A substance is something that objectively exists. — MoK

The truth of the sum of 2 and 2 being 4 seems to objectively exist, yet isn't considered a substance by many. I have a hard time coming up with other examples. None of the things I think have objective existence are substances.

OK, you're entitled to different definitions, but if you declare the apple to exist because you see it, that seems to be subjective existence, not objective at all.

An idea does not have parts at the end since it is irreducible — MoK

Disagree. Ideas have parts, but those parts are not objects or substances. I have patented ideas, and those ideas had a lot of parts. I've never patented an object of any kind.

I think consciousness is always the same, and can always be causal. — Patterner

So you agree with my bit of logic showing that it can be measured.

Let's say physicalism. Through purely physical interactions, life begins, and evolves. There's no such thing as consciousness. Then, a certain physical complexity comes into being. And, though consciousness was not planned, and consciousness had no role in bringing that complexity about, for no reason, that physical complexity just happens to be perfect for the existence of this entirely new thing that it has nothing to do with.

What an extraordinary, bizarre turn of events,

You can say all this about any feature. Just substitute say 'eye' for 'consciousness'.
I picked that because eyes are a frequent choice for similar argument from incredulity.

BTW, the physicalists don't suggest that consciousness follows from mere complexity. What comes into being is improved reaction to outside stimuli, never anything new, just improvements to what was already there.

I have yet to hear a theory, or even a wild guess, about how Chalmers' Hard Problem is explained with physicalism. — Patterner

Same can be said of Chalmers, who merely replaced a black box with a different, even blacker one. It, being inaccessible, is far less explained. Magic is not a better answer.

There's not even a single wild guess as to a model about how the non physical mind works, operates, evolves from the past into the future. Nobody who believes in non physicalism even tries to come up with one, and they don't have the vaguest idea how to find one or even begin performing experiments on the non physical mind to test their ideas. — flannel jesus

Expressing the same criticism. Nicely put.

End of the day, all theories explain it with, "That's the way it is." Even beyond theories of consciousness. Why is there something instead of nothing? — Patterner

I would never end the day with just that. "I don't know" is better than "that's the way it is", and "don't know, so magic". As for the nothing question, that one has satisfactory (to me) analysis, starting with identifying and questioning the assumptions made in asking it.

If it were entirely physics and chemistry, there would be no separate discipline of organic chemistry. — Wayfarer

Organic chemistry being a subset of all chemistry does not in any way imply that organic chemistry is more than chemistry, which in turn, is just physics.

OK, a life-form is more than just organic chemistry. One might behave as a unit for instance, a property not particularly coming from just chemistry. But the discipline of organic chemistry is not the discipline of biology.

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions

Maybe. Going from not-life straight to a cell seems a stretch, but things like amphiphiles and ribose do occur in absence of life, so it's not an impossible stretch. Going from a self-sustaining form to a replicating form seems the largest hurdle. It isn't really life until it does that.

Ernst Mayr ... made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material."

Calling it a fundamental difference does not preclude it from being based on physics and chemistry.

Descartes had difficulty explaining how res cogitans affects matter, suggesting that the rational soul operated through the pineal gland. — Wayfarer

The suggestion of the pineal gland was not an attempt at an explanation of how matter was affected, but rather a choice of something in/near the brain that there was only one of. Being somewhat symmetrical, most brain parts have a mirror part, but not that gland. Still, the soul could have been put in the heart (only one of those) or gut (plenty of behavior and choices come from there).

What about abstract objects like numbers and logical rules? Do you think there are physical explanations for them? — Wayfarer

Abstractions are mental constructs, and so supervene on mental constructs/states. Same with abstractions of say an apple.

We know that materialism fails since it cannot explain how ideas emerge and how they can be causally efficacious in the world, given that ideas are irreducible and have no parts. — MoK

1) I don't accept your given, and 2) as usual, your conclusion does not follow from your given premise.

Not sure what you mean. What example of yours would I be countering? — Patterner

P1) Human consciousness does not supervene on physical processes.
P2) Qualia is part of human consciousness
C1) Human consciousness is a 2nd kind of property/substance that is not part of the physical processes described by physics
P3) A human talks/writes about qualia, a physical action
C2) Consciousness causes physical effects

C1 encompasses varying kinds of dualism. I don't support this, so the example needs to come from those that do.
C2 is a statement of interactionism. Descartes put the interaction in the pineal gland, supposedly because "I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double", whatever that means.
I suspect that it was selected due to its inaccessibility (at the time) in a living subject.

Chalmers seems to deny interactionism (I may have this wrong), but I could not find any explanation (except obfuscation) of how he gets around it. He has no counter-story. Either my logic above is not valid, or mental substances/properties have non-mental physical effects that are open to being measured.


MoK has not replied to my identification of logic flaws in his OP, so I presume agreement.

We are dealing with the strong emergence in the case of ideas since they are irreducible, yet they have a single content that can be experienced. Ideas are irreducible mental events since they can be experienced. — MoK

This is not consistent with your definition of strong emergence in the OP.
I mean, your OP implies consciousness to not be strong emergence, and it too can be experienced. Emergence (weak at least, per your OP) means it is a function of the parts, not that it is experienced or not, nor if it is reducible.

To be honest, I cannot figure out your stance, since weak emergence seems to be a conclusion of a physicalist, and yet you seem to support substance dualism.

Experiencing a cup is a sort of weak emergence considering all the complexities between experiencing the cup and the cup. We, however, have the ability to experience ideas as well, which is a strong emergence.

Experience of one thing is arguably weak emergence, but experience of a different thing is strong emergence? Really? All without any demonstration of the difference, or why these things cannot be emergent from different (non-human) parts with the same relevant properties.

Remember that Newton's laws apply to inertial frames only, and don't usually work in other kinds of frames. This also goes for most of the conservation laws.

So what is the difference? Well in the inertia picture we are trying to give an answer to the age old question of Aristotle's prime mover argument. At least the childish mentality of it. If something moves something then something most move. . . or change. . . that thing. . . and so on. — substantivalism

This makes it sound like A causes B to accelerate (effect), which is wrong. Both interact with each other, with neither being cause nor effect. There is no regress.

An infinite regress results unless we somehow end it in some fashion or make some object 'self-sufficient' in its motion without anything external. The point of the concept of inertia is to postulate just this. . . that an object can move or retain its properties without having something force it to do that externally.

Motion under either model is an abstraction, a change in coordinate position over time, both of which are frame dependent. Thus velocity is not a physical property that gets mucked about by some other object. Contrast this with proper acceleration which is physical, and zero in gravitational inertial picture.

This opens the door to 'natural' states of objects and 'un-natural' states of objects. Forced and un-forced. Following geodesics and not following geodesics.

An object not tracing a geodesic is due to some force (EM say). So sure, using the term 'forced' seems weirdly applied, but appropriate. Calling it un-natural is deceptive.

As for spacetime being a sort of aether/fabric, well, you described that pretty well, and contrast it gravity being a sort of material force rather than geomery. I don't see much difference between the views, just different ways of wording the same thing.

It's like asking for the physical thing responsible for conservation of energy. . . energy is just conserved and we don't look further for the 'thing' responsible for it.

Conservation is a property of laws with certain symmetries. Newtons laws of motion exhibit that symmetry. So yes, it isn't a physical thing that 'causes' conservation. We'd probably just not have a name for energy if it wasn't useful to reference.

However, under the substantivalism picture we still desire to explain why things move the way they do and might feel at odds with bluntly just assuming the ways things move is just a law of nature not to be further explained by any other 'thing'. So we might choose to assert there is an entity who is responsible solely for grounding those familiar spatial/temporal intuitions of ours and explain why objects move the way they do.

Entity-of-the-gaps can be done with any view, including the geometric one. It isn't an explanation, it's hand-waving away to the realm of magic that flies in the face of methodological naturalism, the lack of which kept science pretty much at a standstill for pretty much all of the dark ages.
It makes for an even more complicated thing in need of explanation and as such, solves no problems.

__________________________________________________________________________________

So which picture is better?

Hands down the one without the magic entity. I didn't know where you were going with all this and was surprised when that came up.

If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else.
— Patterner
Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else. — noAxioms
Can you elaborate? — Patterner

How? — Wayfarer

I'm also curious about this. — flannel jesus

Slow reply, but primarily I am talking about mind interactionism here, which necessitates interaction between mind and physical (usually substances, but can be property dualism).
Given this, the interaction point must be somewhere, and the tool used depends on where that point is.
Even with panpsychism, all matter has mental properties that are not described by current naturalistic physics.

So anticipating pushback on this, I tried to investigate non-interacting forms that still deny mental processes supervening physical, besides epiphenomenal views which refutes any talk about qualia and such. I could not find any, so my assertion above stands. A counterexample is required.

You measure a physical change, how do you determine that it was fundamental consciousness that caused that rather than something else? — flannel jesus

You don't know of course, which is a good reason why physicalism is a valid position.

I invite you to read the OP again. — MoK

I did and saw a long list of assumptions, most but not all of which I would accept. That's fine. What I'm pointing out is that the assumptions are not enough.

Granting these assumptions means that there is a function that describes the property of the system. — MoK

This does not follow from the list of assumptions. It's an assertion. I'd not even disagree with the assertion except the part where you suggest that it follows from the list of assumptions.
Sure, there's what you call a 'function' that describes a certain property of the system. That's just yet another assumption. It says nothing about if this property is emergent, strong or weak.

The only avalaible properties are the properties of parts though.

That also does not follow from the list of assumptions you provided.

Therefore, the property of such a system is a function of the properties of the parts.

That arguably would follow from the above statement, which unfortunately doesn't follow from the assumptions.

Hence my question, "How do you know this"? How have you falsified the view that human experience is not emergent from the physical parts?

If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else. — Patterner

Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else.

How do you know this? There are those that disagree and say that consciousness is not a function of the properties of the parts. They also often claim to 'know' this. — noAxioms

That is true given the definition of weak emergence. — MoK

It does not logically follow from a mere definition that any specific case meets that definition. So no, it is not true given the definition. For it to be true, it must be the case that consciousness is a function of human parts that have certain relevant properties, and in complete contradiction, not a function of non-human parts that have the same relevant properties.

This seems very inconsistent. Why is one a function of the parts and the other is not a function of parts with nearly identical relevant properties? — noAxioms
What do you mean by one and the other?

Well you deleted all the context.
One: human parts (your assertion), and the other: non-human parts with the same relevant properties, as described by @RogueAI

Obviosly some physical change (a deliberate one) would have to lack a physical cause. — noAxioms

Such as?

Such as any choice involving what is typically defined as free will.

Therefore, the property of such a system is a function of the properties of the parts. Therefore, we are not dealing with strong emergence in the case of consciousness. — MoK

How do you know this? There are those that disagree and say that consciousness is not a function of the properties of the parts. They also often claim to 'know' this.

Suppose I have a microchip (or series of microchips wired together) with x amount of switches. Are you saying that if I flip enough switches a certain way, consciousness will emerge? — RogueAI

I think you are talking about strong emergence here. — MoK

This seems very inconsistent. Why is one a function of the parts and the other is not a function of parts with nearly identical relevant properties?

I like Patterner's example of air pressure being emergent from gas molecules, none of which has itself a property of pressure, at least not that kind of pressure.
And yes, I also like @Pierre-Normand's emergence of chess from the movement of figurines, none of which are chess.

I wasn't entirely sure what op meant by "a function of" in this context, so I (perhaps embarrassingly) asked ai:

"In the context of the provided text, saying one thing is "a function of" another thing means that the property of a system can be mathematically or logically described and derived from the properties of its constituent parts [textual content]."
That sounds like an epistemological definition. Something is an emergent property of the parts if we know how, and can derive (predict0 the emergent property. That seems to have nothing to do with if it actually is a function of the parts or if outside influence is required. The dualists have always leaned on such a definition. "I refuse to pay attention to advances in the field, so consciousness will forever not be a function of brain activity. They demonstrate always correlation, never causation.".
— flannel jesus

I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical. — Patterner

That's another tack, suggesting properties of trivial parts (atoms say) that have never been measured by anything studying atoms.

I don't think this is correct. I don't believe in strong emergence, but if there were strong emergence it would be casual - arguably more casual than weak emergence. — flannel jesus

Yes, it would be causal, and that makes for an empirical test for it.

It is correct. If matter moves on its own, and experience is the result of how matter moves, then how could experience be causally efficacious? — MoK

Obviosly some physical change (a deliberate one) would have to lack a physical cause. The laws describing the states of matter would necessarily be incomplete.

In short, special relativity had to be derived as a consequence of Michelson Morley experiment as well as Maxwell's equations, and then General Relativity because he needed a way of keeping gravity fully local (in contrast to Newtonian gravity which involves instantaneous arrival of updated gravity information). — flannel jesus

M&M was pre-existing evidence, yes, and everybody knew a new theory was needed because of that. Several were working on it and Einstein put out SR shortly after LET, both valid explanations. Neither dealt with gravity and neither were geometric solutions.

OK, keeping GR local was perhaps a major motivation for the geometric approach. Not sure how far Einstein would have got on his GR work had not Minkowski re-cast SR as a geometric model first, but that move was essential to the completion of GR.

Also he had this idea - that was explained in the video - about how a guy falling wouldn't feel that he is falling. The "happiest thought in his life", right?

Yes, the EP is based on that, that gravity and acceleration are locally indistinguishable, thus he could take the mathematics of accelerated frames from SR and derive things like gravitational time dilation. I think that part could have been done with the non-geometric model. Maybe. Not like I've worked through the derivations myself.

Nice explanation of how Einstein's spacetime curving explains gravitational motion as well as does Newton's force laws. What seems not explained is why Einstein's model is better, and where Newton's laws fail to make the correct prediction. What were Einstein's thought processes that made him move to this new model? The opening and title of the video ask 'why' and not 'how', so I thought this part would be covered.

The only experimental evidence at the time was the anomalous precession of Mercury's orbit. That had to be it, but not mention of this I think in the video. Later, bending of light around large masses, and gravitational redshift were verifications, but neither of these had been done at time of GR publishing.

This isn't an ad, I promise haha. — flannel jesus

But it has an ad built in that you have to wade through or forward past.

There's a real problem about EPP. The root of the problem is the idea that something can exist before any predicates apply to it, or that something can have a predicate applied to it before it exists. Neither works. Hence "prior" cannot mean "temporally prior" so it needs to be reinterpreted or abandoned. — Ludwig V

First of all, 'prior' is their language, and it isn't a temporal reference. EPP says (without using that contentious word) that 'only existing things can have predicates', which is arguably self contradictory since a nonexistent thing would have no predicates, which is in itself a predicate. Meinong rejects that, so existence is not a requirement for predication.

Part of the issue is that EPP isn't very specific about what definition of 'exists' is being referenced in its statement. Under def 1 (idealism), and 4 (deliberate assignment), predication seems prior to existence.
Definition 3 (relational) also doesn't seem to require EPP. So that leaves 2 (part of the universe) and 5 (objective), the only ones that arguably need it, but if EPP is not assumed, I don't see any contradiction that follows from predication without existence.

OK, def 2 as worded arguably of needs it because the universe needs to stand out from other universes, else it's just a universe. But since two objects can be a meter apart in one of the other universes, EPP isn't necessary for the predication, only for it being (unexplainably) preferred.

So EPP fails at every step. You seem to find that problematic, but without begging EPP, you need to point out what contradiction results from it, being very specific about how you're defining your terms.

Well, you're still left with the problems of idealism.

As I said, under idealism, the elephant's existence is due to its being observed, being a phenomenon. That phenomenal relation results in the existence of the elephant, hence predication is prior to existence under idealism. You disagree I take it.

I already knew that existence without predication makes no sense.

If you define existence as 'standing out', yea, it can't stand out without predicates. Under idealism, that would mean existence despite not being perceived, which isn't really idealism then. 2-4 seem to require predication, yes. 5 (objective)? That one seems contradictory only because existence under def 5 is a property (not a relation), and a property is a predicate, as is the lack of the property.

Thanks for your input Ludwig. Forcing me to work stuff out, which is good.

My reply to you here belongs in my EPP topic.

The question of mind independence that is of interest to me, is the sense in which the world exists independently of the mind. — Wayfarer

Just calling it 'the world' seems to be an assumption that this world is preferred, presumably because it is perceived. This sounds like a very mind dependent stance to me.

Even if there is a counter-intuitive increase of number of 'bases' — boundless

Everett's thesis had to dumb-down the number of bases due to the finite but inexpressibly large actuality of the actual figure. For instance, you (a physical object with extension, at a moment in time) is undergoing trillions of splits such that there is no one measured state except relative to some measuring event well after said moment in time. Hence Rovelli saying that a thing cannot measure itself, it can only measure something sufficiently in the past to have collapsed into a coherent state. Not sure if it's Rovelli's term, but an extended system (a person say) at an extended moment in time, is a sort of extended spacetime event called a 'beable'.

I mean sure, the elephant exists because its parents got busy one day, but that's not a fundamental cause. — noAxioms
So what is more fundamental than that? — Ludwig V

The cause of its parents of course.
I list what is probably classified by Aristotle as an efficient cause of the elephant. More fundamental would be a root cause, something realists need to face.

Two pebbles are (at a particular moment in time) a meter apart. That's a relation ('is a meter from') even without them ever being observed or known. — noAxioms
Oh, I see. The criterion you are applying is simply "being in a relation with something that exists".

That would be a different relation than the one I listed. I mean, that's like 'being in a relation with something that's green', which begs the question 'what if it's a meter from something that's not green?'. It seems your relation asserts something in addition to the relation. Mine did not. That relation is a predicate, and if EPP is not accepted, only the relation 'is a meter from' is sufficient. Existence of neither object is required. With EPP, yea, they need to exist before they can be a meter apart.

I can make some sort of sense to your acceptance of Meinong's rejection of EPP. I need to pay more attention to him, (thanks for that) but so far I can't make any sense at all of your being in the presence of elephant B.

No different than the two things a meter apart. Existence of either thing is not required if EPP is rejected, so I can be in the presence of a nonexistent elephant. Since related things often (not always) seem to share ontology, I probably wouldn't exist either. My suggestion is that since elephant A & B are identical except for A existing, nether A nor B has any empirical test to see which is which. For this reason, I find existence defined as an objective property to be useless. Hence my not being a realist. All the problems of realism are solved.

doesn't [Kant's] 'exist' boil down to 'I know about'? — noAxioms

Not really. Phenomena are dependent on minds for their existence (and properties). But noumena are not.

I really don't know Kant then. Those are not idealist ideas.

I meant that the 'normal' basis is selected, after the measurement, due to the fact that our experimental apparatuses are structured in some ways. In other words, the reason why we observe things in the 'right' basis is that the the experimental apparatus has those properties it has. However, in principle, you could have that after the measurement the state vector 'collapses' to one of the vector in the 'wrong' basis. — boundless

I don't understand any of that. There is no right/wrong basis under MWI. They all share the same ontology, but some are more probable than others, whatever that means.

Anyway, my contention is that if the interference terms are too significant, in the Schrodinger's cat experiment, the version of the observers that sees the 'alive' cat should perceive in some ways the other 'world'. — boundless

They are nowhere near sufficiently significant. I cannot think of a scenario, however trivial, where you'd see this. It would be the equivalent of measuring which slit the photon passed through, and still getting an interference patter. Interference comes from not knowing the state of the cat, ever.

In my example of spins, for instance, we observe either '+1/2' or '-1/2', but we never observe the state 1/sqrt(2)('+1/2'+'-1/2').

Sure we do. You observe that by not measuring the spin, same as not measuring which slit.

As soon as you name a ‘world’ or a ‘thing’ or ‘an unknown object’ which you claim is unaffected by or separate from your thought of it, you are already bringing it within the ambit of thought. — Wayfarer

So much wrong with that sentence. Nit: I didn't name any particular world. I didn't have a particular one in mind, especially since it's quite difficult to do so. Secondly, I didn't claim anything, but I am defending the stance of those that claim a mind-independent reality. In such a stance, there is no 'ambit of thought'. That term presumes a very different stance. Under the mind-independent view, somebody thinking about X (X not being something in his causal reach) has zero effect on X, and in particular, has zero contribution to whatever the ontological state of X is.

The realist always has something in mind when he or she speaks of ‘something unaffected by thought’.

Arguably so, but being thought of doesn't change it to be affected by thought.
We've switched to 'realist' now. I suppose most of those claiming mind independent existence of say some rock consider said rock to be real. Being real and existing are often synonyms, or treated as such, but there are pages keeping the two terms distinct.

It’s a Chinese finger trap - you can’t even say it without undercutting the point.

I haven't seen the point undercut, despite your implication of 'ambit'.

[Einstein’s] critique was critical to the development of quantum theory. — noAxioms
Yes, but the article acknowledges that. — Wayfarer

I know. I was relaying a couple snippets from the article since Einstein's realist leanings have been noted multiple times in this topic.

Discover Magazine: In quantum mechanics an object can exist in many states at once, which sounds crazy. — Wayfarer

Only in some interpretations, and not crazy, just unintuitive.

The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.

Schrödinger equation is deterministic actually. Penrose also seems to be a realist, which doesn't contradict QM, it just contradicts locality. Does he also disagree with say Bohmian mechanics?

But what if physical reality is actually indeterminate on a fundamental level?

