10 ms·

Do Our Questions Create the World?

110 points by ynonym00s 8y ago

mnw21cam 8y ago
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)
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
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  - cholmon 8y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "know".
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    We know it by the times when reality doesn't correspond to our ideas and/or questions.
  - dmreedy 8y ago
    I prefer to think of it as just the one impossible question, and the many efforts to try and shape it in such a way that its answer becomes apparent. Or, at the very least, that the incorrectness of other proposed answers becomes apparent (the more typical result).
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    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 http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf (It's the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges.)
    - mnw21cam 8y ago
      Yay, an actual correct usage of the word "effected". You don't see that very often.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    Leaving aside my general scepticism of basically everything, including the knowability of the truth of a statement, including the statement: "At least one mind exists." The answer is pretty simple. Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold. That is how we know our minds don't create reality. We seem to live in a universe of consequence, not a dream. There are things we don't understand that we come to figure out, not the other way around. On the other hand, if by "how would we know?" you mean the fundamental unknowability of everything, yes I agree with you. But as Russel said, "it's boring to stop there" so let's just park that observation and continue on. In this way, philosophy mirrors theology. You take some things by faith and you get on with your life.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold I'm pretty sure gold was well known long before predicting the colors of as-yet-unobserved metals based on any kind of physics.
      - bdamm 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure he's talking about the testability of science; when you have a theory, it's not science until it becomes a testable observation. At one point, presumably, the early model of physics allows "naturalists" to make predictions on the color of gold based on the information of chemical elements. And the color was supposed to be platinum. Therefore, the theory was not quite right, and naturalists of the time could conclude that their model was incomplete. I don't think anyone was ever doubting the true color of gold.
- alexpetralia 8y ago
  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 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?
  - n4r9 8y ago
    I don't know any name for it but I've wondered about those same delineations (my term for the second is "consensus-based reality"). I worry about to what extent the first one can be said to definitely exist.
    - geoffreyhale 8y ago
      I use "reality" instead of "truth" for all of those positions, reserving "truth" for logic or the opposite of a lie.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - solipsism 8y ago
    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" category. The things you list are just labels, not truth statements. Apples and oranges.
    - 8y ago
- Theodores 8y ago
  Is this quote from Time Out Of Joint? 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.
- drb91 8y ago
  Not believing in realty is semantically suspect. Delusion still provides a (false) reality in which to live. Hell if anything it’s evidence of active questioning to perceive anything.
- gowld 8y ago
  Can you prove Dick's statement is true? Denying reality is a very powerful trick. Any unavoidable physical consequence inside reality can be ignored by a sufficiently aversive mind. 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."
- deleted 8y ago
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Tiki 8y ago
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, 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.
- RobertoG 8y ago
  Well, I suppose the answer is the same that for the game of the '20 questions in its “surprise” version' that the article mention. Where was the word before the first question is asked?
- noiv 8y ago
  You may want to exclude language from reality. The dichotomy of questions and answers might not happen in the latter. Or the other way round: As long you have questions you're not there yet. I present you one piece of the puzzle: The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M In a way he supposes minds as entropy inducing entities.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  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 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.
RobertoG 8y ago
I'm too materialistic for taking those views seriously, but I recommend a nice Science Fiction book that deal with this: "Distress" by Greg Egan [1]. 1. http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html
irickt 8y ago
Ugh. Has Scientific American become PseudoScientific American? Recently they published this https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/ 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/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006 https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  For as much as reality is patterned, and can be comprehend 'absolutely' in a pragmatic, utilitarian sense - there's also another side to awareness (or many, I can never be sure). Imagine that everything that has to do with 'mind' is just as comprehensible in a different way. Or rather, imagine that that awareness 'takes over' or 'overrides' the natural awareness one was taught or learned to comprehend 'reality' with. 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.
  - irickt 8y ago
    Over a few decades Scientific American has gone from deep research reports, to pop science, and now to untestable cosmic thinking and other clickbait. If it is not testable it is not scientific thinking. 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.
known 8y ago
"The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" --Einstein
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality Flagged for pseudoscience.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  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.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
    Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to reality" is not.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      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.
      - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
        >We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best. Objective reality can kill me, so I'd consider that rather less shaky than the images that appear when I sleep.
- dang 8y ago
  The article is obviously on topic for HN. Accounts that flag like this eventually lose flagging privileges.
  - 8y ago
wazoox 8y ago
Mmmhkay, so that's a rehash of good ol' George Berkeley's philosophy, then? That's cute, only coming 300 years later :)
- n4r9 8y ago
  There's a world of difference between solipsism and viewing observation as an act of creation.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    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.
lainga 8y ago
If so, by Betteridge's law, the Universe must disappear.
jatsign 8y ago
Reality is a distributed consensus algorithm. Work in the blockchain somehow, sell a million books.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  It'll be like "The Secret" except that if you believe hard enough, Satoshi will add bitcoins to your account.
HuckFackerNews 8y ago
When a user as limited permission access to a database, the blackbox boundary can only be defined by queries. This is the heart of why deep belief networks and knockout training work.
rags2riches 8y ago
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.
- cheeko1234 8y ago
  Just read the 'it from bit' paper referenced in the article. Wheeler goes quite in depth into why "turtles all the way down" is not a solution. http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
- sideshowb 8y ago
  If you were simulating the universe it certainly doesn't help performance having to simulate an exponential quantity of interfering states rather than a single classical one. It's anything but lazy evaluation.
  - carterehsmith 8y ago
    I remember when the "proceduraly generated" games first showed up - 30 years ago? 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.
  - gowld 8y ago
    That's not an answer to the concern. Classical mechanics has no foundation -- it's a large castle floating in the air. Quantum mechanics tries to start from much less less assumed "something from nothing structure", which is puts much more complexity in sight (instead of just hiding it in axioms) that needs to be managed somehow. 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.
adrian_mrd 8y ago
Brilliant reply to the parapsychologists 'incident': "Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” John Archibald Wheeler
BjoernKW 8y ago
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
techbio 8y ago
I immediately became lost in quest to trace the source of a quote near the top of the article, and returned to bookmark this piece to read thoroughly, but here is the fruit of my almost instantaneously easy etymology search: 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 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-erasmus-darwin https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-era...
hi41 8y ago
>“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.
- gowld 8y ago
  Those are strange examples. How is "hunger" or "injustice" anything but imagination?
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  >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.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
for the physics people: first look up charge whitout charge and mass without mass. once you understand what Wheeler says about fundamental particles, and how charge and mass could be topological properties, and how Wheeler coined the term "wormhole". then go and read Maxwell (the original king of unification [of magnetism and electrostatics]) treatise on electromagnetism. There is a chapter on monodromy of electric potential, which would be senseless in an euclidean sense,... i.e. Maxwell himself considered wormholes, but skips over them rather quickly and turns to what is more easily modeled with R^n... On wikipedia "wormhole" concept is attribute to Einstein and Wheeler, but as I read it, even Maxwell considered the possibility that discrete charges were a topological effect in exactly the same sense as "charge without charge"!!
solresident 8y ago
What a vapid piece of a garbage: books by wheeler worth reading?
woodandsteel 8y ago
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.

