Do Our Questions Create the World?(blogs.scientificamerican.com) |
Do Our Questions Create the World?(blogs.scientificamerican.com) |
"Where was mind when the universe was born? And what sustained the universe for the billions of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking back at us."
Can someone explain how his 'answer' is chilling or lovely? It's fine if he wants to offer his own pet theory of reality, but to give a cop out answer to its most fundamental question doesn't go far to support it.
Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from? How did all of this happen?
Life is a waking dream, because we often completely forget that we really just don't know at all why we are here. But we pretend, we forget, we make up stories, we do anything we can do to run away from that question. Why. How did all of this happen? Why does everything happen the way it does? What does that mean, for what I am, all the way at the core?
It's not really nihilism, but it sort of is. It's just, that's the perpetual question that never gets answered directly.
I've thought of myself before as a monad - a being so fundamentally lonely in their own existence that they split themselves up into infinite pieces, just to forget, there's nothing more than what they are. Maybe some buddhist influences, but, we all have our struggles in life. It's not really intended to be sophistry. It just is a very beautiful, but very chilling awareness. What if I go back into what I was when I die?
You could see this as a mental metaphor my mind has arbitrarily made up for all events I've witnessed and been a part of, some sort of perpetual social ostracism I keep walking myself into. But I still think it's more than just that. I loved science growing up. But I can never answer that question - and I know absolutely, that I never will. What happened before 'I exist'?. For any of us. My father often has had a variant of this question, and in the past, it's rubbed people the wrong way because, only a fraction of it gets expressed. We all wear masks. Sometimes there's just a profoundly deep sadness that no one can see.
Chilling, and lovely. In perpetuity.
This one we are beginning to be able to answer. From what I can tell, the question is entirely backwards. One doesn't have a life. A life has a someone.
A self is a messy, changing collection of descriptions of a human, the most extensive of which are those descriptions that are contained within one's own brain and also in one's bodily presence.
The descriptions don't posses the life. The life generates and manifests the descriptions.
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To be fair, there are many, many useful reasons to frequently ignore this perspective and pretend that we are selves that do indeed possess a life -- the strongest being that we seemingly can't help but do so most of the time, just like we can't help but take the next breath.
However, taking the time to appreciate and meditate on the above can very worthwhile. At least, it has been for me personally.
There are intermediate answers to questions like "Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from? How did all of this happen?"
The chain of intermediate questions and answers leads to the ultimate frontiers of science. One has to accept the possibility that our desire for an ultimate, resounding answer to these questions may never be quenched. Perhaps the universe just defies human understanding at some point. Even our language become circular at some point: the definitions of "thing", "entity", and "object" all refer to each other - there is no definition beyond them; without circularity dictionaries would be infinite.
Im not sure the question of what happened before "I" is so puzzling though. If your're making up the events that you're witnessing today, why would the "time" prior to you be any different?
Solipsism?
In a way he supposes minds as entropy inducing entities.
This is the reason that a lot of people don’t like philosophy - because people hide behind verbal tricks which have little meaning beyond sounding “deep”. Green ideas sleep furiously
The trick of the philosopher is an attempt at conveying meaning with a blunt instrument.
"To cross a river you need a boat. But when you reach the other side you don’t pick up the boat and carry it." ~ Alan Watts
The past was created when people started probing it, in the same sense that the present is.
This is an answer in the guise of a question, and the answer (belief) being that the universe is finite. Let me offer a better question: is the universe finite or infinite?
What is the concept of infinity but the outer limit of our mind's ability to conceptualize?
Where was the word before the first question is asked?
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)
The quote "" “Unitarianism [Wheeler's nominal religion] is a feather bed to catch falling Christians” (Darwin); "" is from not one, but two Darwin's.
Here is Charles Darwin quoting Erasmus Darwin in his own slant: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5
The source is a Charles Darwin ancestor, Erasmus Darwin. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-era...
"Distress" by Greg Egan [1].
"Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” John Archibald Wheeler
Work in the blockchain somehow, sell a million books.
books by wheeler worth reading?
Recently they published this https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-mult... by an author who believes ""There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters. This idealist ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism ..." https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...
I can’t take anyone seriously if he suggests that. Is hunger figment of imagination? The war crimes and multitudes of unspeakable injustices? Nature is really real. The effects seen in the atomic world must not be conflated to the big.
Playing Devil's Advocate here, but moralizing such things is indeed the product of subjective human imagination. Nature doesn't moralize, though it does appear to seek balance on some levels while at the same time violently evolving.
If we look into our own body's on a micro scale, we see the same mass conflicts of micoorganisms massacring and genociding eachother. Is that injustice? Without it human beings and living things in general wouldn't exist.
Flagged for pseudoscience.
So often you see unpopular yet perfectly valid (sometimes even technically correct) comments voted into oblivion and then whole arguements arise because if it. Sometimes technically incorrect comments based on popular myths deserve "air time" if they're followed by an intelligent rebuttal, but those comments get lost in the ether meaning nobody learns anything.
It just feels there is so much lost content and bad will generated by the current state of peer moderation.
I say this as someone who has a very healthy "karma" so please dont take this as a whinge post. More just my opinion and observations.
