> On 25 Oct 2019, at 14:49, Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 7:50:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >> On 22 Oct 2019, at 13:25, Lawrence Crowell <[email protected] >> <javascript:>> wrote: >> >> On Tuesday, October 22, 2019 at 1:47:58 AM UTC-5, Cosmin Visan wrote: >> Prove there is something outside consciousness! >> >> I think Samuel Johnson had a good reply to Bishop Berkeley on refuting >> idealism, "If I kick this rock thusly," which Johnson did, "It then kicks >> back." This is not a complete proof, but it works well enough FAPP. > > > Does it? Kicking a rock is a dream-able event, and usually, it kicks back in > dream to (that’s too a dream-able event), so it is hardly an argument to > convince oneself that we are in presence of a “real solid rock”. > > In my long work I call a dream “contra lucid” those dreams where we "test > reality", and get convinced that we are not dreaming. That happens often to > people interested in studying if we can know that we are not dreaming. > Usually, people who train themselves in lucid dream will live the phenomenon > of false awakening. They make a lucid dream, wake up, write the dream in > their diary and then, wake up again. That can happen multiple time. Bertrand > Russel claimed he got one hundred false awakening in succession. I think he > meant “many”. > > With mechanism, it is not difficult to explain that we can know in a dream > that we are dreaming, but we cannot know-for-sure, when awaken, that we are > awake. It is comparable to “be wrong”. We can learn that we are wrong, but we > cannot learn that we are not wrong. Likewise a machine can discover she is > inconsistent, but she cannot justify that she is consistent. > > Bruno > > > Dreams are not very coherent.
By dream, I mean (using Digital Mechanism, my working hypothesis) any computation rich enough to sustain a universal (Löbian) machine/number. So the waking state, relatively to a universal environment is just a special case of dream (a true dream if you want). > I think idealism can be made very suspect on a number of bases. The world we > observe clearly presents evidence of its existence long before we were here. I agree if by “we” you mean “we, the humans”. I disagree if by “we” you mean “we the universal numbers”. > In fact it existed long before anything called life or biology. Locally, yes. But I don’t really believe in it. I have never found even one evidence, and tuns of evidence to the contrary. Then with Mechanism we can test it, and QM somehow confirm the immaterialism implied by the digital mechanist hypothesis. > So the idealist might then point to the panpsychists who say even elementary > particles have some unit of consciousness. That makes of course no sense at all, provably so if we assume Mechanism. But Mechanism is incompatible with the metaphysical belief in an ontological (primary) physical reality. > The problem is that quantum mechanics would require there to be some sort of > observable in association with an operator. Panpsychism would say there is > some sort of quantum number involved with psychic existence. None exists. So > then the idealist would say the past is an illusion and all the evidence of > past cosmic existence is just a mental state or some sort. With Mechanism, the physical reality exists, without much doubt, but it is not a fundamental reality, it arises from the first person statistics on all computations. This explains everything quantum mechanics predicts, without any ontological commitment other than the belief that 2+2= 4 and similar. > The problem here is this lends itself to delusions, in fact to solipsism, and > if idealism is correct then maybe insanity is the norm. I choose not to go > there. Me neither. But that is not a reason to believe that the physical *universe” is the fundamental reality. That is logically impossible if we assume that the brain is a locally finite machine. Such a “real universe” would need magical abilities to select a computation from the infinitely many going through our state. Physicalism requires non-mechanism, and that is out of the scope of my expertise. I don’t go there either. Bruno > > LC > > > >> >> LC >> >> >> On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 03:27:03 UTC+3, Lawrence Crowell wrote: >> >> Idealism is of course rather silly. The idea that all that exists is >> consciousness is a "feel good" idea that is utterly preposterous. >> >> >> -- >> 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] <javascript:>. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/556f8a1c-50f4-489c-aa4f-3feeb9ce0606%40googlegroups.com >> >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/556f8a1c-50f4-489c-aa4f-3feeb9ce0606%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. > > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/54c065b6-74b7-4701-b871-9bd802d4f2bb%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/54c065b6-74b7-4701-b871-9bd802d4f2bb%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/94B601A5-DF9E-40FF-B2B3-8A3C480872DE%40ulb.ac.be.
