> But our view of reality doesn't change reality.
I never said that. I said the universe, which is phenomenon.
>And our understanding of this allows us to broaden our view of reality
using instruments and >logic.
But it 100% based on observations. How do you know you have direct access
to reality with your senses? It's like saying your instrumentation has no
limits when its never been calibrated or checked? It's like saying you know
the total production cross section of a new particle, when you are only
checking one decay mode. That one mode may be it, or it may not be it.
> We have no direct experience of how bats use the reflections of chirps
> beyond the range of our hearing to catch insects in the dark, or how bees
> see colours outside our visible spectrum to find flowers exchanging nectar
> for pollination... But we can work it out and understand it.
>
There is no doubt that we can organize and model our observations in
wondrous ways to get self-consistent models of observations with tremendous
predictive power. But, those models do not and cannot address ontological
questions.
> And of course experiments in psychology show that our own 'direct'
> experience is really another mental model which can be subverted by all
> kinds of perceptual illusions.
>
Well, we do indeed make models of our observations, and inconsistencies can
be found. So, what does that prove? That science is not observation based?
What I don't understand about your position is is how you seem to assume
that only sensory observations have any validity and that, as long as we
have self-consistent models that we make from those observations, that those
models must be reality.
> So the fact that we get on so successfully in the world seems to me to be
> more evidence for the solidity of an objective reality that can be
> approached from different directions than for a reality that is only
> constructed by our viewpoint.
>
If I take what you are saying is that if our representation of reality
wasn't reality itself, then we wouldn't be able to navigate in the world as
well as we do. I don't see why that must be true. For example, lets assume
that Plato was right, and the world we live in corresponds to the shadows on
the wall. As long as the mapping of the shadows is adequate, we'll get buy.
Using my GUI image, there is no reason that the screen has to show the
reality outside, it just has to map it. If it has a blue triangle for a
mountain, and a red circle for the plane we are on and if we've noticed that
the coordinate numbers must differ more than X or there will be trouble;
that would not mean that those numbers would be outside reality.
Now your argument is sufficient to show that the mapping has to be decent,
at least. Thus, it seems fair enough to require that any view of reality be
consistent with our models of empirical observations. But, since
completeness isn't shown, then we are not restricted to that which is
reducible to empirical observations. Thus, morality, free will, good, evil
can all still exist; they just cannot be proven.
>
> A mind isn't a clean formal system with a Godel sentence to send it into a
> recursive tailspin, it is a mess of dirty competing heuristics.
I was not saying it was a single formal system; I was pointing out the
difficulty inherent in self-reference. Its so bad, it even exists in clear
formal systems. Augustine even recognized the problem.
> obvious that a given person at a given time may not be able to understand
> something; but a different person (with different heuristics) might, and
>be able to transfer that understanding to another.[1]
>
> [1] Using one of those obscure inter-mind data transfer protocols like
> language...
>
But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, his initial idea of solving everything
that way doesn't really work.
What I think we are seeing in QM is the boundaries of our abilities to make
models from observations. For example, let us consider an electron, for
which we know the maximum possible at time t. At time t+dt, we have
charge: just the right infinity to observe the proper finite charge after
vacuum polarization
position: indeterminate, with a probability distribution for observation
momentum: indeterminate, with a probability distribution for observation
spin: determined in one direction, indeterminate in all other directions
mass: determined to arbitrary precision
And, its not just electrons. Take the human brain. Its future states are
inherently indetermanistic, for reasons given in my long discussions with
Zimmy.
Dan M.
Dan M.
