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Post by fascinating on Dec 10, 2013 19:34:32 GMT 1
I am finding it difficult to grasp where you are coming from here. I thought you had agreed that, even before the existence of intelligent observers, there was a planet Earth with animals on it, and that light came to Earth either directly from an object we call the Sun, or from objects, planets and moons, that reflected the light of the Sun. Those objects are what constitutes the Solar System, so therefore you are accepting that the Solar System did exist before intelligent life arose, are you not? So why are you casting doubt as to the existence of the Solar System at that time?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 11, 2013 4:07:33 GMT 1
Yes, I do, and evidently so do you - that's the point! Science - reason in general - works by making inferences from evidence. You have questioned the basis for both - you claim that the foundations for inference depend on the neocortex, and may not be valid in the brain of another creature; you claim that there is no ground for the evidential relation, because we cannot "prove" that evidence exists. Both these claims are mistaken, and as I've been trying to point out to you, Socratically, have not the slightest piece of evidence or logic to support them.
Precisely. We are making progress.
Now take what you've just said and ask yourself why this does not apply to times and places where there are or have been no observers.
Briefly - Popper basically argued, in his analysis of the logical process of scientific explanation, two points. One is that the Problem of Induction is avoided in scientific explanation because its rational foundation is through Hempel's process of hypothetico-deduction, not inductive generalisation. You explain a given set of observations by framing a hypothetical underlying structure giving rise to them as phenomenal patterns, then deduce what other observations would also be produced were the hypothesis true. The second point follows: the hallmark of science, distinguishing it in particular from pseudo-science, is in the process of seeing whether these implications actually occur. If they don't, the hypothesis is "falsified" and thereby rejected, requiring new hypotheses to be framed. If they do, the hypothesis is corroborated, though never "proved" in your logical sense.
It's a delicious and stimulating theory (and scientists especially are almost universally enamoured of it, because it gives them a special status, and allows them to sneer at investigations and theories they don't approve of as "pseudo-science"), but rather sadly doesn't work as an adequate description of how science actually works in the real world. Nor is it at all clear that it would be sensible if it did - if we followed his recommendations in so defining science, we'd be left with precious few explanations that could be deemed "scientific" at all, and the practice of the "scientific method" would effectively grind to a halt. Nearly all scientific theories are routinely falsified in Popper's sense on a daily basis - even simple processes like making up chemical compounds mysteriously go wrong a certain percentage of the time. The wave equation typically used every day by physicists around the world making calculations according to QM gives an average correct result of slightly less than 99% - and sometimes it's "wrong" by very much larger margin. QED and Feynman's modification of Schrodinger's equation is considerably more accurate, but even that's not 100%. No one would dram of declaring QM or QED falsified when these results occur - though strictly speaking according to Popper they should, and should start thrashing about for a replacement theory.
"Falsification" is only granted after theory replacement, not before. No one questioned Newtonian gravitation because Mercury wobbled a bit - to the extent they saw it as a problem, they supposed another planet must exist somewhere. The orbit of Mercury did not corroborate Newton - but this observation was not taken as a "test", and such anomalies never are. There is no way to "test" our hypothesis that dinosaur fossils imply a previous age of living dinosaurs, for example; nor do we require such a test before we accept it as a rational explanation of the evidence. And, even if we could imagine such a test - a means by which the hypothesis could be falsified - and actually performed it, a crucial feature of science, as it is actually performed, is that no one would accept such a "falsification": it would persuade no one to dispense with the hypothesis at all. Not until a better one came along, at any rate. Kuhn convincingly showed this is pretty much always true in science - witness these days the still emphatic insistence of the scientists of the IPCC that they are "95% certain" ( ;D) that the AGW hypothesis is true, even though it's been falsified according to Popper's analysis of scientific method many many times.
Even more deflating, Lakatos, Barnes and Bloor, and a host of others have persuasively demonstrated that even if this analysis of the process of science was an accurate and fruitful description of how it actually operates, the Problem of Induction is nevertheless still the great unsolved scandal at the heart of it.
I'm not dissing Popper in the least, by the way - he's one of my favourite philosophers, perhaps the greatest of the last century - certainly the most influential. I greatly admire and respect his political philosophy most of all.