- Objective truth: the physical world as it is. There are no "chairs" in this world (would an ant recognize a chair, or a bacteria?) - only data from which we can derive patterns.
- Consensus truth: what people have agreed to be true, often via perception or abstract logic. This is math, that is red, this is a chair, that is democracy.
- Subjective truth: what I believe to be true, by my own rationality or my own perception. This can sometimes deviate from consensus truth (eg. optical illusions).
There must be a term for this philosophical position, but I haven't found it yet (or the thinker associated with it). Obviously this is due to my ignorance because this is not a particularly profound metaphysical position to take.
Does anyone know the name of this?
- Survival based truth: what we believe in order to keep being alive and make more of us. The moment we mess too much, we're not there any more. An unforgiving, but strangely, also somewhat flexible truth.
I think this is the winner, at least for people and animals. It's got an internal self-righting system and transcends distinctions such as objective, subjective and consensus - it's all of them. It's the kind of truth that keeps existing by adapting to the world, or else it gets eradicated.
The fact that you recognize there's a subjective truth, and that it can differ from the objective truth, hints at philosophical skepticism -- though skepticism goes a bit further and claims the objective truth is essentially unknowable.
I don't really understand your "consensus truth" category. The things you list are just labels, not truth statements. Apples and oranges.
Great book, as far as books that attempt to cover all of human history, science, and philosophy go.
Consider the differences between these claims:
"My reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
"Your reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
and bonus:
"Fantasy is that which, no matter how much you believe in it, doesn't come to be."
If so I need to read that book.
With political and other scandals where you get into believing the propaganda but then there are awkward facts that just can't be erased. Yet the world goes on ignoring the facts that, if taken into consideration, mean the convenient narrative verging on a fable can only be a lie.
The fact that disproves everything could be a five second clip from headline news reporting made decades ago, only broadcast live. Or the first edition version of a newsprint article revised in the 'final edition' that did make it to microfiche. Or a forum repost from a decade ago, now lost to a content management system update. These clues are everywhere, sometimes ignored due to 'fast moving events' where we are collectively still trying to learn the story and pertinent details and little clues are lost to the big picture we are still trying to see.
Maybe only with sci-fi can this be told, with real events too much opinion shaped by TV and the PR companies gets in the way.
> "Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is finite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity, such a system would, as in a video game, render content (reality) only at the moment that information becomes available for observation by a player and not at the moment of detection by a machine (that would be part of the simulation and whose detection would also be part of the internal computation performed by the Virtual Reality server before rendering content to the player). Guided by this principle we describe conceptual wave/particle duality experiments aimed at testing the simulation theory."
Here's the kickstarter they (successfully) ran to fund some of the experiments: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simulation/do-we-live-i...
You could get a billion different scenarios, each one involving a million locations.
None of them existed before you started playing the game. And generating all of them in advance would be a) impossible, given the memory requirements and b) a huge waste, considering that 99.99999% of the players never needed to experience 99.99999% of the scenarios.
So what they did, they only presented up what is "observable" to you, the player.
So there is some saving there.
If you want purely high-performance model of the Universe, nothing performs better than "everything you observe is simply invented the moment you invent it", be it classical or quantum.
Science is vitally important to understanding things, making progress (however humanity defines it), building things, etc. But deep insight philosophically, I mean in my opinion, that's just as important, because they go hand in hand. One becomes a tool for the other. Or a tool turns into an awareness.
As someone whose had more than their fair share of experience wading in the somewhat deep (as in 'crazy') parts of the conscious pool of thought, yea, reality, comprehending it in the same way it's known to others - absolutely vital. But also not.
Doesn't make it pseudoscience. Just different questions, different things being noticed, taken apart, figured out, asked about, pondered on. Just like anything else, like ants on a trail to Feynman. Just because it looks 'weird', misinformed - whatever - for a brief instant, doesn't mean that's what it's going to turn into.
Philosphical thinking may also be grounded in recurring phenomena or be completely blue-sky. A philosophy that premises alternate reality begins by ignoring how underdetermined is the human brain when reflecting on itself. A scientific exploration is grounded in physical premises even if no objective data is possible.
I don't really see it as circular, more like a spiral. Each layer of computation or math - in 3s. Computer, mind, paper. Or symbol relates to symbol through symbol. Deductive proof techniques, the memory of all existing knowledge filling in the gaps between each sequential step. Layers of definitions stack, those are computer programs.
The internet makes so much of life weird. Memories, words. Everything a reminder, automatic.
This is him:
https://www.cs.stevens.edu/~naumann/publications/publication...
Time is something I'm learning to both be able to see as something to keep in mind from a practical perspective, but also, something I can seem to let go of. It's very challenging, sometimes - but it seems essential to grasp 'flow'. Thank you for that.
(I don't know why you switched from "infinite" to "infinity". I am opting to answer for the word "infinite".)
'Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off of it.'
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
> For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we eat?", the second by the question "Why do we eat?", and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"
I can only imagine that there are both, the "Darwinian" one that we humans use as an interface to an underlying, patternless, data-oriented "Newtonian truth."
We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best.
If it exists it isn’t anything like the classical world we inhabit - that has been proven multiple times over.
Objective reality can kill me, so I'd consider that rather less shaky than the images that appear when I sleep.