are and in a sense, they are qualia.

Most of this discussion is getting off topic, going on about frame dependency instead of mind-dependency of ontology. — noAxioms

Sorry, that wasn't my intention but I realize that I took the discussion too far. However, I do believe that discussing about 'what is perspective-dependent' and 'what isn't perspective-dependent' can be useful to the main topic of the discussion. The reason being that I actually don't believe it is meaningful to assign a perspective outside the mind. I won't answer to all your points in order to not go too off-topic.

As a starting point, consider how we define and conceptualize physical quantities. Even those which seem an intrinsic property of a physical object is defined in relational terms. Inertial mass, for instance, is defined as a measure of the resistence to be accelerated. Electric charge is a measure of how an object 'contributes' to an electrical interaction and so on. Certainly, you can make all these definitions more subtle. But IMO the point remains. All physical quantities are measurable and this means that they are about how a physical object interacts with other physical objects.

If the above is true, then, this means that all physical quantities are relational, defined in a particular context and, ultimately, are not properties of only the given physical object. In a sense they are properties of the context in which the object is found, interacts and so on (I believe that one of the merits of RQM is actually to point this out in a very explicit way...). Change the measurement context and you change the description (I think I am in full agreement with RQM here...).

But now, consider. We have said that physical quantities are defined when a determinate context is specified. This means that they are perspectival. RQM asserts that any physical object defines a 'perspective', a context in which it is meaningful to make a description of 'the physical world' according to its perspective. And it also asserts that, after all, there is nothing beyond these 'perspectives'. I find both claims problematic TBH.

The second one implies that we can actually 'go outside' the perspectives, and 'check', so to speak, that there is nothing beyond. This would IMO contradict what RQM actually says. Denying something implies that it would be possible to affirm that thing. So, if according to RQM we have to define a perspective to make a description, we can't go 'outside' of it. RQM should be silent on what can or can't be beyond the perspectives (or even asking the question...). MWI hasn't this problem because it explicitly says that the universal wavefunction is what is beyond 'perspectives' from the start (it has its own problems IMO other than the explosion of perspectives, but let's not diverge...).

Regarding the first problem. Note two things here. I concur with Bohr that our physical concepts are way we try to describe our own experience. And, furthermore, while have direct access to our own 'mental' perspective, we can't have the same access to the perspective of, say, a pen or a proton (assuming that they have one). Furthermore, if physical concepts, physical quantities are actually concepts that we have introduced to order our own experience (i.e. our 'perspectival world'), there is no guarantee that they are valid outside our experience.

To make clearer what I am saying here. Consider a hurricane. It certainly seems a separately existing entity. But, in fact, it's more like an emergent feature, completely reducible to its parts. We might certainly say that 'the hurricane is moving from east to west at 15 knots' but in an important sense this is a useful way of describing our experience.
Is the hurricane a real 'object' or the 'hurricane' is more like a construct (or a 'model', if you like) that we use to make sense of what we are observing.

The division of the world in discrete physical objects, the assignment of physical quantities to those objects and so on seems to me something valid to order our cognitive experience. But it's not necessarily something we can safely assume that is valid outside of our cognitive perspective. So when, say, RQM claims that we can speak maningfully of the 'state of a physical system with respect to a pen' I don't think that it is a straightforward move.

Let me ask you, if MWI is the solution, then what is the problem? — Wayfarer

Well, I believe that the point made here is that in MWI there is only one physical object which evolves deterministically. In a sense no interpretation of QM enjoys a similar simplicity at least here.

I believe that MWI has its own problems, though. For instance, one can well argue that yes the above simplicity is true, but at the same time the universal wavefunction is an extremely complex object and most of its 'structure' is completely inaccessible to us. The same goes for the incredible number of versions of 'us' that are of course inaccessible. To me this erases the 'simplicity' of MWI but I do understand why others may see the theory as simple. I do disagree with them, though.

Well, I believe that the point made here is that in MWI there is only one physical object which evolves deterministically. — boundless

Indeed - but the question was, if MWI is a solution, what is the problem it is addressing? Put another way, if it turned out that MWI couldn’t be the case, then it would have to be admitted that ….

Fill in the blank!

Ah ok, I think I see. But there are alternative realistic interpretations other than MWI (I doubt that any of them would satisfy Einstein, however)

But they’re also solutions to a problem.

So - what’s the problem?

(I was just writing this post...so I include it as an aswer to your question)

In general, I think that it should be noted that I don't think here anybody is questioning the existence of a mind-independent reality. The issue here is if we can describe something that is completely independent of our cognitive perspective with concepts, models and so on that were made to understand our experience ('our' in both the individual and in the collective sense).

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object, i.e. a separately existing entity that truly is a part of a 'mind-independent physical world'. If these things are more like emergent features rather than objects, this would mean that the division of the 'world' into them is more like a conceptual construct that should not be taken literally. Assuming that it actually 'corresponds' to 'how the physical world' is 'in itself' is a strong assumption - a very useful one but it is questionable. It's very useful to us to make distinctions, divide the world in distinct entities and then assume that is 'truly so' but epistemically it isn't truly justified, I believe.

It's seems obvious to me that this 'assumption' or 'move' is something that is not obvious.

On the other hand, also assuming that we have no access to a mind-independent world seems wrong. After all, what grounds the intersubjective agreement if there is nothing outside our perspectives that is 'somehow' connected to the world as-experienced-by-us?

So, maybe, we are encountering an antinomy here: on the one hand, positing a mind-independent world seems necessary to make sense of our experineces. On the other hand, however, there is no epistemic guarantee that our cognitive faculties can step outside from our perspective and give us a non-mediated knowledge of the mind-independent world. So, it seems that we are stuck in an antinomy here.