Again, your basic mistake. Reality is one thing, our definitions, perceptions, observations, and any other mental processing of it is another. We may not be able to adequately define what this reality is, in its entirety, as a final explanatory scheme by which every possible observation is ultimately accounted for as a logical implication - (at the moment) - but this does not mean "it's all up for grabs". There's a process of discovery and progressive refinement going on in the history of rational enquiry, for one thing - Copernicus is an advance on Ptolemy and Kepler and Newton advances us further and Einstein advanced us farther still. In the process, we discover more and more about this reality - the facts I keep referring to but you don't seem to want to recognise. These are not definitively explained until your final exhaustive theoretical understanding of the entire universe has been achieved, perhaps, but they are nevertheless truths about that universe - we might not be able to give a complete and definitive explanation of what hydrogen and oxygen are, and how they are linked, but we know what they are not, and how they are not linked, and we know a host of nestled factual propositions about them - that together they can form the phenomenon of water, for example. It is not "up for grabs" that, say, this wasn't true five billion years ago, when there was no-one around to observe it; nor is it true that a creature on another planet might be able to observe this connection forming something different from what we call "water" - that H2O might be for a Venusian what we call "iron", for example.
If you believe otherwise, which is what you've argued so far, this has nothing to do with rational explanation, or science, or even metaphysics. It's indistinguishable from an unhinged solipsist's claim that "I am Napoleon".
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Post by nickrr on Dec 11, 2013 17:05:17 GMT 1
In what way are they "wrong"? True, we know that QM and general relativity are incompatible in certain cases but that doesn't mean that at least one of them isn't right. In fact QM is probably the most precisely tested scientific theory we have: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 11, 2013 18:23:02 GMT 1
I am finding it difficult to grasp where you are coming from here. I thought you had agreed that, even before the existence of intelligent observers, there was a planet Earth with animals on it, and that light came to Earth either directly from an object we call the Sun, or from objects, planets and moons, that reflected the light of the Sun. Those objects are what constitutes the Solar System, so therefore you are accepting that the Solar System did exist before intelligent life arose, are you not? So why are you casting doubt as to the existence of the Solar System at that time? No, there was not a planet earth or a solar system existing in the form we recognise them today. What there was, was a potential of these things only. I go back to my example of an oven existing in a dimension containing absolutely no observers. Under these conditions is an oven an oven? If you answer in the affirmative then you have to show how it could exist as an oven when there exists no awareness of an oven, anywhere. The only thing you can show is a potential of the oven to become an oven if and when suitable observers, including, perhaps the oven itself, evolve to a level capable of defining what an oven is. The same principle holds true for the example of the solar system.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 11, 2013 18:42:22 GMT 1
The idea of causality and time is a central plank of science. Not really - it only seems that way because we naturally reify our commonplace notions of "cause" and "time" and project them onto scientific theories. Actually, there is no symbol for "cause" in any scientific theory; and time, t, in physics is, notoriously, a static dimension, and has no reference to anything "moving", "passing", or even pointing in any direction. What time refers to in science is change - which is also all that it refers to in our experience. You appear to be mixing up the two indiscriminately. Not even a rate of change, which would in our scientific equations be self-referential; just the indication of a change from one state to an adjacent one. And this is all that is indicated by "causation" in science, too - traditionally marked as an arrow. Of course we project time, as a rate if change, onto scientific theories otherwise it would not be science. You have to use causation in constructing scientific theories else they make no sense. For example, you have to have causation in examining Evolutionary theory since there would be no link between earlier species and later species which is fundamental to its correctness. Or, take the Big Bang theory, the idea that all we see in the observable universe originated from a primeval expansion of space and time. Cell division is yet another example, or the flow of electricity, the list is endless. Without causation none of it would make sense. I accept that philosophically, time poses a problem but science and philosophy are different and whilst philosophical objections might be raised against scientific theories we have to talk about these areas in different contexts. You seem to be mixing them up indiscriminately.
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Post by fascinating on Dec 11, 2013 20:44:13 GMT 1
But you said that there were animals. What did those animals live ON? The only thing they could have lived on was the material body (which we now call) Earth. If there was no Earth, where were these animals living?
Abacus, what is the problem with there being an oven in existence, even if not one single being has become aware of its existence? You have to show why you think that lack of awareness of an object means the object cannot in fact exist.
Before Neptune was discovered, the effects of its gravity on Uranus were noticed first. Then a search was made and the planet was found. You might suggest that Neptune was only 'crystallised' into being when it was first observed, but that can't be right, because the planet must have been there previously, to have an effect on Uranus.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 11, 2013 21:05:34 GMT 1
there was not a planet earth All this is retrospective though. By that, I mean it is only because we have the ability to look back and piece together what existed, however, what you have to consider is that at the time there wasn't any conscious observers smart enough to know what we know now. This is why whenever we make statements about what things were like millions of years ago we are looking at them through our current perceptual and intellectual lenses. It is a logical conclusion. For existence to mean anything it has to be in something's awareness. Yes, but it was only when it was noticed that Uranus was affected that that particular reality led to the further reality of a new planet. Prior to that, Uranus effectively had no status in reality and was completely unknown about.