110 points by ynonym00s 8y ago

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)

notheguyouthink 8y ago
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- cholmon 8y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "know".
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  We know it by the times when reality doesn't correspond to our ideas and/or questions.
- dmreedy 8y ago
  I prefer to think of it as just the one impossible question, and the many efforts to try and shape it in such a way that its answer becomes apparent. Or, at the very least, that the incorrectness of other proposed answers becomes apparent (the more typical result).
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  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 http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf (It's the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges.)
  - mnw21cam 8y ago
    Yay, an actual correct usage of the word "effected". You don't see that very often.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  Leaving aside my general scepticism of basically everything, including the knowability of the truth of a statement, including the statement: "At least one mind exists." The answer is pretty simple. Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold. That is how we know our minds don't create reality. We seem to live in a universe of consequence, not a dream. There are things we don't understand that we come to figure out, not the other way around. On the other hand, if by "how would we know?" you mean the fundamental unknowability of everything, yes I agree with you. But as Russel said, "it's boring to stop there" so let's just park that observation and continue on. In this way, philosophy mirrors theology. You take some things by faith and you get on with your life.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold I'm pretty sure gold was well known long before predicting the colors of as-yet-unobserved metals based on any kind of physics.
    - bdamm 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure he's talking about the testability of science; when you have a theory, it's not science until it becomes a testable observation. At one point, presumably, the early model of physics allows "naturalists" to make predictions on the color of gold based on the information of chemical elements. And the color was supposed to be platinum. Therefore, the theory was not quite right, and naturalists of the time could conclude that their model was incomplete. I don't think anyone was ever doubting the true color of gold.
alexpetralia 8y ago
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 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?
- n4r9 8y ago
  I don't know any name for it but I've wondered about those same delineations (my term for the second is "consensus-based reality"). I worry about to what extent the first one can be said to definitely exist.
  - geoffreyhale 8y ago
    I use "reality" instead of "truth" for all of those positions, reserving "truth" for logic or the opposite of a lie.
- deleted 8y ago
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- solipsism 8y ago
  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" category. The things you list are just labels, not truth statements. Apples and oranges.
  - 8y ago
Theodores 8y ago
Is this quote from Time Out Of Joint? 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.
drb91 8y ago
Not believing in realty is semantically suspect. Delusion still provides a (false) reality in which to live. Hell if anything it’s evidence of active questioning to perceive anything.
gowld 8y ago
Can you prove Dick's statement is true? Denying reality is a very powerful trick. Any unavoidable physical consequence inside reality can be ignored by a sufficiently aversive mind. 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."
deleted 8y ago
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Tiki 8y ago

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, 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.

