Religion and Ethics Forum
Religion and Ethics Discussion => Philosophy, in all its guises. => Topic started by: Sriram on November 04, 2019, 05:36:31 AM
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Hi everyone,
A hundred year old question.... 'Does a tree falling in a forest, make a sound'?
This is a valid question and points to the nature and limitations of our perceptions.
Any views?
Sriram
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Probably, since in a forest there are likely to be animals that have the biology to experience the physical changes caused by the fall of the tree as an auditory event.
If there are no such animals then nothing will experience the fall of the tree as an auditory event, so no sound will be heard by anything - but the tree will still fall and the physical changes that could be experienced as sound will still happen.
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Hi everyone,
A hundred year old question.... 'Does a tree falling in a forest, make a sound'?
This is a valid question and points to the nature and limitations of our perceptions.
Any views?
Sriram
hi sriram
I like this question , it has far reaching implications even if you remove the human/ creature element from it .
In one of Richard Feynmans books (forgot the title or where I've left it ) he says if there were no receptors / receivers no information would be emitted
ie , electrons changing course would not emit light if there were nothing to recieve it !
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If Sriram is alone in a forest and attempts an argument, is it still logically false?
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Time for some Berkeley limericks
http://faculty.otterbein.edu/AMills/EarlyModern/brklim.htm
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And of course Gary Larson
“If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?”
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If Sriram is alone in a forest and attempts an argument, is it still logically false?
;D
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A hundred year old question.... 'Does a tree falling in a forest, make a sound'?
This is a valid question and points to the nature and limitations of our perceptions.
Any views?
Sriram
Yes. Sound is the variation of air-pressure, regardless of whether someone's there to hear it. A falling tree, impacting on surfaces, transfers sound energy to the surrounding air - there is sound.
O.
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It's one of the all time great thought experiments, but I always feel it's a bit of a deepity. There are certainly impacts in terms of some interpretations of physics but rather like the double-slit experiment, people try and drag it out of context and apply the idea even if it doesn't fit elsewhere. Berkeley's idealism is not 'refuted' Johnson-like (Samuel in this case rather than the liar that is PM) by kicking a stone, but it is illustrated as being mostly unimportant to anyone's day to day life.
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Yes. Sound is the variation of air-pressure, regardless of whether someone's there to hear it. A falling tree, impacting on surfaces, transfers sound energy to the surrounding air - there is sound.
O.
Sound is caused by the variation in air pressure...yes. But it isn't air pressure. Variation in air pressure by itself does not create any sound. Sound is the sensation created in the brain after the ear drums vibrate and pass on that impulse to the brain.
In other words, there is nothing that we can call 'sound' in the objective world, except in terms of our experience. 'Sound' is an experience not an objective fact.
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Sound is caused by the variation in air pressure...yes. But it isn't air pressure. Variation in air pressure by itself does not create any sound. Sound is the sensation created in the brain after the ear drums vibrate and pass on that impulse to the brain.
No, sound is the variation in the air pressure - I have a machine, without a brain, that measures sound so that I can check people aren't being exposed to hazardous levels of it.
In other words, there is nothing that we can call 'sound' in the objective world, except in terms of our experience. 'Sound' is an experience not an objective fact.
We have an experience of sound, but the sound exists without us. We know this, because; the sound travels the distance between the tree and the ear, it doesn't just magically appear in the brain; the sound causes a physical response in the ear-drum and ear-canal before we sense and interpret it.
Sound exists, sound transmits energy to objects; some of those objects (i.e. ears) are linked to brains which can then sense the nerve signals generated in response to the sound, but the sound has to come first.
O.
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Outy,
We have an experience of sound, but the sound exists without us. We know this, because; the sound travels the distance between the tree and the ear, it doesn't just magically appear in the brain; the sound causes a physical response in the ear-drum and ear-canal before we sense and interpret it.
Sound exists, sound transmits energy to objects; some of those objects (i.e. ears) are linked to brains which can then sense the nerve signals generated in response to the sound, but the sound has to come first.
Is that quite right? Outside of our brains isn’t it true to say there is no sound, no colour, no smell – rather there is air compression, electromagnetic radiation, aromatic molecules that our brains interpret as experiences we call sound, colour and smell?
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Sound is caused by the variation in air pressure...yes. But it isn't air pressure. Variation in air pressure by itself does not create any sound. Sound is the sensation created in the brain after the ear drums vibrate and pass on that impulse to the brain.
In other words, there is nothing that we can call 'sound' in the objective world, except in terms of our experience. 'Sound' is an experience not an objective fact.
Actually the word "sound" is ambiguous, it can refer to either. I'm with NS on this, it's just deepity.
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It might seem like deepity now because we've all been to school and learned a bit of physics and biology, but that doesn't stop sounds sounding like they're 'out there'. Presumably for most of human history people assumed that sound (as we experience it) really was out there. If you could time travel back and tell them it wasn't they'd probably think you were mad.
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It might seem like deepity now because we've all been to school and learned a bit of physics and biology, but that doesn't stop sounds sounding like they're 'out there'. Presumably for most of human history people assumed that sound (as we experience it) really was out there. If you could time travel back and tell them it wasn't they'd probably think you were mad.
I disagree that that's an easy statement to make about people in the past but it essentially misses the point about why it's a deepity. It's that on a day to day basis it's unimportant. As per the example often given that we don't actually touch things. it's not that people didn't know enough science, it's that it's just on most levels deeply uninteresting.
To take another example, free will, most people might well think some of the many discussions were mad, but it doesn't necessarily mean that listening to them can make any difference. As I've oft quoted before on this 'Of course I believe in free will, I have no choice'. The difference between our hearing something, and the vibrations is not something to build anything upon.
ETA - and it's certainly not something to build either Berkeley's idealism or a strong anthropic principle on. This is just people seeing an ambiguity and claiming it is way more significant than it could ever be - hence a deepity.
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I've just looked up deepity and discovered it has a very specific meaning I hadn't been aware of. I'm quite happy to leave you to decide what is or isn't a deepity. Are you sure a thought experiment qualifies? According to the definitions I found a deepity is a kind of assertion or statement.
We experience the world as if it's actually out there as we experience it, in and of itself - colours, sounds and so on. Discovering that this isn't so is pretty interesting, I think, even if it may not be practically important in daily life.
Re free will, I wouldn't agree that thinking about it doesn't make a difference. It's helped me to be more accepting of myself and other people, a bit less judgemental.
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I've just looked up deepity and discovered it has a very specific meaning I hadn't been aware of. I'm quite happy to leave you to decide what is or isn't a deepity. Are you sure a thought experiment qualifies? According to the definitions I found a deepity is a kind of assertion or statement.
We experience the world as if it's actually out there as we experience it, in and of itself - colours, sounds and so on. Discovering that this isn't so is pretty interesting, I think, even if it may not be practically important in daily life.
Re free will, I wouldn't agree that thinking about it doesn't make a difference. It's helped me to be more accepting of myself and other people, a bit less judgemental.
To take one definition - 'A superficial equivocation which only seems to be profound'. I think the question rests on the equivocation of the ambiguity of meaning of sound as covered by Stranger, that it's had a question mark stuck at the end of it, doesn't to me change that equivocation.
It's certainly interesting and in some cases could be significant - i.e. that the earth isn't flat. I just don't see there's much that you add beyond that. There's a tendency to see 'mystery' as an excuse to build on ideas because of the ambiguity with no justification.
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Is that quite right? Outside of our brains isn’t it true to say there is no sound, no colour, no smell – rather there is air compression, electromagnetic radiation, aromatic molecules that our brains interpret as experiences we call sound, colour and smell?
Sound is the variation in air pressure just like light is the variation in electro-magnetic field - they are there whether we are there to sense them or not, whether we have equipment in place to measure them or not.
It's not a message until it's interpreted - information theory make distinct the data and the information, in this instance the sound and the song/words/identification of the noise, but the noise is there already.
O.
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No, sound is the variation in the air pressure - I have a machine, without a brain, that measures sound so that I can check people aren't being exposed to hazardous levels of it.
Technically, your machine measures the energy of pressure waves in air to make sure they aren't harmful to the machinery we use to interpret and experience them as sound.
There's an ambiguity in the way in which "sound" is defined. It can either mean the experience we have when air pressure waves hit our ears or it can mean the air pressure waves themselves. You've gone for the latter definition, but it doesn't make it wrong for somebody else to choose the former definition.
As for the tree in a forest, your definition makes the question uninteresting. The answer is yes.
The other definition leads to a marginally more interesting discussion but the answer is no. Trees falling don't ever make sounds, they make pressure waves that brains interpret as sounds.
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Technically, your machine measures the energy of pressure waves in air to make sure they aren't harmful to the machinery we use to interpret and experience them as sound.
You can't measure 'energy' without a mechanism - that mechanism, what we're measuring in this instance, is sound. It's not measuring the energy, as there is heat and light energy in there that are being completely ignored. We're measuring variations in air pressure, those measurements are calibrated to give a ration output which we can use to gauge the extent of the energy being transmitted.
There's an ambiguity in the way in which "sound" is defined. It can either mean the experience we have when air pressure waves hit our ears or it can mean the air pressure waves themselves. You've gone for the latter definition, but it doesn't make it wrong for somebody else to choose the former definition.
I've included the second, I've not excluded the former from the definition - it's not so much an ambiguous term as it's a term with a general and a technical meaning (like, say, 'theory'). To exclude the second meaning is wrong; to presume the definition includes the second is not.
As for the tree in a forest, your definition makes the question uninteresting. The answer is yes.
The question is fairly uninteresting; if you are including the sense of sound as waves of air pressure then it's a simple yes, if you're using the definition of an interpretation of those waves then you're arbitrarily creating an artificial distinction. Without the sense of variations of air pressure we wouldn't have the sense of hearing to have the other definition of sound; it's not a concept that can exist in isolation from the source phenomenon.
O.
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Hi everyone,
I can't understand why some of you are dismissing this as a some sort of a minor phenomenon, which is of no importance to us. Nothing affects our day to day life...even evolution, Big Bang, Black Holes, Higgs Boson....and yet these are considered as important ways of understanding our world and our life.
Similarly, understanding the fact that, what we regard as the external objective world, is just our internal experience and not actually 'real', is a very important realization.
