Physicists are not trained in theories of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Yep. If consciousness were central to physics in the way you suppose, wouldn't physicist be the "go-to" for explaining consciousness?

Again, in the Nature survey, the data is as follows:

Does a measurement require an observer?
Yes, and they must be conscious: 9%
Yes, but consciousness is not relevant (and an 'observer' can include
interaction with a macroscopic environment): 56%
No: 28%
Not sure: 8%

The supposition that there is a consensus amongst physicists that consciousness is an inherent feature of the physical universe is a fabrication. 84% of physicists reject the idea that consciousness is necessary for measurement.

You've always seem to me to avoid it only by an appeal to mysticism or changing the subject.

Even accepting Bergson's distinction between time and duration - and I don't see that we need do so - the problem remains that things cease to exist when we are "unconscious". That problem is not resolved.

Ideas to me are irreducible mental events. — MoK

A pretty sketchy notion.

Indeed. We can detect consciousness. That's why we differentiate between some's being asleep and awake...

And we differentiate between doing something consciously and unconsciously - driving to the local shops being the usual example.

It's a problem for solipsism generally. And Idealism has a great deal of difficulty avoiding solipsism. If to be is to be perceived then things cease to exist when unperceived; including, it seems, other people.

Hence solipsism.

Is that a third way?

The clincher is the dynamic between a complete, incorrect account and an incomplete, correct account. I'm advocating the latter, and it seems you are, too.

I hadn't noticed this thread. But I covered much the same topic in my thread Two Ways To Philosophise.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia. — Banno

The trouble with a complete picture is that it tends to be completely wrong.

You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words. — Astorre

That's the analytic approach at work. Thanks for indulging me.

It might well be a language issue, since my reservation rests on that word "revealed". Something is revealed that it is already there but hidden, and comes to be seen. The letter is revealed by opening the envelope, the body revealed by removing the clothing, and so on. But a microscope does not have a hammerness that is revealed by using it as a hammer...

I think you have just shown how the terminology can spiral out of control very, very quickly when talking about the phenomenon of consciousness. — I like sushi

Thank you. That's what I'd hoped. To my eye this shows the incoherence of such talk. So mucht he worse for phenomenology.

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, — Astorre

I don't know how to make sense of that.

Is your suggestion that hammerness is a potential or opportunity or modus inherent in a microscope?

Much simpler to just say that someone might use a microscope as a hammer. Drop all the hoo-ha.

It depends on how you interpret what he was saying alongside what it appears he actually meant. — I like sushi

Obviously.

So, did the clock on your wall keep moving while you slept, or was there a leap from when you closed your eyes to when you opened them again, no time passing - nothing exists, just things leaping ahead as if time had passed?

Indeed, there would be no period of unconsciousness, since time is a part of the world that supposedly ceases to exist "while you are unconscious"...

There could never be a period in which you are not conscious.

C.G. Jung once said that the world only exists when you consciously perceive it. — Jan

Back to this. Was he right?

Did the world cease to exist last night while you slept?

What would happen if you were to pretend that it had? If you insisted that events that others claim occurred while you slept did not occur, becasue nothing existed while you were asleep?

How would others treat you?

Would any advantage accrue to you from this exercise? Any at all?

I’m not ‘proclaiming’ anything. — Wayfarer

Sure.

The graph isn't embarrassing, as indeed is pointed out repeatedly in the comments. The results from this small survey are not too far form the results in the bigger Nature survey I cited above. (thirty odd compared to 1,100). The Copenhagen interpretation hold steady in both.

To be fair, neither survey included your option, "It's magic".

...this is a philosophy forum... — Wayfarer

That doesn't validate a leap into proclaiming what is mere speculation.

nobody understands quantum physics' — Wayfarer

If you stopped there, we would have little disagreement.

But in a few posts you will be leaping beyond the obvious truth that we only know stuff with our mind, to the mind created world; to mind not just being an outcome of the way things are, but the reason that things are this way.

Now you may be right; but the evidence available does not support your certainty. And there are conceptual difficulties you have yet to overcome.

It's you who goes past Feynman's aphorism.

Calling it magic is not explaining it. But calling it magic might lead one not to look for a better answer.

Why make the leap to calling it magic? Why not just say: "I don't know, but I will try to find out..."