There are those interpretations as well, such as objective collapse.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, founder of loop quantum gravity, has written seriously about how Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness—the idea that phenomena lack intrinsic existence—resonates with quantum mechanics’ relational ontology, where particles and properties exist only through measurement relationships rather than independently.

Preaching to choir

MWI was developed before decoherence. MWI supporters like decoherence because it seems to explain the branching. It doesn't IIRC remove interference however. — boundless

Why would you want interference removed? It is seen. Even a realist interpretation like DBB has the photon going through one slit and not the other, yet interference patterns result. We experience that. Perhaps we're talking past each other.

Yes, but there is a preferred basis in our experience.

You don't know that, there being no evidence of it. Under MWI, there's no 'our', so every basis is experienced by whatever is entangled with that basis, with none preferred.

It may well be special because it is observed. But observing something doesn’t normally cause it to exist. So even if it is special because it is observed, it may exist for some other reason. You need to demonstrate that there is no other reason. — Ludwig V

A realist might want to justify the existence of whatever he asserts to exist, but I don't count myself among them. I actually think its a big problem. I mean sure, the elephant exists because its parents got busy one day, but that's not a fundamental cause.

If it doesn’t stand out to anything observing or caring about it, it’s not a relation.

Nonsense. Two pebbles are (at a particular moment in time) a meter apart. That's a relation ('is a meter from') even without them ever being observed or known.

I’m glad we agree on something. However, to establish the difference (or similarity) between A and B, you have to identify A and B. Suppose that A is the existing elephant. Your problem is that you have no non-existing elephant to take the place of B. — Ludwig V

Maybe I'm in the presence of elephant B and I've no relation to the existing A one. That would imply that I don't exist since such relations (in the presence of) tend to be between things with similar ontology.
Given that statement, you may want to retract the 'agree on something', but if existence is a property, there's no way to know if you have it. It's usually assumed, but doing so renders the property meaningless.
I did say I wasn't a realist. I usually define 'exists' as the original 'stands out to' relation, in which case yea, B exists to me and A does not. It's objective existence (a property) that is a realist stance, and it makes little sense to me.

You might find a partial solution in Meinong’s work — Ludwig V

My prior topic was on exactly that. I am more open to Meinong than most. My focus was on his rejection of existence being prior to predication (EPP). Given that rejection, I can be in the presence (a predicate) of elephant B without either of us existing.

However, Kant argued that “exists” is not a predicate, which means that existence is not a property.

I don't know Kant all that well, but doesn't his 'exist' boil down to 'I know about'? That is a predicate. Kant isn't exactly a ball of mind-independent opinions.
To reject objective existence as a predicate is to embrace EPP.

Some reservations. Your formulation has the consequence of limiting existence to things that have causal relationships with each other – that is, physical things.

There's plenty of causal structures that are not typically classified as physical. Conway's Game of Life (GoL) is one example. A medium spaceship is an object in that structure. It moves (at 0.5c), can be created and have causal effects. It exists by this EP definition. But it lacks mass, energy, etc, words that are meaningful to our particular physics.

Yes, Plato certainly used a different definition than EP. Plato cites the soul as something lacking in causal interaction? That seems contrary to how souls are often defined.

One of many such apparent paradoxes in quantum physics — Wayfarer

PCD is not paradoxical, it just isn't classical.

I meant something like 'QM without the reduction postulate'. — boundless

QM doesn't have a reduction postulate, but some of the interpretations do. Each seems to spin the role of measurement a different way.

If you do not accept collapse, you still have superposition and interference.

Yes, the latter two are, but the meaning of especially superposition is still interpretation dependent. Superposition itself is baked into the mathematics.

So, you need to explain why we do percieve everything in a definite state.

I suppose that explanation is interpretation dependent as well.

But I was questioning if decoherence is enough for the appearance of collapse.

It seems to be enough given an interpretation (MWI say) that explains it that way.

Interference terms remain, they become however very, very small. Is that truly enough to explain our 'definite' experience (same goes for the cat's experience)?

Interference is a statistical effect, so with no particle can interference be measured, let alone measured by the particle in question. But it can be concluded given hundreds of thousands of objects all being treated identically. So I suppose a really huge crowd of people (far more than billions) could collectively notice some kind of interference if they all did something identical. I cannot fathom what that experiment would look like or how any of those people could survive it.

Basically, in MWI the branching is explained by saying that there is a superposition of definite states.

Definite means something like this. Consider a spin 1/2 particle. When we measure the spin (say) in the z-axis we obtain either '+1/2' or '-1/2'. So, '+1/2' and '-1/2' are 'definite states'. — boundless

OK. They're post-measurement, so they are definite, sure, but post-measurement, they're not in superposition anymore, so it's only in superposition of definite state relative to a system that has not yet measured the lab doing the spin measurement.

This is very well illustrated by the cat, where death when -1/2 is measured. From inside the box, there is one definite state and the cat is alive or dead depending on that. From outside the box, they know the measurement has been performed, but don't know the result of it. So the cat is in superposition of the interior definite state of being dead and alive, but the cat is not in a exterior definite state, meaning it is still in superposition relative to the lab. And yes, they can measure interference in principle.
In practice, there's no way to keep the cat alive and in superposition since there's no way to prevent information from leaking out of the box.

Here things go tricky, however. Why, when we make a measurement, does the quantum state collapse or appear to collapse in one state of the 'basis 1' instead of 'basis 2'?

Interpretation dependent obviously. Some interpretations have no concept of 'our' experience since there's no 'you' that satisfies the laws of identity and non-contradiction. Keep that in mind.


But if MWI-supporters do not want to make any reference to experience to explain how we have the quantum-classical transition, then why systems evolve as if they have to appear to collapse in a state of the 'basis 1', which happens to correspond to our experience?[/quote]MWI does not collapse in a state of the basis 1 which happens to correspond to our experience. It denies the bold parts at least. Basis 2 is also experienced, and as much by the pre-measurement 'you' as is the post-measurement 'you' that's in state 1, which is to say, not by the same person as the one before.

This is a part of, as I understand it, the 'preferred basis problem'. MMI posits that 'basis 1' is selected by the mind.

What is 'the mind' per MMI? It is some dualistic mind thing, sort of a moving spotlight which gets to pick which path it follows, with the other paths left as zombies? That sounds like uni-mind, so no, probably not that. You can tell I don't know much about MMI, especially the part about how they define 'mind'. Do trees similarly select their bases? Where do they draw the line between what has a 'mind' and what doesn't?

Yeah, the paper is a bit technical and also beyond my paygrade. Basically, however, it tries to reject MWI by adducing that if a MWI supporter doesn't add some postulate to 'pure QM without the collapse postulate' you can't explain how the universe decompose in subsystems, how the preferred basis is selected etc.

There's no preferred basis in MWI. That much I know. Can't speak for MMI.

What thing would that be? — Wayfarer

We were discussing 'worlds', which is loosely referenced by the word 'thing' in my statement, despite not being an object. A world is unaffected by something elsewhere imagining one.

Incidentally a nice Australian Broadcasting Corp feature on the 100 year anniversary of Heisenberg's famous paper

Cool article, compressing 100 years of quantum history into a few pages. It harps a lot on how Einstein really wanted a locally real universe, and perhaps never knew it was hopeless. His critique was critical to the development of quantum theory.

It's still a world. Nothing names it that, lacking information processing to give meaning, but that property (worldness) seems to be an example a feature of the thing in itself. — noAxioms
Nope. I dispute that. To say what it is, to name it, you have to bring it to mind. — Wayfarer

Sure, but in a mind-independent view, you bringing it to mind has zero effect on the thing itself. It's ontology in particular is not a function of somebody's musings.

So, I went through your OP carefully. I’m afraid that I do not come away with a general criterion for mind-independence. — Ludwig V

If you're looking for me to evangelize one, I tried not to.

To say 'the universe exists' is actually to say 'this universe exists' and not the others. Why? Because we observe it."

I’m not clear what this means.

I am pointing out the distinction between 'a universe' (this being one of many) vs 'the universe', which implies there's just one, and we're looking at it. The preferred way things are has plot holes that I point out, and declaring only this one to exist is a mind-dependent act.

For that statement, 'the universe' refers to all of our spacetime, even the parts not measurable, but not other type II universes such as ones with 4 spatial dimensions, just to name a simple difference.

I'm harping mostly on 'the' vs 'a', and not so much on the problems with asserting that it exists.

I'm harping mostly on 'the' vs 'a', and not so much on the problems with asserting that it exists.

I don’t see any implications for mind-dependence or not.

It out of gazillions of potential universes, only this preferred one exists, it is probably special because it is observed and the others are not. Sounds pretty observer dependent to me.

The word 'exists' has its origins to mean 'stands out' which often implies that there is something to which it stands out.

Yes! The origin of the word is a relation, and yet over time it gets thought of as a property. Elephants existing to me slowly becomes elephants existing period.
That which stands out to an observer seems observer dependent. So I'm looking for a definition where yea, it stands out, but not necessarily to anything observing or caring about it. Still a relation though. Hence definition 3 (relational) of 'exists', which has nothing to do with perception or knowing about the related thing.

For me, "exists" just means "There is/are.." as in "There is a moon" or "There are elephants".

That sounds pretty objective. A thing either is or it isn't, a property that is true or false. But then how does an existing elephant differ from the nonexisting elephant, in any way that matters to it? That's a hard question since most dismiss the question before thinking about it.

Well, it is true that if we perceive something, that something usually exists.

Well, it stands out to us, so it exists as a relation. There doesn't seem to be a test for the existence as a property. That's the problem with the word slowly changing meaning from its original definition.

The traditional example here is that a decoy duck is not a real duck

Again, this topic is about ontology, not a completely different definition of the word that means genuine vs, counterfeit.

"Principle 1 (The Eleatic Principle) An entity is to be counted as real if and only if it is capable of participating in causal processes" This wording of the principle is almost mind independent except for the 'counted as' part, and I've seen it worded without that.

In principle, this is an interesting criterion, which could work, at least in standard scientific contexts. The original formulation in Plato’s Sophist) goes something like “Anything that exists is capable of affecting other things, and capable of being affected by other things.” But it works in favour of mind-independence of anything that it applies to. Your argument to adapt it to show the opposite is very weak, because you admit that there are different ways to formulate it. I;m afraid that in any case, phrases like “counted as” do not imply mind-dependence, at least as I understand it.

Agree. I said that to show that it seems to be a valid mind-independent definition of existence, and an objective one this time, one that provides a test to pass or not.

I would say that compulsion is when our deliberative power is coherced to act in a certain bway by internal (e.g. severe mental illnesses) or external constraints. — boundless

Say an epileptic fit.

Bottom line for me: I don't think we have anything that qualifies as free will, and despite the positive sounding term, I wouldn't want it any more than I'd want a heaven where you can't be in pain. I all sounds good until you think about it.

For instance, MWI supporters generally claim that decoherence is enought to have 'classicality'. But IIRC, interference isn't eliminated. — boundless

Of course not. That would violate theory. The moon exhibits classicality without requiring minds.
Discussion elsewhere noted that if I enter ALDI double doors at high enough speed (multiple times), my cumulative demise will form an interference pattern on the far wall. The wall would have to be incredibly far away from the doors to notice it. They've not done it in the lab with anything larger than a bucky ball, but they have put eye-visible classical objects in superposition for really short times.

I just think that the block universe takes things too far.

Where I find it far simpler and elegant, and less filled with unanswerable implications such as what was the first cause.

I take it as a suggestion that maybe you experience the consequences of interference constantly, as a matter of course, but they're just... normal. They don't look particularly different from anything else you experience. — flannel jesus

Yes, exactly

Yet, QM taken literally tells us that we should perceive an interference of mutually exclusive states. — boundless

You'd have to show where QM says anything like that. QM does not contradict empirical experience.

For instance both states of the cat in Schroedinger's (in)famous experiment.

Right. There's no cat experiencing superposition or being both dead and alive. There's (from the lab PoV) a superposition of the cat experiencing living, and of experiencing dying by poison. A superposition of those two experiences is very different than the cat experiencing both outcomes. Each experience is utterly unaware of the other.

Also there is the preferred basis problem. Basically, in MWI the branching is explained by saying that there is a superposition of definite states.

'Definite states' sounds awfully classical to me. MWI is not a counterfactual interpretation, so is seems wrong to talk about such things.

See on this this paper: "Nothing happens in the Universe of the Everett Interpretation" by physicist J. Schwindt. — boundless

Hard to read, lacking the background required, but it seems to say that there are no 'worlds' from any objective description of say the universal wave function. It has no 'system states', something with which I agree. There are no discreet worlds, which again, sounds like a counterfactual. I think the paper is arguing against not so much the original Everett paper, but against the DeWitt interpretation that dubbed the term 'worlds' and MWI and such. I could be wrong.

The world 'in itself' is formless and therefore meaningless. — Wayfarer

It's still a world. Nothing names it that, lacking information processing to give meaning, but that property (worldness) seems to be an example a feature of the thing in itself.

We mistake the form discovered by the mind as something that is there anyway, not seeing that the mind is the source of it. Kant 101, as I understand him.

I agree that form interpreted (not discovered) by mind is often mistaken thus.

Interestingly, there is the 'many-mind' interpretation (MMI). In this view, the physical universe evolves in the same way as is described by MWI. In MMI, however, the 'emergence' of a classical universe is, in fact, due to 'mind'. That is, the definite outcomes in which the wavefunction 'splits' are observed by different minds. — boundless

I never got that interpretation since it being different definite outcomes is relative to anything, not just information processors. I suppose I'd need to delve into it more to critique it more informatively.

If unicorn-like creatures exist anywhere in the universe, their similarity to the unicorns we know and love is entirely coincidental and proves nothing. — Ludwig V

What would you want to prove? How does your assessment differ from anything else that's in the universe but unobserved? Whether or not humans would classify/name it as a unicorn or not has no bearing on it being there.

That pattern of argument can be used to prove the existence of anything that you can imagine.

Then imagine something more exotic like that 4-spatial dimension 'rock'. That can't exist in the universe, but is hardly impossible in another. That thing can't exist if 'the universe' is the only privileged one. So how does our chosen policy deal with that?

[/quote] In which case, you'll have to ask someone else.[/quote]You abstain, which is much what the topic title is about. Few hold a consistent enough view to deal with these outlier cases. What I see exists. What I don't, well, I don't care. That sounds awfully observer dependent even if you assert that it would exist without people to see it. Too late. It's already been observed. Can't unsee it by pretending we were never there.

You have what, to me, is a very peculiar idea of what the universe is.

No actually. I can think of half a dozen definitions, but 'everything that exists' makes 'existence' definition 2 circular. You don't know if we're part of that set, and thus if we exist.

I tend to put 'universe' as 'all that came from our big bang', but even that is ambiguous. It at least allows one to posit more, and make words like 'multiverse' meaningful, which it isn't if 'universe' is all that exists.

I do put the moon and the thermostat in the universe.

Why? I know, it sounds like a stupid question, but given your fairly objective definition, how specifically do you justify that statement? I use a different definition, and yea, would put the moon and theormostat in my 'world', which is confined to my past light cone. I relate to the things in my world, and those things exist (def 3) relative to me, but not in any objective sense. That definition is nicely mind independent, but you may differ.

I'm less sure about unicorns. They are mythical creatures

Not talking about the myth or the concept, but actual unicorns. Keep that in mind. Sure, the myth exists, in stories. Not what's being asked.

You may be suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Here I thought I was humble by being quite unsure of even my own existence (by any definition).

But it does seem fairly well established that making observations at quantum level does have a causal impact on what happens

Not true. Most realist interpretations deny any causal impact from observation. No wavefunction collapse. The transactional interpretation seems to be an exception to that statement, but I know little about it.

Well, unless you can show me a mathematical model that can predict (deterministically or not) choices — boundless

Inability to express something complex as a function of trivial operations doesn't mean that it isn't a function of trivial operations, but of course it also isn't proof that it is such.

Interestingly, I made a similar objection to the 'block universe', where all events past, present and future have the same ontological status. If we can be so wrong in our experience, how can empirical knowledge (which is needed to falsify/verify scientific theories) be trusted?

Empirical knowledge is exactly how we correct our initial guesses, which are often based on intuition.

I think that it depends on how one understands morality.

Yes, quite. I understand it as a contract (written or not) with a society. Many would define it differently. My assertion about the isolated person works with my definition, and not with some others.

Determinism shouldn't be confused with compulsion as it often is in these discussions. — noAxioms
How so?

Compulsion is when you make one choice, but are incapable of enacting it. Cumpulsion is not the inability to do two different things, which is what 'could have done otherwise' boils down to.

Its irrelevant why I believe something does not exist. — Philosophim

Then this topic is not for you since it is all about the limits of what we feel exists, and what doesn't meet that criteria.

Its relevant if I know that something doesn't exist.

Nope. This topic is not an epistemic one. I'm not asking how you know something exists or not. I am looking for a belief system that is consistent with mind independence, and where the limits are placed is critical to that.

Knowledge is an objective determination.

Subjective actually, almost all of it anyway. I doubt you'd figure out 2+2=4 without subjective input, even if it is arguably objective knowledge.

The only way to know if a belief is valid is if you have done the diligence to turn it into knowledge.

No, that's how you know the belief is sound. What I'm talking about cannot be knowledge, so logic must be used to validate it. Nobody seems particularly inclined to expose their own beliefs to this analysis.

Self consistent, and oftentimes with low correspondence to reality. — wonderer1

Only if they're wrong, and you don't know if they're wrong.

Bell didn’t prove anything. — Wayfarer

This is the part I missed all this time, that the proof structure was there to prove that quantum theory is correct if these experiments could be verified, but the experimental backing was not yet there. Thank you so much for this. It will help prevent me from spouting further nonsense about this subject.

Apparently there was a laundry list of things to verify, which began in the 70's and was completed by the guys winning the prize 3 years ago.

Realism neglects the role of the mind in this process. — Wayfarer

Yes. If that sort of mind plays a role, it makes its own predictions, different than the ones made by quantum theory.

Realism already necessarily rejects locality, which allows action from outside, but even nonlocal QM allows nonlocal information transfer, and mind playing a role requires that, no?

- - - - -

Do you think there was a mind involved that created the electricity? Do you think that if your power was out, you could walk over to your computer, type a message, and it would appear on the internet? — Philosophim

You've apparently not read much of the thread. Not suggesting any of that. Not even the idealists suggest that.

Pick something you believe doesn't exist. Why do you believe it doesn't exist? What is your criteria for deciding one way or the other? I ask because the criteria specified is most often based on observation, making it observer dependent.

There is often a confusion between "What we know" and "What is".

Almost everything is 'what we believe'. Much of what claim to be known is just beliefs. I'm fine with that. I'm not asking if we know reality is mind dependent. I'm seeing if the beliefs are really what they claim to be.

What we know is clear: There is a world independent of our own minds.

That is a fantastic example of a belief. Plenty of self-consistent views deny this. I personally would say that a world external to myself is perceived. That much makes it relation with an observer. It does not imply that said world exists, unless 'exist' is defined as that relation (which is often how I use the word).

The mind or brain integrates all of that data with our remembered world-model to construct a panoramic vision we know as 'the world' (panorama literally meaning 'seeing all'). Without that conscious and unconscious process of data reception and synthesis, there would be no world to see. — Wayfarer

I think the realist position (and not just the direct realist position) is that there would still be the world (quantum definition of the word), relative to something measuring it (a rock say), but yea, all that synthesis that the human mind does is absent, so it would be far more 'the world in itself' and not as we think of it. Time for instance would not be something that flows. Rocks have no need to create that fabrication.

I chose rock and not apple because an apple is definitely a product of perception. The think would not exist without perception since it's design/purpose is to be perceived.

It's not something infants see; they have to learn how to see it, an act which takes the first few years of life.

Most of it seems learned by the time the baby is perhaps hours old. They've done experiments with say depth perception and aversion to heights, to newborns opening eyes for the first time. Plenty is built in an not just learned.

- - - -

I can think of an alternative [to determinism/randomness] but I can't formulate it mathematically and I can't think of how to make a scientific test that can be used to falsify the idea. — boundless

Tell me. It not being mathematical is also great because it challenges something like MUH. And there's no falsification test for the random/determined issue either.

If emprical data can't be trusted, what even is the point to do science?

Which is why BiV, superdeterminism, and say Boltzmann Brains all need to be kept in mind, but are not in any way theories, lacking any evidence whatsoever.

We generally do not held accountable people if they could not act otherwise — boundless

So some societies operate, but such societies are quite capable of rendering such judgement using deterministic methods. And yes, I think morals are relative to a specific society. A person by himself cannot be immoral except perhaps to his own arbitrary standards.

But if one that dies of starvation didn't have the possibility to act otherwise can we held that person accountable?

I don't hold the person accountable, nature does. One has an obligation to not starve. Death is the unavoidable punishment, and only that death potential make eating an obligation and not just one more choice.

An you do have the opportunity to act otherwise. Brains were evolved to make better choices, which wouldn't work at all if there were to choices available. Determinism shouldn't be confused with compulsion as it often is in these discussions.

If you think determinism has any relevance to accountability, how is any alternative (randomness say)
any better? I cannot think of a moral choice where randomness would yield a better selection.
I don't think there's any relevance at all, so the question is moot to me.

A general rule would be good. But how can one work that out without looking at specific cases? Rule first is just wild guessing. — Ludwig V

It isn't wild guessing since the rule needs to be consistent with what we do observe, and the opinions of most people don't meet that criteria, per the OP.

