Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.
“Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines—in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm.”
An interesting discussion of the ‘philosophical zombie’ problem.
“Reflecting on the discussion overall, my conclusion is that neither the Mary nor the Zombie Argument makes a decisive case against physicalism. But the arguments do not make obvious, stupid mistakes. They are based on premises with a great deal of intuitive appeal (that science can’t tell us what red looks like subjectively and that a zombie is logically possible), and these premises seem to lead quite directly to the conclusion that consciousness is non-physical. That by no means settles the issue. We need to examine much more carefully both the apparently obvious premises and the reasoning based on them.”
I agree, but you don’t even need to go off planet for it - geology right here on earth happened without anyone watching it. Unless we’re in a simulation with rendering limitations, the ground beneath my feet is already the way it is, before I dig down there to take a look.
I mean, I can’t prove that without digging, and it could be asserted that I’m just wrong and the soil substrata here are being created by my act of observing them, but there is just no good reason for it to be that way. Occam’s razor applies to that.
I respect this point of view but you must not forget that even mathematics is based partly on intuition and partly on rules that originate from the physical world. For example, greater than, less than, equal to, not equal to, etc. Now these ideas are really just common sense to us and we have combined them symbolically to represent patterns we observe in nature but the question is how do we derive such patterns? The answer, of course, is from experiments and our perceptions of such experiments. In other words, we interpret what our senses tell us into something that can be fitted into some paradigm or other. But isn’t this just really expressing our subjective experiences of something into a symbolic form that really has its roots in the ‘conventional’ world? So it would be a reasonable conclusion then to say we cannot really understand the nature of QM unless we are prepared to forget about our pre-conceptions, which once did serve us well in the ‘macro’ world, and adopt an entirely new approach that displaces materialism as the central source of reality and replaces it with ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ as the main dynamic.
In the Schrodinger’s cat scenario (as you are probably aware of) a cat could be either dead or alive until an observer looks to see which. The idea being the cat is both dead and alive when unobserved. This begs the question of whether the cat itself can act as an observer to determine its state or whether another observer is required. But that just leads nowhere as you, as an observer, are in the same situation as the cat, not knowing whether you are, in fact, dead or alive until yet a further observer looks at you, and so on, infinitum. So none of us can really know whether we are either dead or alive unless there is some kind of ‘universal consciousness’ independent of us that somehow is always observing us and transcends physical reality. This universal consciousness must have been about at the beginning of the universe otherwise by what means did the quantum waveform function collapse into a physical universe?
But what is it that exists? The only thing we know exists is ideas about existence so are ideas real? And if the universe isn’t experienced can it exist at all?
Your entire argument appears to hinge on a misunderstanding that a quantum observer must be a conscious person. This is not correct. When two particles collide, they ‘observe’ each other.
Yes. Also fossil history of earth, both pre-life and pre-conscious life. Also, what’s going on in your computer when you’re not looking (unless you consider your computer conscious).
Really, a strict Copenhagener could just invoke big and bigger boxes to hold all these cats, but it doesn’t sit well with me.
Well, indeed, and the speed of information transfer means that in a very real sense, the bit of the universe we live in, is an unopened box to other parts of the universe, so we are in an undetermined state. it doesn’t feel like it from this seat.
You do know that the Schrodinger’s cat scenario was created by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to show the inanity of trying to apply quantum mechanics to everyday life, right?
Attempts to link human conscience and quantum mechanics often leave me annoyed. Both very complicated and not fully understood phenomena (least of all by me), that get conflated by people who seem to understand neither and for no explicable reason other than pseudo-scientific fapping.
If you want a cold, hard factual answer then the best answer IMO is that the problem of whether consciousness plays a role in quantum mechanics is unresolved.
Did the Earth exist before there were lifeforms on it to notice its existence? Geologists and paleontologists seem to agree that it did, so are they wrong?