So, I guess that the question is: can we really assume that we can make a description of a mind-independent world when we are 'inside' our own perspective and it is not obvious we can really step outside of it?

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object — boundless

Which is tantamount to asking if anything is truly physical.

Let's see what the original poster has to say.

That opinion , while apodeitically certain
— Mww

Only in a relational sense, and the opinion wasn't worded as a relation, so I very much question it. — noAxioms

The opinion in question is relational, re: what I see is what exits, and it is apodeitically true, from the LNC. But that is not to say what I see is only what exits. Or, is all that exists. And it isn’t that what I don’t see doesn’t exist.

How is the apple not having objective existence contradictory? — noAxioms

If an apple didn't have objective existence it wouldn’t be an apple. Without descending into abysmal nonsense, we must grant that for a thing to be give a name presupposes at least that there is a thing, or at the very least a possible thing, to which a name can be given.

To say 'what I see exists' is fine, but to say 'only what I see exists' is another story. Which is why I ask where the line is drawn between existing things and not. — noAxioms

Another story indeed, in that I am not authorized to say what I don’t see doesn’t exist, while it being perfectly legitimate to say what I don’t see I don’t experience.

Perhaps experience is the line to be drawn, then. For any subject, any experience is necessarily of an existence, and for that subject, without experience is the same as without its object. Still, this is epistemological, that of which a subject knows as existing or not, rather than ontological, that of which the subject merely infers as possibly existing or not.

All that being said, it must be the case that whatever the line is, it relates exclusively to, and is derivable only from, the subject inquiring about its establishment. Me, I opine it doesn’t much matter what doesn't exist, that being nothing but an exception to the rule for what does. And…..YEA!!!!…..again, for me, the establishment for the rule for what does exist is already given by the LNC.

Easy-peasy.

If an apple didn't have objective existence it wouldn’t be an apple. Without descending into abysmal nonsense, we must grant that for a thing to be give a name presupposes at least that there is a thing, or at the very least a possible thing, to which a name can be given. — Mww

We can meaningfully talk about experiences of "things" and the possible reality in which those "things" don't "exist".

The bald white guy eats a steak in the matrix, and talks about how he knows it's not "real". So most people can conceptually distinguish between real things, and experiences that seem like they're experiences of real things but in fact aren't. Right?

They are relativized becasue one speaker might intend different meaning than another for a specific word. This is not true of computer languages, which allows (almost) no ambiguity. You speak of physical language as distinct from common language, and perhaps my assessment is only true of the latter. — noAxioms

For communication to occur (the primary function of language-use) it would do the speaker or writer good to understand the language understood by their listeners and readers, as well as the level of understanding of the language. What would you hope to accomplish in talking about quantum physics to a 4 year old, or publishing a book written in Spanish in Russia? The relativized nature of language disappears when it is actually used to successfully communicate. You could say that the relativized nature of language only appears when miscommunication occurs.

So what? I presume we share the same ontology, but none of that matters to the question of 1) what that ontology is, and 2) what else (unperceived) also shared that ontology.
'What you are' is irrelevant to the question at hand 'what all is?'. — noAxioms

And you have been using the parts as examples of what all is while appearing to fail to account for the mind as part of the whole as well.

The point is that minds are part of what all is. If you are going to go for the "Hail Mary" to explain what all is, your explanation is going to inherently define what its parts are as well and their relations to each other, and what all is should not contradict nature of its parts.

.

Right? — flannel jesus

Sure. Everydayman won’t have a problem with that, but the philosopher might.

While it is necessarily the case, e.g., “Neytiri”, is subjected to the exact same cognitive system as, e.g., a basketball, hence manifests as an experience in exactly the same way, the philosopher understands the object initially subjected to the system is already nothing more than a representation, while the “vulgar understanding” treats that same object, not as a representation but as a first-order real existence.

All that being given, I’d say it is by reason one distinguishes between the real and the seemingly real, not conceptually.

I disagree. Yes, things behave differently. But how they behave is important. — boundless

Again, the importance of some behavior is a projection of your mind and some goal you have. Importance is a value judgement and the universe does not make value judgements precisely because the universe does not have a goal. The importance you speak of does not exist apart from your mind and its goals.

A washing-machine certainly has a behavior different from a car. But neither of them seem to me to be 'more' than their parts, at least when you consider the interactions.
A hurricane is certainly an impressive feature that is 'identifiable' for various days, can cause a lot of damage and so on. But it's an emergent feature in the atmosphere. — boundless

How is a human more than its parts? Is not a human an emergent feature of its organs and how they work together? Is not a society and culture an emergent feature of a large group of humans and their interactions? You're not making any real distinction between these things. The distinction of "importance" only exists in your mind as a value judgement.

Striving (with awareness of not) for self-preservation implies that there is a meaningful distinction between the 'living being' and 'what is different from it' and that the living being behaves like a separate entity from the outside in a way that a hurricane doesn't.
To me living beings are the best candidates to be individual entities. They are certainly composite objects but their overall behavior suggest to me that they are 'more than the sum of their parts'. — boundless

It seems to me that the ability to strive for self-preservation is an emergent property of the entity's parts. The problem is that your need for self-preservation, and your behavior to preserve yourself is dictated by the environment you find yourself in, no different than how the hurricane feeds off the heat and low pressure, but when it moves into a cooler zone with higher pressure it begins to fall apart, no different than how your self-preservation is limited by the state of the environment you are in and can change. If you behavior is predictable (people that know you can predict your behavior, but I can still predict that you will run if a lion is chasing you even without knowing you), just like everything else.

