Hi Arising,
But I digress.
You wrote:The thing is that whilst the labels of Philosophy can be considered as generalizations they actually tend to then get refined to more accurately describe what they first named. Handy when the subject is one where you find that most of what you think you'd thought about things has already been thought about and better. The bonus is that given the subject there is an 'end' where one can start and its always the Philosophy that is about right now, you've just got to read and write a shit-load to catch-up upon the conversation. If that makes sense.
It makes a lot of sense to me and was clearly put.
It is not that I am disagreeing or arguing with you, it is just that philosophical labels appear to me to be without clear and concise definitions (viewed from their use on this forum). Looking at all the trouble I'm having with 'real' and 'exist' etc. maybe I need to get a handle on those labels first.
My aim, if I was forced to declare one, is to develop a simple, personal view of why I think I am here, described by a pared down to the minimum 'Swiss army knife' of philosophy.
Anything more complicated and I will forget how I got here.
Is it also a warning that anything I think will already have been thought of and published somewhere? I'm no prophet, messiah or evangelist. I only wandered into here by accident and found I enjoyed the mental exercise. While I could read all the books, I find it a highly self affirming experience to work out some of the stuff the hard way.
I am not suggesting that things can be perceived otherwise. My problem is that when viewed in that manner I am left with contradictions and infinite regressions; this tells me that things are not as they seem.
So how do they 'seem'? As seeming and perceiving can be different things I think. What "contradictions and infinite regressions" are you perceiving?
I think I am not making myself clear. I do not see if you are asking me to clarify what I understand the meanings of 'seem' and 'perceive' to be, or what contradictions and infinite regressions go with taking things as having an independent existence.
My use of words will tend to be 'Humpty Dumpty' in nature and I will over rely on context to disambiguate them. My primary aim tends to be building concepts in my head and they do not rely on words as part of their construction. My view of words is that they are only placeholders for concepts and I rely on others to reconstruct the concept from these placeholders. They are only hints, don't read too much into them.
The classic brain scrambler for stuff being real is the double slit experiment. I am told that this has now been done with atoms and even molecules. How does something like an atom got through both slits? How is wave-particle duality not contradictory to someone who thinks stuff has physical existence?
For infinite regression I will simply quote yourself:
What complexity has been removed with respect to the idea of a first cause by science?
Are you not implying here that relying on physical explanations result in infinite regression?
Insisting on physicality appears to be inviting questions about where stuff came from before there was time and space to have stuff exist in.
While I will accept that a chair exists in some sense, I am completely stuck on how my world would be measurably different whether it actually had physical existence or not. Physical existence seems to be a completely unnecessary complication.
I am thinking that the point is that the maths says that the cat is both alive and dead. The problem is that the same maths is better at predicting stuff than reality is.
Yes but in reality I'd be standing by a closed-box knowing that a truly random 50:50 event may have happened and the only possible states are that the cat is dead or its not, I'll only know once I open the box, that the Maths can't predict which until I open the box seems to be based upon the reality of the situation? As what is it that the Maths is saying by saying that the "cat is both alive and dead"?
The maths makes a precise prediction and that is that the "cat is both alive and dead". The problem is that you are insisting that what you perceive is the only solution that is real. When you open the box and find a live cat, you think that that is the only reality and that the you that opens the box and finds a dead cat is unreal and does not exist.
As a halfway house you can view it as the many worlds interpretation with rather a lot of physical universes popping into existence but if you take it as a logical rather than physical construct I think it gets a whole lot simpler.
Simply put, you are perceiving the cat as both alive and dead, you are simply unaware that you are not the entity that you think you are. (Imo)
<snip> Lots of tom foolery about many-worlds football </snip>
LOL, I wouldn't want to refute the possibility.[That we could be a 'sim' running upon some 'hardware']However, as a solution it is only trying to sweep the problem under the carpet. You simply end up trying to explain how the hardware can exist, who built it and what happened before that.
