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Not everything. Life in particular. Because without life (a conscious observer) reality cannot exist. So it should be a property of reality for life to emerge.
by hshshshshsh 2y ago
Not everything. Life in particular. Because without life (a conscious observer) reality cannot exist. So it should be a property of reality for life to emerge.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoThat sounds like a catch-22
- 9dev 2y agoIsn't that kind of mixing up the chain of causation? Without a winner, a lottery cannot exist (or at least, at p=0, it's nonsensical). That doesn't automatically imply there are a lot of winners, however.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoI think what I am trying to say is consciousness (life) is reality. And so all kind of planetary experiences can exist inside consciousness as it's contents since consciousness is capable of generating all kind of content. There is nothing specific about our consciousness that makes it unique to earth.
- timschmidt 2y agoYou are mistaking the map for the territory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
- hshshshshsh 2y agoCan you explain in simple terms? I see physical reality as almost redundant and consciousness seems to be able to do everything.
- timschmidt 2y agoFrom the first paragraph of the linked article: "Mistaking the map for the territory is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself."
- hshshshshsh 2y agoOkay. I can see that in day to day life. People confusing sentences with actual knowing. Like labeling something a tree and thinking you know what a tree is because you know it's a "tree". But how did anyone verify there is an underlying reality outside consciousness? It's just an assumption right?
- timschmidt 2y ago> But how did anyone verify there is an underlying reality outside consciousness? It's the stuff which continues existing when we stop believing in it.
- dekhn 2y agoYes, it's taken on faith by scientists that we live in an objective universe with cold hard reality outside our consciousness. It seems like a reasonable assumption, consistent with all our observations. It seems not unreasonable to assume that in the early universe there was nothing living, then at some point, through random chance, the first living things became alive (possibly from some non-alive replicators), and then later, the first living things with consciousness came to be. Again, all of this is consistent with our observations, but effectively taken on faith/treated as an assumption.
- dekhn 2y agoYour philosophy is consistent with panpsychism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism). Not really clear how this affects the major discussion here, which is about objective reality as determined by science, and so far as we can tell, neither life nor consciousness is not a prerequisite for reality. It's a fun idea to play with but firmly outside the realm of something we could experiment with scientifically.
- dekhn 2y agoThere is no known scientific principle or theory with experimental support that without a conscious observer reality cannot exist. It's not something that can be tested, and lies in the realm of philosophy, not science.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoI don't think reality has this property that what cannot be tested through scientific method is not true.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 2y agoIt might not, you wouldn't be able to convince anybody that something is true, but cannot be tested- that's philosophy and religion.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoI think David Deutsche has this idea that the best explanations should be treated as true even if you can't test it.
- WalterSear 2y agoA 'quantum observer' is merely a physical system that interacts with the quantum system being measured. It doesn't have to be conscious or animate.