Living and especially conscious beings do not seem to be reducible to their components in a way that other emergent phenomena are. With conscious beings you also have the fact that each conscious being has its own private experience, which strongly suggest that there is a real difference between 'it' and 'everything else'.
In both cases, they do not seem to be 'weakly emergent', to use the usual philosophical jargon. — boundless

What is a "private experience" and is it part of a living entity, or is it emergent from all the working parts of a living entity? To say that one's private experience dictates one's actions seems to me that the actions are emergent properties of the private experience and one's physiology, not the other way around. Where is the "private experience" relative to the the living being itself as seen from the "outside"?

But if this is true then I do not see any solution outside an ontological monism in the sense that there is one real entity and distinctions are ultimately illusory or that there is no 'entity' at all (there are only appearances of beings, distinctions etc but ultimately, there are entities). In both cases, all distinctions are cognitive illusions.

While I can concede that this might be true for non-living objects, I think that living beings are not completely reducible to their components. — boundless

The point is that while everything is interconnected via time and space, there are areas of transition, some transitions being faster or slower, or smaller or larger in scope relative ourselves. We are part of the world and part of this interconnectedness. We typically focus on the easily discernable distinctions apart from the transitionary states. But when we focus on the transitionary states we see how interconnected everything is and and those grey areas where the transition occurs is what makes us question our understanding of discrete objects.

The distinctions are not illusory, they are either relevant or not depending on its integration with goals. The distinctions are there, whether we observe them or not, but which ones are relevant (the ones we focus our attention on) at any given moment is dependent upon the goal.

Yes, 'qualia' might well be about mind-dependent objects but they are certainly not mind-independent objects. — boundless

So, maybe, we are encountering an antinomy here: on the one hand, positing a mind-independent world seems necessary to make sense of our experineces. On the other hand, however, there is no epistemic guarantee that our cognitive faculties can step outside from our perspective and give us a non-mediated knowledge of the mind-independent world. So, it seems that we are stuck in an antinomy here.

So, I guess that the question is: can we really assume that we can make a description of a mind-independent world when we are 'inside' our own perspective and it is not obvious we can really step outside of it? — boundless

For me, i think one might be able to say that even though we view the universe from different perspectives, they arguably all procure information about the world that is still mind-independent. If I view a tree from one angle then another, then through a microscope or through infrared goggles, through the echolocation of a bat, through the chemoreception of an insect on the bark; all of these perspectives produce information that maps onto the world consistently due to the way the external world is. It just happens there is a plurality of ways one can engage with the world and extract consistent information about it.

Sorry, that wasn't my intention but I realize that I took the discussion too far. — boundless

Maybe not. You seem to argue the relevance quite well below.

The reason being that I actually don't believe it is meaningful to assign a perspective outside the mind.

There's no mind at the JWST, yet it has a perspective that no human has, especially given its far wider range of light sensitivity than our paltry 3 frequencies.

consider how we define and conceptualize physical quantities. Even those which seem an intrinsic property of a physical object is defined in relational terms.

Yes, any selection of units implies a relation to a standard. Physics seems to work without units, so unit selection would qualify as an abstraction. Charge is quantized, so the units there are arguably physical.

All physical quantities are measurable and this means that they are about how a physical object interacts with other physical objects. — boundless

I'll accept that.

If the above is true, then, this means that all physical quantities are relational, defined in a particular context and, ultimately, are not properties of only the given physical object. — boundless

I want to say no to this, but cannot, so excellent point. A property of an object would be a counterfactual.

Change the measurement context and you change the description (I think I am in full agreement with RQM here...).

Also think Heisenberg.

But now, consider. We have said that physical quantities are defined when a determinate context is specified. This means that they are perspectival. — boundless

OK, point taken on the perspective thing. My retorts to that are classical, and we're not discussing a classical universe.

RQM asserts that any physical object defines a 'perspective', a context in which it is meaningful to make a description of 'the physical world' according to its perspective. And it also asserts that, after all, there is nothing beyond these 'perspectives'. I find both claims problematic TBH. — boundless

Nothing beyond seems worded as a positive claim about a counterfactual: it being empty, as opposed to simply unmeasured. I don't approve of that wording.

The second one implies that we can actually 'go outside' the perspectives, and 'check', so to speak

Does it? Maybe you're saying what I'm saying. Q being unmeasured is not the same as a measured not-Q. Going outside requires a different perspective Z, and sure, from that other perspective, there are things available that were not relative to the first perspective Y. Findings of the new perspective in no way alters what exists relative to Y, and to say 'relative to Y there is something beyond' constitutes a counterfactual.

This would IMO contradict what RQM actually says. Denying something implies that it would be possible to affirm that thing. So, if according to RQM we have to define a perspective to make a description, we can't go 'outside' of it.

Y measures Mars, 20 minutes ago. While [the current state of the space where Mars should be, simultaneous with Y] is unmeasured, it does not imply that there's a reasonable probability that some subsequent measurement Z 30 minutes hence, that includes a measurement of Y, would find Mars to not be there. RQM has to support predictions in a way since predictability is something measurable.

I personally have no problem with a pen state as something defining a perspective.



Concerning the MWI thing (and no, I'm not an MWI proponent)

Let me ask you, if MWI is the solution, then what is the problem? — Wayfarer

Well, I believe that the point made here is that in MWI there is only one physical object which evolves deterministically. In a sense no interpretation of QM enjoys a similar simplicity at least here. — boundless

That's one answer.

