Dear Roger,
That which cannot be perceived, does not exist. But "perception" is
a subtle thing! Is there an entity associated with "physical laws" or
'gravity', or are such an abstract concept that we 'percept'
conceptually? Perception, beliefs, knowledge all seems tied together...
But I would add that just be cause our language paints a particular
picture in our minds, there need not be anything like such 'outside of
us'. How fast we forget the lesson we can can find in Descartes
/Meditations/...
On 1/23/2013 5:18 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
Agreed, the constant other observer needed to
maintain the world when I close my eyes need not be God,
But it has to be something like God. Omnipresent, for example.
Plato called it the One.
Nothing would work without physical laws, and these cannot be directly
perceived.
Gravity, for example, cannot be perceived. Force also cannot be
perceived,
only its effects. And time and space cannot be observed. cannot
be directly perceived. And do I fall on the floor when I turn out the
lights
at night because it is too dark to see my bed ? The list of
counterfactuals
goes on and on.
So I say that, whatever the cause, Berkeley's theory is just plain silly.
----- Receiving the following content -----
*From:* Stephen P. King <mailto:stephe...@charter.net>
*Receiver:* everything-list <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>
*Time:* 2013-01-22, 08:39:30
*Subject:* Re: Is there an aether ?
On 1/22/2013 7:22 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
If you knew more about the history of philsophy,
you'd know that Berkeley finally had to admit that the world out
there is real prior to our individual observation because
it is all observed by God.
Hi Roger,
This is a good example of the problem that the notion of God
has; it server only to act as an impartial observer "so that
everything is real". When we consider large numbers of observers
that can communicate with each other meaningfully, we obtain a
means to define 'reality' and have no need for the excess
hypothesis of God as observer. God's role becomes even less
meaningful when we see that the point of view of such an entity
cannot be transformed into that of a real observer that we can
communicate with, as it is somehow special. We learn from GR and
QM that there are neither preferred reference frames or
observational points of view nor measurement basis. This pretty
much makes the God hypothesis irrelevant.
Why people would seek to rehabilitate it to play the same role
again for mathematics puzzles me!
--
Onward!
Stephen
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Stephen
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