Based on physics, what insights do you make about reality?

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{I'd said}
I've also told why I prefer to use the {quote}...{unquote} method.

I prefer it because I like the larger text.
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{You replied}
It doesn't appear to be working though.
{unquote}

On the contrary, it's working perfectly.

When I quote with the {You said}...{unquote} format, the quoted text is as large as the rest of the message's text.

The {You said}...{unquote} format demarcates quotes. That's all it's intended to do.

Obviously there many ways the quotes could be demarcated. This is just the one that I've chosen.

Michael829

Please, could you Bold the {quote}...{unquote} ?

Claradoon--

Yes, that's a good idea, and I'll start doing that.

Thanks for the suggestion,.

Michael829

If something is hypothetical it's a possibility, not a fact. What am I missing here?



I entered the terms "Faraday, Tippler and Tegmark, hypothetical facts", and found this.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... physics/p1

Written by you? I'll readily admit to not being as familiar with these ideas as I perhaps should be, and I'm probably misunderstanding quite a bit of it simply because we seem to be using some common terms (like 'hypothetical', and 'facts') differently.



So it forms what one could call it's own reference frame, the internal consistency being all that is required. Correct?



I think that perhaps I should read that article I linked to in order to find out more about these ideas that, admittedly, are rather new to me. Whilst I have an interest in philosophical questions (among many, many other things - I'm almost the opposite to the stereotypical "Aspie" when it comes to my profound lack of having any "obsessions"), there is still a great deal that I find hard to accept (like your dismissal of the concept of consciousness), which may simply be due to my current inability to appreciate your perspective.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you are 100% correct about the claims you present here, what are the consequences for all of us personally?



The implication(s) being... ?



Yes.



Yes, the belief in an objective reality of "things" that exist "out there" in some kind of real world, is actually little more than a working assumption, one that many of us just accept because it is, for our purposes, useful to do so.



That's a possibility.



Precisely!

Like you, I am always deeply suspicious of anyone who resorts to the useless cop out of "oh, it (whatever "it" may happen to be) is just a brute fact". The belief in brute facts is based entirely upon blind faith.



Yes, I'll have to look at that document, as soon as I finish typing this, which will be...

now.

Okay, that clears things up a bit.



It's entirely possible that I didn't see it. It happens to me sometimes that something that is staring me in the face will be overlooked. I don't know why this happens.



Yes, I agree with the above.



I've never practiced meditation, nor taken any mind-altering substances of any kind, so I won't comment on this.



Within the context of the above paragraph, what do you mean by "alien", and "alienness"?

The logic and emotion of these regions seem familiar but yet very strange and not quite human, ie. more mechanical.

The best example I could think of maybe might be what you have (assuming) experienced while you were falling asleep or waking up - ie. where the ideas of what felt like it made perfect sense at the time was some type of occult mathematics or numerology-type of thing that you either forget the moment you wake up enough to give it clear thought or can't make heads or tails of when you fully wake up.

Good catch.

It really sounds like he's saying something almost identical to Tom Campbell's 'No Man's Sky' rendering of a virtual world with the if-then rendering suggestion. My own disagreement with Tom Campbell, or why I don't think it's as clean of an analogy, is I don't think the list of players is as neat or clean, that is almost nothing you look at really counts as an npc and the best cases for npc material are the things I'm looking at around my room which, plenty of it came as byproducts from things that weren't npc (great example - the wood for my desk and dressers).

I think that has actually happened to me. There was one dream I had where a character unknown to me (I always dream about people I have never actually met in this world) was explaining something very complex and mathematical that, whilst in the dream, I understood perfectly, but upon awakening couldn't even recall the content of. I felt at the time that it was something extremely important, but I just couldn't remember it. Very frustrating. It might have been my chance for a Nobel Prize!

I would have responded to this earlier but it wasn't obvious that your post was addressed to me since it lacked the quote boxes with my name on them. If your only complaint with quote boxes is size then just use the [ size=number] attribute (but without the space). Just to demonstrate I will use that here on your quotes.

That is a matter of semantics. What I care about is if there is a simulated version of this world and a real version of this world then if the person in charge of the simulation decided to blow up the Earth then would this Earth that I'm currently standing on explode? Just because things are identical doesn't mean that they are the same thing, you can have two of something without then being one thing because they are identical. You can indeed create something that already exists, that's called duplication.


Citations needed.


Observe as well as change it without changing the real one because it's not the real one.


