On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 03:38:29AM +0000, Russ Abbott wrote: > Nick wrote, "the idea of a real world outside experience is nonsense" > > What does that say about areas of the universe or periods of the universe > that have no experiencing beings? > > Also, we synchronize our experiences so that we can communicate. (And we > manage to do that reasonably well most of the time.) Is there any reason > that's even possible if there is no real world outside each person's > individual experience? (Or does this misrepresent what you have in mind?) >
My dear realist and anti-realist friends! I have been having a long debate with another philosopher friend of mine who essentially argues that Goedel's incompleteness theorem entails realism. For the purposes of our discussion, we define realism as being properties independent of observation, ie brute facts about the world, and anti-realism as the position that there are no such properties - every observed property must either come about through the process of observation, or be effectively random eg I speak English here,but there are other people who speak Chinese, and somewhere out in the Multiverse are people speaking any conceivable language, One may categorise realism as the position that some things are and other things aren't. Roughly as a result of that, I argue in my book Theory of Nothing that Everythingism (ie everything exists in a Multiverse) entails anti-realism, ie that laws of physics must be grounded in psychological laws, and vice-versa. As a consequence, discussions of ontology (what might be the real fabric of our existence) are pointless, as no empirical observation can reveal anything about it. Anyway, back to lurking... Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
