Do Our Questions Create the World? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#81

Post by alexpetralia » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:33 AM UTC

solipsism wrote: post #66

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…

The fact that you acknowledge there exists an objective truth means you're a philosophical realist, as opposed to an idealist. 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" categor…

Thank you for these. I will read up on them.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#82

Post by mnw21cam » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

justinpombrio wrote: post #12

notheguyouthink wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deleted

Here is an example of what the world might look like if reality _was_ effected by our beliefs: http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf (It's the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges.)

Yay, an actual correct usage of the word "effected". You don't see that very often.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#83

Post by wazoox » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 10:59 AM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #40

wazoox wrote: post #18

Mmmhkay, so that's a rehash of good ol' George Berkeley's philosophy, then? That's cute, only coming 300 years later :)

There's a world of difference between solipsism and viewing observation as an act of creation.

Berkeley is not solipsist. He posits that reality exists only as much as it is perceived or thought; perceiving is creating. Therefore the world persists only because God perpetually perceives and think it, and the Creation is a continuous process from God's thought.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#84

Post by eli_gottlieb » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #25

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #17

>Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality Flagged for pseudoscience.

John Wheeler is a highly respected physicist and his “it from bit” is still referenced in many papers every year. It's speculative and still not rigidly defined, but definitely not pseudoscience.

Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to reality" is not.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#85

Post by s-shellfish » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #76

s-shellfish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poss…

Was watching Sherlock Holmes recently.

'Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off of it.'

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#86

Post by drdeca » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #71

sridca wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

"Infinite" can be understood as "not finite" or "without limit", or "equinumerous with a strict subset of itself".

(I don't know why you switched from "infinite" to "infinity". I am opting to answer for the word "infinite".)

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#87

Post by akvadrako » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #84

akvadrako wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Wheeler is a highly respected physicist and his “it from bit” is still referenced in many papers every year. It's speculative and still not rigidly defined, but definitely not pseudoscience.

Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to reality" is not.

I personally wouldn’t characterize it from bit that way, but it’s not as crazy as it seems.

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.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#88

Post by s-shellfish » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 8:15 PM UTC

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #69

opportune wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it’s not profound except at face value. Just strikes me as extremely vague and hand-wavy metaphysics 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

Some ideas are so subtle that words fail to describe. In the same way lay explanations of physics lack understanding that pure equations deliver. 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

My former PhD advisor said something along the lines of 'the incompleteness of natural language', this being one of the hardest problems he's been aware of.

This is him:

https://www.cs.stevens.edu/~naumann/publications/publication...

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#89

Post by woodandsteel » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

Questions require a questioner. The normal scientific view is that the world, in part through Darwinian evolution, produced beings that can ask such questions. To have the questioners exist first and then create the world assumes they must be non-material spirits.

Re: Do Our Questions Create the World?

#90

Post by zshrdlu » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 10:09 AM UTC

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…

There are reductionist answers to these questions, albeit incomplete. We know about evolution, we know about the Big Bang. We are not sure by what exact mechanism consciousness works -- if we can even define it properly enough to begin with, but going by our current model of the universe we know it is the result of the Big Bang, and evolution.

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.