I beg to differ. I may be a materialist, an atheist, and a moderate liberal but above all that I am an empiricist which is why I never completely rule out the possibility of anything. I am 99.9999% sure that the universe was not created 12 seconds ago but I can never know that for sure. I would also say I'm about 90% sure that there is no God and 70% sure that the universe is not a simulation, you will never catch me saying that I'm 100% sure about anything.


You keep saying "the truth of the matter" as if you have the slightest clue what's going on. You were thrown into this confusing universe and had to learn to pretend what's going on just like the rest of us. Under empyracism you can never be 100% of anything and the only way I know to get that sure about anything is the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is why I don't trust people who claim to have the absolute truth as a general rule.


I am indeed saying that the position that reincarnation doesn't exist is the falsifiable one. Sure, there may be forms of reincarnation that are not experimentally verifiable but there are also potentially verifiable forms that are which don't necessarily have to be verifiable through memories going with you. The point is that it might be falsifiable, which is better then the alternative completely logically unfalsifiable position.


The problem I have with that is without an ability to communicate back to the living it's about as pointless as finding out what's in a black hole by diving inside. I guess I did make a false dichotomy though between no afterlife and reincarnation, there is stuff like the Christian afterlife which I didn't think to consider. Of those 3 (and potentially unlimited more) options I will still default to not believing in any kind of afterlife because that is the most falsifiable position, because it will be falsified by any evidence of any afterlife of any kind while any particular afterlife can only be falsified by evidence of any kind of afterlife minus one since proving the nonexistence of something such as an afterlife is impossible. My argument still stands if you replace "reincarnation" with "afterlife".


A snowball's chance in hell is better then logically impossible. In a world with no afterlife the only way to correctly assume that would be if it were the default position but in a world with any sort of afterlife there could potentially be ways to find out even if the starting assumption is there there is no afterlife, therefore starting by assuming the nonexistence of an afterlife gives the maximum probability of being right.


And we can agree on that, but what I'm saying is that the lack of evidence for any afterlife is most consistent with there being no afterlife. I never claimed to know which position is correct, I am just claiming that going with the most falsifiable position maximizes your probability of ending up right weather that means assuming correctly or becoming right in the face of new evidence falsifying your current position.


That is certainly an unusual position that I would love to see your supporting evidence for. If it has anything to do with intuition or it just "seeming right" then I'm going to stop you right now before you even begin because quantum mechanics and relativity seem pretty absurd (understatement of the century) and that doesn't stop them from making predictions consistent with observable reality which is about as correct as something can be under empiricism.



And I don't claim to have proof that there is no reincarnation.

-mikeman7918

Techstepgener8ion:
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{You said}
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speculation without experience to base it on like building philosophic card castles on sand, or really a stack of shifting 'should's (unless a person's really dead-set on keeping those stable by refusing to learn anything more once they build that card castle).
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[…]
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without empiricism, ie. experience of some type to verify the claims, it's all just spit-balling.
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{unquote}
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Oops! You forgot to share with us which statement, premise or conclusion of mine didn’t have empirical support that it needed.
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Here are some questions for you (but only if you want to support what you said):
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1. (as mentioned above) Which statement, premise or conclusion of mine didn’t have empirical support that it needed?
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2. What metaphysics has better empirical support than Skepticism (the metaphysics that I prose)?
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3. What sort of philosophically-relevant empirical experience(s) have you had?
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4. What would be an example of a philosophical conclusion that you’ve reached from empirical evidence?
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5.. In your belief, does empiricism contradict the metaphysics that I’ve proposed? If so, what evidence does, and how does it?
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As for what propose:
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My metaphysics is founded on a system of inter-referring if-then facts, which are about hypothetical facts.
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(It’s true that a “hypothetical fact” isn’t, strictly-speaking, a fact. But an if-then fact can be a valid, inevitably-true fact, though its “if” clause (and therefore its “then” clause) is hypothetical. The if-then fact’s relation between those two hypotheticals can be a genuine fact.)
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I emphasize that if-then facts relating hypotheticals can be inevitable and indisputable facts. “If it rains tomorrow, the ground will get wet.” The rain tomorrow is hypothetical. So is the wetting of the ground, which might not happen (if it doesn’t rain tomorrow). But the overall if-then fact that relates those two hypotheticals is a certainty (assuming that no one has covered all the ground with a tarp).
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Likewise abstract logical facts and mathematical theorems. No empirical evidence needed.
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Not all if-then facts are surely-true facts. Some are hypothetical, and are part of the “if” clause of other if-then facts.
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Such are physical laws.
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But the point is that all of this is founded upon hypotheticals, and if-then facts that relate those hypotheticals.
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In other words, none of it needs “empirical evidence”.
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To demand “empirical evidence” for abstract facts is inappropriate and ridiculous.
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If you want things that can be empirically-observed with a geiger-counter, a caliper, a micrometer, a spectrometer, etc., then are you aware that this forum is for politics, religion and philosophy? You might be happier at the forum that discusses science.
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But it can be said that Skepticism isn’t empirically-contradicted.
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Neither is Materialism.
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But Materialism makes an assumption, posits a brute-fact, that isn’t inevitable and doesn’t have any justification or supporting-evidence, empirical or otherwise.
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Michael829