Definitions are fine. But it is a fact that 'sound' is an experience and not an external fact. Similarly with vision, smell and taste.
We tend to imagine that even without our senses and neural connections the world will appear and sound the same, just that we will not be able to see or interact. This is not correct.
In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine what the world would be like without our vision or hearing or taste or smell. What we see and hear is not the objective reality. Our faculties are just our interface with the real world, which enable certain perceptions. This is not the reality.
The sense of 'touch' is a little more complicated. Without our sense of touch we may not be able to feel things around us, but we would still knock against them, I suppose. But even in this, without our body and sense of touch (suppose we were body less persons in some way), whether objects will retain their shape and form I am not sure. Viruses and electrons will see the world very differently.
Take Dark Matter as an example, such large mass of matter (five time more abundant than normal matter) is completely undetected by us, because it does not interact with normal matter. So, if we could see and feel Dark Matter how the world would look and feel it is impossible to say.
Detection is important...and is the only way we can experience the world.
This is not some small philosophical point, it is about what we are and whether we actually see and hear 'reality' or not. It is clear that we don't see the world 'as it is' (whatever that might mean).
We have a certain interface through which we experience the world...like VR goggles. What the world 'really' is, we will never know.
Simply put, what we normally regard as the objective world is really a subjective experience.
Cheers.
Sriram
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I can't understand why some of you are dismissing this as a some sort of a minor phenomenon, which is of no importance to us. Nothing affects our day to day life...even evolution, Big Bang, Black Holes, Higgs Boson....and yet these are considered as important ways of understanding our world and our life.
Evolution is why we have the senses we do, and why those senses have the limitations and capabilities that they do - understanding evolution is part of how we understand what those limitations and capacities are. Understanding the other elements are part of the way we shape the culture and technology with which we interact daily.
Similarly, understanding the fact that, what we regard as the external objective world, is just our internal experience and not actually 'real', is a very important realization.
And wrong. What we regard as the external objective world is probably the external objective world. What we know of it is a subjective experience, and we need to appreciate that difference, and so we construct techniques to try to reduce the subjectivity and establish what is objectively validated about our understanding.
Definitions are fine. But it is a fact that 'sound' is an experience and not an external fact. Similarly with vision, smell and taste.
No, it's not a fact. Sound is a thing in its own right; we have a subjective experience of it, but it's there even if we aren't.
We tend to imagine that even without our senses and neural connections the world will appear and sound the same, just that we will not be able to see or interact. This is not correct.
How is it not? The sound waves travel in exactly the same way through exactly the same medium from the source to a point in space - if we aren't there to intercept them they still exist. If our senses worked differently, or our brains were wired differently, our subjective understanding would be different, but the source phenomena would be the same.
In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine what the world would be like without our vision or hearing or taste or smell.
Talk to some blind or deaf people.
What we see and hear is not the objective reality.
It is. Our understanding of that reality is subjective, but that doesn't mean that the objective reality isn't there as the source material.
Our faculties are just our interface with the real world, which enable certain perceptions. This is not the reality.
Which is why it's important to have an effective method for trying to eliminate the subjectivity and leave as impartial and complete an understanding as possible.
The sense of 'touch' is a little more complicated. Without our sense of touch we may not be able to feel things around us, but we would still knock against them, I suppose. But even in this, without our body and sense of touch (suppose we were body less persons in some way), whether objects will retain their shape and form I am not sure. Viruses and electrons will see the world very differently.
I'm not sure that viruses or electrons have the sensory or processing capacity to have any sort of understanding of reality, to be honest.
Take Dark Matter as an example, such large mass of matter (five time more abundant than normal matter) is completely undetected by us, because it does not interact with normal matter. So, if we could see and feel Dark Matter how the world would look and feel it is impossible to say.
How would we have a subjective experience of something that doesn't interact - there is no way of sensing it.
Detection is important...and is the only way we can experience the world.
Understanding and experiencing are not the same thing - we can understand Dark Matter without being able to experience it, because we aren't limited to our subjective understanding.
This is not some small philosophical point, it is about what we are and whether we actually see and hear 'reality' or not. It is clear that we don't see the world 'as it is' (whatever that might mean).
I agree it's not a small point, but I'd disagree that it's at all interesting or up for debate. Our subjective understanding is a given; the objective nature of reality is reasonably well-established.
We have a certain interface through which we experience the world...like VR goggles. What the world 'really' is, we will never know.
I'd disagree - we might never experience it directly, but there's no theoretical reason why our understanding might be limited. You cite dark matter - we can't experience it, but we can hypothesise which means we can have an understanding of it without experiencing it.
Simply put, what we normally regard as the objective world is really a subjective experience.
No. We have a subjective experience of an objective reality, which we are increasingly supplementing with an academic and intellectual understanding.
O.
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You can't measure 'energy' without a mechanism - that mechanism, what we're measuring in this instance, is sound.
It's a pressure wave in air that it is measuring.
It's not measuring the energy, as there is heat and light energy in there that are being completely ignored.
It's measuring the energy of the wave. I never claimed it was measuring any other kind of energy.
We're measuring variations in air pressure
Not sound then :-)
those measurements are calibrated to give a ration output which we can use to gauge the extent of the energy being transmitted.
I thought you said it doesn't measure energy. Now you are saying it does.
you're arbitrarily creating an artificial distinction. Without the sense of variations of air pressure we wouldn't have the sense of hearing to have the other definition of sound; it's not a concept that can exist in isolation from the source phenomenon.
Nobody said that sound can exist in isolation to the pressure waves that cause it. They are saying that the act of perception is different to the pressure waves being perceived.
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Take Dark Matter as an example, such large mass of matter (five time more abundant than normal matter) is completely undetected by us,
No it isn't.
because it does not interact with normal matter.
Yes it does.
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Outy,
Sound is the variation in air pressure just like light is the variation in electro-magnetic field - they are there whether we are there to sense them or not, whether we have equipment in place to measure them or not.
It's not a message until it's interpreted - information theory make distinct the data and the information, in this instance the sound and the song/words/identification of the noise, but the noise is there already.
Yes variations in air pressure and in electromagnetic waves are there whether or not there’s anyone’s to sense them. That’s data. At an experiential level though aren’t “sound” and "colour" the terms we use for the information we perceive it to contain?
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It is clear that we don't see the world 'as it is' (whatever that might mean).
If we did what would we have to argue about?
Just wondering - if there was a God would he see the world as it is?
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No idea. A God is presumably the creator of everything...so I guess He should be able to see the world 'as it is'.
IMO God, gods, deities are all like screen icons that we click on believing in certain things. But in the process, something happens within us that leads to development of Consciousness. So, God, heaven, eternal life etc. are carrots that lead to something much more complex that we are unaware of.
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No idea. A God is presumably the creator of everything...so I guess He should be able to see the world 'as it is'.
If you accept the principle that nothing can exist but that it is observed, then that rules out the notion of a creator god.
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It's a pressure wave in air that it is measuring.
Yes, sound.
It's measuring the energy of the wave. I never claimed it was measuring any other kind of energy.
No, it's measuring the waves - from that you can calculate the energy involved.
Not sound then :-)
Yes, sound. That's what sound is. It's literally the definition of sound. Noun
sound (countable and uncountable, plural sounds)
1. A sensation perceived by the ear caused by the vibration of air or some other medium.
He turned when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him. Nobody made a sound.
2. A vibration capable of causing such sensations.
3. (music) A distinctive style and sonority of a particular musician, orchestra etc
4. Noise without meaning; empty noise.
5. Earshot, distance within which a certain noise may be heard.
Stay within the sound of my voice.
I thought you said it doesn't measure energy. Now you are saying it does.
No, I'm saying that from the measurement of the sound it's possible to know with a reasonable degree of certainty what the energy involved is.
Nobody said that sound can exist in isolation to the pressure waves that cause it. They are saying that the act of perception is different to the pressure waves being perceived.
The implication of answering the original question with 'No' is that somehow sound only exists if there's someone there to hear it which would mean it was independent of the pressure waves that ARE sound.
O.
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Yes, sound.
No, it's measuring the waves - from that you can calculate the energy involved.
Yes, sound. That's what sound is. It's literally the definition of sound.
No, I'm saying that from the measurement of the sound it's possible to know with a reasonable degree of certainty what the energy involved is.
The implication of answering the original question with 'No' is that somehow sound only exists if there's someone there to hear it which would mean it was independent of the pressure waves that ARE sound.
O.
I am struggling with why people don't get that sound is both the subjective experience, and the intersubjective measure of the vibration, as you make clear. It seems to me that the whole question is based on that confusion, and therefore is not as deep as people think. I know that Sriram thinks that is significant because it makes clear that our experiences are subjective but I honestly don't think that that is very deep. It doesn't take much living to realise that our experiences are subjective, but also to realise that it doesn't feel like that.
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What we feel and how something affects our day to day life is not relevant here NS. That's not what philosophy & science (cosmology and QM) are about. I agree that we can continue with our normal life unconcerned about almost all scientific and philosophical knowledge. Many people do.
But for those whom it may be of interest...its about understanding our true nature. Understanding that our body, mind and behavior is largely governed by tiny DNA molecules is important. Understanding that we are largely empty space is important. Understanding that the objective world is largely created in our brain is important.
People of science argue so much in favor of objective reality and against subjective experiences.....as though subjective experiences are all noise and clutter...and generally of no importance to objective reality.
Well....it turns out that our objective reality is itself only a subjective experience. We don't ...and can't...know what objective reality actually is. Isn't that a revelation?
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What we feel and how something affects our day to day life is not relevant here NS. That's not what philosophy & science (cosmology and QM) are about. I agree that we can continue with our normal life unconcerned about almost all scientific and philosophical knowledge. Many people do.
But for those whom it may be of interest...its about understanding our true nature. Understanding that our body, mind and behavior is largely governed by tiny DNA molecules is important. Understanding that we are largely empty space is important. Understanding that the objective world is largely created in our brain is important.
People of science argue so much in favor of objective reality and against subjective experiences.....as though subjective experiences are all noise and clutter...and generally of no importance to objective reality.
Well....it turns out that our objective reality is itself only a subjective experience. We don't ...and can't...know what objective reality actually is. Isn't that a revelation?
No, it's not. That's why I used the phrase 'intersubjective'. And day to day life isn't removed from science or many aspects of philosophy. It's just that this particular question isn't that deep. It's based on the confusion between the experience we have and how we might describe it in intersubjective terms.
