4 ms·

Saying that Richard Nixon either did or did not eat eggs for breakfast at a certain date is a bit naive. There are many possible physical occurrences where the

Saying that Richard Nixon either did or did not eat eggs for breakfast at a certain date is a bit naive. There are many possible physical occurrences where the material reality will fail to neatly fall into whatever definitions you have of Richard Nixon, eat, breakfast and eggs. Reality itself is pretty cut and dry, till you start to take many worlds seriously, but the mapping of human concepts to physical phenomenon is very very slippery. Would you take it as a given that for some universal wave function, there is a mathematical predicate, formed from your Unicode, that corresponds to “a human is in the room”? It is plausible but unproven and seems like quite a big assumption to incorporate into your world view.

lisper 2y ago
Yes, natural language is very problematic, and those problems extend even to what are normally considered very cut-and-dried propositions like "The sun rises in the east" or "The earth is round" or even "one plus one equals two." If you have a better example to suggest, I'm all ears. FWIW, I take many-worlds very seriously. You might find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...
- lanstin 2y ago
  I take issue with this: "I don't know about you, but my subjective experience is that there is exactly one of me at all times. I consider this aspect of my subjective experience to be an essential component of what it means to be me. " People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts, different neural systems or whatever, whose interactions together make up a sort of fictionalized self, which is really the victors story of what happened, not a persistent entity. But my question was more basic, do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? It can express things at the level of particles and bosons and so on, and plausibly something like "the average kinetic energy in this room is such and such" but unlike building up math from set theory or category theory, there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT. Maybe it can be, maybe it can't, we don't know. It's a very strong assumption to say it can be absent proof of that.
  - lisper 2y ago
    This is getting deep into the philosophical weeds and I can't really do it justice in an HN comment. I'm happy to pursue this with you in depth if you like but we'll probably need a different venue. But here's my best shot. > People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts I don't disagree with this. I've had similar experiences myself, but I see no reason to believe this has anything to do with QM or MW. I think it's just that my conscious self is not all there is of me. I have multiple subconscious sub-systems, but there is only one collection of sub-systems that is me. > do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? I think it just did :-) > there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT I actually think there is, but that's a long story. The TL;DR is that I believe Daniel Dennett got it basically right in "Consciousness Explained", and that decoherence does in fact solve the measurement problem. You might also find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of-time.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-a... It's not completely on point, but it's related.

lisper 2y ago

Yes, natural language is very problematic, and those problems extend even to what are normally considered very cut-and-dried propositions like "The sun rises in the east" or "The earth is round" or even "one plus one equals two." If you have a better example to suggest, I'm all ears. FWIW, I take many-worlds very seriously. You might find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-worlds.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...

lanstin 2y ago
I take issue with this: "I don't know about you, but my subjective experience is that there is exactly one of me at all times. I consider this aspect of my subjective experience to be an essential component of what it means to be me. " People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts, different neural systems or whatever, whose interactions together make up a sort of fictionalized self, which is really the victors story of what happened, not a persistent entity. But my question was more basic, do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? It can express things at the level of particles and bosons and so on, and plausibly something like "the average kinetic energy in this room is such and such" but unlike building up math from set theory or category theory, there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT. Maybe it can be, maybe it can't, we don't know. It's a very strong assumption to say it can be absent proof of that.
- lisper 2y ago
  This is getting deep into the philosophical weeds and I can't really do it justice in an HN comment. I'm happy to pursue this with you in depth if you like but we'll probably need a different venue. But here's my best shot. > People that meditate do not find this unitary illusion to be fundamental, but find that what seems at first to be a singular entity is in fact an entity consistenting of multiple parts I don't disagree with this. I've had similar experiences myself, but I see no reason to believe this has anything to do with QM or MW. I think it's just that my conscious self is not all there is of me. I have multiple subconscious sub-systems, but there is only one collection of sub-systems that is me. > do you think that the mathematical formalism you are endowing with "truth" can even express something like "conscious beings exist" or "a cat is under the table"? I think it just did :-) > there's no clear formalism for "person" or "mind" in the mathematics of QFT I actually think there is, but that's a long story. The TL;DR is that I believe Daniel Dennett got it basically right in "Consciousness Explained", and that decoherence does in fact solve the measurement problem. You might also find this interesting: https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of-time.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-a... It's not completely on point, but it's related.