I'm answering posts in their chronological order. So if I implied that you didn't specify something, but you specified it in a later post that I haven't answered yet, then I'll find that out, and reply, when I get to that more recent post.

Michael829

{I’d said}
Hypothetical facts are still facts even without an objectively-existent “something else” to “describe”.
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{You replied}
If something is hypothetical it's a possibility, not a fact. What am I missing here?
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True, it sounds like a contradiction-in-terms.
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When I say “hypothetical fact”, meaning “maybe-fact”, I’m not referring to an indisputable fact, but only to a hypothetically-supposed fact. …like the one in the “if” clause of an if-then clause.
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{I’d said}
What Faraday, Tippler and Tegmark pointed was that hypothetical facts, and if-then facts about them, have the same consequences, results, relation and events as the supposed objectively existent physical world that they “describe”.
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{You replied}
I entered the terms "Faraday, Tippler and Tegmark, hypothetical facts", and found this.

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https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... physics/p1

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Written by you?
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Yes, that was I.
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I eventually decided that The Philosophy Forum wasn’t a productive discussion-place, because everyone was already committed to a particular philosophy, or to the academic status-quo of relativism and perpetual inconclusive discussion.
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Yes, my term “hypothetical facts” can be regarded as a contradiction in terms. I hope that, above, I clarified what I meant by it.
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{I’d said}
Remember, I’m not saying that any of this has or needs any objective reality, existence, meaning, or factualness. It doesn’t have or need any reality, existence, factualness or reference outside of its own inter-referring context.
{unquote}

{You said}
So it forms what one could call it's own reference frame, the internal consistency being all that is required. Correct?
{unquote}
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Yes. That’s all it takes for a universe, a physical world. …with no need for objective or outside/globally-recognized existence or reality. To whom need it be real, other than to us?
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It need only be real to its inhabitants, who perceive it as real because it’s the context of their lives. It’s as real and existent as they are.
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About my dismissal of Consciousness, I mean that I dismiss the notion of Consciousness as a separate entity, different from the body. As I tell it, there’s just the animal, which might be a human animal. As we deal with our lives, and the things that we have to do in our daily lives, we perceive ourselves and eachother as the person, not a two-part combo of Consciousness and Body.
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And the scientist observing and analyzing an animal knows that, even with the help of the best instrumentation, he can’t instrumentally observe Consciousness or the animal’s 1st-person experience in that examination. He can observe an animal doing this or that. …just as we humans perceive a need or preference to do this or that.
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So I feel that the notion of separate Consciousness and Body is an artificial, and completely unnecessary, complication of something that’s really simple. …a tendency characteristic of Western philosophy.
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…a fiction, a mythology, which I call Spiritualism.