'People of science' is another of your frequent generalisations and you compound it with attributing a view to these 'people of science' that I don't think is correct, and it's precisely because we operate in day to day life as if we are experiencing an objective reality, and have no real choice but to do so, that causes you to misrepresent how people think. Science is methodologically naturalistic, it can't be anything else, but that doesn't mean 'people of science' are philosophically naturalistic.
The whole 'Tree in a forest' question to me makes me think of being a teenager and smoking dope, and finding depth where there isn't any.
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Well...maybe you just can't see the depth. What with the penchant for fending off arguments with one fallacy or the other...you just haven't gotten used to 'taking in' such stuff.
Such realizations about the true nature of 'reality', can be life changing for some people. It can shift their world view and priorities overnight.
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Well...maybe you just can't see the depth. What with the penchant for fending off arguments with one fallacy or the other...you just haven't gotten used to 'taking in' such stuff.
Such realizations about the true nature of 'reality', can be life changing for some people. It can shift their world view and priorities overnight.
Pointing out logical fallacies isn't 'fending off arguments', it's pointing out that the arguments are flawed. And it's precisely because I have taken in the whole idea that we can't know reality long long ago, that I see it as sophomoric to think that there is anything deep in it. It was fun to watch the dawn come up all those years ago, and take a draw on the spliff, and think how far out it was, man, that a tree might not make a sound if there was no one to hear it, but it's really not deep.
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As I said..its about attitude. Information is different from realization. Yes...most people are informed about such matters...but once realization sets in, the illusion breaks and people can change dramatically.
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Just come across this interview with neuroscientist Donald Hoffman which seems very apt here: https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossible-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-argues-a-cognitive-neuroscientist
It's probably not 'deep' enough for some but I found it extremely interesting, no doubt because I'm just shallow.
Sriram will enjoy it, I think.
"Conscious experiences are the fundamental furniture of the universe - not space-time and atoms and quarks and so forth..."
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As I said..its about attitude. Information is different from realization. Yes...most people are informed about such matters...but once realization sets in, the illusion breaks and people can change dramatically.
You have the illusion that if someone disagrees with you on this that they haven't had your 'realisation'. Whereas I've had it, smoked it, poked it, turned into a bowl of petunias and 'realized' that it's just a ride.
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Just come across this interview with neuroscientist Donald Hoffman which seems very apt here: https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossible-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-argues-a-cognitive-neuroscientist
It's probably not 'deep' enough for some but I found it extremely interesting, no doubt because I'm just shallow.
Sriram will enjoy it, I think.
"Conscious experiences are the fundamental furniture of the universe - not space-time and atoms and quarks and so forth..."
Hoffman is doing something very different to Sriram though which is looking at it entirely scientifically, and in that sense it's hugely interesting and I agree with most of ideas. Incidentally if you like his stuff - here's a link to his homepage
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
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What we feel and how something affects our day to day life is not relevant here NS.
Except inasmuch as it's the crux of whether or not you think the initial question is significant.
But for those whom it may be of interest...its about understanding our true nature. Understanding that our body, mind and behavior is largely governed by tiny DNA molecules is important. Understanding that we are largely empty space is important. Understanding that the objective world is largely created in our brain is important.
You are conflating the objective world (a thing independent of us, hence 'objective') and our understanding of that objective world, which is the impression of it we hold in our brains. The objective world is in no way whatsoever created in our brains, but our subjective understanding of it is created - and hopefully refined - there.
People of science argue so much in favor of objective reality and against subjective experiences.....as though subjective experiences are all noise and clutter...and generally of no importance to objective reality.
On the contrary, there are entire fields of science looking at exactly that subjectivity, perceptional biases, how the scale at which we operate impinges on our understanding of physics at various scales.
Well....it turns out that our objective reality is itself only a subjective experience. We don't ...and can't...know what objective reality actually is. Isn't that a revelation?
You've failed to understand, it appears. There is no 'our' objective reality - if there were, it wouldn't be objective, it would be dependent upon us. There is an objective reality, there are a range of subjective experiences of that objective reality with various degrees of justification for their interpretations. We don't know what objective reality actually is isn't a revelation; that we can't possibly know is a claim I think is hard to justify - how do we know that our understanding will not continue to improve over time?
O.
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You've failed to understand, it appears. There is no 'our' objective reality - if there were, it wouldn't be objective, it would be dependent upon us. There is an objective reality, there are a range of subjective experiences of that objective reality with various degrees of justification for their interpretations. We don't know what objective reality actually is isn't a revelation; that we can't possibly know is a claim I think is hard to justify - how do we know that our understanding will not continue to improve over time?
O.
I don't think that it matters that our understanding will improve, we will always in some sense remain in the matrix, and therefore be unable to step out of our built in subjectivity. All we can have is intersubjectivity.
Of course, alternatively, if we solve we either everything will go pouf and disappear, or else god will appear and give us our reward - we just need our Neo.
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Just come across this interview with neuroscientist Donald Hoffman which seems very apt here: https://aeon.co/videos/its-impossible-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-argues-a-cognitive-neuroscientist
It's probably not 'deep' enough for some but I found it extremely interesting, no doubt because I'm just shallow.
Sriram will enjoy it, I think.
"Conscious experiences are the fundamental furniture of the universe - not space-time and atoms and quarks and so forth..."
You haven't seen my earlier thread then.....
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=16814.0
Try this also.....
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/
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Sriram,
What with the penchant for fending off arguments with one fallacy or the other...you just haven't gotten used to 'taking in' such stuff.
No-one “fends off arguments with one fallacy or the other”. What they actually do is falsify them by identifying where your arguments are wrong. Your posts here are full of fallacious arguments, and so are the blogs you link to. This means that those arguments can safely be dismissed. If ever you did manage to justify your beliefs with an argument that wasn’t false, then (but only then) would rational people take your beliefs seriously. So far at least however you show no sign of being able to do so.
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The implication of answering the original question with 'No' is that somehow sound only exists if there's someone there to hear it which would mean it was independent of the pressure waves that ARE sound.
O.
You've got it backwards. You first have to define what you mean by the word "sound". That determines how you answer the tree question. If you decide that sound is the subjective experience that humans (and perhaps some other living organisms) have on detecting air pressure waves, you can answer no to the question. If you define sound as the pressure waves themselves, you must answer yes to the question.
Personally, I don't really care which definition you use as long as you are clear about it up front and as long as you don't summarily dismiss other view points that have some validity.
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If sound is defined as the subjective auditory experience of these air pressure waves then air pressure waves can be viewed as having the potential for sound provided they occur at frequencies humans can hear, and that there are some humans around, and of course it would be different for dogs given they can hear higher frequencies than humans.
This is hardly profound stuff.
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You've got it backwards. You first have to define what you mean by the word "sound". That determines how you answer the tree question. If you decide that sound is the subjective experience that humans (and perhaps some other living organisms) have on detecting air pressure waves, you can answer no to the question. If you define sound as the pressure waves themselves, you must answer yes to the question.
Personally, I don't really care which definition you use as long as you are clear about it up front and as long as you don't summarily dismiss other view points that have some validity.
It doesn't really matter. The difference is simply about viewpoint. That both are reasonable doesn't give the question any more depth.
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My goodness...! You guys are going on and on about words and definitions. ::) Your philosophical limitations are showing...!! You have had too much of microscopic science, guys. Take a breather.
Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
I agree that what we believe about the world works well enough in our day to day life, but that again is only like the laws and realities within a VR game. Not real in itself...! Its all in the mind!
As they say...Consciousness is fundamental.
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My goodness...! You guys are going on and on about words and definitions. ::)
Wow - you said something I actually agree with. Arguing about the meaning of the word is trivial - but then so is the tree in the forest example.
Your philosophical limitations are showing...!!
But then a shedload of irony. At the heart of philosophy is sound reasoning and your frequent use of fallacies shows that you really aren't very good at it.
You have had too much of microscopic science, guys. Take a breather.
And substitute silly put-downs instead...
Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
This is trivially true but not useful. That's why science concentrates on intersubjective verification. We are faced with a shared and inescapable subjective experience that corresponds to what we generally call the 'real' or 'objective' world.
I agree that what we believe about the world works well enough in our day to day life, but that again is only like the laws and realities within a VR game. Not real in itself...! Its all in the mind!
There is our day-to-day experiences of the world, which we know through science to be somewhat inaccurate and very incomplete, then there is the intersubjectively verifiable world, as revealed through science. Philosophically we cannot say that the later is real but if it isn't, it might as well be. Even if it's "all in the mind", if you jump off a tall building you'll still fall to the ground.
As they say...Consciousness is fundamental.
Which doesn't follow at all.
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Wow - you said something I actually agree with. Arguing about the meaning of the word is trivial - but then so is the tree in the forest example.
But then a shedload of irony. At the heart of philosophy is sound reasoning and your frequent use of fallacies shows that you really aren't very good at it.
And substitute silly put-downs instead...
This is trivially true but not useful. That's why science concentrates on intersubjective verification. We are faced with a shared and inescapable subjective experience that corresponds to what we generally call the 'real' or 'objective' world.
There is our day-to-day experiences of the world, which we know through science to be somewhat inaccurate and very incomplete, then there is the intersubjectively verifiable world, as revealed through science. Philosophically we cannot say that the later is real but if it isn't, it might as well be. Even if it's "all in the mind", if you jump off a tall building you'll still fall to the ground.
Which doesn't follow at all.
Agree - it's just something we are forced to live with. It's not profound, it's just a very naughty boy.
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My goodness...! You guys are going on and on about words and definitions. ::) Your philosophical limitations are showing...!! You have had too much of microscopic science, guys. Take a breather.
You've asked a question that relies on the possibility that single word might have two related but distinct meanings - of course there's a discussion of language. As to whether that constitutes a philosophical limitation - my eldest has just finished three years of philosophy and ethics at Chichester, and not surprisingly an awful lot of that is about being sure you've adequately defined your terms.
Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
No. Don't you realise that accepting we have a subjective experience of something doesn't mean that a) the reality we are experiencing is itself objective or that b) in at least some instances our subjective understanding can be (and possibly has been) refined to be an accurate understanding of the objective reality.
