4 ms·
This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measur
by eloff 7y ago
This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago> As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?
- homonculus1 7y agoBecause we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.
- arnoooooo 7y agoI'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case. But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…
- eloff 7y agoObject permanece is a silly statement? On the contrary it's the mainstream view. Anyone wanting to challenge it has the burden of proof on them to demonstrate otherwise.
- arnoooooo 7y agoI'm pretty sure the mainstream view is that the moon "as a glowing disc" is entirely created by your brain. It does not mean that there is nothing when no one is looking, just that what we see is a representation by our brain of something objective that we can't directly assess. The representation stops to exist when we stop looking. What part is representation and what part is objective is debatable. Assigning more to the representation and less to the objective solves some problems neatly, like that of quantum entanglement. Take Donald Hoffman's example of a cube drawn in perspective as lines on a piece of paper. In your mind you see a cube, but nowhere is there actually a cube. The front and back faces of the cube are entangled : if your mind has decided on the projection in which one face is the "front", the other face has to be the "back", and vice-versa if your mind has decided on the other projection.
- vokep 7y agoBut the moon does disappear. The moon as I understand it is a glowing disk with particular patterns on it. That disc and patterns only ever existed in my mind. When not looking at the moon, it goes back to being a very large number of particles near each other and nothing more.
- arnoooooo 7y agoTo go even further, "particles" are also a construction of ours, a representation of an even more "diffuse" reality. "Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That is very startling because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there's no spacetime, it's not clear what physics is about." - Nima Arkani-Hamed Cornell Messenger Lecture 2010.
- arnoooooo 7y agoIt's actually a very old idea in Eastern philosophy called "non duality" : everything it but one big consciousness. Sam Harris of all people should know. Deepak Choprah is clearly not the right person with which to discuss such things, and debating him is just Sam Harris being full of himself or a publicity stunt, not an actual serious look at these ideas.