Sure. Someone will be along soon to remind us of the other three Aristotelian causes, and claim to be agreeing that efficient cause is but one and so not the whole of explanation. We also have logical structure, linguistic and semantic relations, normative and evaluative judgements, Constitutive rules... "counts as", emergent properties... And so on.

Sure. Nor is it answered by Indian mysticism.

, - to be sure, the account is not settled. There is room for discussion and compromise, and the answer may only be decided by experimentation.

However there are those here who, for their own reasons, will pretend that the issue is settled, and in favour of consciousness being needed to collapse the wave form.

In the Nature survey cited above, only 9% of physicists will agree with them.

Now will come a series of arguments aimed at discounting the view of collapse as measurement, beginning with

↪Banno But are can only be validated by observation a posteriori. — Wayfarer

Note that this is a seperate point - the simple truism that we can only know how things are by looking at how things are. It ignores the difference between somethings being true and being known to be true. A common bit of antirealist rhetoric.

That seems right. — Janus

Cheers.

The mechanistic model is a great example of a case taken far beyond it's context. We seem to understand how causation functions in a game of billiards; the picture gains such a hold on us that we presume the same sort of causation is at work in thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics or psychology or sociology or even ethics.

...revealed... — Astorre

Ok, so you are saying that the hammerness is already there in the thing, logically prior to the use as a hammer; and that the use brings out the hammerness.

Why not go the whole hog and say that there is no "hammerness", no property of being a hammer already there; but that what happens is that we decide that it counts as a hammer, basically for our own purposes. That there is no "hammerness already there in the thing".

Hammerness is just an example — Astorre

Sure.

Does hammerness inhere in the hammer, or is it something we attribute to the hammer?

Is hammerness a permanent, even essential, part of the hammer, or is it something we do with and attribute to the hammer?

Examples of measurements without consciousness:

• A photon hitting a photographic plate and causing a chemical reaction
• Cosmic rays interacting with particles in space
• Radioactive decay triggering a Geiger counter in an empty room
• DNA mutations caused by radiation

Each collapses the wave function. None involve consciousness.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y

I did. You speak of "Hammerness". I don't think that helpful. You have the "hammerness" being "revealed" by its use. Better to drop "hammerness" all together and just have that thing being used to hammer as our reason for saying that it is a hammer.

It's not revealed, since that implies that it was a hammer apart from it's use as a hammer. Better to say attributed.

We include that in the set of hammers. It isn't in the set of hammers apart from our so including it.

Some folk would have you believe that consciousness is what collapses the wave function. It isn't. The function is collapsed when measured.

I'm confused. I'd understood from your previous account that, as it were, being a hammer is something we do with that - an attribute, as put it.

But now you are back to talking about a somewhat mysterious notion of "hammerness".

...the hammer is revealed in its use... — Astorre

As if it were a hammer already, apart from our attribution.

You seem to have rid yourself of properties only to reintroduce them.

an icon of what science is about — Ludwig V

Oh, yes. But when one looks closely, it turns out to be difficult to say what sort of thing a cause is, and to describe actual science in causal terms. Like the scientific method, we know what it is until we try to say how it works.

there are reasons for thinking that deductive certainty is not all that it is cracked up to be. — Ludwig V

Yep. TheOP's framework assumes that genuine explanation must bottom out in metaphysical causes. But this misses how much successful science operates at other explanatory levels entirely.

Are you saying that we should stop talking about causes altogether, or that we need to re-think the concept of causation? — Ludwig V

I'd favour the more humble point, that cause is overrated if it is considered to be the only, or even the most important, explanation. When causation is master, non- causal explanations are forced into casual form, as when ethics is seen as mere biology, or maths aw psychology; Non-causal structures and patterns are missed; or worst case, folk mistake the absence of a causal explanation for the absence of any explanation at all.

...underdetermination is the space for research and discovery — Ludwig V

Yep. That willingness to live with and investigate the precariousness inherent in the absence of deductive certainty is more than just science; it's the human condition" "I don't know, buy I'll take a look"

Somethgn like that, anyway.

Well, in pure set theory a and b are sets too, because it's sets all the way down. — litewave

Well, trivially, yes, since pure set theory is about nothing but sets of sets and the empty set.

a and b are sets too? — litewave

No, but {a} and {b} are.

Chairs are collections too. — litewave

We'd have to look into Wittgenstien's analysis of simples here, and ask if the chair or the leg or the table set is the individual.

A step too far, I think, for this thread.