I agree that what we believe about the world works well enough in our day to day life, but that again is only like the laws and realities within a VR game. Not real in itself...! Its all in the mind!
I don't think you only exist in my mind, if only because I'm not sure I could come up with some of this stuff :)
As they say...Consciousness is fundamental.
Which they, because I think they're wrong.
O.
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Sriram,
My goodness...! You guys are going on and on about words and definitions.
Yes, these things are basic because without agreed meanings people like you can slip in any definitions they like and hope to get away with it.
Your philosophical limitations are showing...!!
If you think that to be the case then don’t just assert it but explain where you think those “limitations’ are. So far you seem to mean something like “not agreeing with my unqualified assertions” which isn’t even a limitation on reasoning – it’s no reasoning at all.
You have had too much of microscopic science, guys. Take a breather.
An ill-informed ad hom you try a lot when you have no arguments to make. Why bother?
Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
And then you follow with a straw man fallacy. No-one argues for absolute anything. This has been explained to you many times, so why just repeat the same stupidity over and over again?
I agree that what we believe about the world works well enough in our day to day life, but that again is only like the laws and realities within a VR game. Not real in itself...! Its all in the mind!
There’s reasonable evidence to suggest that there is in fact an “out there” world, and moreover that our senses and mental processes to some degree at least map to that world. If you want to go full brain in a vat that’s up to you, but what would you do with that even if it was true?
As they say...Consciousness is fundamental.
Some people may say that but, so far at least, there’s nor evidence to support the conjecture. So?
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Hi everyone,
I know that most of you will relegate all this to the 'same old...same old' category and go back to your comfort zones. But for those who are somewhat more sensitive and insightful...it can be a very personally fulfilling revelation. It can be very spiritually uplifting.
Cheers.
Sriram
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Sriram
This tree in a forest thought experiment really is banal though.
It is similar to when you encounter a sniffer-dog at an airport and realise that there are aspects of the natural that we are subjectively unaware of that dogs can sense, but you can also see that whenever you take one for a walk and it sniffs everything and anything (including the backsides of other dogs) - it is routinely unremarkable and not in the least 'spiritually uplifting', unless you are easily spiritually uplifted by relative trivia.
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Sriram,
I know that most of you will relegate all this to the 'same old...same old' category and go back to your comfort zones. But for those who are somewhat more sensitive and insightful...it can be a very personally fulfilling revelation. It can be very spiritually uplifting.
Lots of people feel just as "uplifted" by their beliefs in things you'd think to be preposterous, especially if every argument they made to justify them were as hopeless as those you attempt to justify your beliefs.
Being "sensitive and insightful" does not mean abandoning reason to accept whatever unqualified assertions people happen to make.
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My goodness...! You guys are going on and on about words and definitions. ::) Your philosophical limitations are showing...!! You have had too much of microscopic science, guys. Take a breather.
Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
I agree that what we believe about the world works well enough in our day to day life, but that again is only like the laws and realities within a VR game. Not real in itself...! Its all in the mind!
As they say...Consciousness is fundamental.
That would be something, wouldn't it, Sriram? If only 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.'as Scrooge said to Marley's ghost in 'A Christmas Carol', then I would have to take you that much more seriously than I actually do, and not treat you as an actual character on an actual forum. ;) I would think that my mind would have to be seriously compromised to create a character like you. Mind you, the same would apply to you, of course, if I was simply the product of a series of subjective thoughts in your own mind. ;D
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Don't you realize that if all that we perceive as the objective world is just a subjective experience....then all that you people keep on and on about as Laws of Nature, Emergent Property, Random Variations, Determinism etc.etc. are just perceived realities and not necessarily absolute in themselves??!!
Big if there.
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Big if there.
That sort of depends on what is meant by it. By definition all out experiences are subjective. If the 'if' is suggesting that there is nothing real to be experienced, then I agree. Not really clear what Sriram means.
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That would be something, wouldn't it, Sriram? If only 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.'as Scrooge said to Marley's ghost in 'A Christmas Carol', then I would have to take you that much more seriously than I actually do, and not treat you as an actual character on an actual forum. ;) I would think that my mind would have to be seriously compromised to create a character like you. Mind you, the same would apply to you, of course, if I was simply the product of a series of subjective thoughts in your own mind. ;D
Careful Enki, you're perilously close to giving the game away!
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Careful Enki, you're perilously close to giving the game away!
It's too late. I'm slowly disappearing. Help....... :o
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Hi everyone,
This is another of the areas where Science highlights facts about normal human experiences that point to extra human phenomena (what we usually call spirituality).
I know most of you here aren't quite clued in about what I mean and why the fact of subjectivity is so important. But then, that's the way you people have always been. No surprises there! ;)
As I have pointed out many times, spirituality isn't about any God or any religious mythology. It is about realizing the illusionary nature of the objective world and realizing that ultimately its all really a personal subjective experience.
Everyone knows that hearing, vision etc. are impulses in the brain....but to go from there to an actual realization of the subjective nature of reality...is a big step. It is almost an awakening. Not easy, and maybe I was expecting too much from you people here (as always).
Some of you here seem to be admiring and even agreeing with Donald Hoffman...but you don't really get what he is concluding do you?!
Well...never mind.
Cheers.
Sriram
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Hi everyone,
This is another of the areas where Science highlights facts about normal human experiences that point to extra human phenomena (what we usually call spirituality).
I know most of you here aren't quite clued in about what I mean and why the fact of subjectivity is so important. But then, that's the way you people have always been. No surprises there! ;)
As I have pointed out many times, spirituality isn't about any God or any religious mythology. It is about realizing the illusionary nature of the objective world and realizing that ultimately its all really a personal subjective experience.
Everyone knows that hearing, vision etc. are impulses in the brain....but to go from there to an actual realization of the subjective nature of reality...is a big step. It is almost an awakening. Not easy, and maybe I was expecting too much from you people here (as always).
Some of you here seem to be admiring and even agreeing with Donald Hoffman...but you don't really get what he is concluding do you?!
Well...never mind.
Cheers.
Sriram
Hi sriram
Reminds me of the stuff we left behind in the 6th form common room back in the 1970s
Well... Never mind
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This is another of the areas where Science highlights facts about normal human experiences that point to extra human phenomena (what we usually call spirituality).
I know most of you here aren't quite clued in about what I mean and why the fact of subjectivity is so important. But then, that's the way you people have always been. No surprises there! ;)
If you look at history, it's replete with people giving competing claims about what they 'know' about spirituality.
As I have pointed out many times, spirituality isn't about any God or any religious mythology. It is about realizing the illusionary nature of the objective world and realizing that ultimately its all really a personal subjective experience.
And what I've pointed out directly in response, multiple times, is that just because our experience of reality is necessarily subjective doesn't mean that reality itself isn't objective. The goal is to realise the extent of the subjectivity, and to design methods of enquiry that eliminate or reduce it.
Everyone knows that hearing, vision etc. are impulses in the brain....but to go from there to an actual realization of the subjective nature of reality...is a big step.
It is. That's why we've developed things like science, to formalise the investigation, to validate the subjective experience with either mechanical measurement or, at the least, independent assessment.
It is almost an awakening. Not easy, and maybe I was expecting too much from you people here (as always).
It's not 'an awakening', it's an overreach. You've gone from 'our experience is subjective' which no-one is disagreeing with, to 'therefore reality is also subjective' which is just nonsense.
O.
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As I have pointed out many times, spirituality isn't about any God or any religious mythology. It is about realizing the illusionary nature of the objective world and realizing that ultimately its all really a personal subjective experience.
Shouldn't that be "realizing the illusionary nature of the subjective world?"
Here's a definition of the word illusion: a misrepresentation of a “real” sensory stimulus—that is, an interpretation that contradicts objective “reality” as defined by general agreement.
Since we can't directly apprehend the so-called objective world (because it can only be known subjectively through some kind of representation) I'm not sure how we can say that this objective world is illusory. It is not in itself an interpretation or representation. It's just whatever it is.
We can't do anything about whatever the objective world is but we can appreciate that the way we experience it is personal and interpretive. That the sound of a tree falling isn't itself 'out there' may from one perspective seem trivial, as some here have said. However, I accept that the thought experiment that is the subject of this thread needn't end with triviality. It depends on where you are prepared to take it. One might, for instance, use this thought experiment as a portal into what Buddhists call emptiness (shunyata) but I'm guessing that isn't what appeals to you since that would lead to an appreciation of the self as contingent. It would also undermine the idea that there is something fundamental underlying what we call reality and I think you want to say that consciousness is fundamental and that this is what our 'true' self actually is.
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Sriram,
This is another of the areas where Science highlights facts about normal human experiences that point to extra human phenomena (what we usually call spirituality).
I know most of you here aren't quite clued in about what I mean and why the fact of subjectivity is so important. But then, that's the way you people have always been. No surprises there! ;)
As I have pointed out many times, spirituality isn't about any God or any religious mythology. It is about realizing the illusionary nature of the objective world and realizing that ultimately its all really a personal subjective experience.
Everyone knows that hearing, vision etc. are impulses in the brain....but to go from there to an actual realization of the subjective nature of reality...is a big step. It is almost an awakening. Not easy, and maybe I was expecting too much from you people here (as always).
Some of you here seem to be admiring and even agreeing with Donald Hoffman...but you don't really get what he is concluding do you?!
Well...never mind.
Does it really not occur to you that when all you have to "contribute" is arrogant irrationality of this kind that maybe – just maybe – everything you clam here to be be true isn't true at all?
Seriously though?
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Bramble,
Ok...what I am pointing out is, not that there is nothing real. We just cannot know what objective reality actually is.
Why this is important is because scientists have for decades been insisting that what they have probed and discovered is the Truth and that our subjective experiences are of no consequence to external reality. This is false. In fact, everything that we consider as the objective Truth is nothing but a subjective experience. It turns the idea of objective reality on its head.
And this is not just by way of saying that 'we are looking through the senses and brain'...like looking through a robotic device of some sort. No...it is not like that at all. Our senses and brain create the objective world that we experience. It is like a VR world. Is the real world just energy, Strings, elementary particles,...?
Another way of looking at it is.... without the means to interact with it, the world would be similar to Dark Matter. Not there...for all practical purposes. Or alternatively, if we could see and feel dark matter, how would the world be?!