Whilst the last two are religion and I agree should be forgotten(maybe not the very last) the benefits of "How the hardware can exist" would be of benefit I'd guess.
Isn't this another example of infinite regression? You seem happy to think that your world can be a simulation and therefore, by definition, non-physical. However, you still cling to the physical 'hardware' somewhere in the equation. Can you say why there has to be any hardware at all?
Religion? How did that one creep in? But I think this is too far off topic even for me.
Says the man with the 'real' behind the real, and contradictions being possible reality
Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "the 'real' behind the real".
I'm not saying that the contradictions are real, what I am saying is that IF I take a physical interpretation of the world as I see it, THEN I am faced with contradictions and infinite regressions. IF I take a non-physical interpretation of the world as I see it, THEN I lose the contradictions and infinite regressions but am then faced with a reality that is, if not alien, very uncomfortable.
Good question. For me, science has experimentally confirmed that the mathematical models (QM, special and general relativity etc) are better at predicting the world I perceive than the physical models that I hitherto trusted. With a bit of hand waving I am then able to dispose of causality and therefore the need for a first cause.
Near frantic flapping would be my guess
My reference to hand waving refers to conjectural nature of the model I have. Subject to the conjectures, the model is static. It has no beginning or end, it just is. If you need a first cause, then it is simply that the model is possible. If it is possible then it is, always was and always will be.
Don't you think it would be more efficient if it was simulated with an analogue computer? But maybe this is best answered in a separate thread.
Feel free
Ah, I was only trying to tease. But while you are digesting this post I may explore your ideas you expressed in your 'Digital Metaphysics' post.
I think it seriously depends upon what you mean by "predicting the world I perceive"? As QM can barely calculate tiny events let alone the world we perceive, although I'll give you that QED explains the world we perceive. I thought QM and S&G Relativity were incompatible at present? We're waiting upon some theory of gravity or something?
OK, I'll put it the other way around. A purely physical interpretation does not predict the world that I perceive. It is the teeny weeny bits it gets wrong that scuppers the whole concept. (For me)
I don't think QM and S&G Relativity are incompatible, simply unconnected and dealing with different things. I understand progress is being made on a Grand Unifying Theory. However, for me, it is unnecessary to go as far as unifying them to terminally damage my view of a physical reality.
'they' are simply those who try. Black holes sound very tricky things to handle. Big ones would be practically impossible to make and existing ones are a long way away. Tiny ones would be easier to make but would take more energy to produce than they release. My understanding is that tiny ones would be hugely unstable and evaporate almost instantly.
I've heard this and think its a very high-risk risk to test-out, especially with the tax-payers Euros. Let's hope that if the granted improbable happens someone thought to calculate a trajectory away from the earths future orbits.
They have just started using Lead nuclei so maybe the question will be answered soon. I think they are using a 'spray and pray' technique and so you might as well ask which side of a hand grenade is the safe one. Let's hope it is a dud.
Just to cheer you up, I think the point of collision is quite deep underground. Even if it emerged directly upwards and at relativistic speed, would it make it through all that rock without picking up enough mass to slow it to below escape velocity?
EDIT: Ooops, just thought, although below ground level, they probably dug a big hole/shaft to stuff the experiments in so up may be relatively clear. Phew.
Do you mean what do things seem like to me? Pretty much the same as they seem to you as far as perception is concerned. I am not psychotic (in that respect anyway). My position is that the way things seem cannot be the way they are.
Not sure which "way they are" you are referring too?
Maybe if I put it another way.
Looking at a chair, the physical interpretation seems to be the obvious explanation for its presence.
The closer you examine the chair, the less satisfactory the physical interpretation becomes.
What I am saying is that whatever a chair is, it is not a simple lump of matter.
Is it safe to ignore (philosophically) the nature of matter at the small (and large) scale?
