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I don't believe in anything metaphysical, I believe all these things can be explained by what is "real". If I draw a circle and put two dots in it and a curve

• rel_ic 2y ago
  I think it's pretty likely that there are sources of information we don't normally perceive. I mean at some point the theory of evolution says we didn't sense light, and then some mutation let us see what was, at the time, a metaphysical world of wonders that was otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind! We don't really know how brains work, or how reality works, so I think it's premature to be confident about either subject.
  • Flop7331 2y ago
    I've heard a hypothesis that suggests the evolution of eyes set off the Cambrian Explosion. Rather than a "a metaphysical world of wonders", it was a physical world of things to eat and be eaten by.
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    We have countless mechanical sensors and detectors that can sense just about everything there is in this universe, even neutrinos. Even if we magically manage to detect half of that it wouldn't show us anything we don't already know. Although it would be trippy to see the full EM spectrum.
    • kevindamm 2y ago
      "just about everything" includes detecting perturbations in the intensity and frequency of light that Occam's Razor suggests is due to unaccounted mass and energy. Moreover, that the unaccounted-for amount would exceed the light and mass we can detect (75:25, roughly? Maybe less, depending on the model). Our best explanations all sound dubious -- dark matter & dark energy? Hardly an explanation. Extra torsion of the space in each galaxy due to the effect on space from black holes? That's a pretty big rounding error. WIMPs that we've left out of the Standard Model? Recent experiments have left little room for that possibility. There may indeed be things which we can't detect, even with our best instruments, that we don't have a suitable explanation for.
      • moffkalast 2y ago
        I would go as far as to say it's a certainty there are things we can't detect yet... but probably not that many of them. Dark matter is funny because it's actually something that we can detect [0], at least indirectly but can't explain yet. But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to_dark_matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to...
        • fidrelity 2y ago
          > But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist. Then you also have to accept that you're not talking about objective reality in any way but isolated to human experience and limited by our cognitive and experimental abilities.
• kulahan 2y ago
  It really isn’t “wrong and dangerous” - hippies talking about greater consciousnesses have been a thing for a looooong time, and surely you could accept in SOME manner the argument that mankind is a kind of organism as well. That’s basically what sociology is studying!
  • CuriouslyC 2y ago
    The really interesting philosophical question is what causes the aggregation of consciousness. It isn't related to distance or connection, rather it seems to be the result of physical "coupling" through shared history. It's almost like consciousness represents the shared state of a given part of the universe.
• keiferski 2y ago
  I agree that maybe this doesn’t prove the existence of a higher metaphysical plane, but don’t you find it a bit hubristic to assume that the contemporary human perception and way of categorizing things just happens to be the way everything actually is?
  • moffkalast 2y ago
    Here are two fun facts: Wifi antennas are just lightbulbs that shine really red light that we can't see. Trees are loud, like really loud, but we can't hear it at all since it's all ultrasound. It's pretty clear that we as ugly giant bags of mostly water don't perceive much of what's going on and tack a lot of made up shit on top to make it more functional. Like colours which aren't really a thing, objectively speaking (ask a colour blind person or check what the JWST sees in outer space). And yet we know that we don't see these things, because we can detect them indirectly. And we've been finding methods of better indirect detection of literally anything for millennia and mapping it all into the areas we can detect. If there was a configuration of carbon in our heads that mixed with drugs detects something, we'd have built a artificial sensor out of it by now (alas it is but random noise that does not correlate with anything, not even itself). So while there's probably still particles and fields that we can't detect yet and some we even know we don't know about (ahem dark matter/energy ahem), it wouldn't be too much hubris to say we've got most of it covered by now.
    • keiferski 2y ago
      Just because we've found a lot of previously undetectable things in no way indicates that we've found "most" of it by now. All it indicates is that we've found more things than we knew before; for all we know, we may have merely gone from knowing 0.01% to 0.02%.
      • moffkalast 2y ago
        Well to some degree we actually can know how much we know and don't know, with statistics [0] and our observations so far. So much of modern science was easy pickings in the 19th and 20th centuries, while these days we keep investing ludicrous amounts of effort into ultra specific experiments to figure out some small new thing that often just confirms what we already thought, learning relatively little in comparison to the ye olde polymaths making three new branches of science by themselves. The fact that we're so far into diminishing returns is an indicator by itself. Most new tech these days isn't even new, it's just figuring out how to make the already known practical enough to be cost effective. Now sure, a person during the roman times or the middle ages could be caught saying the same thing and couldn't be more wrong. And sure it's entirely possible that we'll figure something out that will revolutionize our knowledge of the universe entirely... but every time general relativity predicts yet another observation to an annoying level of perfection that chance becomes smaller and smaller. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
• Flop7331 2y ago
  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
  • skummetmaelk 2y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    • genghisjahn 2y ago
      That seems to be quite an ordinary claim.
  • edmundsauto 2y ago
    An even more true statement when made in the context of pre Scientific Revolution. We don’t know everything but we know a heck of a lot more than when this was written.