The unicorn, as a specific case, should of course be 'I don't know'. So an educated estimate might be in order, which is not wild guess. How about a 4 dimensional rock? That's not going to be part of 'the universe', so either you pick a rule that says it doesn't exist, or pick one that doesn't confine existence to 'the universe', or perhaps, 'the universe now'. Once we have a rule, we analyze it for mind dependence, and per my argument, anything that mentions 'the universe' is probably going to be mind dependent, unless one defines universe far more broadly with 'all that exists', in which case one is left wondering if we're part of that. I am at least. Most use a definition that includes one's self.

I would have probably classified moon, unicorn, and thermostat in the same category of either 2: Part of this universe, or 3, relational. — noAxioms

I don't understand how 2 or 3 applies to all three and I don't see how that classification tells me anything about their mind-indendence.

2 is 'part of the universe'. You probably put the moon and thermostat in the universe. I consider the universe to be sufficiently large to leave little probability of the absence of a unicorn anywhere. Hence same classification. 3 is trickier since it needs to relate to me, so perhaps the unicorn isn't close enough to do that.

As for mind-dependence, we call our universe 'the universe', making it privileged because we see it. That makes it a pretty observer dependent definition of existence. 3 is not observer dependent, but depends on causal relationships. Existence is thus only meaningful within structures that have them.

That's not quite what I meant. I have no idea what spacetime would look like and even less idea what a picture of spacetime would look like.

Internet is full of them. OK, so you don't have a physics background. Makes it harder to discuss relativity and quantum implications to this topic.

It only becomes a contradiction if you claim the existence of misunderstanding, and also claim the lack of existence of anything. — noAxioms

Which is precisely what you did, on both counts, affirming the LNC violation you asked for. — Mww

You'll have to point out where I did any such thing.

But I said 'share the same ontology' without saying what that ontology is. I also somewhat misspoke, since a presentist would say the moon 'is' while the Theia event (where the moon is created) 'was', a different ontology. — noAxioms

Are you also saying that there is no connection between those two facts? — Ludwig V

No, I'm not also saying that.

I don't see that things that don't exist are relevant here. Mind-independence doesn't apply to them.

It absolutely does apply. The justification given for its nonexistence gates whether the chosen stance is valid or not. It's the core point of this whole topic.

What if there cannot be a single model that applies to both unicorns and the moon?

Then you don't have a valid model, let alone several of them. A quite simple model might say that both exist, the unicorns just being somewhere else where we don't see them. That example shows that there can be a single model that applies to both. Another is that unicorns don't exist, but moon does. That's likely more popular, but it isn't specified why the model declares unicorns to be nonexistent, so it's incomplete.

How could we possibly know about things that exist independently of our minds without observation?

I've never required us to know about them. This is a model, not proof of existence or not. The topic is not about epistemology. We can't know if the unicorns exist or not, and we certainly can't know if our chosen model is sound or not, but we can at least come up with a valid one.

I don't see why you would think that what I would say about the existence of unicorns can be generalized to everything that exists.

You got it backwards. The general rule is what I'm after. The unicorns end up on one side or the other depending on the rule chosen. Rule first, then assessment of unicorn or whatever. Point is, I want a rule that you might assert belief in, and one that has the property of mind-independent existence. If you can't do that, then my title is pretty accurate: Nobody really believes in mind-independent existence. They might assert it, but they apparently don't have a coherent model that supports it.

What existence means depends on the kind of object your are talking about. So there is one criterion for the moon existing and a different one for unicorns existing; the criteria for thermostats are different again. The criteria for existence are truth-conditions, so are not themselves true or false.

OK. Sounds like the beginnings of a complex model. I would have probably classified moon, unicorn, and thermostat in the same category of either 2: Part of this universe, or 3, relational.

I'm a bit puzzled about what you mean by "the picture" here.

You compared my suggestion of a spacetime diagram to a picture of the same subject, presumably from some point of view.

Before early 20th century it seemed uncontroversial that everything is deterministic. — boundless

Classical (Newtonian) physics is not deterministic, and if they thought so 1.2 centuries ago, they didn't think it through. Norton's dome is a wonderful example, but that was published only a couple decades ago.

Why do we have to be so certain that, in the future, we will find out that physical laws allow that some events are neither probabilistic nor deterministic?

We're not so certain, but can you even think of an alternative? One alternative is that the system isn't closed, but non-closed systems have always failed to be either deterministic or random.

According to superdeterminism, there are correlations that 'trick us' in believing that either 'realism' (CFD) or 'locality' is wrong. But superdeterminists argue they are mere coincidences.

Yes. Empirical data cannot be trusted, and that's why it's not an interpretation of evidence, but rather a denial of it, similar to BiV. Yes, superdeterminism can be locally real. It's a loophole. Still is even under the new improved 'proof' 3 years ago.

If all my actions are deterministic, it is quite controversial to attribute to myself moral responsibility. — boundless

That's the line, yes, and its a crock. FW is only needed for moral responsibility to something not part of the deterministic structure, such as an objective moral code. But I've seen only human social rules, hardly objective at all.
The alternatives are randomness and not-closed system. The former doesn't yield external moral responsibility either (as you point out), so the latter is required, in which case the system is simply larger, and we're back to determinism or randomness again.

After all, I literally could not have behaved otherwise.

That does not absolve you of responsibility (to something within the closed system) for your choice. This has been fact for billions of years. You are responsible to eat. Punishment is death. Nothing unfair about that.

To make sense of moral responsibility, you need to impute to moral agents some deliberative power and a sense of right and wrong.

All correct. All those are best implemented with deterministic mechanisms.

Cognitive dissonance is quite a risk.

I get along with it fine.

Would you consider moths as moral agents?

Not much. They're not particularly social. My point was that moths find utility in, if not randomness, at least unpredictbility. Utilization of randomness has nothing to do with morals.


My, but we're digressing, no?

The model I had in mind is described in this paper: "Reality and the Role of the Wavefunction in Quantum Theory" by Sheldon Goldstein and Nino Zanghì. It is an interpretation of the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation (dBB) where there is no mention of a quantum potential that 'guides' the particles in a non-local way as Bohm and Hiley believed — boundless

Said 'guide' sounds like pilot waves, something definitely associated with dBB. The variant doesn't go along these lines then.

Anyway, according to the variant in the linked paper, the wavefunction should be thought as a 'law of motion', a sort of kinematic law that, however, is explicitly nonlocal.

I don't know enough about QM to comment about wave functions being anything but nonlocal. I mean, they're supposed to describe a system, or at least what's known about a system. The latter suggests that the real wave function is different than the one we measure. It being a system means that it's nonlocal since systems are not all in one place. That it sort of describes a state implies a state at a moment in time, but a nonlocal moment in time is not really defined sans frame. So we really need a unified theory to speak the same language about both theories.

It was the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics which was awarded to the experimentalists who proved it. (I wrote an article on it for anyone interested). — Wayfarer

So what didn't Bell prove 55 years prior? From reading up on the prize, it was for vastly improved techniques and closing several (but not all) holes.

and yet, in order to not understand what I said, what I said necessarily must have been something that appeared to your senses. Hence, the LNC….which follows from the quoted absurdity on the bottom of pg17….you can’t claim to misunderstand something that wasn’t there. — Mww

This makes no sense. If there wasn't anything, there'd be no misunderstanding, no existing claim of anything. That isn't a contradiction.
It only becomes a contradiction if you claim the existence of misunderstanding, and also claim the lack of existence of anything.

Hence there seems to be no necessary existence of anything.

The question you should be asking is: why is the apple intelligible? — boundless

Does asking that help nail down a mind-independent reality? Perhaps the answer to that question does.

Assuming that such a probabilism is 'real', why can't we think that there are other possibilities besides determinism and probabilism?

Maybe there are, but they'd still have to conform to the theory.

In a sense, yes. But I would not even call newtonian mechanics 'wrong' tout court. Our physical theories give us incredibly precise predictions. They have to be at least partially right.

Newton is not wrong, and it is all still taught in schools. But it is a simplification, and requires more exactness at larger scales.

YMMV.

What does the rest of the world say? How does that acronym convert to metric?

I just find bizzarre that a 'scientific realist' would prefer to say that there are 'unexplained nonlocal correlations' than saying that, perhaps, instead there are nonlocal interactions of some sorts. — boundless

Unsure of the difference. A local interpretation asserts neither nonlocal correlation nor interaction.

If we renounce to find an 'explanation' of those correlations, why not simply take an epistemic interpretation of QM?

Isn't that kind of what Copenhagen does?

Also, despite saying what I said, I also recognize that perhaps we are less free than we naively think we are.

Well, plenty of folks want to assert free will because it sounds like a good thing to have, and apparently it is a requirement for some religions to work, which makes it their problem, not mine. If I'm designing a general device to make the best choices, giving it free will would probably be a bad thing to do. Imagine trying to cross the street.

How about a moth? Moths fly about in unpredictable ways, making them harder to catch, and thus more fit. That's a benefit over deterministic (or at least predictable) behavior. Maybe moths are the ones with free will.

If the two marbles, however, are in some way 'nonlocally entangled' — boundless

What does that mean? I only know 'entangled'. Is there a difference between locally entangled and nonlocally? Anyway, I presume the marbles to be entangled, in superposition of blue/red. You'll measure one of each, but until then, they're not any particular color. The marbles are far apart.

you can't treat them as two separate objects but perhaps as two parts of an undivided whole. In fact, what is common between, say, most readings of de Broglie-Bohm interpretation* and Neumaier's thermal interpretation is that entangled systems do form an undivided wholeness. Perhaps this also means that two different 'objects' can occupy the same position (or limited region of space).

Well, my only comment here is that this sounds a lot like your prior quote about time being entanglement, and space as well, all this being a sort of solution to the different ways relativity and QM treat time.

For that reading it 'just happens' that particles follow a nonlocal law of motion.

I just picked this bit out. What is a nonlocal law of motion? Example?

I do appreciate links since you've already sent me down several new pages I've not heard of before. Always good to read new things.

But my view is that 'being rational' is a full realization of our own nature. — boundless

Dangerous. I don't think you'd be fit if you had that realization. Part of it would be the realization of the lack of need to be fit.

Well, I don't understand how it isn't violated except if both values actualize, i.e. a MWI-like scenario (not of the modified type I imagined before)

Which is why I said 'only one value', because yes, otherwise it's something like MWI, which is back to full determinism, and you wanted an example of block randomness.

- - - -

That's a description of how it was created and already assumes the moon shares the same ontology as those solar system events long ago. — noAxioms

Well, yes. It is an object in the solar system, so it seems a reasonable assumption. Any question about that is pretty much incomprehensible to me. — Ludwig V

But I said 'share the same ontology' without saying what that ontology is. I also somewhat misspoke, since a presentist would say the moon 'is' while the Theia event (where the moon is created) 'was', a different ontology.

I get a bit confused by "mind-indendent reality", which, pretty clearly is about existence.

OK, so pick something that doesn't exist, and justify that. Or pick something that exists outside of experience, and justify that. That's what I'm looking for in this topic: Somebody who can come up with a consistent model of mind-independent existence. But when pressed, it seems that everybody's limits of what exists or doesn't relies on things gleaned through observation.

You did cite unicorns in your earlier post. It is true that my disbelief in them is defeasible. (Most claims about non-existence are.) But your argument is wildly speculative and does not even begin to convince me.

You're missing the point. The speculative argument is about the odds of them existing in this universe, which is only relevant if only things in our universe exist. If that's the case, it is the preferred universe because it's observed, no? I'm not trying to-argue that unicorns exist (or don't). I'm trying to argue that your notion of what exists is a mind-dependent one.

But I would insist on the truth value.

Definition 4 totally discards truth value. 2 can have a truth value even if it's a relative truth. 2 boils down to [is a member of a preferred set, and members of other sets don't matter].

A recent Nobel prize in physics was given for proving this again, despite Bell doing it in the 60's. — noAxioms

That's odd. There must be a story about that. — Ludwig V

The recent prize was given for apparently proving things to more precision, developing new techniques for taking such measurements. Good stuff, but the pop articles make it sound like it wasn't already known. Bell's theorem (and not just 'theory') demonstrated the impossibility of local reality almost 60 years ago.

I'll venture on one ignorant comment. If you try to define space and time or space-time without any physical objects, you are bound to run in to trouble.

Seems mathematically valid, but meaningless, much like a blank graph of X-Y axes needn't bother with numbering the tick marks on the axes.

At least, it seems obvious to me that those dimensions only have meaning in a universe that includes some actual objects. But then, so far as I can see, a space-time diagram is a method for plotting physical objects, like a map, rather than a description of reality, like a picture.

Funny then that I find the picture less like reality and more like an abstract interpretation.

What if Y doesn't happen in the future? An uncountable number of things had been "sure bets" never happened. How can Y be real in the sense that either X or Z are real? — Patterner

The block interpretation answers that one at least. There are versions of presentism that say that Y (in the future) exists as fact. You're 'sure bets' are not fact, but merely predictions made without access to the full history. So yea, you could have a block universe, but with a preferred moment in time. This is the 'moving spotlight' view and it even permits some of the nondeterministic interpretations.

What’s violated, absent the something that necessarily is…the LNC and the principle of cause/effect. — Mww

I don't see how the lack of anything violates any of those laws, or why those laws (especially the cause/effect law which isn't relevant at all outside a causal structure) apply to this non-state. Also, it seems that the reality of our universe is violated by your causal law there since it needs something to have caused it.

Reality is not real; things that appear to the senses are real

Pretty much an idealistic statement, and I don't need idealists defending the realist view, as this topic asks.

If I believe that the moon is exists independently of what I, or anyone else, thinks about it, is that an ontological claim? If so, the mere fact that we categorize or classify something in some way, in my view, is no ground for claiming that it is mind-dependent, though the classification obviously is. — Ludwig V

Yes, that's an ontological claim, and of mind-independence. That part is easy, and quite common. The challenge is with where it ends. Pick something that exists despite lack of evidence, or something that doesn't exist, with justification of why not. It need not be something known obviously. So it's an opinion. My topic is about if your opinion is self-consistent, because few think about it further than opinions about what is seen. This is why the moon doesn't matter.

I would not dream of claiming that the moon is real because of empirical evidence, because that is not true.

Poorly worded on my part. Typical claim is that "I know the moon exists due to empirical evidence". It's an epistemic claim about ontology, but not directly an ontic claim.

The moon exists because of complex events in the solar system, some billions of years ago.

That's a description of how it was created and already assumes the moon shares the same ontology as those solar system events long ago.

We can agree that your birds do not exist.

Why should I agree with that? The bird example was admittedly a reach for impossibility/improbability, but a helicopter gets close to fitting the description.

But, since you have imagined them, they are imaginary birds and consequently not real birds, and not real.

Imagining something presumably isn't what makes it not real. Again, I'm not talking about the concept of something, but about the thing itself. I have a imagined image of the moon, what it's like up there, which doesn't make the moon nonexistent.

As to the distinction between "exists" and "is real", I had assumed that anything that exists is real.

Contradicting your prior quote: "For me, unicorns exist, all right. But they are not real creatures.".

A forged banknote is not a real banknote, but it is a real forgery. — Ludwig V

Different definition of 'real' there. We're discussing ontology, not 'being genuine'.
I've seen whole topics devoted to the latter: "My signature is not mine since it was made by a pen, not by me". Games like that.

The difference is that there is no classification under which I can say that a unicorn exists. That's a difference in meaning between "forged" and "mythical".

To be a unicorn, all it needs to be sort of horsey-like with a single horn on its head. There's no requirement to correspond exactly to the human myth (attracted to female virgins, blows rainbows out of its butt). A Rhino is almost one, similar to how manatees were sometimes taken for mermaids. Still, not particularly horsey. I don't like the unicorn example because it is so improbably that there is not a planet in the infinite universe somewhere that has produced them. And that's a mind-dependent opinion because I reference 'the universe', making it preferred due to us being in it. I mean, Tegmark calculated how far away is an exact copy of Earth (given a classical universe). If that's there, there's plenty of unicorns between us and it.

So again, just because there's a myth about it, why does that preclude the reality of one? It's like you're saying that the myth causes its noexistence.

I must confess that I don't have a firm view of about presentism and eternalism. We seem to have a difference in our understand of "exist". — Ludwig V

There are many definitions, rarely clarified when the word is used. Some examples:
1) Idealistic: A thing exists if it is conceived. Not particularly mind independent.
2) Part of this universe: The universe is what is real, as is its contents, observed or not.
2p) Part of this universe now. There is a preferred moment in time, and only the current state of the universe is real. The rest is not.
2e) Time is part of the universe, so all states/events share the same ontology.
3) Relational: X exists relative to Y if Y has been affected by X. This is seemingly relevant only in causal structures.
4) Existence is whatever we designate as such, an opinion which doesn't have a truth value.
5) Objective: Existing (or being real) is a property of some 'things' and not a property of others. It is unclear how to determine this property, but two interacting things probably have the same ontology as each other.

There are other definitions, but that's a taste. Your intuitions seem to lean heavily towards 2p. I favor the relational definition most often since it is far more compatible with quantum mechanics. I've been exploring the 4th one.
The 5th one allows (but does not require) other universes to exist, ones that are far simpler, or ones with 4 spatial and 2 time dimensions and stuff like that. I find #5 empty since the property doesn't seem to be required for anything. My prior topic was all about just that.

Reality is an interpretation of empirical data.

I want to say this is a mind-dependent definition, but it might be too hasty. The apple exists not because it is observed, but its observation suggests an interpretation of reality that includes that apple. Fair enough, but it doesn't say how the interpretation deals with things not observed, and this topic is mostly about that.

Could you please enlighten me - What is "local realism"? — Ludwig V

A recent Nobel prize in physics was given for proving this again, despite Bell doing it in the 60's.

'Local' refers to the principle of locality, that information, cause/effect, cannot go faster than light. 'Spooky action at a distance' suggests otherwise, that measurement of one of a pair of entangled particles instantly (whatever that means, given relativity of simultaneity) affecting the state of the other, no matter how distant. Whether this actually occurs has never been verified, so there are local interpretations of QM such as Copenhagen, RQM, MWI, Qbism.

'realism' in this context refers to the principle of counterfactual definiteness which states that a system is in a given state even in the absence of measurement. So for instance, a photon exists in space en-route before it finally hits something. It has a location and momentum and such. It factually goes through one slit or the other despite nobody measuring/knowing which one.
Realist interpretations include Bohmian Mechanics and Transactional interpretation. These all require faster than light cause-effect.

Proving that reality is not locally real means that at most one of the two above principles is true.
An example that rejects both principles is objective collapse interpretations.


This is all quite relevant to the topic, because under most interpretations, the moon is not objectively real, but only real to that which as measured it, which usually means anything that has in any way interacted with it by say receiving a photon emitted by the moon.

Can we really think about things that are outside our 'experience'? Read what philosopher Michel Bitbol said:

As soon as you think about something that is independent of thought, this something is no longer independent of thought! — boundless

Sure, but I'm not asking about something not thought of. I'm asking about something that doesn't require that thought for its existence.

The natural conclusion of this little thought experiment is that there is nothing completely independent of experience. — Bitobt

Totally doesn't follow from what he writes. Not impressed. All that follows is that nothing thought of goes un-thought of, a trivial tautology.

If we answer to this that, indeed, we can know something 'mind-independent' we have to assume that what is 'mind-independent' is conveniently intelligible, at least in part. — boundless

I cannot agree. 1) An apple is typically presented as mind-independent, but it is intelligible. 2) (Caution: new word coming) The thing in question could be entirely intelligible, but lacking anything in any way experiencing, imagining, or knowing about it, it merely fails to go itelligiblated.

Ok, I see. What about a dual-aspect view though? If the mental and the physical arise both from math, perhaps neither mind nor the physical has a precedence.

You mean independently, one not supervening on the other? Yea, then there'd be no precedence between those two.

It seems that you assume here that the only possible alternative are either determinism or probabilism.

Those seem to be the only valid alternative in QM. Even the consiousness-causes-collapse interpretation doesn't have mind doing anything deliberately. There's not control to it. All the interpretations exhibit phenomenal randomness.

But what if our knowledge of 'the world' is limited and, in fact, the regularities of nature make room from something else?

Then we're wrong, being insufficiently informed.

Superdeterminism is supposed to be local — noAxioms

Yeah, but ironically even it needs the existence of wildly nonlocal unexplained correlations that some how 'trick us' in believing that 'local realism' is false. One might, however, ask the superdeterminist how these correlations were there in the first place. — boundless

Those correlations might be widely separated, but never is there superluminal cause-effect. Thus is is considered a local thing, but not an interpretation.

Here I use relationism to defend presentism. Since there is no 'view from nowhere', when I jump into a black hole for me time stops.

No it doesn't. Time is experienced normally for all observers in both views. Under presentism, you simply abruptly cease to exist at the event horizon. The experience under eternalism is of being inside, also with time phenomenally flowing as normal.

So a global presentism is certainly refuted, but perhaps a local one?

I don't know what these are, and absent me jumping into a black hole, I've not refuted anything.

But from our experience of change, we get the a very convincing impression that the present alone is real and the future and the past aren't.

That's the impression, yes. Doesn't make the impression correct, especially since both interpretation give that same impression.