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Post by fascinating on Dec 12, 2013 9:26:02 GMT 1
For the purposes of clarity, please answer my question as to whether there was, in actuality, an Earth at the time those animals were there receiving the light from the Sun and Moon and planets.
This, I suppose, is the logical fallacy at the heart of your case. For some reason, you think that for something to exist, some entity has to be aware of it. We have 2 separate concepts here, existence and awareness. Whereas I would say that it is necessary to exist to be aware (because awareness is a property of a subjectively-experiencing subject), it does not follow that it is necessary to be aware to exist.
Your position is extraordinary, you are determined to believe that no aspect of the Universe could have been actualised until someone actually observed it. Yet there had to be objects in existence (for example, the Sun and planet Earth) BEFORE sentient beings could arise to do the observing.
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 12, 2013 10:47:08 GMT 1
For the purposes of clarity, please answer my question as to whether there was, in actuality, an Earth at the time those animals were there receiving the light from the Sun and Moon and planets. My position is that there existed the potential of an earth at that time. Something certainly existed but only in the context of the observers present at the time. So, for example, at the time of the dinosaurs, reality would have been defined by the perceptual abilities of these creatures. When more sophisticated animals came on the scene reality would have been expanded and the earth would have developed to a level much closer to its current state. Well, my personal opinion is that the only thing that can exist is consciousness. By this, I'm not just referring to human consciousness, but a kind if "universal consciousness" that penetrates every bit of matter and energy in the universe. Where this originated from is profoundly mysterious but it seems the only thing that makes sense because we do seem to live in a self-aware universe in the sense that everything operates in harmony to make the universe work. So, awareness and existence seem to me to be two sides of the same coin, or two aspects of the same state. Why do you say that? Why couldn't reality just evolve over time from the the possibilities inherent in the unformed universe? If we look at the BB, how do we account for its origin? Many scientists (not all) think the BB spontaneously happened without any cause so if this is correct why should things be any different now?
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Post by abacus9900 on Dec 12, 2013 11:03:34 GMT 1
The problem is, nobody can really define what reality is, therefore, it's all up for grabs, it seems to me! What you seem to be forgetting is that for us to examine reality we have to interfere with it in some way which inevitably changes what was there before we looked at it. This is why it is meaningless to talk of observation being completely separate from reality since they act in a participatory process to produce what we define as reality. So, it is the way we choose to observe things that, for us, define them.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 12, 2013 13:24:55 GMT 1
Some confusion here about the "observer effect".
In social sciences there is no doubt that the presence of a known observer will modify the observed, and an unknown observer is considered unethical, but nevertheless what you observe is what actually happened, therefore reality even if not the reality you wanted to know about.
Schrodinger doesn't postulate a real observer - it's a purely hypothetical model of the mechanism of an unseen reality, but what you observe when you open the box is the reality of a dead cat.
Heisenberg's principle is more correctly described as indeterminacy (see Schrodinger) but can be accurately modelled as "bouncing a photon off an electron", i.e. observation interfering with reality. The reality is indeterminacy.
In experimental or observational physical science we see photons that came from the experiment somewhere between a nanosecond (laboratory science) and a zillion years (astrophysics) ago, from which we infer the reality at the time of emission. The observer may contribute bias in his report, but the event the emitted the photon was independent of his presence.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 12, 2013 18:07:12 GMT 1
Firstly I wonder why you say that is the crucial question. But my attempted answer to the question is probably "Yes". Evidence is, by definition, "what is evident" and the word "evident" means "obvious" or "manifest". If it is accepted that there is a Universe, then the very fact that a Universe is there is manifest, obvious, evident. It's true that there may need to be sentient beings around for the Universe to be made manifest to. But that isn't the same as saying that, before sentient beings came along, there was no Universe. Then there is the aspect I alluded to before, quite possibly the whole idea of a Universe is an illusion dreamt up by my own deluded mind, and everything I believe to be external to me (including abacus9900) does not really exist. I think we are not treating such a scenario seriously but even if we (or I) did, I could still say that the Universe evidentially, manifestly and obviously (from the knowldedge of my own subjective reality) exists, consisting entirely of me. Well, I am reminded of the days when the police did not have access to things like DNA profiling or other forensic information. Now, at this time could we really say that evidence that we take for granted today was an overt aspect of police methodology in terms of solving crimes? Of course not because these things had not been developed so were unavailable for detective work. This point is merely the equivalent of saying dinosaur fossils only existed once someone unearthed them. You are merely repeating your identification of existence with knowledge.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 12, 2013 18:20:52 GMT 1