That is what I mean by an illusion. Not that there is no objective world but that what we are currently experiencing is created by our senses and brain.
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Sriram,
Why this is important is because scientists have for decades been insisting that what they have probed and discovered is the Truth...
Name one scientist who's ever said that. Why do you keep lying about this?
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Sriram
I understand what you are saying. What I'm interested in is where you want to take it. You've read here people dismissing the fact that we can't experience the objective world as it is in itself as trivial and unimportant. Clearly you don't think that it is and you've said a little about how you find this insight spiritually uplifting. I know enough about Indian thought to appreciate that the idea of illusion - maya - is extremely important. There is a long tradition of understanding 'reality' as existing one way but appearing another. I've said a bit about how this has influenced Buddhist thought. Some spiritual traditions speak of how we can awaken from the 'dream', others argue that we can only do so to it. Perhaps you could expand on how this is central to your idea of spirituality. It might help people to appreciate why this isn't trivial for you and even why it might not be trivial for them. Now there's optimism for you!
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Sriram
I understand what you are saying. What I'm interested in is where you want to take it. You've read here people dismissing the fact that we can't experience the objective world as it is in itself as trivial and unimportant. Clearly you don't think that it is and you've said a little about how you find this insight spiritually uplifting. I know enough about Indian thought to appreciate that the idea of illusion - maya - is extremely important. There is a long tradition of understanding 'reality' as existing one way but appearing another. I've said a bit about how this has influenced Buddhist thought. Some spiritual traditions speak of how we can awaken from the 'dream', others argue that we can only do so to it. Perhaps you could expand on how this is central to your idea of spirituality. It might help people to appreciate why this isn't trivial for you and even why it might not be trivial for them. Now there's optimism for you!
Where can I 'take it'? That would again be an attempt at imagining objective reality...which we know is not possible. The only way as I have said, is to see it as a VR world. Now, what the 'real' world would be like outside the VR world, how can a person within the VR world say? Maybe people who have had NDE's have some idea of the real world. That is all I can say.
But the fact the the Self or Subject or experiencer is the only reality that will exist beyond the 'VR world', is true, as far as we can know.
Never mind the guys here...! :D
I am not a fan of Buddhism though many westerners seem to have found it useful as a gateway to Indian philosophy. It seems to be fashionable, though currently on a low. Everyone shoots over Buddha's shoulder and everything from Samkhya to Vedanta to Yoga to tantra to theism to nihilism is touted as Buddhism. Many scholars feel that the only real words of Buddha himself is perhaps the compact Dhammapada.
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Sriram
I'm not asking you to imagine objective reality, merely to explain why you think it important spiritually to appreciate that we live in a VR world, as you put it.
Some folk might say that if we live in such a world then so what? It's just the world we live in. We have to live in some world, after all. Could there be a way of taking the world that is not a representation? Presumably even God would have to know the world in his own interpretive way, were he to exist. So if there isn't a 'higher' view to seek what would be the spiritual importance of appreciating the illusory nature of appearance? This is what I'm asking you. I think I was perfectly clear about this in my previous post, so I'm guessing you don't really want to answer the question. It would be interesting to know why.
I'm also puzzled by your comment that the only reality beyond the VR world is the experiencer. Earlier you wrote Not that there is no objective world implying that you do accept the existence such an objective world beyond the VR experience. This implies that you think the objective world and the experiencer are one and the same. Really? Sometimes it can be very difficult to fathom what it is you are trying to say! If the VR world is the world of experience, the subjective world, then how could the experiencer lie beyond it? How could something beyond experience be doing the experiencing? And if the subject self does lie beyond experience how are we to know ourselves? Isn't self-knowledge part of the goal in your spirituality?
If you don't want to engage with these questions I shan't keep coming after you for answers, but at least I have tried to engage constructively with you. It often seems to me that you want people to take an interest in your views but then won't give good reasons why they should do so. I'm trying to take an interest but I'm having trouble understanding why this topic has spiritual importance for you, beyond being 'uplifting' in some unexplained way. You've been offered an invitation; the rest's up to you.
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I don't know what explanation you want. I have already said that it is like a VR world. If you play a VR game, what is the only 'reality' there...YOU. If you want to know reality beyond the Vr game...you have to know yourself. Only from you can the real world be accessed.
If you try to take many microscopic views from within the Vr world and try to put them together to understand reality...what will you get? Nothing. You cannot understand reality from within the VR world. You have to go beyond the game...which is understanding the real you beyond the one in the game....the watcher or experiencer himself. This is the essence of spirituality...knowing yourself.
Nothing more for me to clarify.
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I don't know what explanation you want. I have already said that it is like a VR world. If you play a VR game, what is the only 'reality' there...YOU. If you want to know reality beyond the Vr game...you have to know yourself. Only from you can the real world be accessed.
If you try to take many microscopic views from within the Vr world and try to put them together to understand reality...what will you get? Nothing. You cannot understand reality from within the VR world. You have to go beyond the game...which is understanding the real you beyond the one in the game....the watcher or experiencer himself. This is the essence of spirituality...knowing yourself.
Nothing more for me to clarify.
Begs the question by saying there is a 'you' to be known.
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I don't know what explanation you want. I have already said that it is like a VR world. If you play a VR game, what is the only 'reality' there...YOU. If you want to know reality beyond the Vr game...you have to know yourself. Only from you can the real world be accessed.
With current technology, a VR game can control visual input (which is probably our main sensory input, in most instances) and can control a significant amount of what we can hear, whilst influencing smell, temperature etc., but it can't control touch, balance, neuropropioception and a myriad other senses by which we can get a subjective understanding that there is something outside of what the VR system is feeding us. If you are suggesting that we can't tell if we're in a sophisticated VR set-up, then we may not be able to disprove it, but there's no basis for accepting the claim either - it's an untestable hypothesis with no supporting evidence.
If you try to take many microscopic views from within the Vr world and try to put them together to understand reality...what will you get?
That's not what we're doing. We're taking microscopic views of the VR world to try to put together an understanding of the VR world because there's no reason to presume that there's anything else out there.
Nothing. You cannot understand reality from within the VR world. You have to go beyond the game...
Why presume there is something outside of it? What basis do you have for thinking that the things that we can consistently demonstrate are artificial creations of something for which we have no evidence?
which is understanding the real you beyond the one in the game....
Except that, if all we've known is the VR world, the 'us' of that world IS the real one. That's the fallacy of your 'subjectivity' deepity - our experiences make us who we are, regardless of how subjective they are. If the subjectivity suddenly gets stripped away and objective reality is somehow revealed to us, we remain who we are, just adrift in a foreign reality.
the watcher or experiencer himself. This is the essence of spirituality...knowing yourself.
You don't need to pretend to step out of your own experience into something allegedly broader in order to that. In fact, quite the opposite, even if there is something more than the physical reality that we can perceive, in the absence of any information about it or any impact on our lives from it, who we are is BY DEFINITION entirely independent of it - we are the creation of ours subjective experiences in the 'limited' scope of actual reality.
O.
Nothing more for me to clarify.
[/quote]
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Sriram
You've simply ignored most of my earlier post so I won't waste time pursuing this. You clearly don't want to engage. You also seem confused as to whether the subject/experiencer is inside or outside the VR game as you've claimed both at different times. This is just pointless.
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Hi Bramble,
I'm not asking you to imagine objective reality, merely to explain why you think it important spiritually to appreciate that we live in a VR world, as you put it.
He can’t (or won’t) because he’s not a thinker in any meaningful sense. What he's implying without actually saying it is that “reality” is all guessing anyway, so…
…any guess is as valid as any other – therefore believing there to be “auras”, “biofields” etc is as epistemologically valid as believing there to be rainbows and oxbow lakes. It’s neither very bright nor very honest – not very bright because it fails to grasp that the experience of intersubjective reality creates a meaningful means of proceeding (which is why we use the stairs rather than jump out of the window) and not honest because it relies on repeated misrepresentations of what science in particular actually entails and a foundation of fallacious reasoning.
As others have noted, it’s all a bit sixth form but laced with condescension because he just assumes he’s right but other lack the jones’s to see it too. In short: there’s nothing to see here, just move along etc
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Sriram
You've simply ignored most of my earlier post so I won't waste time pursuing this. You clearly don't want to engage. You also seem confused as to whether the subject/experiencer is inside or outside the VR game as you've claimed both at different times. This is just pointless.
???
What do you mean...where is the experiencer? Where is the experiencer in any VR game?
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With current technology, a VR game can control visual input (which is probably our main sensory input, in most instances) and can control a significant amount of what we can hear, whilst influencing smell, temperature etc., but it can't control touch, balance, neuropropioception and a myriad other senses by which we can get a subjective understanding that there is something outside of what the VR system is feeding us. If you are suggesting that we can't tell if we're in a sophisticated VR set-up, then we may not be able to disprove it, but there's no basis for accepting the claim either - it's an untestable hypothesis with no supporting evidence.
That's not what we're doing. We're taking microscopic views of the VR world to try to put together an understanding of the VR world because there's no reason to presume that there's anything else out there.
Why presume there is something outside of it? What basis do you have for thinking that the things that we can consistently demonstrate are artificial creations of something for which we have no evidence?
Except that, if all we've known is the VR world, the 'us' of that world IS the real one. That's the fallacy of your 'subjectivity' deepity - our experiences make us who we are, regardless of how subjective they are. If the subjectivity suddenly gets stripped away and objective reality is somehow revealed to us, we remain who we are, just adrift in a foreign reality.
You don't need to pretend to step out of your own experience into something allegedly broader in order to that. In fact, quite the opposite, even if there is something more than the physical reality that we can perceive, in the absence of any information about it or any impact on our lives from it, who we are is BY DEFINITION entirely independent of it - we are the creation of ours subjective experiences in the 'limited' scope of actual reality.
O.
Nothing more for me to clarify.
If we take life to be like a VR game because of all the subjectivity involved...it automatically makes sense to presume a world outside the Vr world. You ask why....I ask why not?!
In a VR game we do step out of our own VR experiences. We have one identity in the game and another outside it. We continue being the experiencer but our world and identity changes.
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Bramble,
You've simply ignored most of my earlier post so I won't waste time pursuing this. You clearly don't want to engage.
He never will. When someone dismantles his attempts at reasoning he just ignores the falsifications and repeats the same mistakes and misrepresentations. I can't imagine what he gets out of it though.
