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Do Our Questions Create the World?

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Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#71

Post by wu-ikkyu »

sridca wrote: post #70
Tiki wrote: post #5

Towards the end of the article was the question I had all along reading it: "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,…

> Where was mind when the universe was born? 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?

>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?

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#73

Post by wu-ikkyu »

hi41 wrote: post #61

>“I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,” 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.

>The war crimes and multitudes of unspeakable injustices?

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.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#74

Post by dwaltrip »

alexpetralia wrote: post #34
mnw21cam wrote: post #2

No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)

My metaphysical philosophy has always been: - 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…

The book Sapiens uses the term "intersubjective" for your consensus truth. He describes such things as shared fictions.

Great book, as far as books that attempt to cover all of human history, science, and philosophy go.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#75

Post by visarga »

alexpetralia wrote: post #34
mnw21cam wrote: post #2

No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)

My metaphysical philosophy has always been: - 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…

There's also:

- 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.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#76

Post by dwaltrip »

s-shellfish wrote: post #16
Tiki wrote: post #5

Towards the end of the article was the question I had all along reading it: "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,…

I find it both chilling and lovely. Because on one hand, life, endless adventure, full of surprises, insights, new understandings and experiences, feelings, etc. On the other, absolute, fundamental, loneliness (sophistry?) of our own nature - having an individual sense of self but also feeling related to everything we define as not 'I'. Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from? How d…

> Why this life, why is this the one I have?

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.

------

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.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#77

Post by procedural_love »

rags2riches wrote: post #36

I can't claim to understand the first thing about quantum mechanics, but whenever I read about it I always come to think of lazy evaluation. Then I want to know if it's there simply for performance reasons or if it's to enable an infinite universe.

This is a line of reasoning that some physicists are exploring: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00058

> "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...

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#79

Post by sleepyams »

alexpetralia wrote: post #34
mnw21cam wrote: post #2

No. No, I think the world would still be there if we didn't question it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)

My metaphysical philosophy has always been: - 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…

Roughly speculative realism?

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#80

Post by alexpetralia »

visarga wrote: post #75
alexpetralia wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My metaphysical philosophy has always been: - 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…

There's also: - 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…

I believe this is what Jordan Peterson calls "Darwininan truth." He thinks it is the ultimate truth, but Sam Harris (on the side of "Newtonian truth") would certainly beg to differ.

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."

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