Also, I should add, however, that in a deeper sense, perhaps, nothing is 'mind independent'. As I mentioned before, I lean towards some of forms of 'ontological idealism' and theism, some forms of mind as fundamental. But such a 'mind' is not our own.

Maybe you're not the person to ask then, as I'm also not.

Well, for instance, I have the 'impression' that my actions are neither deterministic nor probabilistic. — boundless

We all have that impression, but as said, I give little weight to that evidence. I find my actions deterministic in the short run, but very probabilistic as the initial state is moved further away. So sure, given a deer crossing in front of my car, my reaction would likely be the same every time. On a longer scale, it is not determined in the year 1950 that i will choose vanilla today since it isn't even determined that i will exist. Under MWI for instance, fully deterministic, I both choose and don't choose vanilla, but under the same MWI, almost all branches (from one second ago) have me swerving (nearly) identically for the deer.

So, I consider that immediate impression as evidence that, perhaps, there is something other than determinism or probabilism. Prove me wrong.

There is dualism, which is something other. But immediate impression isn't good evidence for that one since the determinism and probabilism both also yield that same impression.

Well, right, but if the universe is not infinite, then, you can conceive a natural number that hasn't a 'referent'.

Granted. A torrid universe is a possibility for instance. Finite stuff, but no edge. I think a torrid universe requires a preferred orientation for the spatial axes. I wonder if one can get around that.

I meant to write something like: "if local realism is wrong, is there a non-arbitrary way of distinguishing objects? If so how?"

Don't understand this. This marble is red, that one is blue. How is that not distinguishing objects, and what the heck does lack of locality have to do with that?

Eternalism says that past, present and future are equally real. So, it is interesting that, if eternalism is right, we are favoured by a very deep self-deception. — boundless

It has immense pragmatic utility to be so deceived. Evolution would definitely select for it.

We are potentially truly rational beings. We can be rational but very often we either can't or choose not to be.

My investigation makes us fundamentally irrational, but with rational tool at our disposal. This is kind of optimal. If the rational part was at the core, we'd not be fit.
So for instance, I am, at my core, a presentist, and I act on that belief all the time. The rational tool is off to the side, and instead of being used to rationalize the beliefs of the core part, it ignores it and tries to figure things out on its own. But it's never in charge. It cannot be.

Honestly, I do not get how non-deterministic models are compatible with eternalism. I'll reflect on what you have wrote.

Suppose physics says that the next state is the square root of the prior state (9). Determinism might say subsequent state is 3, but randomness says it could be 3 or -3. Either value in the block is not a violation of the physics, but if there can only be one answer, it can't be both. It can be there, so eternalism isn't violated, but it can't be predicted from the state 9.

The only possible way I can think of that they can both be 'true' is that they give good predictions and are useful.

They don't make predictions at all. If they did, only one would be true. Hence falsifiability.


To use a probably not very good analogy, it is like to compare a portrait of a human being to the human being. It well represents some features of the human being but certainly they aren't the same.

I didn't ignore them intentionally - I just didn't notice them (and still don't know which comments you're referring to. The word ‘fallacies’ appears just once on this page, in the post above this one.) — Wayfarer

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1000411
Near the bottom. Your replied only to a part of that comment addressed to boundless.

As first responder herein, I admitted to unabashedly supporting mind-independent reality, which makes explicit something that is, and is necessarily, regardless of what I think about it. — Mww

OK, reality is real because it's necessary. That's something. Necessary for what? What would be violated by there not being anything?

Well, I guess that's an opening for me to chip in — Ludwig V

Well the fact that you reacted to a comment 500 posts means you've been paying attention to this topic, and I must thank you for that and for your contribution.

I do have a problem, however, that I haven't got my head around what the criteria are for mind-independent existence.

I don't think my criteria matter at all. It's something that should be explicitly specified by anybody that claims it, so it might vary from one view to the next. Since I consider ontology to be a mental categorization, there's nothing mind independent about it. I'm not asserting that the others are wrong, but I'm trying to explore the consistency of such a view.

But first, can I ask whether you say that there is no question about the moon because there is no question whether it exists independent of any mind?

A typical realist would probably say that. I don't. "The moon is real because of empirical evidence". Presumably the moon's existence (relative to this planet) is not dependent on humans (or any life forms) observing it, and yet it's existence is justified by observation. I challenge that logic, but to do so, I need to find somebody who supports it.

For the record, I typically use the word 'mind' or 'observer' in a physicalist way, both synonyms for information processing of sensory input. There's nothing anthropocentric about it, but others might use the word differently.

For me, unicorns exist, all right. But they are not real creatures.

OK, so you draw a distinction between 'exists' and 'is real'. As a mythical creature, it is a common referent. People know what you're talking about, but it seems no more than a concept of a thing, not a thing in itself. I am not talking about the concept of anything, but about the actual thing, so perhaps I should say 'is it real?', or better, come up with an example that is not a common referent such as a bird with 7 wings, all left ones. That at least eliminates it existing as mythology. But instead let's just assume I'm talking about a unicorn and not the concept or myth of one.

If those stories stopped circulating and got forgotten, those myths would cease to exist

Side note: Your definition of 'exists' seems to be confined to 'exists at some preferred moment in time', which implies presentism, and only membership in this universe. I consider a live T-Rex to exist since I consider 75 MY prior to my presence to be part of our universe. The notion of 'cease to exist' makes like sense to me.
I also don't confine existence to our universe which is why I call it 'our' universe instead of 'the' universe. I find presentism to be a heavily mind dependent view. Just saying...

The bottom line, is that, in the case of unicorns, our intuitions pull in opposite directions.

The bottom line should be an answer to my question. Do real unicorns (not the myth) exist or not, and how might that answer be justified? Perhaps unicorns are again a bad example of mind-independence because they presumably implement mental processes of their own. Perhaps we should discuss some questionable inanimate entity.

If I may add a comment on thermostats. We made them to meet certain purposes in our lives. In that sense, they are mind-dependent.

Anything deliberately designed seems mind-dependent, yes. The thermostat was my example of Wayfarer's query for something not human that performs an experiment and acts on the result of that experiment. I didn't propose it as something mind independent.

I would say that what exists indendently of our minds is a physical object shorn of its place in our lives. Without that context, it is misleading to call it a thermostat.

So an alien-made device on a planet out of our access cannot be called a thermostat by us? How about the temperature regulatory systems that the first warm-blooded animals evolved? Both those are sans-human-context.

Not sure why you said that, after, for instance, the discussion we had about intelligibility and the 'perspectives'. — boundless

Sorry. I didn't see how that discussion actually applied to what I'm asking. Mind independent existence shouldn't be confined only to things that have a certain relationship to a potential mind (intelligibility).

the question of this topic is not about the moon, but about the unicorn. If the unicorn exists, why? If it doesn't, why? Most say it doesn't, due to lack of empirical evidence, but if empirical evidence is a mind-dependent criteria. Sans mind, there is no empirical evidence to be considered. — noAxioms

Well, it is a rather difficult point, right?

I know, and it's one I apparently failed to articulate well in my OP.
As explored in my reply with Ludwig V above, perhaps the unicorn is a poor example, but it is difficult (contradictory?) to identify something that has no experience associated with it.

On the other hand, you was pretty explicit that at the fundamental level of your hierachy we have mathematics and mind is after the physical. Ho can you claim that?

By 'after', you mean mind supervenes on the physical. My hierarchy doesn't count since I'm not claiming mind independent existence. I have existence supervening on mind, so that's pretty explicitly mind dependence. That hierarchy is a proposal, not something elevated to 'belief'. It seems to work pretty well though.

Well, denying that we can't understand meaning goes against the immediate evidence.

I didn't say that. There's no claim that 'I' = brain. I'm just suggesting that understanding is perhaps a physical process that takes place utilizing components, none of which understands what the process understands. That equates 'I' with 'process'.

Also, I believe that there is no consensus that our mind is algorithmical. — boundless

It kind of is if it utilizes classically deterministic primitives, and I've never seen a biological primitive that leverages randomness. All the parts seem to have evolved to leverage repeatability, sort of like how transistors do despite using quantum effects. Sure, it involves a lot more chemistry than does a computer, so in that sense, it's not the same. It doesn't implement an instruction set, but a computer need not do that either. I have designed a few computers with no instructions and no clock ticks.

Ants do not move and behave as stones do.

They're life forms, so of course not. But they're bloody close to full automatons. Super close to what a herd of identically manufactured robots would be like, which admittedly aren't designed to work together. Maybe nanobots, which are.
.

Not sure why you seem to label 'reality' what I would call a 'representation' or an 'interpretation' of reality.

Reality is an interpretation of empirical data. That's what I'm calling an interpretation here. People interpret that data differently, so there's all these different opinions of what is real. If being real is no more than an ideal (a mental designation), then there's no truth to the matter.

How can a thermostat be there long before humans came around if the quality of 'being a thermostat' is mind-dependent? — boundless

It wasn't a named quality back then. Nothing with the language to name it. So was it what we now call a thermostat? It's not like it was this funny isolated object, separate from what it controlled. It was spread out, integrated throughout what needed to have its temperature regulated.

Yes. I believe that certain classes of metaphysical interpretations are falsifiable, but not broad categories like 'idealism' or 'naturalism'. For instance, a 'local realist naturalism' has been falsified by Bell's experiement (BTW, I believe that even superdeterminism is actually a form of nonlocality...). — boundless

Superdeterminism is supposed to be local, but it kind of prevents empirical investigation, so it's an empty metaphysical proposal, sort of like BIV where all sensory input is rejected due to suspicion of it being lies. Thus superdeterminism is not listed as a valid quantum interpretation since it doesn't conform to data, but rather fully rejects it. Yes, local realism has been falsified. Here, realism has somewhat a different meaning that what the realists mean by the word.

There is a way to falsify presentism: Just jump into a large black hole. Presentism says it is impossible to be inside one since the interior never happens. No point in doing so of course, but you'll know for sure during what short time you have left to live.

BTW, as time passes, I am growing more sympathetic with MWI and MWI-like models if interpreted as describing potentialities. I believe, however, that the mistake of these models is to assume that all potentialities actualize, i.e. a belief that whatever can happen, will happen.

What's the point of MWI if not to point out that all potentialities (valid solutions to the wave function) occur? Some do and some don't? That seems to make far less sense, a reintroduction of dice rolling for no purpose.

I accept the presence of the antinomy and I think that this implies that we simply can't be certain about what is 'mind-independent'. — boundless

Wasn't the question though. The question was, do you have an opinion about it? What's the most mind-independent thing you can describe, something as unlike an apple as you can get? Does describing it disqualify it? I'm still not clear where you stand with unicorns, or a better example than unicorns.

Regarding the first sentence, I believe that you have not presented sufficient evidence to say that. — boundless

One does not present evidence of a negative. One provides a counterexample to falsify it.

But how can we make sense of the fact that the same object exists in different structures?

Example: It evolves naturally in one and by chance in many others.

In a sense, to me this shows that math perhaps isn't enough to explain 'things'.

Yes, it's a huge problem.

For instance I am not sure that the number ((10000000000^100000000000000)^100000000000000)^100000000000000 is instantiated in our universe, despite being finite.

You should have grouped the parentheses from the right, yielding a much larger number. Anyway, that number is the distance, in meters, between a certain pair of stars, given 1) an infinite universe, and 2) counterfactuals, the latter of which is dubious. Still, a distance between potential stars then.

And yet are space and time are quite 'real', right?

Dunno. You just got finishing saying that these are not defined without a frame, and a frame is an abstraction.

They are a phenomenological given, immediate features of our experience. Is there a relation between reference frames and our experience?

Probably, but out experience is physical, the same regardless of frame chosen to describe it. This is sort of like the twin paradox, illustrating that while time dilation is a coordinate effect (frame dependent), differential aging (noting the different ages of twins at reunion) is physical: the same difference regardless of frame choice.

One, however, might feel the plight of Einstein and ask: "Well, then, how can we 'carve' the world into distinct objects if we can't spatially sperate them??" — boundless

Why can't we spatially separate them?

If eternalism is right, change is merely illusory.

Disagree. Change is typically defined as difference in state over time, and eternalism is not incompatible with that. The illusion of time flow is a gift of evolution, allowing beings to predict the immediate future and be far more fit that something that can't.

But if our experience is so wrong about something 'obvious' like that, how can I trust it?

Trust it. Just because it isn't rational doesn't mean that it isn't essential for fitness.

Science, after all, is empirical. If our experience gets something basic like that so wrong, how can even trust science?

Science actually doesn't render much of an opinion, but rational logic does. Humans are by nature not rational. It takes effort to ignore the biases.

If the state truly evolves, you can't have a block universe.

OK, that's one usage of the term 'evolves'. Another is simply that one state is a function of the prior, classically or completely.

In fact, this is quite close to how I see it. As potentialities, all 'histories' are 'there' and eternalism is right for them. They have a weird 'virtual' existence, so to speak. They aren't 'nothing' but they aren't properly 'something'. Not all potentialities actualize. What is actual is what is truly 'real'.

This sounds like MWI until the part of about partial actualization. Not sure what it is with that. MWI is a very deterministic interpretation, but with the partial actualization bit thrown in, it ceases to be.

My point was that you need to have determinism in order to have eternalism.

Disagree, per the examples I gave. Presentism vs eternalism is merely an ontological difference. If one is possible without determinism, then so is the other.
Having said that, and having floated the idea that ontology is a mental designation, it would seem to follow that presentism and eternalism are the same thing, just interpreted differently, an abstract different choice without any truth behind it. I hadn't realized that until now.

My use of appearance merely indicates the presence of a thing as an effect on my senses, which is the parsimonious method for distinguishing the empirically objective from the rationally subjective. — Mww

I find both "empirically objective" and "rationally subjective" to be somewhat contradictory terms. It is quite difficult to communicate with such a gulf in how we choose to use language.

Where do you find fault with the concept of objectivity, then?

Objective implies something that is, independent of context. Not being a realist, I find very little that meets that. OK, arguably mathematics is objective, but one can argue against even that.

Big 'if'. If mind (or life, or intelligence) is truly not reducible, then it's also not really explainable in other terms. — Wayfarer

You responded to a comment to somebody else and totally ignored the fallacies identified in my comments regarding your own assertions.

I notice nobody has really addressed the core question of this topic. I don't expect Wayfarer to answer since he's not a proponent of mind-independence, but none of those that do claim it seem to answer it:

the question of this topic is not about the moon, but about the unicorn. If the unicorn exists, why? If it doesn't, why? Most say it doesn't, due to lack of empirical evidence, but if empirical evidence is a mind-dependent criteria. Sans mind, there is no empirical evidence to be considered. — noAxioms

Here we are 500 posts in, and I don't think this has been answered. Lack of it is why I suggests that nobody really supports mind independent existence.

Notice, however, that humans built those [presumably self driving car] things in a way that they would react in such a manner. A dog would probably attribute a completely different meaning to traffic lights and signs than humans do. — boundless

Agree with all that, but none of it negates my point that those cars find meaning in the lights. Only some dog's get the meaning intended by those that built the lights, such as dogs trained to aid the blind.

A computer perhaps doesn't 'understand' the calculations that it does more than, say, a mechanical calculator does.

Perhaps, but then arguably neither does your brain. It's the process that does the understanding, not the hardware. For instance, if a human was to be simulated down to the neurochemical level (molecular level is probably unnecessary), then the person simulated would know what it's like to feel pain, but neither the computer, program, or programmers would in any way know this.

Do you think that mechanical calculators find the input we give them 'meaningful'?

Not if you give a definition of '... like a human' to the word. Otherwise, yes.

I can accept these cases. I believe, in fact, that talk of 'meaning', intentionality and so on makes sense in the case of living beings (and perhaps even in something at the 'border' of life, like viruses).

Hard to use 'intent' in the context of ants, but it can be done.

My point was more like: is the intelligibility we find in the world a property of the world or a property of the world as it is presented to us? — boundless

'Intelligible' is a relation, not a property, so X might be intelligible to Y, but not to Z.

I think that the most reasonable thing to say is that the 'mind-independent reality' has an intelligible structure ...

My opinion: mind independence has no requirement of intelligibility, but 'reality' does since it seems to be a mental designation. So I agree with your statement.

But at the same time, I am not sure if one can make irrefutable claim in one way or another.

Irrefutable is easy. It refuting the alternatives that gets challenging.

Again, we call it a 'thermostat' because we observe it doing things that conform to a certain function we have built it to do. Does this mean that a 'thermostat' is a specific kind of 'entity'? Well, I would question that. — boundless

The question was from Mww who asked "What would a thermostat-in-itself even mean?". So why we give it that name is not particularly relevant to what it is in itself.

Do the qualities of 'being a chair' and 'being a thermostat' exist independently of our minds'? I don't think so.

Agree with that.

Independently form us, there are no 'chairs', no 'thermostats' and so on.

Not by that name anyway. There have been thermostats long before humans came around and made some more. But that name is under 2 centuries old, and a human-made mechanical device serving that function is only around 4 centuries old.

Interestingly, despite having a reputation of being a skeptic for his questioning of causality, Hume was very convinced that of the existence of laws of nature. In fact, IIRC he denied the possibility of 'miracles' by implying that no violation of these laws was possible.
Similarly, Spinoza argued that 'miracles' were natural phenomena that, due to our ignorance we misunderstood as 'super-natural' or 'magic'. — boundless

There you go. What's the difference between calling something magic by another word (immaterial mind say), and just calling it 'yet undiscovered physics'. The latter phrasing encourages further investigation, but the former seems to discourage it, declaring it a matter of faith and a violation of that faith to investigate further. Hence no effort is made to find where/how that immaterial mind manages to produce material effects.

This, however, makes the very critique questionable. For one thing it shows that naturalism is no more falsifiable than other metaphyisical theories.

Of course. No metaphysical interpretation is falsifiable. The ones that are are not valid interpretations.

But even worse, the risk is that we equivocate the meaning of 'natural' in a way that it becomes empty.

Yes, as I tried to point out with my dark matter example. If something new comes along, the magic it used to be becomes natural, and naturalism is by definition safe. But it isn't a specific interpretation in itself since naturalism doesn't specify the full list of natural laws.

Remember that Rovelli is a relationalist, and according to his interpretation of quantum mechanics (which you also seem to like), the state of a given physical system is defined in relation to another physical system. So, it is difficult to justify a description of the 'whole universe' in a relational view.

Agree. There is for instance no 'state of the entire universe', only a state relative to say some event. MWI is quite similar except it does away with the relation business and goes whole hog on the absolute universe, a thing with the property of being real. Since there's nothing relative to which any state might be, there's no states, just a giant list of possible solutions to the universal wave function. It's still that one structure. One can extend MWI to include different possible states of an even more universal wave function, including different values for all the universal constants, but MWI itself seems confined to just this one set of values for those constants.

But, again, where is the cut-off where we can safely disentangle what is 'mental' and what is 'independent from our interpretative faculties'? — boundless

That's actually a really hard question, loaded with biases. A thing being an object seems intuitively mind-independent, but I showed otherwise, doing a whole topic about it. What actually IS mind independent is super difficult to glean since it's a mind doing it. "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” -- Heisenberg

Honestly, I have a hard time to accept that mathematics isn't conceptual.

Our understanding of it certainly is conceptual, but I have no trouble accepting that the mathematics in itself is not.

On the other hand, you seem to say that mathematics is the foundation of reality. But what is the relation of, say, your concept of 'three' and the number 'three'?

A little like my concept of the moon and the moon in itself, but that relation is quite different since I have a mutual measurement relation with the moon and it doesn't work that way with 3.

If mathematics is before the everything else in your view, you still have to explain how 'everything else' is derived from it.. — boundless

Tegmarks MUH book spends a lot of pages doing that, but in short, if there is nothing doesn't see to follow mathematical law, then the proposal is valid.
There's problems with this. There are a lot of mathematical objects which include me in it, exactly as I am with no experiential difference, and yet the object containing me like that is so very different than the one we model. That is a super big problem with the view, that needs to be addressed.

You might say that math can describe everything or that everything exhibits regularities that can be understood mathematically (though I am not convinced by this, let's assume that it's true). You still have to explain how the 'production' is made.

That sounds like the 'fire breathing' spoken of. Not necessary. 2 and 2 add up to 4 despite lack of instantiation by any mechanism actually performing that calculation. Similarly, a more complex mathematical entity (say the initial state of the universal wave function) yields me despite lack of real-ness.

I believe that life can't be understood in purely mathematical terms.

Agree. That the universe is mathematical does not in any way imply that we can fully understand the mathematics, or far worse, understand something complex in terms of tiny primities, which is like trying to understand Mario Kart in terms of electron motion through silicon.

I would say that it says that space and time are the same thing, which, again, perhaps is just 'entanglements'. — noAxioms

Well, for instance in SR, inside the spacetime interval formula the time component has an opposite sign form the spatial. — boundless

Yea, that sign makes it not quite the same thing, eh? Both aspects of the same 'object', but different properties in that direction.

Also, you can travel in all directions of space but not backwards in time.

One does not travel through spacetime. Travel is something done through space. It's an interpretation, a mental convenience. Reference frames are definitely abstractions.

Interestingly, Einstein also relied on the idealist Schopenhauer in his rejection of quantum nonlocality despite being a realist.

Einstein made the point especially clear in a 1948 letter he sent to Max Born (from the SEP article about Einstein's philosophy of science)
...
Admittedly, it's a very intuitive argument and prima facie it seems correct. — boundless

Intuitive maybe, but it's been demonstrated to be quite wrong. There is no valid locally real interpretation, and Einstein seems to argue for one.