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Bramble,
He never will. When someone dismantles his attempts at reasoning he just ignores the falsifications and repeats the same mistakes and misrepresentations. I can't imagine what he gets out of it though.
I was thinking the same. What's the point? Perhaps someone lost their laptop on the way to work and now a feral goat is treading randomly on the keyboard, generating the illusion we think of as Sriram in the strange VR reality that is this forum.
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If we take life to be like a VR game because of all the subjectivity involved...it automatically makes sense to presume a world outside the Vr world. You ask why....I ask why not?!
In a VR game we do step out of our own VR experiences. We have one identity in the game and another outside it. We continue being the experiencer but our world and identity changes.
I think the analogy of someone donning a VR headset is not really true to the concept of the primacy of consciousness, in that, like that other chestnut, the driver driving a car, it is somewhat sloppy and misleading and it lends itself to an easy misinterpretation that aligns comfortably (for some) with the ancient notion of souls.
Someone putting on a headset implies an ontology for the wearer that is not justified by a concept of the primacy of consciousness. A headset wearer suggests a highly complex composite experiencer with a persistent identity whereas in a primacy of consciousness scenario, it is experience itself that is primary, not a composite experiencer.
An experiencer would be a passing ephemeral agglomeration of experience, not something with its own persistent identity that can go around getting into different cars or donning different headsets.
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I was thinking the same. What's the point? Perhaps someone lost their laptop on the way to work and now a feral goat is treading randomly on the keyboard, generating the illusion we think of as Sriram in the strange VR reality that is this forum.
Communication is a two way process Bramble....!! One is what I say...another is what you understand. So, lets just close the discussion, shall we?!
Thanks & Cheers.
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I think the analogy of someone donning a VR headset is not really true to the concept of the primacy of consciousness, in that, like that other chestnut, the driver driving a car, it is somewhat sloppy and misleading and it lends itself to an easy misinterpretation that aligns comfortably (for some) with the ancient notion of souls.
Someone putting on a headset implies an ontology for the wearer that is not justified by a concept of the primacy of consciousness. A headset wearer suggests a highly complex composite experiencer with a persistent identity whereas in a primacy of consciousness scenario, it is experience itself that is primary, not a composite experiencer.
An experiencer would be a passing ephemeral agglomeration of experience, not something with its own persistent identity that can go around getting into different cars or donning different headsets.
Analogies are like that. They cannot be used in toto. They are just meant to explain a specific concept within a context.
What do you mean...."it is experience itself that is primary, not a composite experiencer". How can there be an experience without an experiencer?!!
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Analogies are like that. They cannot be used in toto. They are just meant to explain a specific concept within a context.
What do you mean...."it is experience itself that is primary, not a composite experiencer". How can there be an experience without an experiencer?!!
That is the whole point of Hoffman et al who are arguing the primacy of consciousness. A complex 'experiencer' would be something that derives from fundamental primitives of experience. This thinking turns our traditional conceptualisations on its head. Like a string theorist would make the case that all matter ultimately derives from strings, complex forms of experience must derive from fundamental underlying constituents, Hoffman calls them 'conscious agents', but that does not mean a conscious agent equates to an 'experiencer'. A conscious agent would be something that collapses a wave function to instantiate matter and bring about the apparent physical world for instance. An experiencer, such as you or I, would be an ephemeral passing agglomeration of trillions of conscious agents. In other words, experience is fundamental, and experiencers derive from them through agglomeration.
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Some of you here seem to be admiring and even agreeing with Donald Hoffman...but you don't really get what he is concluding do you?!
What do you mean...."it is experience itself that is primary, not a composite experiencer". How can there be an experience without an experiencer?!!
You've gotta appreciate the irony. This is the problem when you half-look into something, think it agrees with what you want to believe and then go on about how all these scientists and philosophers are agreeing with you.
Here's an extract from Hoffman's paper Objects of consciousness (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full) (with thanks to Udayana for providing it on the other thread):
Conscious realism and the conscious-agent thesis are strong claims, and face a tough challenge: Any theory that claims consciousness is fundamental must solve the combination problem (Seager, 1995; Goff, 2009; Blamauer, 2011; Coleman, 2014). William Seager describes this as “the problem of explaining how the myriad elements of ‘atomic consciousness’ can be combined into a new, complex and rich consciousness such as that we possess” (Seager, 1995).
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A conscious agent would be something that collapses a wave function to instantiate matter and bring about the apparent physical world for instance.
He seems to be saying that there is nothing but conscious agents. He maps the wave function of a free particle to interactions between them. He seems to think the physical world is a simplified representation of the infinite network of conscious agents.
Full marks for thinking outside the box, I guess, but it involves a shedload of assumptions and faces a number of difficult questions. It also seems to be somewhat self-defeating in that much of his early arguments depend on things he later concludes are not real. I can't say I find it particularly convincing.
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Communication is a two way process Bramble....!!
At least you do irony, Sriram. Let's hope the self-awareness catches up in time.
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That is the whole point of Hoffman et al who are arguing the primacy of consciousness. A complex 'experiencer' would be something that derives from fundamental primitives of experience. This thinking turns our traditional conceptualisations on its head. Like a string theorist would make the case that all matter ultimately derives from strings, complex forms of experience must derive from fundamental underlying constituents, Hoffman calls them 'conscious agents', but that does not mean a conscious agent equates to an 'experiencer'. A conscious agent would be something that collapses a wave function to instantiate matter and bring about the apparent physical world for instance. An experiencer, such as you or I, would be an ephemeral passing agglomeration of trillions of conscious agents. In other words, experience is fundamental, and experiencers derive from them through agglomeration.
What? How can experience be fundamental and experiencers derive from them? Why should experiencers be ephemeral passing...whatever?
I would say that experiencers are conscious agents themselves. Of course, conscious agents are possibly at various levels because consciousness itself exists in various levels. There could be trillions of conscious agents at lower levels but probably just one at the highest level.
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What? How can experience be fundamental and experiencers derive from them? Why should experiencers be ephemeral passing...whatever?
I would say that experiencers are conscious agents themselves. Of course, conscious agents are possibly at various levels because consciousness itself exists in various levels. There could be trillions of conscious agents at lower levels but probably just one at the highest level.
It is just brilliant how in VR you can just up your spiritual level a couple of notches and save years of work explaining basic principles and showing how existence and the universe logically follows from them!
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Sriram,
So, lets just close the discussion, shall we?!
You can't "close a discussion" that you've refused to engage with in the first place. Perhaps if you do find some self-awareness to you could try next to find some self respect and stop behaving this way?
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What? How can experience be fundamental and experiencers derive from them? Why should experiencers be ephemeral passing...whatever?
In the same way that an ocean wave is ephemerally substantiated by fundamental particles - sea water, say, none of which define the wave, and all of which will form part of some other structure once the energy has passed. In the same way, a conscious being, enjoying eyesight and touch and taste, would be an ephemeral instantiation of trillions of fundamental conscious agents all dancing to a particular tune orchestrated by biology. In this view, you, me, and Stranger are all ephemeral passing collaborative arrangements of many conscious agents. These superstructures will come and go, but the primitive conscious agents themselves are eternal. When there is no longer a 'me', channeling them for my particular vision or my particular taste, they will still go on doing there thang, helping to collapse wave functions or whatever. No pun intended.
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In the same way that an ocean wave is ephemerally substantiated by fundamental particles - sea water, say, none of which define the wave, and all of which will form part of some other structure once the energy has passed. In the same way, a conscious being, enjoying eyesight and touch and taste, would be an ephemeral instantiation of trillions of fundamental conscious agents all dancing to a particular tune orchestrated by biology. In this view, you, me, and Stranger are all ephemeral passing collaborative arrangements of many conscious agents. These superstructures will come and go, but the primitive conscious agents themselves are eternal. When there is no longer a 'me', channeling them for my particular vision or my particular taste, they will still go on doing there thang, helping to collapse wave functions or whatever. No pun intended.
I think what you mean here is similar to Prana. These are individual conscious agents that are present everywhere and which induce Life within objects. Prana is something elemental. It makes up what is the Mind and the Aura. It is a part of the normal world (never mind that science hasn't discovered it yet....but some people are getting there apparently).
But we as individuals are beyond even the mind and aura. We are Consciousness (Self, soul etc) that uses Prana in this world. It is similar to a computer being powered by trillions of agents that we call electrons (electricity). But a User is still different.
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=16598.0
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Sriram,
These are individual conscious agents that are present everywhere and which induce Life within objects.
Except of course that the evidence tells us pretty much the opposite of that. Consciousness is a property that emerges from interacting constituent parts that are not themselves conscious. Apart from that though...
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If we take life to be like a VR game because of all the subjectivity involved...it automatically makes sense to presume a world outside the Vr world. You ask why....I ask why not?!
Except that, my point is that we don't have grounds to presume that life is a VR game - we have no evidence of anything outside of life in order to presume that. It's technically a possibility, but so are any number of outlandish notions.
In a VR game we do step out of our own VR experiences. We have one identity in the game and another outside it. We continue being the experiencer but our world and identity changes.
Yes, but what makes us who we are doesn't change - the experiences we've had have been in some sense 'artificial', but the changes they've made to us as individuals are real, and we take those changes with us when we step outside of the game. Those changes are, perhaps, significantly less profound when we know it's a game, but if we have no basis for presuming that, if we've lived the game as though it were real, who we are is a product of the game.
O.
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Except that, my point is that we don't have grounds to presume that life is a VR game - we have no evidence of anything outside of life in order to presume that. It's technically a possibility, but so are any number of outlandish notions.
Yes, but what makes us who we are doesn't change - the experiences we've had have been in some sense 'artificial', but the changes they've made to us as individuals are real, and we take those changes with us when we step outside of the game. Those changes are, perhaps, significantly less profound when we know it's a game, but if we have no basis for presuming that, if we've lived the game as though it were real, who we are is a product of the game.
O.
But why do you say we have no evidence?! All the things that we have been discussing on this thread and elsewhere, ideas of consciousness and subjectivity, Hoffman's ideas etc....are some of the reasons to believe that our life is like a VR game.
The point of this 'VR game' is to change and develop our consciousness. Spirituality is essentially about experiencing the world through different bodies, changing our identity and becoming free finally.