"abstract" objects — litewave

I spoke a bit about how we might define "abstract" here - that we have a and b and then add the abstract item {a,b} without adding anything to the domain - it still contains just a and b, but we can talk as if there were an abstract thing {a,b}.

I was responding to your post in which you used the phrase "reified metaphysical entities". I understood them simply as real entities. — litewave

Cool. Too many words, too many crossed discussions. The aim might be to be clear about what the individuals we are talking about are.

So we can talk about a and b. And we can change the game a bit and talk about {a,b}. And in one way we have added a new thing to the conversation, yet in another way we are still just talking about a and b. We may be tempted to ask which way is real, but perhaps that question is irrelevant provided we talk clearly.

Chairs are collections too. — litewave

There's a whole new barrel of fish.

Yep.

I interact with collections of objects all the time. — litewave

Sure. Just not in the way you interact with chairs. Different domains.

I have always treated sets as real metaphysical entities. So if properties were sets, then properties would be real too. If properties are not sets, I am not sure if properties are real, but I tend to think they are. — litewave

Do you want me to go on?

What is a real metaphysical entity as contrasted with a real entity? What does the word "metaphysical" do here?

What is a real metaphysical entity as contrasted with a metaphysical entity? What does the word "real" do here?

So what more do we have then "I have always treated sets as entities", which seems quite agreeable.

Just leave aside the baggage of "real" and "Metaphysical".

So if properties were sets, then properties would be real too. — litewave

So instead think about these issues in terms of sets, with all the clarity of the formal apparatus that invokes, and just drop the use of "property", or use it as an anachronistic approximation.

If properties are not sets, I am not sure if properties are real, but I tend to think they are. — litewave

What does it mean to say they are real? What more can we do with real properties that we can't do just with properties? Or much better, with talk of sets or predicates?

This stuff:

What's curious here is how "the property of..." serves to confuse things. The very grammar of "the property of..." encourages us to think we're talking about entities when we're really just manipulating linguistic constructions. — Banno

This is the legacy of syllogistic logic. Since it can only deal in terms of "All S are P", "Some S are P", and so on, it obliges the user to think in terms of substances having properties. It squeezes the world in to an ontology of things and properties. Scholastic metaphysics elaborated on this logical limitation by inventing essences, accidents, substance and so on.

We now have better logical tools for dealing with all of this stuff. The answer on offer to ↪litewave is not to identify properties with sets but to drop talk of properties for talk of sets and predication and extension. Indeed, that is probably the intuition behind the OP.
a day ago — Banno

Odd.

You think she should throw it out on the basis of of her imaginings?

Yes, because my attempt to treat the set and the property as one and the same object seems to have failed. — litewave

But I hope you see that your intuition - that having the property of being red and being a member of the set of red things say much the same thing - remains valid?

That sets are objects in the ontology of set theory. — litewave

And so long as you do not expect to bump in to them as you walk down the street, that's fine, isn't it? What is needed is to keep track of which domain is which.

I think the intuition in the OP is quite right, and in a rough line with Quine and indeed pretty much all of more recent logic.

Cheers. Respect.

Mary Tiles (a philosopher of math) says she can imagine mathematicians ditching set theory someday. — frank

And I hope has the sense not to ditch it yet?

Well, they are, a bit. :wink: — bongo fury

:lol:

Which is why these threads are neverending.

I wanted to say that the set is the common property of its elements. — litewave

Thanks for the clarity.

To my eye, this reifies the property, making it a thing alongside the elements of the set.

That is, you now have the set and the property, separately, and are apparently defining the set in terms of the property.

But of course we could then stipulate a set with no common properties.

I had taken you as proposing to eliminate properties in favour of sets. I would agree with that. But it seems you have something else in mind.

And I'm not at all sure what.

I thought this was what Banno was pointing out to you 4 years ago? — bongo fury

Me, too.

But in set theory, sets do add to ontology. — litewave

What does this mean?

Here's one way to look at it. We have the domain <a,b>. The only items in that domain are a and b. Constructing the set {a,b} does not add to the domain. It does not add {a,b} to the domain.

Are you eliminating properties in favour of sets (which I would support), or making sets into reified metaphysical entities that ground properties?

One of the problems here was a classic for Tones - the move from formal exposition to philosophical exposition. The OP makes that move, by equating the formality of set theory with the informality of properties. So we are a bit stuck with it.