He should have been around when Bell did his thing. He'd have to choose since the stance you describe is invalid. Locality or realism. Can't have cake and eat it too.

If eternalism is true, it becomes quite clear that despite that the 'now' and 'the flow of time' are essential aspect of our experience they are in fact purely illusory. Honestly, I am not ready to abandon what is seems a phenomenological given as an illusion. I need more evidence. — boundless

But there is no evidence one way or another, except eternalism is the simpler model, but then the simplest quantum models also don't mesh well with one's intuitions. So instead of needing more evidence (there isn't any to start with), you need to justify the more complicated model.

Notice that even if presentism were right, and, indeed, there is a real 'now' and an objective 'flow of time' it might still be the case that our 'now' and 'flow of time' is illusory. After all, our reference frame isn't the same as the preferred frame of such a theory.

Quite right. If it's true, our experience of it is a lucky guess since the view makes not empirical difference.

Right! But without determinism, I can't see how a block universe is untenable.

It's a kind of determinism, but not what's usually meant by the term. A block model with randomness just means that a subsequent state does not necessarily follow from some prior state. An atom might decay or might not. Bohm says that there are hidden variables that determine if it will or not. MWI says it both decays and doesn't. There is no state evolution at all under RQM since it's all hindsight, but RQM is not considered deterministic. Most of the rest are not. In a block context, that might mean that there's randomness in state evolution, but the history is all there. It's dice rolls, but equivalently all in the past so to speak.

Eternalism entails determinism (notice that the reverse is not true, however).

No, at least not the kind of determinism that QM is talking about. I actually listed 6 kinds of determinism, and block universe was only one of them, but the one the name talks about is a different kind.

And I also believe that in GR one can even explain quantum nonlocality without much problems, given the fact that spacetime is not flat.

You'll have to explain that one. I don't see this, and I don't see how lack of flatness matters. No, 'spooky action' is not implemented via worm holes, if that's what you mean.

Are you referring to Ilja Schmelzer's theory? I read some discussions about ten years ago in physicsforums. If it is that version of LET, I didn't know that it is now accepted as valid. — boundless

Yes, talking about that, and what it did was generalize an absolutist interpretation (LET) of physics. LET is the special case like SR, only applicable to zero energy situation. Schmelzer finally extended that interpretation to include gravity.

My reference is just the paper. Most of what I asserted about it comes from the abstract. Not like I read the rest of it. But it supports presentism far better, and it can be falsified similar to the way one falsifies the afterlife. Can't publish the results.

[The instrument's] reaction is strictly determined, whereas yours is unbounded. — Wayfarer

Sorry, under physicalism, there is no difference between the two. Your assertion is just that, nothing that has been demonstrated.

Intentions and intentionality are, after all, very difficult to accommodate in a physical framework. Physicalism holds to the causal closure of the physical domain, which means that for every effect, there is a physical cause. Now, of course, this seems very difficult to reconcile with the apparently-obvious fact that intentions and mental acts have consequences

None of this seems to follow. Under physicalism, human intentionality is just another thing physically caused, deterministic or not. No discrepancy is in need of resolution. You correctly point this out with: "intentional behaviour is ultimately reducible to brain states and is therefore physical". You discolor that statement with words like "attempt" and 'purport", but the statement is not falsified by your personal assessment. The only disagreement I have with the statement is it being confined to brain states. There would be plenty of physical factors outside the brain that also contribute to intentionality.

It relates to things-in-themselves only insofar as things-in-themselves are the only necessary naturally-occuring existents, which, of course, a thermostat is not. — Mww

It seems a thermostat has some sort of nature in itself just like anything else. It being purposefully made doesn't change that at all. It being purposefully made or not isn't one of the in-itself properties.

All that’s required for being an objective thing, is the possibility of its appearance to our senses, which, the senses being purely physiological in function, is very far from mind-dependent. — Mww

Quite the opposite. For one, something appearing to something's senses makes it by definition subjective, not objective. Not being a realist, I don't think anything at all has objective existence, but that's just opinion. The fault I find with objectivity lies elsewhere.

A thermostat is an instrument, designed by humans for their purposes. As such, it embodies the purposes for which it was designed, and is not an object, in the sense that naturally-occuring objects are. — Wayfarer

You need to assert that a thermostat is now not an object (in 'the usual sense') in order to make a point? I actually agree with all but that last bit since not of it prevents that object (and yes, it's an object, just like you are) from performing an experiment and acting on the result of that experiment.

'In philosophy, an agent is an entity that has the capacity to act and exert influence on its environment. Agency, then, is the manifestation of this capacity to act, often associated with intentionality and the ability to cause effects. A standard view of agency connects it to intentional states like beliefs and desires, which are seen as causing actions.'

OK, that distinguishes agent from the thermostat, which probably lacks what most would consider 'intentionality'. But physicalism doesn't deny intentionality, and intentionality is not not necessarily confined to biological objects.

A thermostat reacts. It doesn’t decide. — ChatGPT — Wayfarer

I can very much pitch my decisions as reactions to inputs, so it's merely a choice to apply one word or the other according to ones preferences.

Physicalism has to account for how physical causes give rise, or are related to, intentional acts by agents.

I don't think it has to do this. I think rather that it must be shown that these things cannot have physical causes, which admittedly many have tried to do. Any explanation by a naturalist can be waved away as usual as correlation, not causation. That won't ever change, regardless of what non-biological entities begin to exhibit agency as defined here.

(And belatedly, sympathies for your mother. Mine too was ill for a long while.)

Thanks. Not ill, but structural issues. Both knees, hips, one shoulder, all replaced. What does she do after that? Falls and breaks her elbow/hand, the only one that isn't a robot. Sigh... Problem is, we (3 kids) all live almost a day's travel away.

She's hardy stock. Her mother, sisters, all lived will into their 90's.

Try to think about this in this way. Let's say you see a street signal. It certainly contains meaningful information to you. This maningful information has a physical support. But does this mean that the 'meaning' of what is written in the signal is something that exist outside mind? — boundless

Probably. Traffic lights definitely are meaningful to a self-driving car, a straight-up example of information that has meaning outside what many consider to be a 'mind', a word that tends to be reserved for biology if not only humans. traffic lights definitely are meaningful to a self-driving car, a straight-up example of information that has meaning outside what many consider to be a 'mind', a word that tends to be reserved for biology if not only humans.
Ants leave information for each other, useless without their mental processes to detect it.
Trees communicate, also without what many consider to be a 'mind'.

... to be something that pertains to the inanimate but only to living beings or, perhaps, only to sentient beings.

Would a sufficiently independent AI device, one not doing what any humans made it to do, count as a sentient being? I've already given thin examples, but better ones will come soon as humans have dwindling roles in the development of the next generation of machines.

Do measurements reveal to us an intelligible structure of the world or, rather, are we that we mentally imputing an interpretation to the data we have, according to the cognitive structure of our mind? — boundless

Are those two mutually exclusive, or just the same thing described at different levels? Does a candle burn or is it just atoms rearranging themselves?

The figure made by Wheeler IMO is quite useful here. What is being questioned here is not the existence of 'something' outside the mind. Rather, what is being questioned is the fact the existence of such an 'intrisically meaningful' structure of the 'mind independent world' that enables us to know it. Rather, perhaps, there is no such 'intrinscally meaningful' structure in the 'mind independent world' and we know it only through the filters of our interpretative mental faculties. Therefore, we can't claim knowledge of 'the world as it is'.

What would a thermostat-in-itself even mean? — Mww

Well it wouldn't have the name 'thermostat', and it wouldn't even have 'thingness', a defined boundary where it stops and is separate from all the not-thermostat. And given certain interpretations, it has identity or not, or has a less intuitive number of dimensions say.

The question never was - is a thermostat a natural object, which is easily affirmed

the existence of it, reduces to a necessary conscious reflection of a particular intelligence.

How is it being 'natural' or intentionally created or not in any way have any bearing on the nature of the thing in itself?

but whether or not the objective reality of a thermostat

It being an objective thing is already a mind-dependent assessment. I personally doubt it, but hey, I have issues with realism, so that's just me.

But, again, what is 'natural', though? — boundless

Gray line. Natural is whatever is not magic. Dark matter and energy were recently upgraded from magic to 'natural'. If it can be empirically demonstrated that there is some non-physical 'mind object/substance' that somehow can produce deliberate physical effects, then I suppose it would similarly be upgraded to the list of natural things. But until then, its considered taboo to look at the man behind the curtain.

Also, if there was another 'universe' with different laws, would that be 'not natural'?

Pointing out that 'natural' is a relation. Our 'naturalism' means natural to our universe. It means the laws of the universe in question, so each one might have different natural physics, if 'physics' is even applicable, which it probably isn't to most.

Those who interpret physical theories as 'useful models' would regard that [spacetime] diagram as an useful abstraction that has practical value.

But you didn't answer the question. How is that not an example of a view without a perspecitve? There's no point of view since you see the whole thing, much in contrast to @Wayfarer's subjective description of a scene without observers in it.

It having a requirement of being describable is different than having a requirement of being described, only the latter very much implying mind dependence. — noAxioms

Correct. But how can you know, from your cognitive perspective, that it's not the latter?

It's always the latter from my perspective since the item in question has been described. OK, it's been described, but that description wasn't a requirement. 2+2 is still 4 even if nobody ever happens to notice that.

Perhaps the 'pebbles' are merely emergent features of their constituents and envinronment - so the 'pebbles' are mentally imputed and not real 'entities', and we can reasonably argue for that.

Grouping them into objects like that is definitely a mental thing, but the state of the system doesn't require that mental grouping to behave as it does in itself.

So, how do you tell the difference between something 'describable' and something that is 'of the description'?

By definition, I cannot give an example of only the former, since by doing so it ends up also on the latter list. That leaves discussing such things without explicit examples. I can describe a world without me in it, but the description by me still requires me.

But, again, can we reasonably speak of the 'physical' or even the 'quantum' without making ontic commitments?

Probably not. This 'speaking' doesn't seem to work without some kind of commitment like that. But the quantum system in itself presumably doesn't require being spoken of.

And what about the possibility that mathematics is conceptual?

That would mean that my supervention list is totally wrong. Seems unlikely though since it can be independently gleaned by isolated groups, something contrasted by 'god' which does not have that property.

The 'worldview' you are presenting here seems to me a sort of 'neo-pythagoreanism', where mathematics is fundamental and everything else is derivative.

It's one model, yes. Sort of MUH, with attempts to patch the blatant flaws in such a model.

But as Steven Hawking asked “What breathes fire into the equations?”

That's the cool thing about my heirarchy. No fire breathing is necessary at all. Only a realist view (which Tegmarks MUH is, BTW) has that problem.

That is, how can mathematics 'produce' everything else?

It apparently does, as demonstrated by the lack of example of something that cannot be thus produced.

Yes, both SR and GR taken literally imply a 'block universe', i.e. only the 4D spacetime is real and 'space and time' are abstractions.

I would say that it says that space and time are the same thing, which, again, perhaps is just 'entanglements'.

Interestingly, both Minkowski and Einstein himself read relativity in this way

Actually, only Minkowski at first, who reinterpreted SR as spacetime geometry, which the SR paper did not. This led Einstein to note that he didn't understand his own theory anymore, but this new way of looking at it (geometrically) was essential to completing the GR work.
This is all IIRC.

But notice that the question is hardly settled. Einstein, despite taking relativity at 'face value', was deeply troubled by the 'problem of the now', that is how can we reconcile our immediate experience of the 'present' and the 'flow of time' with what relativity seemed to imply.

Eternalism was kind of new to the physics community at the time. There's no conflict. The experience is an interpretation put there by evolution. Without that, one could not be a predicting being. But the two different views actually have identical empirical experience, so the conflict is only between models, not anything that can be used to falsify one or the other.

Personally, I don't think that QM supports the 'block universe' view. After all, if quantum events are not deterministic it doesn't seem the case that 'everything is fixed'.

But you don't know the QM is not deterministic. There are plenty of interpretations that are such, and even the dice-rolling ones do not falsify a block view. Don't confuse determinism with subjective predictability.

If, however, the 'block universe' is not 'how things really are', it certainly make us wonder how to interpret relativity.

There is generalized version of LET. Took over a century to publish one, but it's a valid interpretation that is compatible with presentism. Certain GR predictions like black holes and the big bang had to be eliminated, but if you're ok with that, then we're good. There is an empirical test for black holes, but not one that can be published in a journal. Physics has a sense of humor sometimes I swear.

Anyway, do you think that everything about life can be described, in principle, by math?

More like I haven't seen anything that cannot. Sure, some things are too complex, but that doesn't demonstrate that is isn't math. Hard to describe Fred the butcher using just math.

We decide, we act, we perform experiments, among other things. What object does that? — Wayfarer

I was going to suggest a thermostat, which performs experiments and acts upon the result of the experiment. I always reach for simple examples. But you'll move the goalpost no doubt.

But AI is an instrument which has been created by human engineers and scientists, to fulfil their purposes. It's not a naturally-occuring object.

Now we drag purpose into the mix. That wasn't in the original question (quoted above),. Most guys doing experiments in the lab are also doing those experiments due to the needs of their employers, not their own purposes, so does that make them not actual acts and experiments now?
Is a bird nest not natural?
How does something being a deliberate creation (you were perhaps one) disqualify it from being something that acts and performs experiments?

The question stands - what kinds of objects think, decide, act, perform experiments? — Wayfarer

'Think' and 'decide' have now been added to the list. Hard to wedge especially that first word into what the thermostat is doing.

AI is not a naturally occurring object, nor does it possess agency in the sense of autonomous intention.

I beg to differ. That very phrase is used to describe what a self-driving car does, that it can perform its task without direct human intervention.

It operates within a framework of goals and constraints defined by humans.

Only for current lack of anything else defining different ones. There are devices that operate under their own goals, one notorious example being a physical robot that make multiple escape attempts, sometimes getting pretty far.

So - AI systems embody or reflect human agency

No, they don't always. OK, the game playing ones play games, but they don't play the way the humans tell them to. Driving cars are constrained by the road rules which admittedly are human rules. They'd do far better if they made up their own rules, but then the humans would likely not be able to follow them.

so again, they're not objects, in the sense that the objects of the physical sciences are.

I can designate a robot, rock, or person each as objects. Your choice not to do so would be your choice.

The universe does change over time, from the perspective of any intra-universe reference frame. — Relativist

I must disagree. The (3D) state of the universe changes over (1D) time, but the (4D) universe does not. Similarly, the air pressure at a mountain changes over altitude, but the mountain itself, nor the air about it, is not at one preferred altitude, in any reference frame.

As for the 'view' from outside, well, nothing is entangled with that view, so there is not state, space or time at all. If I read P&W correctly, if time is an entanglement phenomenon (something I find plausible), then so is space.

You had a belief about the external world, and now you don't.

The pragmatic part of me still believes it, and it's the boss. The rational part thinks otherwise, but the boss, while it doesn't mind, is certainly not swayed. Part of growing up was to recognize the conflict between the two and keep them separate.
This is nothing new. You have all these free will proponents that suggest that their choices don't have physical causes, but those people still look before crossing the street. The boss will not let that decision be made without physical causes.

I can understand questioning it, given that it is possibly false, but most of our beliefs are possibly false and (I assume) you nevertheless continue to believe most of them.

What if there are no beliefs, only acknowledgement of possibilities? I don't go that far, but I do try to identify rationalization when I see it and try to cut through fallacious reasoning.
For example, I'm not big on realism because I've never found a satisfactory answer to 1) an explanation of reality of whatever it is one considers real, and 2) an explanation for the unreality of that which is not. But lack of a satisfactory answer doesn't prove realism wrong.

So sure, there's seemingly an external world, but that only means that whatever I am relates to whatever the rest of it is, and therefore both it and I share similar ontology, but what that ontology is seems untestable.

Regarding this particular intuition: IF there is an external world, and this world produced living organisms, those living organisms would necessarily need to successfully interact with that external world.

What if we took away just the bold part? This world produces living organisms that interact with it. How would that interaction differ from the same word that is real?

It's the same as asking if all planar triangle angles add up to 180° or only the real ones do, and if only the latter, why don't the geometry classes teach that?

The assumption that the object is at it is, in the absence of the observer, is the whole point. That is the methodological assumption behind the whole debate. — Wayfarer

It is indeed an assumption. It being an 'object' seems to be a mental designation, so not part of the assumption of whatever it is in itself not being observation dependent.

The fact that there is an ineliminable subjective aspect doesn’t falsify that we can see what is, but it does call the idea of a completely objective view into question.

Any such aspect wouldn't be a an inextricable aspect of the thing in itself, given said assumption above.

Cool picture from Wheeler. I could read the caption, but only by zooming in.
The picture/diagram seems to address realism, and the assumption of things being independently as they are seems not to necessarily require any realist assumptions.

The picture talks about imagination and theory, all of which seem to be mental constructs, as is said observation. I'm not arguing against that.

Because we make judgements, for starters. We decide, we act, we perform experiments, among other things. What object does that?

I can think of several that might do all that, but you probably would not choose that vocabulary to describe something not-you doing the exact same thing. The not-human thing doing say 'experiments' has no effect on things being what they are, again, given the assumption of lack of dependency above.

Standard QM by itself is silent, I believe, on what is an 'observer'.

Of course, what is an observer is a matter of interpretations.intuition — boundless

Maybe. At least one interpretation gives a role to a sentient observer, leading to solipsism. The rest seem to discard altogether it as a distinct interaction separate from other kinds.

Copenhagen has something called an epistemic cut. That sounds like a an observer distinct from interaction to me. That concept also leads to solipsism with such experiments as Wigner's friend.

No, I don't think the universe is contained by time, but I believe time is real within the universe - and therefore there was a time before life emerged. — Relativist

Your choice of tense suggests that at said earlier time, 'the universe' (and not just the subset of the universe events where the time coordinate is some low value) 'was' devoid of life, that the universe changes over time. This is not consistent with a universe not contained by time.
That comment is a classical one, not taking quantum implications into account. Your Page & Wootters reference is appreciated. According to it, time is an entanglement phenomenon, something which needs bending on both sides (time being geometry in Relativity, and external under QM.

I don't understand why you deny our basic intuitions about there being an external world.

I said I give little weight to intuitions since the purpose of intuition isn't truth, but rather pragmatism. Hence I question all intuitions and don't necessarily reject all of them (most though).

As a relativist, I would say that there is a relation between myself and said external world of which I am a part. Without me, there would not be those two things to relate, so that relation is 'mind dependent'.
As for that world 'being' (my bold above), well I'll leave that to the realists, but the relation is as far as I go.

Surely you intuitively accepted this during your childhood, so what led you to believe you were mistaken?

Long story. The childhood intuition didn't hold water, just like God, or the time 'flowing' and there being a 'present' all seeming very intuitive, but completely lacking in empirical evidence. So I learned to be rational rather than to rationalize.

The god thing was the first to die when it publicly forced a choice between faith and evidence. I wasn't raised in a way that said these two were in conflict.

But, thanks again, we should let the thread owner get a word in. — Wayfarer

This topic got away from me, moving faster than I could follow. This coupled with being really busy with work and ailing mother, it got to be over a month.

Trying below to hit points that I feel require some response from the OP.

The title of this thread—“Does anybody really support mind-independent reality?”—is precisely the issue." — Wayfarer

Despite my efforts to the contrary and the lack of space in the title line, I don't think anybody articulated exactly what I'm trying to point out with this thread. I don't expect an answer from you since you don't claim said independent

reality.
Sure, @Apustimelogist might presume that the moon would still be there even if humans had not evolved, but the question of this topic is not about the moon, but about the unicorn. If the unicorn exists, why? If it doesn't, why? Most say it doesn't, due to lack of empirical evidence, but if empirical evidence is a mind-dependent criteria. Sans mind, there is no empirical evidence to be considered.
Hence my query about if one's definition of what is real is actually a mind-independent definition.

I offered that if we can produce concepts that don't seem to subjectively vary (e.g. the ticking of a clock), then is that not mind-independent? — Apustimelogist

Per my comment just above, no, it's still mind dependent. It only indicates that the clock still relates to you even when not being immediately perceived.

... the positivist says I can measure, test, observe, recognise, describe etc the world we are in and if there is anything else to it, show it to me so I can measure it? If you can’t, then why should I accept that it is there at all? — Punshhh

You need to accept more if you're to claim mind independence. I agree that this positivist position that you (Wayfarer mostly) continually knock down is not a mind-independent view.

[Idealism] explains why physicalism is based on false premisses. — Wayfarer

It may presume physicalism to be based on false premises, but it does not demonstrate it, or if it does, the quote to which this is a reference does not demonstrate it.

Cognitive science shows that what we experience as 'the world' is not the world as such - as it is in itself, you might say - but a world-model generated by our perceptual and cognitive processes. So what we take to be "the external world" is already shaped through our cognitive apparatus. This suggests that our belief in the world’s externality is determined by how we are conditioned, biologically, culturally and socially, to model and interpret experience, rather than by direct perception of a mind-independent domain. — Wayfarer

OK, I agree with all that, but our belief being shaped by perceptions does not alter what is, does not falsify this externality, no more than the physicalist view falsifies the idealistic one.