We don't know that it is a game till the very last stage....which is what the illusion is all about. We think we are doing certain things for certain reasons (the carrot) while all the time something else is happening beneath the surface. At the last stage the illusion breaks, we realize the truth and our identity shifts.
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2019/11/04/reality/
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But why do you say we have no evidence?! All the things that we have been discussing on this thread and elsewhere, ideas of consciousness and subjectivity, Hoffman's ideas etc....are some of the reasons to believe that our life is like a VR game.
Which just underlines the fact that you don't understand what evidence means.
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Sriram,
But why do you say we have no evidence?!
Because evidence and conjecture are not the same thing. My conjecture that there may be leprechauns leaving pots of gold at the ends of rainbows is not evidence for leprechauns leaving pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.
As a few posts ago though you fundamentally mis-stated what science has to say about absolute truths, I suppose there's no reason to expect you to have a better grasp of what the word "evidence" actually means either.
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But why do you say we have no evidence?! All the things that we have been discussing on this thread and elsewhere, ideas of consciousness and subjectivity, Hoffman's ideas etc....are some of the reasons to believe that our life is like a VR game.
Subjectivity is not evidence of a VR style existence, it's evidence of an absence of absolute knowledge.
The point of this 'VR game' is to change and develop our consciousness.
And you base this 'conclusion' on what, exactly? That we, generally, change and develop our consciousness over time is not evidence that this is somehow 'the point' of life.
Spirituality is essentially about experiencing the world through different bodies, changing our identity and becoming free finally.
See, I thought that was what Dungeons and Dragons was about - don't get me wrong, I love D&D, but I understand that it's a hobby, not some hidden underlying mystery of reality.
We don't know that it is a game till the very last stage....which is what the illusion is all about.
If that's the case, how do you know now?
We think we are doing certain things for certain reasons (the carrot) while all the time something else is happening beneath the surface.
I think, here, is part of where you misunderstand certainly my take on things, and presumably a number of others, too: I don't think we do things for an overarcing purpose or reason, I don't think there's an underlying point to it all, I don't think there's an ultimate goal.
At the last stage the illusion breaks, we realize the truth and our identity shifts.
Well, no, at the last our identity stops.
https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2019/11/04/reality/
I think you mischaracterise the scientific/materialist view, here - I'm not suggesting maliciously - inasmuch as you think science considers there to be two realities, somehow. There aren't, there is the objective reality, and there are a range of subjective partial understandings of that reality (which are, at the same time, part of that reality). We operate, in a lot of instances, as though our subjective partial understanding were complete and accurate, but we appreciate that there are times when that's not appropriate (and, probably, times when we don't appreciate that it isn't, too).
One of those times is the idea of 'scientific fact'. We operate as though most of what science has solidly demonstrated (evolution, gravitational effects, theory of electromagnetism etc.) were absolute truth, but when pressed a good scientist will concede that scientific enquiry only ever leads to provisional understandings. It only takes one solid piece of contrasting evidence to undermine even the most fundamental understanding we have from science, that's the nature of a system that rests on experiential enquiry. There is validity to be found in common experience, even more validity when that experience is moderated with non-subjective measuring equipment, but it's always - at least technically - provisional.
You suggest that our 'inner world' does not impact on the larger reality on its own, only inasmuch as it is expressed by us - the thing is, though, that 'inner world' and our thinking process that edits which parts of it will be let out in which scenarios, and those scenarios themselves, are all part of that larger reality - that's reality playing out. There isn't a divide there, our inner workings are one more manifestation of the innumerable sideshows and feedbacks and cause and effect chains that are part of the reality of which we have a subjective understanding. There is no more nor less mystery in why one of us cries at a funeral whilst another laughs than there is in why one leaf gets pulled under in a stream whilst another rushes to the sea.
You also suggest that we think the world is somehow immune to our activities, that we play out against a background that has a scheme that will continue regardless of us; partially the case (for me, at least) inasmuch as I think the world will play out in an inevitable pattern based upon where it started. However, we aren't superimposed over that pattern, we are an intrinsic part of it - some of the things that happen don't happen despite our presence, they don't happen because of our presence, but they do happen through our presence, just as our presence happens because of things that came before. We aren't outside reality subjectively looking in like it was a television show, we are inside the machine. We are, to quote an old TV show 'the universe made manifest... stardust seeking to understand itself'
And so we return to the tree - and here is where our interpretation of the broader question manifests in this example. You suggest that sound is not the compression waves in the air, it's our subjective impression of those compressions. Our understanding of sound is through our senses, but the phenomenon that we experience is the sound, that's what we call those compression waves, but we call them that whether we're there or not, that's how physics works. Reality is objective, that is sound - if we're there, we experience the sound, if we're not there we don't, but it's not dependent upon is, it's objective; our subjective appreciation of it is dependent upon us being there, but that doesn't 'create' sound, that allows for the experience of the sound.
If we put our hand on the tree itself, there is a tree - we feel the tree. If we aren't there, there's still a tree to fall, no-one questions that - sound is the same. Sound is a thing, and we've named that thing BASED ON our experience of it, but it's the thing that we've named, not the experience.
O.
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No...I don't think you understand my point. We tend to think that if we did not have senses and a brain, all external objects will continue to be what they are...just that we will not be experiencing them. Like a blind or deaf person.
If we (and all creatures) did not exist with our bodies and senses....how do you know that a tree will exist? A tree is a specific structure of molecules in a specific shape that our senses perceive in a specific way. To a virus or an electron it will not look the way it looks to us. If our bodies do not interact with the light from the tree how do you know it exists or that it has any specific shape? It could be just lot of empty space with elementary particles moving around...or maybe just Strings. It is our senses that interact with it in a specific way and create the impression of a tree.
This is why I gave the example of Dark Matter. If we could see and feel Dark Matter, how would the world look and feel? Will we be able to see normal matter the way we do? Will we and the earth, planets, sun and stars be able to move around the way they do?
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Sriram,
No...I don't think you understand my point. We tend to think that if we did not have senses and a brain, all external objects will continue to be what they are...just that we will not be experiencing them. Like a blind or deaf person.
Yes, that’s a reasonable assumption – that there’s an “out there” world. That’s not to say that Bishop Berkely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley) was necessarily wrong about immaterialism and you’re not a brain in a vat creating your own reality, but even if you are what then would you do with that information? What choice in other words do you have but to proceed as if there's a reality out there?
If we (and all creatures) did not exist with our bodies and senses....how do you know that a tree will exist? A tree is a specific structure of molecules in a specific shape that our senses perceive in a specific way. To a virus or an electron it will not look the way it looks to us. If our bodies do not interact with the light from the tree how do you know it exists or that it has any specific shape? It could be just lot of empty space with elementary particles moving around...or maybe just Strings. It is our senses that interact with it in a specific way and create the impression of a tree.
Now you’re eliding whether there’s an out there world into whether or not we perceive it accurately. If there is a reality external to us, it’s reasonable on the basis of intersubjective experience to conclude that some aspects of it at least are sufficiently accurately perceived to enable us to navigate it.
This is why I gave the example of Dark Matter. If we could see and feel Dark Matter, how would the world look and feel? Will we be able to see normal matter the way we do? Will we and the earth, planets, sun and stars be able to move around the way they do?
That’s a bad example because there’s no evidence for dark matter – it’s just implied by observation that would need it to exist to explain what we see. You’d be on safer ground arguing that the reality we perceive without the aid of instruments is akin to seeing the world from inside a letterbox. We can’t perceive the very fast or the very slow, the very small, the ultra-violet, the infra-red, the very quiet etc. All these things are aspects of reality we know to exist only because we can measure them artificially, but again so what?
That’s your problem you keep running away from. Yes, of course there are all sorts of aspects of reality we can only identify with artificial means, and that maybe we will never be able to identify at all. None of that though takes you even one iota toward demonstrating that any of the assertions of fact you make (“auras”, Biofields” etc) are true. As ever, you’re just blurring the possible into the probable with nothing to take you from the former to the the latter. It’s the thinking of a twelve-year-old, but for some reason you seem to be entirely unable to progress beyond it.
PS I notice by the way that you've just ignored your recent mistake about the nature of evidence, despite people taking the trouble to correct you on it. Why is that?
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No...I don't think you understand my point. We tend to think that if we did not have senses and a brain, all external objects will continue to be what they are...just that we will not be experiencing them. Like a blind or deaf person.
Exactly, yes.
If we (and all creatures) did not exist with our bodies and senses....how do you know that a tree will exist?
That's not actually the same issue - whether I think it's the case and whether I can prove it are different things. All the scientific evidence in the world that I can produce only shows that reality has been consistent so far, that's no guarantee that it won't change tomorrow. I have to operate on the understanding that it won't, but I can't prove it.
A tree is a specific structure of molecules in a specific shape that our senses perceive in a specific way. To a virus or an electron it will not look the way it looks to us.
Notwithstanding the idea that nothing can 'look' like anything to an electron, which operates at the level at which electromagnetic quanta carry light... let's instead think of a dog. A dog's sensory apparatus is significantly different to ours, the interpretation of that sensory input is almost certainly vastly different again... they still hear the sound of a tree falling. If I'm not there and the dog is, the sound is heard because the sound is not dependent on either me or my particular interpretation of it.
If our bodies do not interact with the light from the tree how do you know it exists or that it has any specific shape?
Hypothetically, through measuring equipment which can interact with light, with accounts from people who do have the correct sensory apparatus. I guess this is graduating the question to 'If a tree falls near a deaf person does it make a noise?' - the answer is still yes.
It could be just lot of empty space with elementary particles moving around...or maybe just Strings.
At some level, whether we can see it or not, that might be what it is, or at least one way of interpreting what it is. We have a word - tree - for the macroscopic level that we interact with, that's useful for our living, and if we start to look at a different level (microscopic, quantum, whatever) then that understanding of 'tree' becomes less useful, but it doesn't suddenly become invalid.
It is our senses that interact with it in a specific way and create the impression of a tree.
No, it is our senses that interact with various aspects of THE TREE that give us an impression of the tree, just as they'd give a dog an impression of a tree (which it might not have a separate conception of, to be fair).
This is why I gave the example of Dark Matter. If we could see and feel Dark Matter, how would the world look and feel?
Different, but dark matter would feel like dark matter because it would interact in the same way consistently - the reality would remain consistent, because it's not dependent upon whether we can or do interact with it, we are dependent upon that.