RobertoG 8y ago
Well, I suppose the answer is the same that for the game of the '20 questions in its “surprise” version' that the article mention. Where was the word before the first question is asked?
noiv 8y ago
You may want to exclude language from reality. The dichotomy of questions and answers might not happen in the latter. Or the other way round: As long you have questions you're not there yet. I present you one piece of the puzzle: The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rWqJhDv7M In a way he supposes minds as entropy inducing entities.
s-shellfish 8y ago
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 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.

RobertoG 8y ago

I'm too materialistic for taking those views seriously, but I recommend a nice Science Fiction book that deal with this: "Distress" by Greg Egan [1]. 1. http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html

irickt 8y ago

Ugh. Has Scientific American become PseudoScientific American? Recently they published this https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/ 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/2018/00000025/f0020005/art00006 https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2018/00000...

s-shellfish 8y ago
For as much as reality is patterned, and can be comprehend 'absolutely' in a pragmatic, utilitarian sense - there's also another side to awareness (or many, I can never be sure). Imagine that everything that has to do with 'mind' is just as comprehensible in a different way. Or rather, imagine that that awareness 'takes over' or 'overrides' the natural awareness one was taught or learned to comprehend 'reality' with. 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.
- irickt 8y ago
  Over a few decades Scientific American has gone from deep research reports, to pop science, and now to untestable cosmic thinking and other clickbait. If it is not testable it is not scientific thinking. 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.

known 8y ago

"The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" --Einstein

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

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

akvadrako 8y ago
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.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  Wheeler is a fine physicist. Claiming "consciousness is fundamental to reality" is not.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    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.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
      >We know that subjective reality exists because we directly experience it. But the evidence for an objective reality is shaky at best. Objective reality can kill me, so I'd consider that rather less shaky than the images that appear when I sleep.
dang 8y ago
The article is obviously on topic for HN. Accounts that flag like this eventually lose flagging privileges.
- 8y ago

wazoox 8y ago

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

n4r9 8y ago
There's a world of difference between solipsism and viewing observation as an act of creation.
- wazoox 8y ago
  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.

lainga 8y ago

If so, by Betteridge's law, the Universe must disappear.

jatsign 8y ago

Reality is a distributed consensus algorithm. Work in the blockchain somehow, sell a million books.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
It'll be like "The Secret" except that if you believe hard enough, Satoshi will add bitcoins to your account.

HuckFackerNews 8y ago

When a user as limited permission access to a database, the blackbox boundary can only be defined by queries. This is the heart of why deep belief networks and knockout training work.

rags2riches 8y ago

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.

cheeko1234 8y ago
Just read the 'it from bit' paper referenced in the article. Wheeler goes quite in depth into why "turtles all the way down" is not a solution. http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
sideshowb 8y ago
If you were simulating the universe it certainly doesn't help performance having to simulate an exponential quantity of interfering states rather than a single classical one. It's anything but lazy evaluation.
- carterehsmith 8y ago
  I remember when the "proceduraly generated" games first showed up - 30 years ago? 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.
- gowld 8y ago
  That's not an answer to the concern. Classical mechanics has no foundation -- it's a large castle floating in the air. Quantum mechanics tries to start from much less less assumed "something from nothing structure", which is puts much more complexity in sight (instead of just hiding it in axioms) that needs to be managed somehow. 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.

adrian_mrd 8y ago

Brilliant reply to the parapsychologists 'incident': "Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.” John Archibald Wheeler

BjoernKW 8y ago

"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

techbio 8y ago

I immediately became lost in quest to trace the source of a quote near the top of the article, and returned to bookmark this piece to read thoroughly, but here is the fruit of my almost instantaneously easy etymology search: 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 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-erasmus-darwin https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/566632-the-life-of-era...

hi41 8y ago

>“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.

gowld 8y ago
Those are strange examples. How is "hunger" or "injustice" anything but imagination?
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>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.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

for the physics people: first look up charge whitout charge and mass without mass. once you understand what Wheeler says about fundamental particles, and how charge and mass could be topological properties, and how Wheeler coined the term "wormhole". then go and read Maxwell (the original king of unification [of magnetism and electrostatics]) treatise on electromagnetism. There is a chapter on monodromy of electric potential, which would be senseless in an euclidean sense,... i.e. Maxwell himself considered wormholes, but skips over them rather quickly and turns to what is more easily modeled with R^n... On wikipedia "wormhole" concept is attribute to Einstein and Wheeler, but as I read it, even Maxwell considered the possibility that discrete charges were a topological effect in exactly the same sense as "charge without charge"!!

solresident 8y ago

What a vapid piece of a garbage: books by wheeler worth reading?

woodandsteel 8y ago

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.