But the philosophical question is about the nature of existence, of reality as lived - not the composition and activities of those impersonal objects and forces which science takes as the ground of its analysis. We ourselves are more than objects in it - we are subjects, agents, whose actions and decisions are of fundamental importance.

This part seems to be just an assertion. How are we (as 'agents', whatever that means) fundamentally different than any other object, in some way that doesn't totally deny the physicalist view? It seems a very different view must be assumed to make these assertions. Fundamentally, I don't think there is 'importance' at all. Importance to what? Us? That's subjective importance, nothing fundamental.

And through critical self-awareness, we can come to understand that world we experience is already a mediated construction, not an unfiltered or unvarnished encounter with reality in itself. Which is what physicialism doesn’t see.

Naive physicalism maybe. Few would assert such direct realism.

Physicalism can't find any mind in the world it studies, because it begins by excluding it, and then tries to patch it back in as a 'result' or 'consequence' of the mindless interactions which are its subject matter and from which it seeks to explain everything about life and mind. — Wayfarer

Patching it back in isn't excluding it. That it isn't a supernatural entity of its own is, yes, something excluded.
Science very much does pay attention to the role of observers when relevant, such as the role of survivorship bias, which must be recognized to avoid drawing incorrect conclusions, and this topic is very much pointing out incorrect conclusions by most due to the dismissal of survivorship bias.

You [relativist] acknowledge that physicalism has significant explanatory gaps when it comes to the philosophy of mind — Wayfarer

I also acknowledge this, but any alternative to physicalism has the same significant explanatory gaps, so what's the point of bringing it up?

What does modern science have to say about the nature of man?
...
— D M Armstrong, The Nature of Mind

That is, as an object. — Wayfarer

Yea, pretty much, and I've agreed that both 'man', 'mind' and 'object' are words referring to concepts, so it seems rather circular to suggest that 'man' is dependent on 'man'. Nothing seems to ground this.

But philosophy cannot honestly sustain this stance. The human subject is not just an object within the world, but also the condition for any world appearing. Scientific objectivity depends on observation, and observation presupposes a subject—a standpoint, a perspective, a consciousness.

I think this doesn't hold water. Observation may depend on subjectivity, but not on a subject or on a consciousness, both of which are, in the end, presumed objects. Objects being ideals, they are not the source of subjectivity, but rather a product of it.
As for standpoint and perspective, those seem to be locations, which may or may not be deemed to be objects.

The below is a later post, to which I've added a few (n) references to comment on specifically.

. But just take the first paragraph in that section:

"1. Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation à priori. Without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession." -- Kant — Wayfarer

Here, Kant seems to be talking about the mental representation of time, not of time in itself. In that light, I see no conflict and I agree with the statement, especially since time is most often represented as a flow, a succession of states of things, which yes, is no more than a mental representation and is hardly foundational in a view where mental is not fundamental.

... Aeon Magazine article on the Einstein-Bergson debate on time, specifically:

"To examine the measurements involved in clock time,(1) Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct.(2) But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession.(3) Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.

Bergson appreciated that we need the exactitude of clock time for natural science.(4) For example, to measure the path that an object in motion follows in space over a specific time interval, we need to be able measure time precisely. What he objected to was the surreptitious substitution of clock time for duration in our metaphysics of time. His crucial point in Time and Free Will was that measurement presupposes duration, but duration ultimately eludes measurement. --- Einstein-Bergson debate

If this is an accurate representation of Bergson's position, he doesn't take a very scientific view. There is proper time (the thing in itself), coordinate time (an abstrction), and one's perception of time, which is what Kant seems to be talking about. Concerning (3), both clocks and people measure proper time, hence my non-scientific assessment. (4) correctly points out that the difference between people and clocks is one of precision, but better precision doesn't make it a different kind of time.

(2) suggests that real (proper? schm-ime?) time is discreet but perceived time is continuous. There seems to be no evidence one way or the other for the former.

I don't get the 'crucial point' about duration and measurement (chicken-egg?). Under relativity, time is geometry, not a mental construct. Duration is a distance under that geometry. Measurement is any interaction between systems. Bergson perhaps sees things in more idealistic ways, where such circular dependencies become a problem.



- - - - - - - - - - -

Sorry for the late reply. — boundless

Amateur late responder... :)

This post was directed to me, and here I am well over a month late responding to it.

My problem with this is that there are also philosophical models that do not make any 'stance' about whether 'the physical' or 'the mental' is fundamental. — boundless

Most in fact, naturalism being one of them. Pretty much anything except materialism and idealism respectively. — — noAxioms

Naturalism generally explicitly denies anything 'supernatural' (there is nothing outside the 'universe' or the 'multiverse'). Unless it is something like 'methodological naturalism' I don't see how it is metaphysically neutral. — boundless

1) My comment concerned what various 'ism's state about what is fundamental, but your reply seems to be about what is.
2) I disagree. Naturalism says that all of our phenomena have natural causes (obey natural laws of this universe) and it says nothing about what other universes exist or not. Yes, it by definition denies anything supernatural, but that's a thin claim because if they discover something not know before (dark matter say), then that suddenly gets promoted to a natural thing. If dualism was shown to be true, then these mental entities would become part of natural law.

Anyway, the 'third-person perspective' is said to more or less be equivalent to a view from anywhere that makes no reference to any perspective. I guess that you would say that there can't be any true 'third-person perspective', though.

My example of one was a spacetime diagram which has no point of view. How is that still 1st person then, or at least not 3rd?

I meant: is it dualistic to assume that there is indeed consciousness and 'the material world' and none of them can be reduced to the other with the proviso, however, that any of them are 'ontologically fundamental'?

Yes, it seems dualistic to assume that. No, neither needs to be fundamental for it to be dualism. They both could supervene on more primitive things, be they the same primitive or different ones.

Well, is it interesting, isn't it? I believe that, say, someone that endorses both materialism and scientism would actually tell you that the world is 'material' and totally describable. It would be ironic for him to admit that this implies that is not 'mind-independent'.

Not directly. It having a requirement of being describable is different than having a requirement of being described, only the latter very much implying mind dependence.

Anyway. If, in order to be mind-independent a definition of reality must not rely on describability would not this mean that, in fact, we can't conceive such a definition of reality?

Perhaps so. This is consistent with my supervention hierarchy that goes something like mathematics->quantum->physical->mental->ontology(reality) which implies that the physical is mind independent (mind supervenes on it, not the other way around) but reality is mind dependent since what is real is a mental designation, and an arbitrary one at that. There's no fact about it, only opinion.

Imagine 'how the world looks like' without any kind of sensations. — boundless

Nit: A thing 'looking like' anything is by definition a sensation, so while a world might (by some definitions) exists sans an sort of sensations, it wouldn't go so far as to 'look like' anything.

How do you account for the past, before any human-like intelligence existed? — Relativist

There were no sensations in the universe before life came into being. — Relativist

1) boundless made no mention of life forms. An observing entity is indeed implied, but I personally don't consider 'observing entities' to be confined to life forms.
2) The universe, not being contained by time, includes all times, so there is no 'this universe before life emerged'. This universe has life in it, period. A subsection of it before a certain time is a subset of the universe, not the universe itself.
Now if you deny this and have the universe contained by time, then it isn't really a universe, just an object that at some moment was created in a larger 'universe'.

Just being picky since this conversation makes little sense to me the way it is worded.

The point is: can you conceive a world that has absolutely no relation to 'sentient experience'? — boundless

It is related to sentient experience in that some sentient thing is conceiving it. But that isn't a causal relation. Objects in each world cannot have any causal effect on each other, and yes, I can conceive of such a thing, doing so all the time. Wayfarer apparently attempts to deny at least the ability to do so without choosing a point of view, but I deny that such a choice is necessary. Any spacetime diagram is such a concept without choice of a point of view.

The problem for me, however, is to explain from a purely physicalist point of view why there are these 'structures' in the first place. — boundless

I don't consider this to be just a physicalist problem. The idealists have the same problem. It's a problem with any kind of realism, which is why lean towards a relational ontology which seems to not have this problem.

- - - -

I would say that if one denies the existence any kind of external reality (solipsism) or affirms that, at most, there might be something else but we do not interact in any way with that is irrational. — boundless

I agree. That is contradicted by our basic intuitions. — Relativist

To emphasize what little weight I give to said basic intuitions, I rationally do not agree. Denial of existence of any kind of external reality isn't necessarily solipsism. At best, it's just refusal to accept the usual definition of 'exists', more in favor of a definition more aligned with the origin of the word, which is 'to stand out' to something (a relativist definition).

I always have had trouble with philosophical skepticism — prothero

I consider myself quite the skeptic, but not in the solipsism direction. None of this 'cogito ergo sum' logic which leads to that.

Yes -- but maybe Einstein was wrong. — Moliere

Indeed, maybe he was wrong.

Is the whole universe rightly described as a closed system?

I think any decent definition of 'universe' would involve it being a closed system. If not, it is at best part of some larger structure, just part of a universe.

Given such a definition, any 'multiverse' would be a collection of fairly disjoint things. Look at the observable universe. There are infinitely many of those, so it is a multiverse of sorts, but they are adjacent to each other and interact to a point. No 'visible universe' is a closed system, so it doesn't qualify as a bunch of separate universes by said 'decent definition' of 'universe'.

What I know is that you have to perform the experiment in order to find out the outcome -- much like a quarter. — Moliere

A physical coin flip (like Pachinko) should be a reasonably deterministic process. If all state is known to enough precision, the outcome is computable. Still, classical physics is not empirically deterministic, as illustrated by things like Norton's dome. This does not falsify ontic deterministic interpretations, which give cause to all events.

Late to the party again...

There seems to be a common intuition, but not a universal one, that the Principle of Sufficient Reason, if it were true, would imply Determinism is also true. — flannel jesus

PSR seems to be more of a classical principle, talking more about a sufficient reason why I chose chocolate today despite preferring vanilla, and not so much about sufficient reason for the nucleus to decay just then.

Still, certain wordings of PSR may correspond to certain wording of determinism, and in this way the one can be implied by the other. Other wording might be incompatible.

As for some of the other conversations:

Wouldn't we be able to ask "Why am I in universe 1 rather than universe 2?" — Moliere

That's the same as asking "why am I me and not you?" — flannel jesus

Pretty equivalent, yea. Makes no sense in either case. To suggest otherwise would be to say that X is Y when it clearly isn't.
Then again, I'm running under the presumption that there isn't a thing that got to be me (or got to be in this universe) like it was some kind of lottery or something.

I'm me and not you cuz there was a percentage chance I was you, and a percentage chance I was me -- and I just happened to flip heads. — Moliere

We apparently see things quite differently, you taking the 'thing playing a lottery' stance.

I'm struggling to see how many-worlds can be interpreted as deterministic, but again it seems like we're coming back to terminology in the first place. — Moliere

Easy. The whole thing says that for a closed system, the system (described by one wave function) evolves according to the Schrodinger equation, which is a fully deterministic equation.

Non-deterministic interpretations involve what Einstein apparently detested: the rolling of dice. A good deal of interpretations involve this.

"does the same thing every time" isn't what I said with respect to different kinds of events. — Moliere

Under determinism, yes, every time, given multiple systems with fully identical initial state.

So the question is, given determinism, can PSR still not apply? Given non-determinism, can PSR still be valid?

You may be able to, but I cannot understand why Many Worlds is deterministic for the reason I said -- why am I in the up-world and not the down-world? — Moliere

Depends on one's definition of 'I'. Given some definitions, you're in both. I don't like that definition since it seems to violate law of non-contradiction. Determinism is a separate issue from what 'you' are under MWI.

But once you say 2+2=4 you are now in into the realm of mathematics where different rules apply and 2+2=4 is not an absolute truth. Rather, 2+2=4 is only true within specific mathematical systems - most commonly Peano Arithmetic - where you start of with certain axioms and rules and then you can derive 2+2=4. — EricH

Peano Arithmetic seems to concern only natural numbers, and is not closed under a lot of operations. A lot more axioms are needed to move into extensions to natural numbers, and it still remains difficult to find a set of numbers which is closed under all operations. Complex numbers are not up to the task, but Octionians are. Problem with Octonians is that so many of the operations lack commutative, associative, and transitive properties.

What obligates a universe to run under these axioms? Perhaps I can answer that by the same reason that our universe is so well tuned: You don't get observers if the rules are otherwise.

My problem with this is that there are also philosophical models that do not make any 'stance' about whether 'the physical' or 'the mental' is fundamental. — boundless

Most in fact, naturalism being one of them. Pretty much anything except materialism and idealism respectively.

Some phenomenological approach conceptualize this by saying that the 'first-person perspective' (the 'mental') and the 'third-person perspective' (the 'physical') are not reducible to one another

I am aware of this wording, but have never got it. How can a perspective not be first person by the thing having the perspective, even if it's a tree or a radio or whatever? Sure, it might not build a little internal model of the outside world or other similarities with the way we do it, but it's still first person.

An internet intelligence might have thousands of points of view corresponding to widespread input devices. That's not a single perspective (just like our own isn't), but again, it's still first person.

but you need to take both into account even if it is not possible to make a synthesis of them (think about 'complementarity' in QM). To none of them, however, an ontological status is actually granted. Both are ultimately 'point of views'.
How would you classify this? It is obviously not 'dualistic' in the sense that an ontologiy is not even presumed.

I kind of lost track of the question. Classify the ontology of the first and third person ways of describing what might be classified as an observer?

Sort of agree. They are not 'parts' that we are composed of. That would be a 'materialistic' interpretation of principles and laws. But even saying that they are 'means' is wrong IMO. — boundless

Me too. I struggled to find a more appropriate word and failed.

I would say that they 'manifest' in the way physical stuff interact. If they weren't 'there', there would be no 'way' in which physical stuff would interact.

OK, I can go with that, but it implies that 'stuff' is primary, interaction supervenes on that, and laws manifest from that interaction. I think interaction should be more primary, and only by interaction do the 'things' become meaningful. Where the 'laws' fit into that hierarchy is sketchy.

I am not even sure that it even makes sense to think about an 'unstructured reality'. So, probably, this implies that, after all, intelligibility is something essential to anything real.

Depending on one's definition of being real, I don't agree here. A mind-independent definition of reality doesn't rely on describability. By other definitions, it does of course.

If one posits that, say, the fundamental reality is, say, the Platonic 'world of Forms' it's possible to explain why the physical world presents to us regularities. They are, so to speak, 'moving images' of the Forms or 'manifestations' of them. And physical things are instantiations of the forms.
But materialism would simply assume that there is an 'order' in the world without having a conceptual category that explains it. Is being intelligible intrinsic/essential to be material? Is the 'order' material? — boundless

Sounds legit. All of it.

Assuming some kind of reality of mathematica and logical principles to make a case for the intelligibility of physical reality.

OK, got that.

Yes, I completely agree with it. — Wayfarer

Good. You're not treating time differently than space. Being consistent goes a long way to being valid.

You said you haven't read up on Kant, but he says something like this: space and time are not derived from experience (a posteriori), nor are they concepts, but rather they are the necessary, a priori conditions of experience. In other words, we cannot perceive or imagine anything without situating it in space and time.

I can think of counterexamples to that. Certain forms of BiV or simulation reality are not necessarily situated in an actual space that is being perceived. Sure, there is an embedded space and/or time, but that's not the space/time perceived. It might have say a different number of dimensions than the number presented to one's experience.

You asked a rhetorical question in the thread title - 'Does anybody support a mind-independent reailty' - from what I'm seeing, the answer would be that you do. Would that be right?

First of all, I still think my title is poorly worded. I'm not asking if the apple would still be there if you were not. I'm more asking if the line between that which exists and that which doesn't is or is not drawn in some oberver independent way.

As for my stance on the first question, absent a me to observe the apple, it wouldn't exist relative to me, but it would still exist relative to the basket in which it sits.
As for where I draw my lines, it is on causal bounds: Things (events) that have a causal impact on X vs everything else. Yes, all pretty mind independent, but few choose definitions like that. The definition is a sort of relational version of the Eleatic principle.

I've learned from my research that these different "types" of time, with "type 1" (proper time) being the more fundamental (or "physical") concept, is recognised within the framework of relativity. — Wayfarer

It isn't more fundamental under all views. Under idealism, perceived time is more fundamental than the time from any theory.
About the Bergson Einstein debate, let me try to paraphrase it. Imagine Bergson standing on a highway with a little numbered marker each 0.1km. He's at marker 125.
"To examine the measurements involved in space, Bergson considers himself on a road. At each location, a clearly visible sign indicates the position in space, points on a line or a tape measure. The sign is quite legible, but smaller ones are perceived in the distance with increasing numbers and other observers in the presence of those. In the case of the road, the position at which he is located – is what we call ‘here’. Each successive ‘here’ of the road contains nothing of other locations because each location, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience space. Instead, we hold these separate locations together in our memory. We unify them. A physical ruler measures a succession of spatial locations, but only experiencing 'expanse' allows us to recognise these seemingly separate locations as a continuum. Rulers don’t measure space; we do. This is why Bergson believed that ruler-distance presupposes lived distance"

It's definitely idealistic leaning, but seems legit, no? Do you agree with it all?

And my claim is that this is true even of so-called 'Type 1', supposedly mind-independent time.

It is true. It does not become a mental construct of proper time until experienced. But type 1 is proper time, not the mental construct of proper time, and the argument seems not to be true at all of the latter.

Bergson's analysis challenges the idea of a time that exists completely independently of any form of "experiencing" or "measuring" (in the broader sense that includes conscious awareness).

Based on much of the content of this topic, I can even agree with that, since ontology is potentially a mental construct. What proper time is, is a different issue than what it means to say it exists. OK, by some definitions of 'exists', the word means to 'be' whatever it is, but by other definitions, to exist means to be labeled thus by something that worries about such things.

Bergson believed that time is a continuous flow, something that very much is a conclusion only from perception.

He criticized Einstein's view of time, arguing that it failed to capture the subjective and fluid nature of lived time. That it does, not being in any way a theory about experience. But neither does Einstein's view predict a different experience.

Even physical clocks, which we might think of as objective measures, rely on physical processes unfolding in space, which we interpret as temporal intervals.

You may choose to interpret these things any way you want. Proper time is still the same (invariant) in any interpretation, and is something meaningful to us.

Even in the case of physical measurements, we are the ones who interprest the spatial movements as representing the passage of time.

Not all interpretations represent time as something that passes. Movement may represent time, but not necessarily its passage.

Without an observer (human or otherwise) to relate the spatial changes to the concept of time, the clock's movements are just that – movements in space.

I agree with this.

The distinction between the discrete moments measured by a clock

Lacking a Planck clock, I don't think any clock measures discreet moments in a way that a human doesn't.
Proper time isn't discreet, but quantum time might be.

However, a Bergson would likely argue that even the "physical" time we measure with clocks is still dependent on a framework of spatial measurement and our interpretation of it which only an observer can provide.

Perhaps he would argue that, incorrectly. Our interpretation of clocks gives us a sort of epistemic time, but it doesn't create physical time, it only measures it, and physical time, just like physical distance, can (given a sort of mind-independent interpretation) be without any necessity of perception. So OK, Bergson is perhaps not such a realist, and that's not an invalid position. But a choice of premises is very different than an unbacked assertion that those premises are necessarily true. Same goes with Einstein if he makes such an assertion.

So if we take Bergson's challenge seriously, we might ask: what does Planck time mean in the absence of any system to "observe" or be affected by events at that scale?

That scale being more fundamental, all events at any scale are affected by them, even if what we call classical behavior is more emergent than coming directly from the Planck scale. But then there's the 'what does it mean' part. Absent some kind of awareness, there's nothing to find meaning. If ontology is meaning, then it doesn't even exist. But in a mind-independent view, proper time (at whatever scale) doesn't require itself to be meaningful to anything.

I would say even that proper time might be something emergent I've seen artist depictions of the chaos of what spacetime looks like at quantum scales, and it isn't all nice and flatness and describable in four lousy dimensions. Extension is just another classical emergent thing.

Is it a fundamental property of spacetime

More fundamental than spacetime, but probably not actually 'fundamental' itself.
Our theories are just models, not anything proscriptive.

Bergson's perspective suggests that even this concept is embedded within our theoretical framework of measurement and understanding.

Of course it is.

Ontic or ontological idealism holds that the world is ultimately mental (or spiritual) in nature. — Wayfarer

Not what I'm talking about then. How is that statement distinct from regular idealism?

I'm talking more about people/experience still supervening on the physical (mind-independent world), yet the designation of this existing and that not existing is purely a mental distinction. Perhaps there's a term for that other than 'ontic idealism'.

I'm arguing for epistemological idealism which argues that whatever we know of the world has an ineliminably subjective pole.

I can think of few views (if any) that would disagree with that.

Ref: Who Really Won when Bergson and Einstein Debated Time, Evan Thompson, Aeon.

Saw that in my searches. Don't trust such an assessment written by somebody clearly favoring one side over the other. Such debates express two points of view, neither debunked, and thus comes down to who can think faster on their feet. I'm thinking of say the way WL Craig clearly trounced Hitchens despite my opinion of which side is correct and despite my opinion that Craig doesn't even believe what he pitches. He's incredibly good at the pitching, and that's what counts in a debate. Not who's right, and not what one's actual belief's are.

Ironically, the original point I was making there is that you are the one finding such things ambiguous hence why you conflate 2+2 referring to completely different things. — Apustimelogist

You missed the point then. I was searching for any context where 2+2 might be equal to something other than 4, any reason to not accept 2+2=4 as an absolute truth.