I believe that MWI has its own problems, though. For instance, one can well argue that yes the above simplicity is true, but at the same time the universal wavefunction is an extremely complex object and most of its 'structure' is completely inaccessible to us. — boundless

Complex, yes, but that's only a problem if something more fundamental is being posited to be driving its evolution, a simulation being run or some such. As a pure mathematical object, no such problem is there. As for the restrictions to subjectivity, that's true even without MWI where we have access to only a tiny visible universe out of an otherwise infinite classical universe. We only have access to a well-tuned world and not all the other ones which lack sufficient complexity to be observed. Complexity is your friend here, without which there's be nothing to know anything.

The same goes for the incredible number of versions of 'us' that are of course inaccessible. — boundless

A problem why? Bugs your intuitions? Again, even a classical universe has said 'incredible number of versions of 'us' that are of course inaccessible'. MWI didn't invent this, it just put some of them spatially very nearby.


Many humans have a natural aversion to their world getting bigger. Wayfarer especially has this bias, which is why I can push his buttons by mentioning MWI. Apparently you also feel this aversion, being uncomfortable with other worlds, many of which are not observed at all, despite your assertion of a belief in mind-independent reality.
Think of when it was first suggested that those stars in the sky were actually other suns and distant solar systems. Ours was not the only one. The pushback on that was incredible, rendering extraordinary evidence to justify what was at the time an extraordinary claim. Much of the arguments against this finding are the very ones being expressed by both of you here. Intuition doesn't like big, but intuition is pretty much the last thing I listen to for philosophical topics. It's all lies that serve a very different purpose.

Put another way, if it turned out that MWI couldn’t be the case, then it would have to be admitted that …. — Wayfarer

Well for one, it would have to be admitted that the universe cannot be locally deterministic. No other interpretation allows that. They're either non-deterministic or they allow something like retrocausality.

I doubt that any of [the alternatives] would satisfy Einstein, however — boundless

Maybe. He didn't have Bell's proof, restricting what can be demanded of a satisfactory interpretation. He definitely expressed a preference for locality (relativity leans on it so hard) and determinism (the 'God does not roll dice' quip), but he probably didn't want to let go of his counterfactuals either, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Einstein might not have known that.

Consider a hurricane. It certainly seems a separately existing entity. ...
Is the hurricane a real 'object' or the 'hurricane' is more like a construct (or a 'model', if you like) that we use to make sense of what we are observing. — boundless

Is the hurricane a real 'object' or the 'hurricane' is more like a construct (or a 'model', if you like) that we use to make sense of what we are observing.

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object, i.e. a separately existing entity that truly is a part of a 'mind-independent physical world'. If these things are more like emergent features rather than objects, this would mean that the division of the 'world' into them is more like a conceptual construct. — boundless

I find 'separately existing entity' to be only an ideal, not anything physical. Discussed here if you're interested.
I would say that said division is a conceptual construct. It being that does not make the world mind dependent, on the division into objects is so dependent.

Assuming that it actually 'corresponds' to 'how the physical world' is 'in itself' is a strong assumption — boundless

No, talking about a weaker assumption, that it corresponds to something in the physical world, not that the concept is an accurate portrayal of the thing in itself.

So, maybe, we are encountering an antinomy here: on the one hand, positing a mind-independent world seems necessary to make sense of our experineces. On the other hand, however, there is no epistemic guarantee that our cognitive faculties can step outside from our perspective and give us a non-mediated knowledge of the mind-independent world. So, it seems that we are stuck in an antinomy here.antinomy — boundless

I see no antinomy identified, no contradiction in this description. That there is a mind independent world, and a description of the nature of it (however poorly matching) seem not to be mutually contradictory.

If an apple didn't have objective existence it wouldn’t be an apple. — Mww

Exists, sure. Objectively? Non-sequitur. It was of course discussed in my prior topic, so I won't go further here.

Another story indeed, in that I am not authorized to say what I don’t see doesn’t exist, while it being perfectly legitimate to say what I don’t see I don’t experience.

Positing unseen existence has explanatory power, but technically if it's only part of explaining what is seen, it doesn't shake off the mind dependency altogether.

All that being said, it must be the case that whatever the line is, it relates exclusively to, and is derivable only from, the subject inquiring about its establishment.

Not if it's not based on said subject's subjectivity.

The bald white guy eats a steak in the matrix, and talks about how he knows it's not "real". So most people can conceptually distinguish between real things, and experiences that seem like they're experiences of real things but in fact aren't. Right? — flannel jesus

But the steak has properties. Its existence is due to common consensus. Hence it has properties, predication, and all that. But this case is declared to be one of nonexistence, only because the mathematics of the situation ironically is being implemented by something more fundamental, as opposed to real things which are not implemented at all. No fire being breathed into the equations.

Somehow the ontology got backwards from what some people assert. Anyway, matrix is weird because it isn't actually a simulation, it is a VR, an artificial sensory stream fed into something not simulated, so in that scenario, the experiencer is more real than that which the artificial experience feed leads you to believe. What about an actual simulation? Is a simulated steak being eaten by a simulated bald guy not real?

For communication to occur (the primary function of language-use) it would do the speaker or writer good to understand the language understood by their listeners and readers, as well as the level of understanding of the language. — Harry Hindu

Which is why definitions are so important on these forums. For example:

And you have been using the parts as examples of what all is while appearing to fail to account for the mind as part of the whole as well.

How are you using 'mind' here?

If you are going to go for the "Hail Mary" to explain what all is

Not attempting that, lacking a ground of meaning for the question. All I see is relations, so all I ask is 'what is relative to X or to Y?' My claim in the OP might be expressed as everybody starting out with 'what exists relative to me', but somewhere while concluding that the 'me' isn't required for something to exist relative to something else, it is forgotten that it's still only a relation being considered.

