For the classical formulation of this characterization of metaphysics, see Aristotle, Metaphysics, I (A), 1 (981a-982b); Kant himself characterized the subject-matter of metaphysics in these terms pre-critically, in A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition, 1755 (1:387); and in the original Theoretical Philosophy, I755-I770, p. 5. But not as such, and subsequently as he wished his use of the concept to be understood, in the first Critique.
Which puts yours in direct confrontation with mine……
“…..all pure a priori cognition, by means of the special faculty of cognition in which alone it can have its seat, constitutes a special unity, and metaphysics is that philosophy which is to present that cognition in this systematic unity. Its speculative part (of pure a priori cognition) to which this name (metaphysics) has been especially appropriated, namely that which we call metaphysics of nature, considers everything insofar as it is (not that which ought to be), on the basis of a priori concepts….”
……insofar as metaphysics can have no empirical conditions whatsoever in it, which makes explicit it cannot synthesize, or be the catalyst for synthesizing, natural events to each other, or, with some form of an empirical event with metaphysics itself, however mathematical its ground.
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Agreed. So either your theory is the logic-defying miracle, or, nothingness never was real.
It’s not intuition either. Intuition is that faculty in which occurs the synthesis of matter and form, giving phenomena as its objects. It is impossible to synthesize two ideal infinites such as the absolute and the limitless, that could produce an object related to but different than both.
Exactly. My theory does not defy logic; absolute nothingness can never have existed. Therefore we should start from the least complex alternative, which is infinite unrealised possibility. Can you think of any other options?
I think we need to start with something which looks like the ultimate paradox, because unless we start there then we always end up with paradoxes popping up in other places (where they can’t be eliminated).
The least complex alternative to why there is something, is that explanation the negation of which, is a contradiction.
Better to spend time wondering what a thing is, than why the thing is. The first we can answer, sometimes with apodeictic certainty, the second we cannot answer with any certainty at all, at least for those naturally occurring things that are appearances for us.
If you ask me, we’ve already a victim of the ultimate paradox, in that we insist the brain is responsible for allowing us to know stuff, but at the same time must admit the brain absolutely refuses to let us know how it lets us know stuff.
And if we are refused that knowledge, what’s to be gained by looking for the fundamental instantiating why of things?
This is what I argue is incoherent. You propose an “informational block”, but what the information within the block indicates, is that time was passing during that “history”. To remove the passing of time from “history”, produces something incoherent. This renders the entire supposed informational block, which is supposed to be a history, as incoherent because it’s not a history at all, therefore not informational at all.
And instead of accepting this incoherency as the incoherency which it is, you attempt to validate it with MWI, saying it’s “an entire set of histories”. But that doesn’t do justice to the proposed concept, because it’s really an infinite set of supposed “histories”. Now, instead of one history which had time passing throughout its entirety, as we commonly assume, you have an infinite set of histories, and none of them had any time passing within. So you have an infinite set of past histories, yet none of them could possibly be the actual past, because none had any time passing. What’s the point?
This is the root of the incoherency, claiming that “now” requires consciousness. What is this premise based on? You say “consciousness evolves”, but does that imply that “now” evolves? What could that mean, that “now” started out as a primitive form of now, when consciousness was just emerging, then the “now” evolved into an advanced form of now as consciousness evolved? And what about that time just prior to when consciousness emerged, wasn’t there a 'now" then, to allow that time was passing, so that consciousness could emerge? How could consciousness emerge from a block of infinite histories, every one of them without any time passing?
MWI is absurd, even it’s creator, Everett knew this. But he also believed that it was the only logically coherent way to make the wavefunction compatible with reality as we know and experience it.
That the only way to make this theory consistent with our lived experience, is by accepting something absurd, is a very clear indication that the theory itself is fundamentally flawed. Therefore that is where we ought to focus our attention, on the flaws of wavefunction theory, not on building a system based in the absurdities produced from the flawed theory
Experience without its content is not experience. True religious experience is about God.
It was about your knowledge about God, pointing out that you know something about God, but seem to be denying your own knowledge of it, or not knowing the fact that you know something about God.
This is what I argue is incoherent. You propose an “informational block”, but what the information within the block indicates, is that time was passing during that “history”.
How can time pass if the whole history already exists, from start to finish? For time to pass you need something which is moving along the timeline, interacting with things as it goes. But nothing can be moving, because the whole thing already exists.