I do not have the language to do this justice (I visualise this, not calculate it) but from where I am looking I see I am intrinsic in nothing and by extrapolation, so is everything else. That is to say, take a lump of nothing, stare at it for a bit and you will see yourself (etc) there.
Leibniz's Monads?
No, sizable minds.
From what I read about this I would say I was 50% with and 50% against the idea. I do not see an atomic 'monad' as the root. Where would it have come from and why?
You got one of these TOE's then? As Philosophy has had loads.
No, do you think I should?
I have a loose cabal of concepts supported by a couple of conjectures which come together as an informal model.
I suspect that a theory is a formal construct and my conjectures would rule out the title.
Maybe a 'Conjecture Of Everything' would be the best I could hope for. How about this that drops out of the model:-
Everything = nothing.
It is nicely commutative:-
Nothing = everything.
And just right for the front and back of a T-shirt.
Of course, the T-shirt should be blank to be truly parsimonious, the observer inferring the above from first principles.
I was hoping for something a little less prosaic after all this work
Nurse, I think it's time to increase the medication.
While an answer is good to have, I think the value is in knowing why I believe that it is this answer over other possibilities.
It is not so much what I think, but why I think it.
(By 'unfolding' I do not intend to imply a process, I think everything is entirely static. I do not think we exploded out of nothing. Rather, I think what we see is what nothing looks like.)
And it look like what I'm looking at is my guess. Unless you have another explanation for how I have a consciousness through time?
I think I am missing what you are getting at here. You seem to be agreeing with me so the 'Unless' confuses me.
The reason you have a consciousness through time is the same reason that we think we are viewing the same thread.
Just to clarify what I mean about Psychonaut's posts. They gave me means and practice at reasoning and, more significantly, the awareness to see the pernicious fallacies that I had accumulated throughout my life. It simply cut the ground from beneath my feet and I can no longer avoid seeing the cracks in reality and what that must mean. That hurts my brain.
What do these cracks look like and what does this brain pain feel like?
'Look like'? Oh dear, language is on the blink again.
Let me bounce this back at you. Are you happy that your physical world is an adequate explanation of all the phenomenon you perceive? Do you assert that physical explanations for all phenomenon are simultaneously true with no resulting contradiction?
I get 'no' as an answer to this and that is enough of a crack to get my attention.
My brain pain is a mixture of vertigo, stretching, excitement and dread.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by 'thinking', 'thoughting' and 'knowing'. Just guessing but when I see a conjurer do something impossible, I do not conclude that magic is possible. I conclude that there is something happening that I am unaware of. I see what you see; it is just that I think it is a conjuring trick.
There's your problem I think, you can't "see what I see" in a very real sense. A real trick is that we can use symbols to refer to what we can't see.
I did not wish to imply I could somehow see through your eyes, but that we draw different conclusions about what we see.
As a philosopher you may wonder about whether chairs cease to exist when you stop looking at them. I, however, do not believe that the chair exists even while I am looking at it.
Language is a neat trick but I am finding it somewhat of a double edged sword.
What do I find unbearable about the new model? That's a tough one. Firstly, I was being melodramatic; it isn't, because I'm still here. Secondly, it shreds the basis of all my past hopes and fears and so precipitates a very uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
Not surprised, best to find some new hopes but I'd drop the fears this time
What were they?
Oh, just the same as other folks I guess. Just life stuff.
The problem is the new model works in such a fundamentally different way and dictates a purely deterministic situation.
My specific problem is that I find it such a compelling reason why I am here that I struggle not to believe it.
Thirdly, the sheer scale of it hurts my brain; in contrast, the total perspective vortex sounds claustrophobic.
I diagnose two, no three!! Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. That should do the trick. Barring that, some Phenomenology.
I hope you meant 'prescribe' and you are not insinuating I'm not in full control of my faculties.
If Phenomenology is the study of phenomenon then I would say that is what got me into this mess in the first place.
(If it is the study of Muppet songs then I don't see how it is going to help.)
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