And there may be other [explanations for the tuning problem] — Apustimelogist

There are indeed others, but are there others that fall under methodological naturalism?

The problem is considered real in the scientific community, despite your expressed apathy on the subject.

as opposed to real things which are not implemented at all. — noAxioms

Is that so? I don't think I would say that. Is a real steak not implemented in the physics of the situation?

There are indeed others, but are there others that fall under methodological naturalism?

The problem is considered real in the scientific community, despite your expressed apathy on the subject. — noAxioms

Again, my point is that this issue is so abstract and we know comparatively little about thr universe works that I don't trust anyone's reliability in offering an explanation which is even close to correct.

At the same time, the problem is not an actual technical problem or one of errors in predictions. The problem is subjective personal incredulity which I don't really share because I have no inherent problem with the issue of very unlikely events occurring, especially in scenarios where we have no context to reliably and assess the issue, like with the question of "why is there anything at all?"

Wayfarer especially has this bias, which is why I can push his buttons by mentioning MWI. — noAxioms

Nothing to do with bias, but a considered judgement. I'm one of (apparently quite a few people) who simply think that Everett's metaphysics (as this is what it was) is absurd.

There's an interesting account of the genesis of Everett's ideas in a Scientific American article The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III:

Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.

(The 'slosh or two of sherry' became more than that, as he died an alcoholic, emotionally estranged from all around him, with instructions that his cremated ashes be put in the household trash, which they were, having long since left theoretical physics for a career charting the re-entry paths for ICBM warheads.)

Everett addressed the measurement problem by merging the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He made the observer an integral part of the system observed, introducing a universal wave function that links observers and objects as parts of a single quantum system. He described the macroscopic world quantum mechanically and thought of large objects as existing in quantum superpositions as well. Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Everett’s radical new idea was to ask, What if the continuous evolution of a wave function is not interrupted by acts of measurement? What if the Schrödinger equation always applies and applies to everything—objects and observers alike? What if no elements of superpositions are ever banished from reality? What would such a world appear like to us?

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object. The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome. According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.

Isn't it obvious that 'bifurcation' and 'branching' are in effect metaphysical postulates? And that they're postulated in order to avoid the scientifically-embarrasing implications of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation', which Everett sought to challenge?

What Everett avoids is wavefunction collapse — but what he adds is a multiplying ontology of parallel, and forever unknowable, worlds. That’s not an empirical discovery, but a philosophical wager — one many find less compelling than the problem it was designed to solve.

Philip Ball also has a critical chapter on Many Worlds in his book Beyond Weird, which can be reviewed here:

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains...

Again, the importance of some behavior is a projection of your mind and some goal you have — Harry Hindu

Perhaps, but it's one of the cases that the difference is actually relevant.

How is a human more than its parts? Is not a human an emergent feature of its organs and how they work together? Is not a society and culture an emergent feature of a large group of humans and their interactions? You're not making any real distinction between these things — Harry Hindu

Unless you can conclusively show that you can explain consciousness in virtue of the physical parts of our brain in a way that is analogous to how we explain, for instance, the liquid state in terms of how particles move, interact and so on, yes, I believe that there is a difference here.

Regarding human society, I actually believe it is more like the 'weak emergence' of the states of matter (for example).

It seems to me that the ability to strive for self-preservation is an emergent property of the entity's parts. — Harry Hindu

The point is that the hurricane, as far as we know, doesn't strive for self-preservation as a living being does. The way that living beings behave are suggestive of some degree of 'intentionality'. I am not claiming that bacteria are conscious but maybe do have intentionality in some rudimentary forms.

In the current philosophical jargon, I believe that hurricanes, chairs etc are 'weakly emergent'. To me being 'weakly emergent' means that they are actually more like features rather than entities. On the other hand, the degree of differentiation that a human being or even a bacteria has suggests to me that they are not 'features' (yes, I know that this is a controversial claim, but seriously I don't think one can reduce biology to the 'hard sciences').

Where is the "private experience" relative to the the living being itself as seen from the "outside"? — Harry Hindu

This question is IMO problematic. Private experience is an undeniable fact and since it is private it is to be expected that is not 'seen' from the outiside (one can infer, for instance, that someone is in pain by observing the behavior, but it is an inference we can make because we ourselves are conscious or we suspect that that person is conscious). Also, I am not sure how qualitative experience can be explained in purely physical terms. The properties we encounter in physics do not seem remotely like what we know about our conscious experience.

The distinctions are not illusory, they are either relevant or not depending on its integration with goals. The distinctions are there, whether we observe them or not, but which ones are relevant (the ones we focus our attention on) at any given moment is dependent upon the goal. — Harry Hindu

They might no be 'illusory' in the sense that can be discerned by a mind. But these distinctions can still be called 'illusory' because they do not exist in the way they appear to exist, i.e. as separately existing entities. A chair is a mental construct ultimately. This doesn't mean that if I hit its leg with my toe I don't feel pain, of course. But the 'chair' is not an entity - as an 'individual object' seems to exist only as a mental imputation.

For me, i think one might be able to say that even though we view the universe from different perspectives, they arguably all procure information about the world that is still mind-independent. If I view a tree from one angle then another, then through a microscope or through infrared goggles, through the echolocation of a bat, through the chemoreception of an insect on the bark; all of these perspectives produce information that maps onto the world consistently due to the way the external world is. It just happens there is a plurality of ways one can engage with the world and extract consistent information about it. — Apustimelogist

I see what you mean, but IMO isn't enough to reject what I am saying.