We need to think about how we ended up here, starting with Newton. Newton’s laws almost perfectly describe the behaviour of normal material objects moving in 3D space as time passes, so scientists and philosophers quite reasonably assumed that reality is actually like that. Then came Hume, who ruined that simple view by pointing out a profound contradiction – on the one hand, it is impossible for us to ever escape the “veil of perception”, and impossible for anything outside the veil to causally penetrate within, but on the other hand, the brute facts of our daily existence require that we do have knowledge of objects in the world, because we continually interact with them (two way causality). It was this contradiction which provoked Kant to claim in the CPR that in fact we can only know phenomenal reality, and science tells us about only that. Noumena might causally affect us, but we cannot know the nature of that mind-external reality, and it cannot be a 3D world where time passes. This is the point where science and philosophy parted company, because the philosophers could not ignore Kant, but the scientists couldn’t do anything with Kant’s ideas and continued to believe in a mind-external classical world.
And that is the way things remained until Einstein came along and showed that naive materialism was incompatible with science, claiming reality in itself is not a 3D world that changes as time passes, but an entirely unintuitive thing called “space-time”. Is it possible to imagine space-time? It isn’t easy, but at least it is still defined in terms of space and time, so it doesn’t seem quite impossible. Physicists had barely had time to get used to Relativity when QM came along and really messed things up, because QM describes a world utterly alien to our intuition. The result was deep confusion about the true nature of reality, but the story that has been told to laypersons ever since is that QM describes how the universe behaves at very small scales, while GR describes it at large scales. This is a fairytale. It never made any sense, either intuitively or scientifically. Intuitively our minds just reject the idea that at the smallest possible scale everything is in a superposition, and the problem becomes even worse when entanglement enters the picture, because this claims two particles can somehow be joined together at the quantum level even if they are on different sides of the galaxy. How is that a description of what happens at “the micro-level”? Scientifically it makes no sense either, because the mathematics doesn’t work – you cannot fit GR and QM together at all, so there is no way of justifying a micro/macro boundary. It’s pseudoscience.
Bell’s Theorem should have finished the fairytale off for good, because it proves that quantum reality is non-local. NOT “very small” but another sort of reality altogether – one where space and time don’t exist (so entanglement suddenly makes sense) – a reality made purely of non-local information. But the fairytale persisted because physicists and cosmologists could not agree on a better way to explain the nature of reality.
2PC resolves this situation by taking QM literally. It conclusively rejects the micro/macro division and gets rid of space-time at the same time. Instead it agrees with Donald Hoffman: the classical world we experience is just a “dashboard”. Kant was right when he claimed that classical reality only exists within consciousness, but wrong when he claimed that this means we cannot know objective reality at all. Instead, reality in itself is exactly what QM and Bell’s Theorem say it is: a non-local, pre-spatiotemporal realm of superposed possibilities. Pure structure or information. In 2PC this is “Phase 1”. But consciousness requires a brain – not a Phase 2 material brain (that’s just a “projection” on the “dashboard”), but a Phase 1 quantum brain. It logically follows that unless a Phase 1 quantum brain exists, Phase 2 doesn’t exist at all.
From that we must conclude that the entire pre-brain history of the cosmos only existed in Phase 1, and Phase 1 is pre-spatiotemporal. Time only exists as a dimension of the information block. Nothing changes, and time cannot pass, because there is nothing moving through it. Time can only begin when the wavefunction starts collapsing, because it is the irreversibility of collapse which provides time with an arrow (in quantum reality, the laws of physics are completely reversible). The passing of time is the trimming of the MWI-like block into a single classical timeline which is actually experienced by the entity which determines what is trimmed and what remains as Phase 2 reality.
There is nothing incoherent about this. Kant was basically correct, and so is Donald Hoffmann. Quantum mechanics does not describe a very small version of classical reality. It describes a completely different sort of reality where time and space do not exist.
I think technically it is not quite infinite. It is just unimaginably large.
The point is that this is a literal interpretation of QM, and accepting it at face value solves a very large number of problems.
Before LUCAS (the first conscious being), evolution did not happen in real-time. It is a retro-selected history, during which something resembling evolution happened – or at least appears to have happened after that history was selected. Only after LUCAS, when a single Phase 1 13bn superposition is replaced by countless micro-collapses occuring within the specious present does evolution work in the way we have always thought of it working (except with the added complication of conscious animals being able to collapse wavefunctions).
There is no such thing as a “primitive now”, or a “half formed consciousess”. In phase 1 there is no “now” and no consciousness, and in phase 2 there is a full “now” and a full consciousness. It is a binary switch, not a gradient.
There was no now and no time passing. Consciousness appears only when a Phase 1 brain exists.