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{You continued}
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you are 100% correct about the claims you present here, what are the consequences for all of us personally?
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For one thing, it saves us a lot of time wasted on trying to find and understand the elusive “Consciousness”.
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Consider the immense amount of time, and other people’s money, that academic philosophers have wasted on their Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness. (…but I don’t claim that they don’t benefit from that.)
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I feel that clarification and simplification are good, for their own sake.
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That goes for my metaphysics, that I call Skepticism, too.
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It (like other versions of Eliminative Ontic Structuralism) is a tremendous simplification. …quite eliminating assumptions. …entirely Ockham-parsimonious.
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Those would be justifications enough.
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But I feel that there are other personal consequences too. …more difficult to put in words.
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(By “Materialism” I refer to the belief in Materialists’ fundamentally, independently, objectively existent physical world, with its objectively existent “Stuff”. Though superfluous if true, it doesn’t contradict Skepticism, because that “Stuff” could still superfluously be here. By “Exclusive-Materialism” I mean the position that tries or pretends to believe that Materialism’s world comprises Reality. Exclusive-Materialism is more extreme, and, (as stated elsewhere) obvious insupportable bullsh*t. But I guess all Materialists are Exclusive-Materialists.)
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The traditional Exclusive-Materialism (when Materialists won’t even admit that there is anything else) is gloomy, dismal, pessimistic. …and obvious insupportable bullsh*t.
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{I’d said}
It isn’t at all in doubt that there are these infinitely-many systems of inter-referring if-thens.
There’s no particular reason to believe that our physical world consists of anything else, other than one such hypothetical inter-referring system.
{unquote}
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{You replied}
The implication(s) being... ?
{unquote}
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Simplicity. Openness.
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A dropping of Exclusive-Materialism’s oppressive, dismal, gloomy pessimism.
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It isn’t any surprise that Materialists and Scientificists have such Nihilism and angst.
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We agree about declarative grammar’s objectively-existent physical world, with its objectively-existent “Stuff”.
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Yes, belief in a brute-fact is faith-based.
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Michael829

So of the two options (a simulation or God) you give the simulation hypothesis a higher probability? If our reality really were nothing more than just a simulation, then the simulator(s) would themselves be godlike for us. I myself am about 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% certain that we are NOT living in a simulation, for it raises, among many other things, the question of whether or not the simulators themselves are being simulated, and why they would even want to simulate us in the first place. Then of course there is the question of whether the human mind is even capable of being simulated (which I seriously doubt).

Didn't forget, I just prefer to get responses rather than anticipate them when we're on such wide-open planes.


For as tough as it's been to read between the lines, it seems like you've bought into something like a model of panpsychism where each atom or subatomic particle is both consciousness and a physical artifact. You also seem to imply that emergence is all materialist hand-waiving or that suggesting that there's a separate mind/body is something that should be looked at as 'spiritualist'. As far as I can tell, emergence doesn't necessarily need to be a blunt appearance of something so much as it can be a useful model for how such groupings collate to one another to form more advanced and versatile systems. It's a bit like how ribozymes can behave almost like simple animals when they really aren't even cells, yet when you get various RNA behaving in complex manners into cells, then into larger structures - then us - you get something with a set of features, based on resources, that wasn't quite possible before.

My problem right now is seeing where you go with the esoteric side of this - ie. as if our ability to track our surroundings gets drawn and quartered as our bodies break down. I've seen too much evidence that very self-aware consciousness exists without physical embodiment as we'd usually think of it and it seems like there's enough information out there with respect to NDE's and the like to suggest that most people aren't going through the sort of no-identity fog that you're suggesting.


I'm still not even sure what you mean by that. If you're talking about you're if-then structures we still need to hear more about what that breaks down to on a practical level. I'm seeing too many veils here - particularly with respect to the notion of gaining a working knowledge of consciousness. I don't understand why that would have to be an inherently 'materialist' endeavor. I also got reminded, seeing a recent interview with Stuart Hameroff, that there are sound medical reasons for trying to understand consciousness - especially in the areas of treating mental illness. As far as trying to discuss culture or advancement that would probably be beyond the scope of this response but I also think and understanding of consciousness is critical for us to make good decisions going forward, especially knowing in what ways we can help ourselves better adapt to the environment that we're creating with the rapid pace of technological advancement and just how much that's changing how we interact and 'do' culture.


- At least two vivid Isis/Mary encounters.
- Being woken up in the middle of the night on several occasions by beings who were playing with me, articulating touch through nerves in my skin.
- Two situations where I felt an energetic presence enter through the top of my head and push its way down through the soles of my feet. When I say entered - I mean that it burrowed/tunneled through layers of resistance, I felt my body convulsing, and the first time it happened I was awakened by those convulsions.
- Several occasions where it felt like something akin to an energetic goldfish was swimming around my abdomen.
- Having my heart give off a glowing sensation, so much so that it felt like it was flapping energetic wings almost out of my chest with a sort of beautiful excitement.
- Having had dreams where my whole body and mind sensed another bubble, something foreign to me, trying to ram its way into my identity.
- Having had my sense of touch extend out to two or three feet beyond my body in every direction and being able to feel something like a visualization and the affect display of beings within that field.
- Having had a moment of deep self-critique where something pushing hope within me separated out, gave a silent cry of anguish, and (again - through touch on my nerves) wrapped its arms around me on consolation.