Consider, say, a chair. A chair certainly appears to us to be a distinct individual phyiscal object. I can look at it from various angles, I can measure its geometrical properties and so on. Those views and measurements are certainly compatible with my mental construct of the chair as a unified object.
Of course, it can be broken and we know that the chair is, in fact, a composite object and as we study it more deeply we do find that its boundaries are not even well-defined and so on. Furthermore, its properties can be explained by studying the properties of its parts and their interactions.
On analysis, the 'chair' seems to be a 'weakly emergent' feature. Labeling it as a chair and considering it as a 'unified thing' seems to be a cognitive mistake. In an important sense, the chair's existence is imputed, a mental construct (note, I am not denying that I can feel pain if my toe hits it...).

This is to say that having a consistent map of different views doesn't necessarily imply that the objects in which we divide reality are 'truly there'.

Thanks for the answer. I hope I'll be able to answer you back tomorrow.

Nothing to do with bias, but a considered judgement. I'm one of (apparently quite a few people) who simply think that Everett's metaphysics (as this is what it was) is absurd. — Wayfarer

I don't doubt that, and intuition probably plays a significant roles for most. The view makes a hash of personal identity for instance, and that's a lot to ask some people to give up.

There's an interesting account of the genesis of Everett's ideas in a Scientific American article — Wayfarer

Thanks then for the snips because it wanted my soul to read it. Not money at least.

Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Which follows directly from the premise of the dissertation.

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object.

Hence personal identity bearing no resemblance to one's personal experience of identity.

The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome.

Really? Did Everett call them 'copies'? You never know how much liberty these SA columnists take in writing these articles. I'm just wondering what terminology was Everett's and what came from DeWitt (such as 'multiple worlds').
Quote from the Bell article says otherwise: "This is why we shouldn’t, strictly speaking, talk of the “splitting” of worlds (even though Everett did), as though two have been produced from one.". OK, 'splitting' is in quotes but 'worlds' is not. So yea, he used the word 'split'.

Another Bell quote:
"The many-worlds interpretation is distinct from the multiverse hypothesis, which envisions other universes, born in separate Big Bangs, that have always been physically disconnected from our own"
This is Tegmark's type II multiverse, as opposed to type III for MWI. Type II is the consensus solution to the fine tuning problem spoken of in the OP.

Bell apparently quotes Tegmark:
“The act of making a decision,” says Tegmark — a decision here counting as a measurement, generating a particular outcome from the various possibilities — “causes a person to split into multiple copies.”
Ouch. A decision has nothing to do with it since decisions are largely deterministic processes. Sure, quantum uncertainlty might eventually influence a choice, but then it was the quantum event, not the decision, that split the worlds. I like Tegmark, but man, he can make some really dumb things.
The graphics all over the Bell article page emphasizes exact this: A decision, not a measurement, splitting worlds.

According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.

[Citation needed]. The worlds can interact. If they are sufficiently decoherent, they can be treated as independent entities, but they never fully separate. The whole point of superposition is different worlds interacting with each other, but any measurement of such superposition states entangles the measurer with the system measured.
Hence the cat measuring the decay of sample and getting entangled with that system despite the fact that the lab device outside the box is not thus entangled with the radioactive system. He can in principle measure superposition of the cat state, which is the two worlds interacting. This has been done, just not with cats, but still with macroscopic objects.
Bottom line, I don't take SA's word for that statement.

Isn't it obvious that 'bifurcation' and 'branching' are in effect metaphysical postulates?

As would be expected from a metaphysical interpretation of any theory.

And that they're postulated in order to avoid the scientifically-embarrasing implications of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation', which Everett sought to challenge?

Do interpretations have scientific implications? They have metaphysical implications, sure.

What Everett avoids is wavefunction collapse — but what he adds is a multiplying ontology of parallel, and forever unknowable, worlds. That’s not an empirical discovery, but a philosophical wager — one many find less compelling than the problem it was designed to solve. Everett's view does solve the collapse issue, but so do others. Ensemble interpretation (Bohr, probably the oldest one) does not conclude collapse, but I don't know enough about it to see how that is the case. Maybe it just isn't measurement that causes collapse. Yes, Copenhagen had issues solved by MWI, but at the expense of a unique history, something which you apparently find important.

Philip Ball also has a critical chapter on Many Worlds in his book Beyond Weird, which can be reviewed here:

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all.

That article is open to read.
There is a universal wave function. It evolves by specific rules. In our spacetime, it evolves per some specific constants, but that's a local rule, not a fact. The rest are facts, but nothing like "Earth has a big moon", which seems to be what Ball doesn't like.
Facts become relative to the observers entangled with them. Break my heart, since that's what I've been saying all along.
Bell makes mistakes in his critique such as 'infinity of universes', conflating universe with worlds. It's one wave function, one universe.
"But Bohr and colleagues didn’t bring wave function collapse into the picture just to make things difficult. They did it because that’s what seems to happen. When we make a measurement, we really do get just one result out of the many that quantum mechanics offers. Wave function collapse seemed to be demanded in order to connect quantum theory to reality."
Everett did not in any way change what one expects to observe, yet this statement seems to imply otherwise. The interpretation would not have got off the ground if there was an empirical difference.

It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now.

Non-sequitur. It eliminates no such thing except a coherent 'we' doing the experiencing since, as I said, it does make a hash of personal identity. If he means that, then he should say it instead of saying something wrong.

I didn't read it all, but I'd like to. I think I've commented enough for noew.