Clearly the answer to your question is: the potential. I can agree with most of your posting there, but I still don't know what you are driving at. In the chicken and egg question, the answer is the egg (the first chicken came from an egg that had the DNA of a chicken, and that egg was created from the mixing of the DNA of the parent birds (which of course were not chickens, but an earlier species). Maybe if you could answer my question in Reply #56, I might understand what point you are trying to make. Sorry, fascinating, in all the many posts that have been made about this thread I did not spot this one. Well, it is not that the solar system did not exist in any absolute sense, rather, it existed as a suspended potential waiting for conscious observers, particularly intelligent observers, to evolve, at which point it become crystalized into objective reality. I suppose, in a way, you might say it was an accident waiting to happen, which, actually, is quite an accurate way if looking at it. Until you give an analysis of what you mean by potential, this is all gobbledygook. You have repeatedly claimed that this potential exists. In what way is it different from the term existence, then? There are only two ways to give this term any sense, that I can think of. One is as a noumenon, that which exists which gives rise to our perceptions of it (the phenomenon). The other is as some hypothetical seething sea of uncollapsed wavefunctions, whereby your citing of QM experiments as evidence would make some sense. But in that case, you need to explain how such unresolved wavefunctions arise (in QM, they always do so from an existent system), how they interact (in QM, they do not, and can not, by definition, but are merely superposed), and above all, how these potentials become actual (no one, including every QM physicist, has a clue about this.) A mere repetition of your so far unsupported and unexplicated assertion that existence requires observation. Kindly provide some evidence for this. (Hint: you can't: no such evidence is possible, by the terms of your assertion. Hint: therefore it explains nothing, can not be falsified, or corroborated, and is in fact meaningless.) That's merely a restatement of your original statement! You need to provide the connecting argumentation. It's nothing of the sort. If interstellar travel is a real possibility, it always was so: we've merely noticed it, that's all.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 12, 2013 18:29:50 GMT 1
I can only assume that you mean non-human observers, because I suppose you accept that humans only came into existence after the Solar System did. So can you describe for me the nature of these intelligences who were able to crystallise the Solar System? Yes. Animals who would have been aware of the moon, one or two of the planets, such as Venus as a bright object, would have registered such images, but, of course would have had absolutely no conception of a solar system, as such. The Moon is uninterested and unaffected by whether any animal has any conception of it. You need to give the smallest piece of evidence that it is before your claim makes sense. Then you need to explain why the appearance of the Moon, and any other object that existed before any animal, presents abundant phenomenal data that can only be explained by the hypothesis that they have been physically interecting with other existent objects in the universe. The Moon is liberally cratered, example - easily explained by the hypothesis that objects have for billions of years been impacting its surface. On your metaphysic, these craters have popped into existence when some creature evolved that could see them. Why? Why would it present such phenomena, and how? Not "meaningless" at all, assuming a realist metaphysic. It's only meaningless assuming your metaphysic. That's why you're wrong, you see? You can't explain anything.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 12, 2013 18:46:54 GMT 1
In the same way that craters on the Moon are overt.
What is the difference between a potential and something that exists, please. Answer this question and we can progress.
We don't find this in QM. What is superposed are particles' wavefunctions, not the particles themselves.
I suspect you don't know what the foundations of logic and mathematics are. May I direct you to G.Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" for a basic explication? There you will see that all we need to account for logic and mathematics are a field of some sort that can be marked and the action of another mark that negates the first. Given this you can construct all of propositional logic and all of mathematics - arithmetic and set theory, at any rate, which are according to most mathematicians all that is required. My own view is that you also need the ability to build relations - ratios - but most mathematicians claim that it is possible to construct relations from set theory. I'm unconvinced by that, but never mind. Even if you don't, all that is required in addition is the supposition that the field that is marked has dimensions. In my opinion, this is required in any case, to give proper sense to sets - for a mark to be an enclosure. (It also gives you geometry, which in my judgement is the fundamental basis of mathematics - and science. That is, the "ultimate explanation of the entire universe" will be geometrical - something along the lines of Garrett Lisi's elaboration of string theory using Lie Groups: not it, but along those lines (rather than, say, Feynman's QED - bringing us back to nickrr's post - which, ultimately, is merely algebraic.)
So - that's it. Given a ground of some dimensionality and an ability for it to be marked and for that mark to be an enclosure and for that mark to be negated, you have all of logic, all of arithmetic, all of geometry, all of set theory, and hence all of mathematics. Now - explain how there could be any possible universe that has neither a field - something that is extended - nor the ability to be marked - for a dot or a line to be drawn in it? If you can do that, you'll have given some possible sense to your assertion that it's therefore possible to have alternative logics and mathematics. Until you do so, it's gibberish.
It doesn't matter how unfamiliar it might be. For it to be a "reality" it needs to be extended and it needs to have marks. There you have the foundations of logic and mathematics, in their entirety.
You need a brain for brain activity to occur. This point has already been conceded.
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