Will we be able to see normal matter the way we do? Will we and the earth, planets, sun and stars be able to move around the way they do?
Again, our subjective sense of things could differ - my understanding of green could be different from your understanding of green, I might interpret brass musical tones differently to you, but that's my intepretation based on my experience vs your interpretation based on your experience; the particular green remains that particular green, a particular brass tone stays as a brass tone whether you hear it, I hear it, a dog hears it, an electron doesn't hear it or there's nothing to hear it.
O.
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Again, our subjective sense of things could differ - my understanding of green could be different from your understanding of green, I might interpret brass musical tones differently to you, but that's my intepretation based on my experience vs your interpretation based on your experience; the particular green remains that particular green,
... as is the case of those with Synesthesia.
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Exactly, yes.
That's not actually the same issue - whether I think it's the case and whether I can prove it are different things. All the scientific evidence in the world that I can produce only shows that reality has been consistent so far, that's no guarantee that it won't change tomorrow. I have to operate on the understanding that it won't, but I can't prove it.
Notwithstanding the idea that nothing can 'look' like anything to an electron, which operates at the level at which electromagnetic quanta carry light... let's instead think of a dog. A dog's sensory apparatus is significantly different to ours, the interpretation of that sensory input is almost certainly vastly different again... they still hear the sound of a tree falling. If I'm not there and the dog is, the sound is heard because the sound is not dependent on either me or my particular interpretation of it.
Hypothetically, through measuring equipment which can interact with light, with accounts from people who do have the correct sensory apparatus. I guess this is graduating the question to 'If a tree falls near a deaf person does it make a noise?' - the answer is still yes.
At some level, whether we can see it or not, that might be what it is, or at least one way of interpreting what it is. We have a word - tree - for the macroscopic level that we interact with, that's useful for our living, and if we start to look at a different level (microscopic, quantum, whatever) then that understanding of 'tree' becomes less useful, but it doesn't suddenly become invalid.
No, it is our senses that interact with various aspects of THE TREE that give us an impression of the tree, just as they'd give a dog an impression of a tree (which it might not have a separate conception of, to be fair).
Different, but dark matter would feel like dark matter because it would interact in the same way consistently - the reality would remain consistent, because it's not dependent upon whether we can or do interact with it, we are dependent upon that.
Again, our subjective sense of things could differ - my understanding of green could be different from your understanding of green, I might interpret brass musical tones differently to you, but that's my intepretation based on my experience vs your interpretation based on your experience; the particular green remains that particular green, a particular brass tone stays as a brass tone whether you hear it, I hear it, a dog hears it, an electron doesn't hear it or there's nothing to hear it.
O.
You are still not in the same wavelength.
I am not talking about differences in the working of our senses or differences in brain chemistry. I am talking about interacting with the world. Let me see if I can explain...
What is the world essentially...? No one knows. People however think that at the smallest level (that we can think of currently) the world is Strings. Some tiny bit of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions and transforming itself into the world. That is the most basic picture of 'reality' that we have currently (I think).
After this, there are different levels of reality...at the elementary particle level, atomic level, molecular level and so on. If we could perceive at each of these levels, reality will appear different....
Alright...then why are we not seeing all these realities but only seeing a tree? This is because at our scale, our senses and brain show us that 'reality'.....that is why. Not that the tree is actually real....but that our interface with the world works like that and shows us molecules arranged in that form.
If we had a different type of interface, reality would appear different.....such as being able to see and feel Dark Matter, for example. Or being able to see molecules or atoms or electrons moving about....whatever.
So, my point is that the tree is not 'real' in an absolute sense. It is real only as far as our interface is concerned.
Dogs and other creatures share the same interface. Instruments and cameras are also made in line with our interface (senses). So obviously, they all show the same 'reality'.
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You are still not in the same wavelength.
I am not talking about differences in the working of our senses or differences in brain chemistry. I am talking about interacting with the world. Let me see if I can explain...
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Not unreasonable. In fact that is what most posters here have been positing... ?
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As Udayana says, this is what other posters have been basically saying. In the case of the tree, we simply give it that name, because our brains recognise the same thing in the same way. No one has suggested, as far as I can see, that it can't be interpreted in different ways(e.g. your possible string level, particle level or molecular level). What's the problem?
How we interpret something does not mean that the 'something' doesn't exist in its own right, whether we are there to interpret it or not.
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You are still not in the same wavelength.
I am not talking about differences in the working of our senses or differences in brain chemistry. I am talking about interacting with the world. Let me see if I can explain...
What is the world essentially...? No one knows.
No-one has absolute knowledge, but we have a range of increasingly and decreasingly confident understandings at various scales and of various phenomena - it's not absolute ignorance any more than it's absolute knowledge
People however think that at the smallest level (that we can think of currently) the world is Strings. Some tiny bit of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions and transforming itself into the world. That is the most basic picture of 'reality' that we have currently (I think).
That's one theory - it's one in the less well validated end of our pool of knowledge, as I understand things.
After this, there are different levels of reality...at the elementary particle level, atomic level, molecular level and so on. If we could perceive at each of these levels, reality will appear different....
Those aren't different levels of reality, those are just reality - they are different levels of our understanding, they are scales at which we can observe distinct ways of defining phenomena, but they are all simultaneous and equally valid. The scaling and the levels are facets of our limitations of understanding, not differences in reality itself.
Alright...then why are we not seeing all these realities but only seeing a tree? This is because at our scale, our senses and brain show us that 'reality'.....that is why.
It is the level at which our sensory apparatus has evolved because it's the level at which those developments increased breeding success in our ancestors.
Not that the tree is actually real....but that our interface with the world works like that and shows us molecules arranged in that form.
Of course the tree is real - and whilst we directly perceive the solidity of the bark, it is at exactly the same time essentially empty space with interacting quanta floating in it, and a collection of plant cells interacting with each other and the environment, and a four-dimensional block-time object. That reality is there, our perception of it is divided.
If we had a different type of interface, reality would appear different.....such as being able to see and feel Dark Matter, for example. Or being able to see molecules or atoms or electrons moving about....whatever.
Importantly, though, reality would not BE different - it's our perception that alters, not reality. And, as we learn more about the facets of reality that we can't directly perceive, so our understanding and perception slowly approaches a more complete one.
So, my point is that the tree is not 'real' in an absolute sense. It is real only as far as our interface is concerned.
No, the tree is real, our perception is limited (but, arguably, improving). If we perceived at the atomic scale the tree would still be a tree, we'd just be looking at a different level. Examining plant cells under a microscope doesn't stop a flower being real.
Dogs and other creatures share the same interface. Instruments and cameras are also made in line with our interface (senses). So obviously, they all show the same 'reality'.
No, some cameras see wavelengths that we can't, other animals detect phenomena that we either don't or aren't consciously aware of (Earth's magnetic field, for instance), some equipment detects entire phenomena of which we are directly unaware (neutrino emissions, for instance).
O.
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https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quantum-physics-experiment-questions-the-existence-of-objective-reality
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This may seem counter intuitive. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.
But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts.
In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective.
We have now for the first time performed this test experimentally at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons.
....we succeeded in showing that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts – we violated the inequality.
Clearly these are all deeply philosophical questions about the fundamental nature of reality.
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https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quantum-physics-experiment-questions-the-existence-of-objective-reality
This is the same paper as you used in More than one reality exists (http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=16565.msg765333#msg765333) - see my comments in reply #4 (http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=16565.msg767999#msg767999).
In particular it isn't compatible with the idea that an observation has anything to do with consciousness - the "observers", in this experiment, are just quantum scale particle states.
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It is not the same paper.......
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It is not the same paper.......
In the previous thread you linked to this article: More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) (https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html)
That article linked to this paper (pdf): Experimental test of local observer-independence (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05080.pdf)
Above, you linked to this article: New Quantum Physics Experiment Suggests Objective Reality Doesn't Exist (https://www.sciencealert.com/new-quantum-physics-experiment-questions-the-existence-of-objective-reality)
That article linked to this: Experimental test of local observer independence (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832)
Which, minor rewording aside, appears to be the same paper.
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If Sriram is alone in a forest and attempts an argument, is it still logically false?
Also, If a man in a forest makes a decision and there isn't a woman there to hear him is he still wrong.
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No, sound is the variation in the air pressure - I have a machine, without a brain, that measures sound so that I can check people aren't being exposed to hazardous levels of it.
We have an experience of sound, but the sound exists without us. We know this, because; the sound travels the distance between the tree and the ear, it doesn't just magically appear in the brain; the sound causes a physical response in the ear-drum and ear-canal before we sense and interpret it.
Sound exists, sound transmits energy to objects; some of those objects (i.e. ears) are linked to brains which can then sense the nerve signals generated in response to the sound, but the sound has to come first.
O.
But you can measure the variation in air pressure at frequencies we can't hear would you still call it 'sound'.
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Also, If a man in a forest makes a decision and there isn't a woman there to hear him is he still wrong.
I think, if my matrimonial training has held true, that he's only wrong if she didn't tell him the right decision beforehand, or sometimes if she did but it was a while ago and 'things have changed'...
O.
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I think, if my matrimonial training has held true, that he's only wrong if she didn't tell him the right decision beforehand, or sometimes if she did but it was a while ago and 'things have changed'...
O.
Can't argue with that. But it is good to know that some things old true.
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But you can measure the variation in air pressure at frequencies we can't hear would you still call it 'sound'.
Depends on the context - if you were talking frequencies other animals could hear, the perhaps, but probably not. At that stage it's just measurements of variation in air pressure. But, of course, in that situation it wouldn't matter if anyone was there or not, it still wouldn't be heard...
O.
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Depends on the context - if you were talking frequencies other animals could hear, the perhaps, but probably not. At that stage it's just measurements of variation in air pressure. But, of course, in that situation it wouldn't matter if anyone was there or not, it still wouldn't be heard...
O.
Hi,
Perhaps we also use the word sound, meaning air pressure waves, to differentiate from electromagnetic waves.
Also, when sound is out of the human range we often add the pre fixes sub (sub sonic) and ultra (ultra sonic or ultra sound) to indicate that it is not in the audible range. We also do this with light by using ultra and infra.
There must have been a time in the past when the word sound or its origin only meant what you could hear.