I don't buy into MWI, but I don't find it absurd at all. It just bucks intuition, which is a known liar anyway.

Interestingly, RQM is listed as having collapsing wave functions, but the version I support does not. I guess my philosophical take on relationalism isn't exactly how Rovelli sees it. For one, he seems to harp needlessly on terminal states of worldlines, with no identity given to intermediate states. I don't take that approach.

Again, my point is that this issue is so abstract and we know comparatively little about thr universe works that I don't trust anyone's reliability in offering an explanation which is even close to correct. — Apustimelogist

Ignoring the issue is an option, sure. There are solutions (at least two), and some problems still have no solution, room for further study.
The goal isn't to 'know' how the universe works, but rather to find some valid ways that it might work.

Is a real steak not implemented in the physics of the situation? — flannel jesus

The comment was about the substrate on which the existence of a thing rests. Suppose for the sake of argument that our universe is mathematical and doesn't just appear that way. That means it could be simulated. Any mathematical causal structure (anything that evolves over some notion of time) can be simulated, drawing a distinction between the structure itself (real?) and the simulation of it (not real?).

So we have a simplified mathematical structure that includes a person and a dining room with a steak. The simulated steak is not real, but the steak in the actual mathematical structure is by definition just as real as a steak in this world which also happens to be running that simulation. A simulation being run somewhere else, but of this world, would include a steak which is designated as not real. The person eating the steak, simulated by anything or not, would not have any empirical way of telling if he's real or not.

I'm not suggesting that we're a simulation. I'm suggesting that since one cannot have access to a test of reality, does it really matter?

I hope I'll be able to answer you back tomorrow. — boundless

Looking fwd to it. Your answers have at least got me thinking and re-assessing.

Some of what I offer instead. — Banno

Anyone can grep a word from your posts. You see your hand and perhaps don't think about the rest enough to see the problems I tried to identity. Good pragmatic policy, but not one that holds water.

And yes, that identifies me as a Linux person.

I see what you mean, but IMO isn't enough to reject what I am saying. — boundless

I don't think so, because I didn't make any assumptions about labelling other than inadvertantly in order to convey the point about perspective. Regardless of whether or how you label things, there is an image there on your retina or other sensory epithelia that is in some sense can be said to be carrying information about the world. I don't think you need to stipulate boundaries for this to make sense, and in any case, I don't think people really view the world like this anyway. Sure people talk about objects like televisions and cars, but when push comes to shove I think the way people engage with reality is far more fluid and flexible than the idea that we uphold some fixed ontology with lists of well-defined objects. Now you can say this is kind of an anti-realism about objects, which couls be true to some extent, but its also kind of vacuous in a way because ultimately we are talking about different ways to effectively point at arguably veridical information about the world.

Ignoring the issue is an option, sure. There are solutions (at least two), and some problems still have no solution, room for further study.
The goal isn't to 'know' how the universe works, but rather to find some valid ways that it might work. — noAxioms

I wouldn't say its necessarily ignoring an issue but expressing skepticism that anyone can sensibly tackle this topic without more context and knowledge about the universe. All the options I have heard are extremely speculative shots in the dark, sometimes bordering on nonsense (e.g. God did it). And again, I think this issue is not really a technical problem but one of subjective incredulity unless there is an actual physical contradiction here whoch is not just about rarity. Obviously we will just have to agree to disagree; from my subjectove perspective the issue is borderline close to "why is there anything at all?", just leading to my skepticism of a sensible answer.

There's no mind at the JWST, yet it has a perspective that no human has, especially given its far wider range of light sensitivity than our paltry 3 frequencies. — noAxioms

Yes, but you are still thinking within a conceptual framework which has been devised to explain the phenomena of our perspective. For instance, can we truly speak of the JWST as a separate object from its environment? Maybe individuating the JWST as 'a thing' is a mental imputation.

Yes, any selection of units implies a relation to a standard. Physics seems to work without units, so unit selection would qualify as an abstraction. Charge is quantized, so the units there are arguably physical. — noAxioms

Note that my point is that physical quantities are defined in a relational way from the start.

Charge serves as a measure of how much a given charged object interacts with others. Hence, I am not really sure that it can be considered as an intrinsic property of a given object. The same is true for mass.
Both inertial mass and gravitational mass (which appear to be the same) are defined in a relational way. This seems to be the case for all physical quantities.
Hence, a 'particle' (or really any purely physical object) seems not to be understood 'in itself'. You need to consider 'something else' to understand it. And this might imply that the 'division' of the 'external world' into truly existing physical objects is conceptual, not 'real'.

Also think Heisenberg. — noAxioms

Also Boh'r 'indivisiblity of the quantum of action' (note that David Bohm admired the 'relational' aspect of Bohr's interpretation. In fact, when one looks at it, even in the deBroglie-Bohm interpretation relations are very important. Also, Bohm himself abandoned a too 'literal' approach of his own interpretation.).

Nothing beyond seems worded as a positive claim about a counterfactual: it being empty, as opposed to simply unmeasured. I don't approve of that wording. — noAxioms

I am not sure if I am following you, here.

