On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 10:18:12PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 4/8/2014 8:45 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 06:05:44PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > >>>Then why claim that there is an external ontological reality at all, > >>>if all you're banging on about is intersubjective consistency? It > >>>doesn't buy you anything, except unanswerable questions. > >>It's like Bruno's 'comp', it's a model or assumption from which you > >>reason. It's a good model for explaining why there is > >>intersubjective consistency. I suppose you might also have a > >>solipist model which would explain the consistency as, "I thought of > >>it all and I'm consistent and I want people to agree with me so > >>that's the way I think'em." > >> > >I can see that, but it is also equally valid that one doesn't need > >either hypothesis. Certainly it is sufficient that if the properties > >of observed reality is constrained by one's act of observation, then > >any other observed putative observers must report observations of a > >reality constrained in the same way. > > Aren't you assuming other putative observers are the same as > yourself and subject to the same constraints, and that the > constraints are quite strong so that they enforce consistency with > there being a common external reality? So I might say, with > apologies to Lagrange, what a beautiful hypothesis it is. >
This would appear to be the conclusion of something like COMP. > I can imagine beings that would see the world in different terms (as > mystics claim to, or Nagel's bat) and yet still see it as consistent > with the same reality that I do. > Of course. How does that contradict what I've said above? One would expect that the laws of physics should be invariant to the type of observer, even though those laws derive from the process of observation. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
