--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Marvin Long, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Or one can turn the question around and ask: if humans ceased to >exist,
would bees cease to pollinate flowers? Would fire ants no >longer build
colonies in what used to be my lawn? Would elephants >no long roam in
Africa?
The answer would be yes, of course. All of these are phenomenon. Reality
would continue to unfold, but the universe: the organization of impressions
of reality made by human minds, would cease to exist.
>
>In other words, what is the minimum degree of perception required to
>guarantee the existence of the universe?
That's a good question. The answer is probably unknown, right now. A human
being's perception definitely can create the universe. I'm not sure what
other minds would create. If we were to communicate with an alien race, they
may not perceive themselves as living in something akin to the universe.
Their minds may be significantly different from ours.
I'm not suggesting that alien races will have the ability to violate the
laws of physics. But, their perceptions may very well be different, and
they may very well probably would not be living in the same perceived
reality as us. Or, our minds may be similar enough so that the phenomena we
observe are virtually identical.
>Would it take another fully intelligent and conscious species, or would
animals >the level of my neighbor's cat suffice? Granting that a cat
wouldn't see >exactly what I see when I look at a tree, would the tree still
exist?
My guess is no, but my real answer is "we just don't know." A similar
question is whether cats have reflective self awarenesses. We just don't
know. We do know that we do not need to posit them having this awareness to
explain their behavior.
>
> Is an amoeba's "simple act of registration" sufficient to sustain the
>universe?
My guess is that they don't have reflective self awarnesses.
>
> But that
> doesn't imply that a transcendant perspective exists....it just so happens
> that the buck stops at the quantum level...and that's it.
Well, there are some interesting clues in work that has been done over the
past 50 years. For example, renormalization: do electrons really have
infinite charge? Or, virtual partons...do they really exist? Or, what
happens when we have two formulations of a theory with vastly different
ontological connotations for a realistic perspective; how do we decide which
is right?
>
> What would a transcendant perspective "look" like, anyway? Without time,
> space, or causality to condition the transcendant observer's perspective,
> would he or she or it just see a nondescript ball of mass-energy (that
> isn't really a ball, because there's no extension in space; and can't
>really be observed, because there's no time to observe it in, etc.)?
You mean, please describe that which is beyond words and beyond our
experiences in 500 words or less? I have no idea and can have no idea what
that's like. Nomenon is simply a word for that which is as it is. One
should assume that words fail to describe it.
> Referring specifically to Kant's noumenon, how can there be a
>thing-in-itself when all criteria for defining a thing are absent?
Why must a thing be defined by us to exist? He is speaking of that which
exists apart from our mind.
>
> How can there be things-in-themselves (plural) if all criteria for
> determining quantity and quality are stripped away?
>
Because we don't have to judge it by a criterion for it to be.
> What I'm wondering about now is how any complete physical description of
> the world could avoid raising QM-like problems. It seems to me that at
> some point in the definition of matter and/or energy one is bound to hit a
> wall beyond which description and direct observation are impossible. QM
> appears to be such a wall, otherwise metaphysical questions wouldn't be
>raised.
But, its more than that. Back in the mid-1800s it was thought that reality
was going to be "turtles all the way down." (There is a joke associated
with this, I'll tell it if asked. :-) ) That is to say, that the worldview
was that everything could be explained mechanistically.
If we finally got to the point where we could no longer peer into the next
layer of mechanisms, then there would not be a metaphysical problem. We
just would state our basic axioms and be happy with our mechanistic
worldview. But, observations were not consistent with that worldview.
>
> Suppose you reached a point at which you had tiny marble-like
> irreducible particles with mass and volume and maybe charge, and you'd be
> faced with the contradition of a solid but indivisible item. We'd wonder
> what's inside one of the little beasties and be endlessly frustrated by
> the demonstrated impossibility of knowledge beyond this seemingly
> arbitrary point.
>
I'm not sure we'd be endlessly frustrated.
> The natural metaphysical steps would be either to say 1) that's all she
>wrote, folks, or 2) to hypothesize an idealistic explanation for the
>mystery. It would be really hard to prove either position.
Or, just say that's as far as we can see, for now.
>And why Kant's noumenon, anyway?
That which we cannot define, and exists apart from our observations.
> In the case of QM, we might follow
> Berkley: to be is to be perceived, and QM defines the limits of human
> perception while demonstrating that the existence of the universe depends
> upon observation. Yet despite the mystery of particles between
> observations, the world persists, so God must watch the electrons in all
>their superimposed glory.
God, if he exists, would be part of the nomenon. The nomenon is sort of a
general catch all for everything that exists without us having direct access
to it. Our own minds have existence, but they are not part of the nomenon.
I don't think Kant got into the question of the minds of other people.
>One doesn't have to posit a problematic
>thing-in-itself, and we still get to keep the strangeness of a
> world grounded in QM, and we get God too, the establishment of whom, IIRC,
> was the ultimate point of positing a noumenal world in the first place
> where Kant was concerned.
>
Actually, the last statement is not true at all. One of the most radical
parts of the Critique of Pure Reason is the proposition that God cannot be
arrived at via pure reason. Kant tore apart, rather successfully, the old
proofs of God's existence.
Dan'm Traeki Ring of Crystallized Knowledge.
Known for calculating, but not known for shutting up