Let's consider the Wigner's friend scenario, where the Friend makes an experiment in a lab which is locked from the outside. Wigner asks to his friend if he saw a definite result and the Friend says 'yes'. According to Wigner, the Friend and the physical system are in a superposition and knows that when he will enter the lab, the Friend will report the same result as he can observe.
Note that this a very weak 'intersubjective' agreement between the Friend and Wigner. When Wigner asks his Friend (who we assume is not a liar) which result he obtained, Wigner can check his claim and verify that, indeed, the result is the same. But all of this happens in Wigner's perspective. Wigner is not 'entilted' to go outside of it and ask himself what the Friend, in the Friend's perspective is seeing.
Assuming that the Friend also has his 'perspective', he would find out that Wigner agrees with him about the experimental result.
Still both of them do not actually know what the other truly observed. Only that, in their own perspective, there are no logical inconsistencies. For Wigner it is as if the Friend sees the same as he sees. But it cannot say what is truly seen by the Friend. This also means that under RQM (and, really, QBism and similar) Wigner can't even say that there are 'perspectives' other than his own with certainty.

Only positing something beyond the 'perspectives' can ground intersubjective agreement.

This implies that one cannot know what is 'beyond' one's perspective.

Y measures Mars, 20 minutes ago. While [the current state of the space where Mars should be, simultaneous with Y] is unmeasured, it does not imply that there's a reasonable probability that some subsequent measurement Z 30 minutes hence, that includes a measurement of Y, would find Mars to not be there. RQM has to support predictions in a way since predictability is something measurable. — noAxioms

As I see it, there is nothing in RQM (and, really, also in QBism and similar) that 'Mars in the perspective of Y' and 'Mars in the perspective of Z' are the same thing. Y will never find inconsistencies.

I personally have no problem with a pen state as something defining a perspective. — noAxioms

The problem with this IMO it is that we are 'anthropomorphizing' the pen. In our own perspective, of course, the conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of our experiences make sense. But how the world appears to a pen is something we have no possibility to know. Even assuming that it makes sense to attribute a perspective to a pen is questionable.

Regarding MWI, I see what you mean. And yes, I share (at least some of) @Wayfarer's qualms about it. To me the idea that at each interaction the universal wavefunction truly 'splits' into two or many 'branches' seems to weird to accept (all these 'branches' being 'worlds' or 'timelines'). Also, I am not sure if the 'preferred basis problem' (i.e. how to explain in MWI that the wavefunction can be decomposed in a way to explain the appearance of the 'classical world') has been solved and, also, it's not clear to me how the Born Rule is explained in this interpretation.

But, yes, in a way the first 'objection' is not perhaps 'scientific' but simply philosophical. I believe that I need more evidence to accept the picture of the world MWI gives us.

Still, I have to say that it is often mis-represented. Oddly enough, it is actually the closest physical theory to a 'ontological monism' that has been proposed (the universal wavefunction being only 'real thing' and subsystems being like appearances...a bit how the Substance and the modes relate in Spinoza's philosophy if you are familiar). Also, I find interesting MWI if it is taken as a way to speak about 'possible alternative histories', i.e. an useful way to reflect on the meaning of 'possibility' (but MWI claims that all possibilities are actual...).

Maybe. He didn't have Bell's proof, restricting what can be demanded of a satisfactory interpretation. He definitely expressed a preference for locality (relativity leans on it so hard) and determinism (the 'God does not roll dice' quip), but he probably didn't want to let go of his counterfactuals either, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Einstein might not have known that. — noAxioms

Probably, yes.

I would say that said division is a conceptual construct. It being that does not make the world mind dependent, on the division into objects is so dependent. — noAxioms

If the division into physical objects is conceptual and doesn't reflect faithfully the structure of mind-independent world, how can we claim that we do have knowledge of the 'world beyond' our perspective?

No, talking about a weaker assumption, that it corresponds to something in the physical world, not that the concept is an accurate portrayal of the thing in itself. — noAxioms

But this still is based on some assumptions you make about the 'world in itself'. Assumptions that do not seem to be justified in light of scientific knowledge only.

I see no antinomy identified, no contradiction in this description. That there is a mind independent world, and a description of the nature of it (however poorly matching) seem not to be mutually contradictory. — noAxioms

How can you check that the description of the 'mind-independent world' actually matches its structure? It seems a reasonable inference, yes, but can we have compelling reasons to assert that there is this correspondence?

Looking fwd to it. Your answers have at least got me thinking and re-assessing. — noAxioms

Many thanks for this. I hope that this post didn't change your mind:yikes: I also find your anwers very useful

Sure people talk about objects like televisions and cars, but when push comes to shove I think the way people engage with reality is far more fluid and flexible than the idea that we uphold some fixed ontology with lists of well-defined objects. Now you can say this is kind of an anti-realism about objects, which couls be true to some extent, but its also kind of vacuous in a way because ultimately we are talking about different ways to effectively point at arguably veridical information about the world. — Apustimelogist

A problem here, I believe, is that you are assuming that there must be some kind of correspondence of our mental constructs of the world and the world in itself. The structure of the model must somehow reflect the structure of the world. But how can we verify this assumption?

If the assumption here were false, then we would not have knowledge about the structure of the 'mind-independent world', but only of phenomena. In fact, we would not have just ignorance but, in fact, we would be mistaken.

I don't think that scientific knowledge alone can give us a definite answer about this question. This would imply that we have to 'suspend judgment' about how our models can 'reflect' the structure of the world and admit that, in fact, we have no way to make sure claims about our own cognitive perspective.

A problem here, I believe, is that you are assuming that there must be some kind of correspondence of our mental constructs of the world and the world in itself. The structure of the model must somehow reflect the structure of the world. But how can we verify this assumption? — boundless

Well, my reply would be that if this were not the case, then it would suggest a picture of the world and metaphysics which is much more inflated than I currently believe, where there is some kind of conspiratorial aspect of nature that deceives our senses. Even though this could be the case, I don't see any positive evidence to believe this over a simpler story of how the world works and how we relate to it like the one that has been built up through physics, biochemistry, neuroscience, etc.