• pdimitar 2y ago
  > But I find it wrong and dangerous to try to theorize that there is "something out there bigger than our brain". Whether one believes in one thing or another is a personal value system and neither side should dominate. But... why is it dangerous to try and theorize that there is something out there bigger than our brain?
  • bdavisx 2y ago
    > theorize "a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world that is based on the scientific method and uses facts, hypotheses, and laws" Because it's not theorizing, it's wishful thinking. And for some reason it almost always leads to people telling other people how to live their lives based on the "thing that's bigger than our brain" (e.g. god, because that's what you're all trying to imply). That's why it's dangerous.
    • pdimitar 2y ago
      People telling other people how to live sadly happens everywhere and I wouldn't correlate it with popular beliefs, as in religions et. al.
  • buildsjets 2y ago
    Primarily, it is dangerous to his preconceived beliefs, because it might force him to reconsider them, and then they would no longer exist.
• Xen9 2y ago
  Because you express no uncertainty, your belief equals the statement: There exists 0% probability that agency in the physical universe is embedded. This is stupid, because embedded agency does exist, EG we have programs that simulate consciousness & life that are embedded. You have evidence that we could with some non-zero probability embed a worm or baby ape into a simulation that will approximately work like it would in real life with only the physics being less accurate (IE cannot model quantum states perfectly). You should now combine this with the fact that by default embedded agents have no "real" models of the external world, IE a smart monkey in a small simulationmight deduce external world has computational complexity limits BUT they probably cannot say "Eiffel Tower exists in Paris" or "The Universe expands at speed of light." Thus your position should be approximately: There exists non-zero probability that agency in the physical universe is embedded but since its small and "external" to our agency, one has no reason (ability?) to believe in other than by stating this as their best model. --- Englightement is to know that death means merely the state after which what happens cannot be predicted because you are dead. But what is relationship between intelligence & immortality?
  • yungporko 2y ago
    i'm pretty sure they just meant what they said, which was that they don't believe in anything metaphysical.
    • Xen9 2y ago
      My bad for potentially strawmanning.
• altruios 2y ago
  Oh! I get to talk about my favorite subject: the egregore. When a company forms it is useful, if not entirely accurate, to describe it as an intelligent agent. This entity does not physically exist, the soul of Disney is not in it's avatar micky mouse, or it's CEO, it's in the (collection of) minds of everyone that sees Disney as an entity. Santa Clause does not exist outside your imagination, yet parents act as the egregore's hands giving out presents. To a real extent, Santa Clause is the cause of acts of good will, and even though Santa doesn't physically exist, physical actions are taken in Santa's name. Same with any accolades of any religion. Or employee's of a company. Its truth value is orthogonal to it's predictive value, and it is very predictive. See, there are two kinds of general groups within the egregore, the hands (creators, generators, those occupied with the 'mission' of the egregore) and the mouth (those occupied with feeding and sustaining an egregore, sales/marketing). The hands start off in charge and everything works, but eventually the mouth gets control and eats the hands, starving the egregore. An egregore eats it's own hands and starves to death. This is exactly what happened with Boeing. It could be modeled from an individual's mind, but some concepts take a village to execute, and some(times) things emerge when you put a bunch of smaller things together. A wave isn't the matter in which it materializes, it's something emergent from when you move some material in a certain way. But yeah, Atheist here, this is about as esoteric as I get :)
  • fallinditch 2y ago
    Interesting. Sounds like this could turn into a long form essay or book. > Its truth value is orthogonal to its predictive value This seems to imply that the integrity of a company's information/communication functions (truth value) is unrelated to its ability to make accurate predictions about future events ... Why is this significant, or have I misunderstood?
    • altruios 2y ago
      I mean to say, modeling a company hyper accurately - down to personal psychology of the high level employees - has diminishing returns for predictive value, and also diminishing returns for generalizability. And a surprisingly useful toy model (the egregore and it's hand eating lifecycle), describe better(or at least, good enough) what will happen with any particular company given it's current state according to the terms of that model. To clarify the possible misunderstanding: 'its' is referring to the toy model of the egregore (not any particular company/egregor), My point is useful things are useful regardless of them being strictly true.
• ericmcer 2y ago
  The real is extremely mysterious though. We are just a clump of matter floating through space with some crude detection devices equipped so we can tell when electromagnetic waves hit us. If the brain is just forcing all this input into some kind of reality, with illusions like the flow of time to attempt to predict the constant change/entropy going on around it, then couldn't drugs expand that capacity? In other words, if time is just perception of changing states in the universe, and there is no past/present/future, just states, then we aren't really experiencing a "present", but an illusion created by using patterns from past state changes. In that case if drugs expanded that pattern detection then you could start altering your "present" much more powerfully, e.g. vividly replaying past states, or perceiving state changes that you would normally filter out, like a conversation someone is having across the street. Sorry also I can't really express this correctly and it also may be total nonsense!