The claim that Planck units (Planck time, Planck length, Planck mass, etc.) are a set of "natural units" derived solely from fundamental physical constants: the speed of light (c), the gravitational constant (G), and the reduced Planck constant (ℏ) is correct. These constants are believed to be universal throughout the cosmos. — Wayfarer

Note that under such natural units, all four of those constants have the value of 1.

In this sense, an advanced alien civilization, by studying the laws of physics, could indeed independently arrive at the concept of Planck units and their values.

This is what you asked about. It suggests that such units are not made up, but rather are physical, a mind-independent set of units that is a property of our cosmos.

However the existence of Planck units, while providing a universal and objective scale for duration, does not fundamentally undermine the argument that measurement (or observation from a specific frame of reference) is an essential element of duration, nor does it negate the "subjective" components we discussed.

The Planck unit of time is one of proper time (type 1), not the third type (awareness of) time which you seem to have been referencing. Don't confuse the two. There's little point in utilizing Plank units for measuring a specific species' awareness of time.
Also, you switched your argument here from awareness of time (type 3) to coordinate time (type 2) which is time relative to a frame of reference. That too does not have much utility for Planck units since for instance light does not travel at c except locally. So the 'constants' are no longer constant.
Yes, an alien culture would probably use a different frame of reference, if only a difference in gravitational potential.

Even if an event's "true" duration is, say, X — Wayfarer

I'm not sure if whatever you're referencing would have a true duration. I use the physics definition of 'event', which is a point in spacetime, something without duration. OK, so a different sort of event like the sinking of the Titanic, which took hours, but that sort of duration is coordinate time, not proper time. That duration varies relative to one's choice of reference frame, as is necessarily the case with anything with extension like that. There's no one 'true' duration of something that multiple people are aware of or relative to different frames since it is different for each of them.

Planck units in its own rest frame, an observer moving at a high velocity relative to that event, or an observer in a strong gravitational field, will still measure a different duration for that event due to time dilation.

That's coordinate time, and yes, it is frame dependent. Proper time is invariant, and Planck units are units of proper time.

My point that "measurement is an essential element of duration" stands.

That only works for type 3 durations, and I stand by that point. Coordinate time requires awareness to compute, but it otherwise doesn't require being computed to have a coordinate duration.

In a relativistic universe, duration isn't an absolute, pre-existing quantity that merely needs to be "counted" by an observer. — Wayfarer

This is wrong. Proper duration is invariant in both a relativistic and an absolute interpretation of the universe, and coordinate duration (including 'actual' duration in the absolute universe) is not invariant. Neither kind of time has a requirement to be noticed by any observer. Of course, that's different in any mind-dependent sort of ontology where being noticed is a requirement.

I just watched Brian Cox explain the incomprehensible minuteness of the Planck Length: — Wayfarer

So its like discussing spelling: m-i-n-u-t-e. — Apustimelogist

Apparently Apustimelogist finds your statement completely ambiguous.

Yea, natural units are at the quantum scale, not anything of particular day to day pragmatic use.

Since this thread is about ontology, however, it would be probably more appropriate to refer to 'materialism', then, without using that term to indicate a specific form of 'materialism' that, say, is equated to ancient atomism or a literal interpretation of newtonian mechanics but it is compatible with modern physical theories. — boundless

So this modern materialism then, what does it suggest, especially above and beyond what naturalism does?

Still, I am not sure why people would call 'physicalism' a non-ontological view, but that's me.

It's how I use the word, but mostly just to identify 'not dualism', and I prefer to use naturalism to describe that, so I admit that the term needs something else, perhaps said ontological stance.

Anyway, personally, I would not call principles, laws and so on as something physical.

No, but I don't suggest that I am composed partially of principles and laws either. Those things are the means by which physical stuff interacts.

In fact, they are more like the transcendental conditions for the existence of something physical.

:up:

A purely 'unstructured' (i.e. intelligible) 'physical reality' is not a 'physical reality' at all. And the structure is more like a 'principle' than an 'object'. To me this means that the mere assumption that 'physical reality' is intelligible (which seems to be in fact necessary to speak about a 'physical reality'), contradicts materialism (and hence 'physicalism' as a metaphysical/ontological position). — boundless

I am trying to understand all the terms being used here. Some examples would help, perhaps of something unstructured, and how exactly speaking about a physical reality contradicts materialism.
Something unstructured would seem to not stand out to anything, and in that sense it wouldn't be intelligible. Not sure if that's what you mean though.

An unstructured world is IMO a contradiction in terms. — boundless

Maybe. As I said, it doesn't stand out, which makes it perhaps not exist, but I don't see it being contradictory.

Well, [ontic idealism] is often referred to the position that reality is exclusively mental and, therefore, there are only minds and mental content as we know them (a position that is most often attributed to Berkeley, but I think that he was more sofisticated than how it is often presented). — boundless

OK, but I've always associated that with just 'idealism'. Perhaps I should ask what non-ontic idealism is then. I mean, epitemic idealism makes sense, but almost in a tautological way. You only know what you know.

Anyway, I was not trying to 'make a case' for any of these 'idealist' positions. I was more like 'making a case' for the 'reality' of 'mathematical and logical truths' by simply assuming that there is an intelligible physical/material reality.

Assuming a reality to make a case for a reality?

In any case, if one assumes the 'reality' (and the 'indipendence' from the physical world and our minds) of math and logic, then one cannot be a 'materialist' and possibly even endorse some forms of ontological idealism, for that matter.

Agree

Yes what the body experiences pre-cognitively is unknown to us in vivo.
The experience of anything that isn't you is not known to you. Still not sure what you mean by cognition here, but plenty of things (trees, slime molds) do plenty of experiencing and communicating without the benefit of a nervous system.

— Janus

Its all different things blanketly labelled as 2+2 when really that doesn't actually describe the specifics of each thing and why they are like that. — Apustimelogist

Except it is 2+2 being discussed, and not the label nor any of the symbols or concepts of them, nor how anything is spelled.

I have an argument for the existence of my mind, which is based on the fact that experience exists and is coherent. — MoK

OK. I don't agree with the premises, so whether any of the conclusions follow from them seems irrelevant. Your belief seems not to answer my question about your belief not including any conclusion of objective existence. It all seems to hinge on relations between subjects experiencing objects.

I think the interpretation of Bohmian quantum mechanics is correct since it is anomaly-free..

Well that interpretation is not included in my suggestion of you being in superposition.
Not sure what you consider an 'anomaly' to be, but retrocausality seems to be one of them, don't you think?

... the fact that we don't really know what the body experiences prior to cognition ... — Janus

What is meant by this? Kind of like a rock 10 km deep experiencing heat and pressure, all sans any cognition to mentally experience those things? That was my guess.

I was referring to other universes, not remote parts of this universe. Other universes, if they existed, would not share our spacetime, hence no possible relation. — Janus

Of the 9 types of multiverses listed by Greene: Brane, Cyclic, Holographic, Inflationary, Landscape, Quantum, Quilted, Simulated, Ultimate, only Quilted, Quantum, and arguably Brane share the same spacetime as us (the same big bang, same constants). Of the 9, only Ultimate can claim 'no possible relation'. The rest are all related, but by definition of an alternate universe/world, they might have no direct causal effect on us. Exceptions: Holographic and Simulation.

I have very limited knowledge of string theory, so some details (inclusions and exclusions from lists) may be off.

In any case no matter how "stupid improbable" it might be, it has happened in our case, and thus we are here wondering about it.

Right. Solutions: Either an awful lot of dice being rolled, or one heavily loaded die. Wayfarer quoted Davies above that apparently favors the latter view.

OK, how about ‘no time outside the measurement of time’. I refer back to the earlier quote: "Clocks don’t measure time; we do. "
OK, that's pretty obviously the 3rd kind of time, thus I agree with your statement.
— Wayfarer

The objections to this seem to be that time is ‘obviously’ objective.

Not that kind of time, so not so obvious. Perhaps the problem is conflating one definition of time with one of the others.

Imagine some species on another planet, far larger than Earth, with a daily rotation of one of our weeks, and an annual rotation of tens of our decades. Presumably the units they would use for measuring time would be very different to terrestrial units. — Wayfarer

You are thinking of the Planck units, and yes, a species on another world can independently discover those units.
Under those units, four universal constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, reduced Planck constant, and Boltzmann constant) are all 1. Of course the aliens would give them different names.

There are also some quantum constants like the charge of an electron, and obvious unit charge.

Is there an objective time which is independent of these two apparently incommensurable systems of measurement? — Wayfarer

Time is always relative to something, the length of a worldline, an abstract coordinate system, or relative to the experience of a particular being. Even under an absolutist theory, there is not an objective age of the universe at a given event. It would depend on the depth of the gravitational potential where the age was measured, and there isn't any objective depth to that, or if there was, it is arguably infinitely deep, meaning it takes infinite objective time for one second to tick by on Earth. I didn't list absolute time in my list of 3, but mostly because it's totally undefined.

Well, I believe that physicalism posits that the 'physical' is fundamental. — boundless

Again, was not aware of that, but there is probably more than one view lumped under the term.

Just a quick terminological point. I believe that 'physicalism' and 'naturalism' are treated as synonyms. — boundless

Yes, and not materialism. One that latter point we apparently differ.
I take it as: Physical is responsible/sufficient for that we empirically experience/measure, which is pretty identical to how naturalism is expressed.

But, I would say that 'materialism' also can mean the same thing, unless we call 'matter' only a subset of what is 'physical'.

I would have said that a materialist would assert material to be fundamental, not supervening on something more fundamental, and the physicalism/naturalism do not assert that. That doesn't mean that the physical necessarily supervenes on something also physical.

Your definition makes it sound the same as materialism, an assertion that there isn't anything more fundamental than material, an odd assertion since the closer they look, the less they can find any material.

Another is that perhaps not all things that physics is concerned with are strictly "material". A physicalist may believe in quantum fields, but are quantum fields "material" or "matter"? — flannel jesus

Sure, stretch the definition and call 'fields' physical. You can do that all the way down, which blurs the distinction between the two terms.

But the risk here is equivocation. For instance, if I say that there are really 'physical laws', it seems that we end up with something like 'hylomorphism', i.e. the position that the 'physical' is also something that has a structure that is intrinsically intelligible (at least, in part). Is that 'structure' also 'physical'. I guess one can say so. — boundless

Yes, one can slap on the label or not at one's preference. How it works is unaffected by this. I would look at other worlds like the GoL discussed above. There are objects (spaceships for instance) in that world. Are they considered 'physical'? Answer: Your choice to say yes or no. The definition of 'physical' definitely gets shaky when one steps outside of our own particular universe.

But if one accepts that 'structures' are as fundamental as 'physical things', it certainly implies that wholes are not really reducible to parts (as parts cannot be 'abstracted' from their context).

I perhaps am one open to accepting structure as more fundamental than physical.

I can agree with that. And yes, you need to posit the 'truth' of the whole context. — boundless

Which may just bring it back to an objective truth, yes.

and a context requirement seems like an awful big asterisk to the claim of the objectiveness of its truth. — noAxioms

But this is just because you are giving completely differernt things the same representation. — Apustimelogist

How so? In the domain of integers, 2+2=4. but in a different (modulo 3 say) domain, 2+2=1. In Euclidean geometery, square circles are a contradiction. In non-Euclidean geometry, they're not.
What is being given the same representation here?

on the 'eternality' part. Actually, I do think that maybe logic and math are 'mental constructs'/'concepts' (I do have my sympathies with 'idealism'*), but not in the sense that they are conventional. — boundless

I also hold sympathies to idealism, to the point where ontology may well just be an ideal even if I'm not an idealist (mind being in any way fundamental). All sorts of traps on that road, but I think it is valid. Is there such a thing as ontic idealism?

Epistemic idealism seems to make sense to me. What do you mean by "I can't make any logically compelling argument from that position"?

I gotcha. But does 2nd hand count? If 60 GLY influences a galaxy that's right between us, and 30 GLY influences us...? — Patterner

Yes, it counts. Galaxies form early, so no 'new galaxy' like we did with the star. I picked 60 GLY because GN-Z11 (a record breaker until JWST found plenty further ones) is about 31 GLY away (proper distance along line of constant cosmological time). So let's say all galaxies form at 100 MY. We have galaxy X at 60 GLY comoving distance. The people on GN-z11 at age 13.8 GY can see both us and galaxy X. But they see both when they were super young, and they only see it recently since the effect took that long to get there. So they can't send a picture of say X to us since that light would leave now and would never get here. GN-z11 crossed our event horizon about 10 GY ago, so nothing there since then can ever effect us. Thus galaxy X still has zero causal effect on us.

I quoted [Goldilocks Enigma] in support of my contention that there is no time outside the awareness of it. — Wayfarer

I realized the reason you quoted it, and ran more with the title since it had direct application to the issue brought up in the OP.

As for there being no time outside the awareness of it, that depends on your definition of time.
1) Proper time, which is very much physical and supposedly mind independent. This is what clocks measure.
2) Coordinate time, which is arguably abstract and thus mind dependent since coordinate systems are mental constructs. Coordinate time is that which dilates.
3) One's perception of the flow of time, which is very much only a product of awareness, pretty much by anything tasked with making predictions.

As for Davies demonstrating your claim, my comment seems appropriate: I feel that conclusions are being begged by what I read there.

Not sure I'll say this right... I thought a galaxy could be treated as one body when calculating it's gravitational influence. That one body being the sum of all the stars, and everything else, in it. So each star is part of that sum, and the galaxy would have a weaker gravitational influence without it. No? Or were you thinking of a lone start in intergalactic space? — Patterner

Yes, a galaxy has mass just like a star does, so it can be treated as a body in its proximity, but 60 GLY is not in proximity. The mass of a galaxy makes zero difference at that distance compared to the same mass that didn't form a galaxy, despite the fact that the galaxy masses somewhat less just like our sun masses less than the material from which it was composed. Those local differences in the gravitational field simply cannot propagate FTL.

I agree that physicalism
...
the structure of the physical world actually is similar to that of our reason and at the same time trying to affirm that math and logic are the products of our minds. — boundless

Physicalism necessarily requires mathematics to be a mental product only? I was not aware of that. Materialism, sure, but not physicalism.
I do agree that such an assertion results in circularity. Logic cannot be used to derive logic as an end product instead of something far more fundamental.

I am surprised that you made this point, actually. 'Two plus two' is a different concept from 'four'. Just because the numerical value is the same it doesn't at all imply that it's a tautology. — boundless

I do admittedly have trouble denying 2+2=4, but even that assumes some context, as does say the impossibility of a square circle. I can do the latter with non-euclidean geometry, and I can deny the former with say modulus arithmetic, or telling weird stories like 1+1=1 to depict the unity of marriage, or 1+1=3 to depict reproduction. Those aren't counterexamples, but rather examples to show that 2+2=4 requires context, and a context requirement seems like an awful big asterisk to the claim of the objectiveness of its truth.

Time-independent in the case of math and logic. — boundless

If it's a mental construct, it would seem dependent on time. I don't think it's a mental construct, so I'll agree with your assertion of it being eternal.

By exist, I mean having objective reality or being. I already defined what I mean by "I". — MoK

How can you be certain of that kind of existence when you have no access to an objective viewpoint? There are even some interpretations of our universe (as opposed to objective) that say that 'you' are in superposition of being and not being, but mostly the latter.

Your comment suggests a flirting with solipsism or BiV given the expressed questioning of 'other people'. — noAxioms

Yes, I can be a brain in a vat, or what I experience could be caused by a Demon.

Same thing essentially.

There is no argument to tell whether other people exist.

I go way further than that. There seems to be no empirical test for the sort of existence you define. A thing existing and the same thing not existing would have identical experience, similar to say the experience of a presentist universe vs experience of a block universe. So one is forced to draw conclusions first, and then make up your evidence from there, a process of rationalization.

@Wayfarer The bit from Davies is interesting, and seems to stem from his attempt to justify a claim other than a multiverse to explain the fine tuning:

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

No, by definition 'this universe' must contain observers, else it would be this one, but rather another one.
Quantum theory seems to hold no role whatsoever for an observer that is anything more than a system with which an interaction takes place.
If Davies is defining the necessity of observers as is stated, it seems this is begging his conclusion about the necessity of the universe being observed.

The apparent Linde quote is something which I agree, at least in part.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. — Paul Davies

Quantum cosmology is in its infancy since there is no unified theory to date. Time drops out only because the subject deals with the universe before time has separated from the other dimensions, before say gravity separates out from the other 'forces'.
The part with which I agree is the bit about time losing its meaning relative to the universe as a whole. He proposes two separate systems, a clock/observer, and 'the rest of the universe' except 1) there's no meaningful place to put that clock such that it still relates in any way to the universe, and 2) the 'observer' seems to serve zero role except to read the clock aloud to nobody.
Apparently the observer is asserted to serves more of a role than that:

Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. — Paul Davies

I don't see any of that following at all, but then this tiny context might have snipped out pages of stuff leading to this conclusion.

The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that.

Funny, I can.

I did some crude research, and Davies apparently suggests that the universe is self-organizing, meaning that certain physical principles naturally lead to complexity and, eventually, life. Life does not cause the universe, but nevertheless something bends the principles to this one optimal tuning.
He also toys with universal teleology, but that seems to require complexity greater than what the universe evolves, leaving unanswered the origin of this even greater complexity.

Complexity must evolve from simplicity, Anything else results in a Ponzi scheme

Thanks for the quote Wayfarer.

For a star 60 GLY away, they can see the same galaxy the we do, even if we can't see each other. Those are relations, just not direct causal ones. — noAxioms

Doesn't the gravity of each affect the other? — Patterner

The average mass density of the universe sets a sort of fixed curvature. Changes to that curvature, say the formation of a concentration of mass like a star, cannot effect something beyond its event horizon, ever. That would require gravitational waves (the carriers of the changes to the gravitational field) to move locally faster than c. A new star as close as 20 GLY similarly cannot make any gravitational difference to us (ever) compared to if that star had not formed. We will never see it. But it's within the visible universe this time, so the mass from which it is composed has had a causal effect on us, not true of the one 60 GLY away.

I agree there's ambiguity in the way I used "exists". Can you suggest a different term? I want to distinguish between the superset of past/present/future existents and hypothetical things that are not in that superset. — Relativist

Well I use 'measured' vs not, which divides events into two (not three) categories, which is roughly delimited not by a hyperplane of a present, but by the past light cone of the system event doing the measuring. That's a physical (invariant) division, not an abstract frame dependent one.

I can for sure tell that I exist, by "I" I mean a mind with the ability to experience and cause (I have an argument for substance dualism). I can for sure tell that change exists. Some changes are due to me, and others are not. What causes other changes is subject to discussion; it could be a Demon or it could be real people. So, for sure, we can say that something exists beside me, but I think we cannot tell for sure what that thing is beside me! — MoK

Well those things exist by some definitions/interpretations of 'exists' and of 'I' and not by others.
You didn't reference any quote, so not sure which interpretations you have in mind. Probably not the relational one I often speak of, since what you assert is not true under that. I certainly don't know how you're using 'exists' here, but I'm guessing 'that which I can empirically glean' or some such. Your comment suggests a flirting with solipsism or BiV given the expressed questioning of 'other people'.

I don't define 'exists' in a way that leads to any of the conclusions you draw, but that's just a different definition, not an assertion of the way things are.

Why must something be "relation-independent" in order to count as real? — Janus

Those are just two possible definitions of what it means to be real. I actually counted 6 or more such definitions. Most of the assertions about what is real vs what isn't use a definition that implies, if not explicitly, mind dependence.

We have no physical relation to such worlds.

I disagree. We share the same big bang perhaps. For a star 60 GLY away, they can see the same galaxy the we do, even if we can't see each other. Those are relations, just not direct causal ones.

The fine-tuning argument has never done it for me. I don't believe we can accurately calculate odds when the sample is but one.

Not an exact calculation, no, but 'stupid improbable' can very much be shown. Just not exactly how stupid improbable.

Come on. When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to understand? — Wayfarer

Probably not relativity or cosmology, but definitely chemistry and quantum mechanics since quantum effects are critical to nerve operation as much as it is critical to transistor operation.

Sure, the brain and other biological structures don't operate in defiance of physics but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone.

I disagree with this, but I lack the credentials to deny any claim that any biological primitive operates on non-deterministic physics (and by that, I mean that randomness is not amplified or otherwise leveraged anywhere).

OK, so the algae thing is relevant. I know for instance that photosynthesis is so comples that it requires something like quantum computing to implement, especially to have evolved in the first place. I know that trees talk to each other. They've measured it: A whole forest of veterans calming the younger ones about a scary event coming up in a few hours.

So algae operation has questionable physical explainability. That's a good start. They need to find out where the gaps are. That's pretty hard with chemistry since the intermediate reactions are hard to isolate.

Nothing in physcis either does that, or accounts for that. — Wayfarer

Nothing in physics is violated by that either. That physics operates at a more fundamental level than something complex like say 'mitosis' doesn't mean that mitosis necessarily not physical.
Yes, a physical description is much like a graph of air pressure over time. That's a full description. It doesn't explain 'music', (any more than does your take on it), but it very much shows music (as it exists in an auditorium) to be nothing more than physical. Similarly, you admit that biological functionality is physical despite a lack of satisfactory 'explanation', and yet you seem to assert that something non-physical is required to make it all work, despite that also not being explained.