My argument's not that you should simply believe any of the above, but that to a degree this stuff is accessible and I think years of snarling scientism has caused us to give up on that to figure that we can flesh out what we can't see with educated guesses. In my experience a lot of this really doesn't map fully onto intuition and that's where I really don't trust that a strictly logic-based system would get at this properly, ie. a purely logic-based system won't surprise you or throw you any curveballs the way a scientific experiment, or an occult magical experiment for that matter, could.



Admittedly I have no idea whether these experiences are exactly what they present as but most of this suggests to me that conscious systems can swim through one another, join and separate, when one joins you can't even really tell once that happens unless that merge is broken (in that last example by a profound enough disagreement on something - and even there I think it was more just pushed to an extreme hyphenation), and none of that really squares away for me with the suggestion that we're locked in to our subatomic particles or that we'd diffuse into a sort of vague I AM-ness with no memory, basking in eternity, until we re-embody. What it suggests to me is that consciousness is either in dynamic systems themselves, or free to move through them at will. Either way I don't see the tethering.


Just what I mentioned above. On a side note though I really meant what I said about materialism back on the second page of this thread. IMHO it's too incoherent to even be looked at as a thing to be avoided. At best it's a claim that things which have been vetted scientifically are special, and I think when 18th century Newtonian physics broke down it was subsumed by scientism but somehow still kept the same name.



If the universe were as uncomplicated and easy to understand as any Joe on the internet, or any in history, would have thought - science would be redundant to philosophy and wouldn't be needed. As it stands there may be competing theories in philosophy, scientific experiment comes to bear on that topic and either edifies one at the expense of the other or may even crush all of the competing hypotheses with something which was too odd to be expected.

That's where I think philosophy really can't be a stand-in for science. Philosophy has no place for projecting or anticipating the truly counter-intuitive and anytime you'd run into the truly counter-intuitive, reflexively by its nature, you'd have no reason to surmise it - rather any person, without knowing facts that are yet to be known, would pave right over the paradoxes with what seem to be perfectly sound and reasonable expectations. Expectations and actualities rarely quite map the way we think they would - hence, I think for good reason, I don't trust any theory advancing toward a TOE because they're almost always drastic overreaches.

In a more humorous example - Steven C Meyer quite powerfully demonstrated that Intelligent Design was real in Signature in the Cell, and he did so with all kinds of statistical justifications for how short the half-lives or the components in RNA and DNA are, what their likelihoods were of bonding in the right order, and he came to a figure that stripped the maximum calculated number of atoms in the universe. All of that sails smoothly of course if his assumptions are correct, but man - that's one killer 'if'.


At your current rate you'll probably read my conversation with Lintar about what I meant by empiricism by tomorrow or Monday. This is also why I don't like throwing wall-texts up, they're almost never worth the effort and even when you think the effort might be justified you're taking a gamble as to whether anyone will even read it.


Which again - I don't think most people using the word 'materialism' really know what it means, to the extent they do I find that they can't stand the word 'scientism' mainly because they sense it's a direct synonym, and at the end of the day I think it's just a big mound of internalized brow-beating by people they've been trained to think are higher-status, know their stuff, therefore their dogmas should be taken as canon.

As far as skepticism though, I'm still not sure what you're getting out of it. I understand skepticism in the usual sense of the word - ie. testing outlandish claims, most of the time they're wrong but sometimes they're right, other times if it gets flung too wildly you get things as strange as round-earth skepticism, and at the end of the day I just see it as a tool - ie. hammers are great on nails, not so great on your own forehead - maybe someone else's if they earned it. To try and say that you mean skepticism as 'if-then statements are the bread and butter of reality' - I don't feel like you've walked through what that means well enough to even make a particularly educated comment on it.

I think the only things I'd suggest here, which gets back to my quip earlier - is that there are more tools available in evaluating the flow of consciousness in the universe, what it's doing, or even what it's behavior suggests about it's relationship to matter, than beating Kant against Hegel against Heidegger all day.

I accidentally posted a message on page 6, that was box-quote addressed to the wrong individual.

I can't delete the message altogether, but I've deleted the text, and replaced it with this announcement.

I deleted the text so that there won't be duplicate posts.

The reply, to mikeman, addressed properly this time, is posted on page 7 now (just before this post, if this post appears on page 7).

Michael829

Last edited by Michael829 on 10 Sep 2017, 7:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I'm not mikeman7918.