I read an excellent book called The Idea Of The World, by Bernando Kastrup that reminds me of this. It made me consider idealism waay more seriously.
Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
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Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#52The most interesting thing, to me, is that if you abandon materialism, what does it say about Consciousness? Consciousness can't come from material if it doesn't really exist. So is material "created" by Consciousness?
People have proposed the idea that consciousness is the building block of the universe and not matter. See Itzhak Bentovs book Stalking The Wild Pendulum.
Panpsychism is the term.
For usage in popular fiction & fun reading, take a deep dive into the lore of The Elder Scrolls, especially Morrowind-era content. In short, the universe is dreamed up by The Dreamer, and thus by definition is made of consciousness. Interesting consequences ensue as a result, especially for the few bits of consciousness (people) that become "lucid" within the dream.
This was all inspired of course by some parts of Hinduism if I remember correctly.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#53Looks like it's hardwalled, which means it's off topic for HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#54I can only see the introduction, but it already shows some confused thinking. Whether something exists, and whether you call it X only because there are humans who call it X, those are two different things. On a planet without humans, stones exists, but no one is there to call them "stones". So they don't really exist, is that what the article is trying to tell me? Also, the stones do not exist, because only atoms ex…
What about Dirac's words ~ there being a fundamental size where any experiment will disturb the subject non negligibly, thus science can never speak causally prior to quantum measurements. This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool. Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something phy…
> Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong?
Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people.
If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you cannot observe directly still follow the model... simply because there is no good reason to assume they don't.
If we take the logic of "if I can't verify it by experiment, it does not exist" too far, then Big Bang is also not real, because we can't replicate it in the lab. Actually, we should take quite seriously the idea that the universe was created at this very moment, because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the "everything is quantum entanglement" theory proposed here really incompatible with materialism? Additionally, is "materialism" perhaps just an overloaded term with no strict definition? It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dua…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation. The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and…
>The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look.
True.
>It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
>Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation. The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and…
>The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. True. >It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive. How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjecti…
> How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
> This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
I'm just extrapolating the trend - of course I don't know what end-game physics looks like, but I'm basing my understanding over what's happened so far.
All we have to build our interpretations on are what we know now. That's the reason we no longer believe in supernatural causes - we've figured out better explanations for enough phenomena that we can reasonably assume the rest are explained naturally too. From the models we have so far, we know that the universe is organised bottom-up and our understanding of what we consider "complete objects" like a cat or a solar system are just the emergent phenomena of collections of rules (or are engineered based on those rules in the case of manmade objects). So if objects don't actually exist in the way we perceive them, I'm not sure what credibility is left for materialism if the whole concept of 'object' only exists in my interpretation.
> I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
That may well be true, but I had to look 'naturalism' up because I hadn't heard the term before. It's probably the angle from which I've approached metaphysics that's to blame for that though.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#57Way back in 1781 Immanuel Kant discussed this (without considering quantum implications, obviously) in "Critique of Pure Reason". He coined the term "noumenon" to describe a thing as it is, not as it is perceived.
And Plato before him had his cave. For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx? [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
This is actually quite a common theme in Buddhist literature. Apart from the central concept of the nature of mind that is by definition unthinkable (in the same way that the eye can't see itself), there are also specific experiences related to the nature of mind that evade ordinary mind.
A simple example: in his boo The Crystal and the Way of Light, Namkhai Norbu describes one of his meditational experiences where he sees 5 spheres of light in one bigger sphere. In this experience, there is no space between the spheres but this seemed perfectly natural. After he finished the practice session, he sat and tried to draw it and after several attempts realized it's impossible. There are many similar accounts.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Plato before him had his cave. For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx? [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
There are, and they begin with a brainfu*k esolang dialect called Hofstadter that represents instructions as different camelCase capitalizations of the name Hofstadter. If neither of these are familiar to you, sorry about your afternoon!
Damn you, and I didn't even get as far as Hofstadter. I bottomed out in albumen prints.
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Dirac's words ~ there being a fundamental size where any experiment will disturb the subject non negligibly, thus science can never speak causally prior to quantum measurements. This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool. Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something phy…
> Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong? Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people. If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you…
> because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
We have access to memories of the past which are physical. Records in the rock strata of Earth's formation, neuronal connections in our brain of Grandma's barbecue and who was in attendance, red-shifted EM signals traveling since a few seconds after the big bang.
The information of these processes and events is never lost. "The present is the key to the past" and such. Even every causal relation since t=0 could be worked back to arbitrary accuracy from t=n for a near-omnipotent civilization. One still following all laws of physics, just very advanced and capable.
QM creates a novel situation imo where nothing, not even near-omnipotence, allows one to probe "pre-measurement". The very act of measuring causes something to occur. Scattering a photon or electron or proton with something is the smallest tool in quantum field theory, probably the most well studied near-fundamental theory in physics. There is no way in principle to ever probe pre-measurement because there is no disturbance-free way to observe. There is no sub-photon. There's nothing besides particles and fields to investigate with. There's no tool to build to improve things. The type of knowing in knowing the superposition of states pre-measumrent is not the same as knowing the past. We can arbitrarily improve tech to investigate the past to arbitrary degrees. The information of the past is out there, physically accessible to some kind of observer. In QM, there is no way to improve that lack of knowledge. It is forever inaccessible to any type of observer.
If this still all exists for you, then what about the past? Why doesn't that exist? What notion of "exists" could you thread that denies the past's existence yet asserts the existence other inaccessibles?
Surely there are kinds of existence in each of these ideas.
(To be clear absolute size isn't the only motivator for QM, just one aspect of it).
Re: Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong? Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people. If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you…
> because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either. We have access to memories of the past which are physical. Records in the rock strata of Earth's formation, neuronal connections in our brain of Grandma's barbecue and who was in attendance, red-shifted EM signals traveling since a few seconds after the big bang. The information of these processes and events is never lost. "The present is the key to the past"…
> The information of these processes and events is never lost.
The photons we send to the atoms encoding the information about the past also cause disturbances, don't they?