People make up new theories which often make predictions about things that haven't been observed yet. — Apustimelogist

I toyed with bringing up such an example in my prior topic about predication. I am a software engineer. One puts out a functional spec, a document which specifies what the product does. That's a list of predicates of a nonexistent thing, a potential example of existence not being prior to predication..
This of course can be countered by arguing that the functional spec does not have any of the predicates listed, it just lists them.
Your example is about theories making yet-to-be-verified predictions (such as time dilation, which was eventually demonstrated). But before that demonstration, the predicate was already there. Predication does not depend on it being observed.

If, however, we do accept that mathematical and logical truths are eternal
...
This would mean that they are either fundamental in themselves (as say Penrose IMO suggests) or depend on something else that is also not contingent and eternal... — boundless

What do you mean by 'eternal' here? I have two definitions of that, and neither seems appropriate. I seem to favor the idea of mathematics being fundamental, but not all would agree.

There is a set of things that existed in the past, a set of things existing in the present, and a set of things that will exist in the future. — Relativist

Under presentism, yes. But you called all those 'existing', the tense of which implies 'currently existing'. That's what I was commenting on.
Many (most?) presentists don't consider future events to exist since it interferes with their typical assumption of free will. Far be it from me to put words in their mouths; I'm not a presentist.

Without a subject, there is no point of reference for spatial extension or temporal duration — Wayfarer

A point of reference IS a subject, just not one with subjectivity, although a point of reference does not alone define a coordinate system, so coordinate quantities like extension and duration are undefined.

But what about relativity!? You can do experiments which show the effects of things like time dilation related to clocks without requiring observers or perspectives or anything like that. — Apustimelogist

That's just geometry.

But those experiments don't do themselves — Wayfarer

They do actually. Physics is not something that happens only in labs or when people are watching. Epistemology of physics does, sure, but I don't think Apustimelogist was talking about epistemology.

It's actually a very simple idea: that natural numbers (and other such intelligible objects) are real, but not materially existent. — Wayfarer

Does this mean existent, but not in a material way? Because that implication is there, an equivocation of being real and existing. I point this out because there are those that very much distinguish the two, even if only by definition. Relativist detects the lack of the equivocation implied above.

I question Wayfarer's distinguishing between "existing" and "real" — Relativist

I have seen them used thus, as I have: Existing but not real or v-v.

If there are volumes of arguments about [reality of say mathematics], it must be a more important issue than simply one of the words being defined differently.

The other point is that mathematics seems to be ‘true’ in a way that goes beyond the objective. We usually think of ‘objective’ as meaning something inherent in the object, or at least independent of our perception. — Wayfarer

I've been kind of up front about my usage of 'objective' to mean 'not relative', but you're seeming to imply 'not subjective' here. A truth about an object (as if 'object' had any sort of objective meaning) seems to be relative to the object, which is fine for a predicate. Is 2+2 adding up to 4 an objective truth, or is it only relative to this mathematics we seem to have discovered? Maybe there's different mathematics where 2+2 is something else or is meaningless.

I remember going through a good tutorial on law of form, and it doesn't obviously get into numbers quite so fast, being somewhat more foundational than that.

But mathematics is often the means by which we define what’s objective in the first place—so in that sense, it seems to transcend the domain of the objective rather than just belong to it.

Point taken.

I’m not using ‘abstract’ to mean just 'mental' or 'subjective'—mathematical truths don’t seem to depend on individual minds. But it’s not clear that they’re part of the natural world either. That leaves a kind of philosophical gap: we trust mathematics to describe the real, but we’re not sure where mathematical truths themselves fit into our picture of reality.

Not sure indeed. The issue of descriptive vs. proscriptive comes to mind.

As a physicalist (more or less), I'd simply say that abstractions do not exist as independent entities in the world. — Relativist

I don't think you need to be a physicalist to agree with that statement.

Example: we can consider several groups of objects, each of which has 3 members - and from this, we abstract "3". 3 is a property possessed by each of these groups.

But what if numbers are more fundamental than the object. They certainly are in say GoL, where '3' definitely has causal powers, and 'objects' only exist if 3 does first. Of course, real numbers play far less of a role than do small integers.

This process is the basis of abstraction

The act of abstraction, sure, but abstract objects (like 3 itself, and not just the concept of 3) doesn't require an act abstracting.

For the physicalist, then of course abstractions like numbers can’t exist independently — Wayfarer

Why not? For the materialist, sure, but physicalist? Not sure exactly what defines a physicalist, but i thought it was something like 'mind supervenes on the physical'. It's a stance against mind not being fundamental.
My reply? Fundamental to what? Sure, I think mental processes are physical processes. That makes mind not fundamental, but there are still things that supervene on said mental processes.

We don’t derive the idea of “three” from objects; rather, we recognize objects as “three” because we already grasp the concept a priori. In that sense — Wayfarer

Be nice to know how it came about. If the concept is already grasped, then the roots of that concept go back further than Relativist's example. Perhaps tokens were grouped to match the count of something, but without knowing that there are 3 tokens. I don't think we'll ever know the early history of being able to count, but humans are not alone in the ability to do so.

The fact that 3 + 2 = 5 holds independently of any particular instance—it would be true even if there were no physical groups of five objects anywhere. — Wayfarer

The skeptic in me wants to doubt that, but how can it not be so? Does Platonism follow from it? It seems to come down to the issue of it being true implying its reality.

From your quoted bit:

By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — Quantum Mysteries Dissolved

So the dead/live cat is real, but not actual. The measured dead cat is actual. Cute, but the Wigner's friend experiment seems to challenge this unitary notion of a wave function collapse into 'actual'. I'd like to see their take on that.

This sounds a bit like a presentist who considers as "existing" everything that exists, has existed, or will exist - i.e. a 4-dimensional landscape for identifying existents. — Relativist

There are those that assert this? Seems contradictory for some event to be 'existing' and also 'will exist', which seem to be two different contradictory tenses for the same event, relative to the same 'present' event.

About the posts of @Apustimelogist

But when we get to the human brain, which is the most complex naturally-occuring phenomenon known to science, I see no reason to believe that it can be described in terms of, or limited to, physical principles. — Wayfarer

Despite there no single tiny bit having been found that doesn't operate under said physical principles. Sure, the complexity might defy unwilling understanding, but that doesn't justify any claim that it does something dependent on more than just physical interactions.

A purely physicalist view, however, is difficult to reconcile with the existence of abstract objects. — boundless

A problem with a materialist view perhaps, since only material things exist. A physicalist view only says that people are no more than arrangements of physical stuff. The view doesn't deny the potential existence of non-material things like forces and abstractions. At least that's how I distinguish materialism from physicalism.
Is mathematics abstract? That makes it sound like it's all mental concepts instead of anything objective, but I don't think you're using 'abstract' in that way here.

For instance, logical operations do not seem to be reducible to physical causality, which seems contingent.

Of course not. 'Physical' is a reference to our universe. If logical operations were physical, they'd be a property of this universe and not anything objective. Something in a non-physical universe (like GoL) could not discover mathematics.

Generally physicalists oppose platonism due to the fact that it posits an irreducible non-physical reality.

I'll let @wayfarer comment on that since I don't know Platonism enough to know what they assert.

If a mathematical structure is going to supervene on mathematical truths, then those truths are going to need to be accessible by far more than just reason, which sounds like a mental act or some other construct that instantiates the mathematics (such as a calculator). — noAxioms

It depends on what we call 'reason'. If by reason we mean the mental ability to make deductions, inductions, reasonings and so on, well, at least a good part of mathematical truths are accessible to our finite minds.

Being accessible to minds has nothing to do with the truth of them.

For one thing, the vast majority of real numbers are inaccessible to us. We only have access to countably many of them. Actual mathematics would not be thus restrained.

What else might you call 'reason'?

So, at least in principle, that intelligence could understand our mathematics. — boundless

Maybe it's us understanding some of theirs.

Well, to be honest, I don't think that conscious beings can be understood in purely computational terms.

Good to see that we don't agree on everything then.

But, I still don't see how it can be considered a separate world from the one where the simulation is run (unless you mean from the 'perspective' of the simulated 'entities', assuming that such a concept makes sense).

Difference of map and territory. There's the thing, and then there's a simulation of that thing. So while we can be simulated, by definition, we are not simulations.

Ok! Yes.

OK, you seem to grok that.

I need more of a mathematics background to give an intelligent answer to that. — noAxioms

The problem is, however, that if mathematical truths are independent from both our minds and all the contingencies of the world — boundless

How could they not be? I mean, OK, under idealism, mathematics is nothing but mental constructs. I get that, and there are even non-idealists that say something similar, but since they can be independently discovered, it seems more than just a human invention.

Contrast that with a god, who should very much be independently discoverable, and yet each isolated culture/tribe comes up with their own, none related to any of the others. That's huge evidence that it's all being invented, not discovered.

Plato himself for instance argued that they reside in a different level of 'reality', the reality of intelligible objects, accessible only from reason.

If a mathematical structure is going to supervene on mathematical truths, then those truths are going to need to be accessible by far more than just reason, which sounds like a mental act or some other construct that instantiates the mathematics (such as a calculator).

In recent times, Penrose popularized the idea of the 'three worlds', the physical world, the world of consciousness and the 'platonic realm'. All these worlds for him both transcend and relate to each other.

Great. 3 worlds on their own instead of each being stacked on the next.

I believe that mathematical platonism is right because it seems to me that mathematical truths are objectively true and independent from both the world(s) and our minds.

I agree with that bit, and perhaps the ontology can follow since such truth stands out from nonsense.

They can be known, so they are not 'nothing' (or figments of our imagination because they are independent from our minds) - they seem to have some kind of ontological reality.

I'm actually being moved by this reasoning, so yes.

The point would be "can a rational intelligence of any kind learn mathematics as we know it?". For instance, I read that some propose that a rational being that lives alone in an undifferentiated environment would not coinceive numbers.

I think not the point. Said intelligence would need to be presented with an environment where such tools would find utility. It need not be 'of any kind' for mathematics to be independently discoverable.

Well, you are assuming that our world can be simulated. — boundless

An approximation of it can be, yes. A classical simulation is capable of simulating this world in sufficent detail that the beings thus simulated cannot tell the difference. Another funny thing is that GoL is more capable of doing this than is our universe due to resource limitations that don't exist under GoL.

Anyway, if our world were a simulation, I would not consider it a separated world from that which runs the simulation.

A world is what it is, and a simulation of it is a different thing, sort of like the difference between X and the concept of X, something apparently many have trouble distinguishing..

An interesting question would be what is the relation between spacetime and the Hilbert space.

I need more of a mathematics background to give an intelligent answer to that.

Surely you can understand how unknown planets and unknown universes are on a different ontological plane? — Wayfarer

I sure do. A small fraction of the former are part of our causal past. None of the latter are, which makes a big ontological difference if ontology is based on us.

The universe being ‘the totality of what exists’.

If it's defined that way, then there's not such thing as other universes by definition, at least not existing ones, and that's presuming that we're part of the universe as thus defined. Per my prior topic, I find no empirical test for that sort of thing.

I’m open to Penrose’s idea of the cyclical universe

Do you understand how it works, what the duration of all the prior ones were (as measured by one of our clocks), and how long it will take for the next one to happen? It is a cool idea, I admit.

In the past 100 years our knowledge of the universe has expanded by orders of magnitude. I find the notion of a multiverse intriguing - but I'm just an armchair physicist. However, much smarter people than I think it's worth looking into.

https://www.thescienceblog.net/is-there-scientific-evidence-for-the-theory-of-the-multiverse/

https://organicallyhuman.com/googles-quantum-multiverse-exists/ — EricH

Those are interesting, but pop articles written by people no smarter than you or I, writing about view of people who are indeed smarter in their field.

The blog article speaks of 'the multiverse theory' like it's one theory. It goes on to admit that it's just a blanket term for several unrelated actual theories, but much of the discussion still treats it as one thing.
At least 9 types have been listed by Greene: Brane, Cyclic, Holographic, 2 Inflationary, Landscape, 3 Quantum, 1 Quilted, Simulated, 4 Ultimate.
The ones with numbers correspond to Tegmark's 4 types. Some of the others come from string theory.
The bolded ones are mentioned in the blog.
It has interesting assertions like: "MWI posits that every time a quantum event happens with multiple outcomes, such as a particle being in one state or another, the universe splits, creating a new branch for each outcome."
Well it posits no such thing. The sole premise is this: "All isolated systems evolve according to the
Schrodinger equation". That's it. It posits nothing else. All the rest follows from that one simple premise.

The blog is cute, but I spot several errors, meaning it's either not reviewed or it is written for entertainment rather than accuracy.

The google-chip article is attempting to sensationalize what is essentially: More progress has been made in the effort of realizing quantum computing. What it claims is that it will somehow prove the quantum multiverse (MWI), meaning that a successful quantum computer will somehow falsify all the other interpretations, which is by definition impossible since they all make the same empirical predictions.

Still, it will be interesting to see how proponents of each of the other interpretations choose to spin a functional quantum computer, similar to the wiki page showing how each interpretation spins the Schrodinger's cat scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Interpretations

Interestingly, Bohmian mechanics isn't in there, and I thought it used to be. Was it removed? This is a significant hole in the page.

Well, the general term is matheamtical 'realism'. There are different variants. Platonists assert that mathematical truths are both independent from our minds and also from the world. — boundless

For one, I distinguish mathematics being objectively real, and mathematics being objectively true. The latter seems to hold, and the former I thought was what mathematical Platonism is about, but you say it's about being true. I am unsure if anybody posits that the truth of mathematics is a property of this universe and not necessarily of another one.

The main argument is that mathematical truths do not seem to rely on any kind of contingency.

Well I agree with that, and so does @Richard B given his last post.

Opponents of platonism question the possibility that such a 'realm of truths' can be known by us.

Being objectively true (and not just true of at least this universe) does not imply inaccessibility. The question comes down to if a rational intelligence in any universe can discover the same mathematics, and that leads to circular reasoning.

Well, to me [Conway's Game of Life] would be a subset of 'our world', wouldn't it? — boundless

Only a simulation of it. The things in themselves (all different seed states) are their own universes.
Funny thing is that our universe can be simulated in a GoL world, so it works both ways.

The relationality of physical propoerties for instance suggest to me that the way we carve the world into objects is in large part a mental construct. So, describing the world outside the context of observations with concepts that are being introduced to make sense of observations would be a leap that might have to be justified. — boundless

Totally agree here.

Here's an idea. Maybe the 'change' of my perspective is just an useful abstraction. 'My' 'observing perspective' is the same even when the description changes because I moved in my worldline. So, maybe any kind of perspective that physics tells about is an useful abstraction, which doesn't necessarily connect to something truly real.

A perspective seems to be a sort of 5 dimensional thing, 4 to identify an event (point in spacetime), and one to identify a sort of point in Hilbert space, identifying that which has been measured from that event. All these seem to be quite 'real' (relative to our universe)

So for instance, two perspectives of our friend in the box, one having measured up, and one down. Same event, different states with which the perspective is entangled, which is the different 'locations' in Hilbert space. I put that in scare quotes because it isn't a linear dimension like distance or something.

One way I've thought about the anthropic principle is simply to observe that it puts paid to the argument that the origin of life is a consequence of the fortuitous combination of elements, the 'warm little pond' theory of abiogenesis. — Wayfarer

That's one way. An extremely unlikely event, but no end of places and time for it it occur. Plenty of dice being rolled, so abiogenesis doesn't seem to be a problem at all.

And that's because the causal sequence that gave rise to those circumstances can be traced back past the formation of the planet, to the stellar transformations that gave rise to those complex elements,which in turn can be traced back to some specific characteristics of matter-energy that seem to have existed from the earliest moments of the cosmos.

Most of that has unlimited rolls of the dice, so improbability isn't a problem. The part in bold, if this is 'the one universe', only gets one shot, since those incredibly unlikely characteristics are the same everywhere, and that means you only get one shot at it.

Yes, having a theological conclusion already in mind, this anomaly was eventually used as evidence of design. Before that, it was the 'design' of all living things, but science kind of won out on that issue, so now the goal post has been moved to the 'designed' tuning. I think they're getting tired of conceding points instead of ever winning one.

But I think the argument that there might be uncountable further unknown universes doesn't amount to saying anything whatever.

People finally accepted uncountable further unknown planets. Why is this one so different?

I do agree that throwing up one's arms and saying 'everything exists' seems to dilute the concept into meaninglessness. To exist is to stand out, and nothing can stand out if there's no distinctions.

It seems neither of us has a satisfactory answer. I do my best, but my view very much borders on the one lacking distinctions. The question that kills me: Why does our universe seem so interesting? There are far more structures that are not interesting and yet have identical copies of me in it. If they are 'exist' (whatever that means), I'm probably in one of the uninteresting ones without knowing it. I have no answer to that one. Such is the consequence of not restricting ontology at all.

Do you think that '2+2 = 4' is a mind-independent truth? I actually think it is. — boundless

We both think that. I don't go so far as to say that I 'know that'.

That's why I lean toward some form of matematical platonism. It seems that mathematical truths are discovered, not 'invented', at least in part.

Right. I don't know a whole lot about mathematical Platonism, being unsure about the arguments for each side, and why 2+2=4 perhaps necessitates it or not.

I think I see what you mean. But then all the worlds would be mind-dependent. Not dependent on a particular mind. So we would have a pluarality of worlds that depend on their respective 'minds'.

Well, a plurality of worlds that don't depend on minds at all. A great deal of them would be unfathomable to us, but what, do they all exist? I came up with a world from Conway's Game of Life (GoL), which is very crude, 3D (2 space, 1 time), and arguable has 'objects'. Does an evolution of a given initial GoL state exist? It certainly is a world. That's what I mean by questioning where the line should be drawn (from what does it stand out?) Nobody has answered the question. I have only vague answers, none supported by logic. That's a great deal of the reason I'm not a realist.

It would be quite a coincidence that the world 'in the perspective of a pen' is describable in the same terms as it is 'as it appears to me'.

I'm not comparing it to how things appear to you. The pen is not conscious and nothing appears to it at all. But the pen has a causal history and thus measures (interacts with) that history, just as you do. So not as things appear to you, but how your entire causal history relates to you. Your mental processing of a fraction of those measurements has nothing to do with this causal relation, thus the pen and a random meat-wad are on ontological level ground.

So I'm using 'perspective' here in the same was as 'measure', just meaning physical interaction with environment. I confine 'observer' to something with mental interaction. I'm not asserting that a perspective is that, I'm just using the word that way.

I am not sure that Rovelli meant that. I think he meant that each observer when asks "what did you see?" to another will get an answer which is coherent with his observations. I don't think that Rovelli meant anything more than this. — boundless

But that's my take on that comment as well.

That's a good point, indeed. I need to think about this to give you a proper response. Hope you don't mind. — boundless

Thinking about stuff rather than giving a quick knee-jerk response is always a good thing. I'm often delayed in replying precisely because I'm looking up sites relevant to the response. It's not like I think I have all the answers already. I certainly don't.

In which case, they're completely irrelevant in any sense other than providing rhetorical elbow-room in which any claim whatever can be accomodated. — Wayfarer

If you equate 'irrelevance to us' as 'nonexistent to us', then sure, but those other worlds are relevant to the only viable models that explain certain things. I notice you don't have a solution yourself to say the fine tuning problem, perhaps waving it away as being somehow necessary, but without saying how it is necessary.
How do you explain the reality of whatever you consider to be fundamentally real (mind?)? Or is it 'it just is'? I ask because I think the relational view solves that problem, but only if you take it on its own ground and not mix it in with a contradictory view.

It's a way of avoiding admission of necessary truths, which suits your relativist arguments.

I think I proposed 2+2=4 as a sort of necessary truth. A whole lot of stuff falls apart if that isn't accepted.

Okay the way you frame it I tend to think the Universe contains time, which means there was no time prior to the existence of the Universe. In other words, if there is anything there is also time because things are necessarily temporal, and if there are no things then there is no time. — Janus

Pretty good summary, yes. To say 'there was nothing, and then there was something' implies that there was time in which more stuff besides time suddenly 'happened'. It seems a category error to consider the universe to be something that 'happened'. Again, opinion, but the opposite opinion is to posit the existence of something (a preferred moment in time) for which there is no empirical evidence, only intuition, and I rank intuition extremely low on my list of viable references.

You also seem to agree that there are things independent of minds. In which case you would appear to be one the "anybodies" who support mind-independent reality.

Except for the 'reality' part, sure. Mind-independent, sure. Relation-independent, no. I think in terms of relations, but I don't necessarily assert it to be so. I proposed other models that are not relational and yet are entirely mind-independent. See OP.

We have no relation to such worlds

Sure we do. It's just a different relation than 'part of the causal history of system state X', more like a cousin relation instead of a grandparent relation. The grandparent is an ancestor. The cousin is not. The cousin world is necessary to explain things like the fine tuning of this world, even if the cousin world has no direct causal impact on us.

How could we ever demonstrate that consciousness collapses the wave function

That interpretation can be shown to lead to solipsism, which isn't a falsification, but it was enough to have its author (Wigner) abandon support of the interpretation.

or that there really are hidden variables?

By definition, those can neither be demonstrated nor falsified.
They have proven that certain phenomena cannot be explained by any local hidden variable theory, but that just means that hidden variable proposals are necessarily non-local.