That is what the Embodiment Threshold explains. The block can only be extended in a timeless, branch-splitting (unitary) way so long as there is nothing within the block which is capable of choosing which possible future (which possible extension of the mathematical structure) is preferable. Once that information structure exists (a Phase 1 brain), then continued extension of the Phase 1 block would result in a logical inconsistency – a mathematical impossibility (while we are conscious, it is impossible for us to not prefer one possible future over the others). It can therefore only be extended if the information block is “inhabited” by Brahman becoming Atman (the Void steps in to resolve the contradiction), which then allows it to make non-computable value judgements, thereby choosing which is best of the available continuations. What we call “consciousness” is what it feels like to be an embodied Atman making those choices.
What flaws? QM is the most succesful scientific theory there has ever been. Just because it sets up mind-bending problems regarding the nature of reality, it does not mean the theory is flawed. It has never been shown to be incorrect.
Well, as you already know, a lot of people don’t agree with that.
Perhaps it would help if you provided a definition. What exactly does the word “God” refer to, for you? Does it have brain? Can it make decisions? Or are those anthropomorphisations?
I am happy to discuss with you why I reject the Abrahamic conception of God, but I need to know what your own understanding currently is.
There are also a lot of people who claim you can live in Mars.
You seem to be changing the topic of conversation here. It wasn’t about my definition of God, brain or making decisions.
My point was from Kantian notion of noumena. It is not simply and absolutely unknowable world. It is unknowable in degrees, and where you exercise faith and postulation, it can be fully knowable according to Kant.
One needs to read the other relating publications by Kant to be able to make credible claims on the topic. There are quite a few apart from CPR discussing on the topic.
Please correct me, if I am wrong. But God is one of the object in noumena. It was not about God, but was about “unknowability” in your claim on Kant’s noumena.
The OP is about metaphysics. It would be good to go over Kant’s metaphysics in order to understand even what metaphysics means and is based on.
If God exists then God would be noumenal, at least according to some people. Doubtless there is a theological argument along the lines you are suggesting – maybe God can be known through His works in the phenomenal world, or directly by people’s consciousness. But if you don’t believe in an Abrahamic God, this whole discussion is a bit pointless.
I disbelieve in the Abrahamic God because of the Problem of Evil. We can discuss that if you like, but it is theology rather than metaphysics.
QM and science are not metaphysics at all.
QM raises metaphysical questions it cannot answer. It forces people to discuss the things that Wittgenstein argued it is impossible to discuss.
I can definitely endorse the open spirit of your attitude.
Basically I don’t want to be trapped in blind prejudice, but I also hope to synthesize a specific sense of what is relevant and worth closer study. I see labels like “phenomenology” as handy indicators of this or that person’s current general approach. But we can only expect so much from such a simple label. Really we have to talk to people, understand them as individuals.
I respect your belief and views on God. But God can be discussed in metaphysics for its existence and nature from ontological and ontotheological point of view. It doesn’t have to be always from theology.
I feel QM’s problem is their object of claims. It doesn’t matter what questions they raise.
The objects they talk about are usually particles, atoms, heat or gas, which are not really directly related to human existence, mind, and the world human beings live in. Not sure if these are legitimate or meaningful metaphysical topics.
I explained this to you already. The wavefunction models energy transmission as a wave. But by denying the importance of a substance (aether) which actually has waves, the wavefunction does not represent anything real. Because of this, it is impossible to produce an accurate representation of the interaction between massless electromagnetic waves, and massive objects.
The convention is to fall back on Einsteinian principles of special relativity. But since the speed of light is constant relative to massive objects this creates a boundary, (producing infinity in the mathematics), between the activity of massive objects and the activity of light waves. The result of that boundary is the uncertainty principle of QM.
You need to respect the fact that “space-time” is not meant to be a representation of reality. It is a conceptual tool used to assist physicists in their measuring of physical activities. So relativity theory does not claim that “reality in itself is not a 3D world that changes as time passes”, it gives us a measurement tool which represents the universe in a way other than this.
We ought to consider that after Newton’s experimentations with light, it came to be accepted that light consisted of wave activity. There is much empirical evidence to support this, and the principle became very useful. However, efforts to determined the aether within which the waves propagate were fruitless, and the Michelson-Morley experiments demonstrated that the relationship between the aether and massive objects is not the way that it was hypothesized to be. Einsteinian relativity provides the principles to relate this wave activity to massive objects, with a complete ignorance of the aether which is logically necessary as the substance of those waves. That ignorance manifests as the principal flaw of QM, a wavefunction which does not represent any real waves.
Your supposed “quantum reality” is false, a fiction. It is a fairy tale. Equally, general relativity based cosmology, is fictional. They are both based in the intentional ignorance expressed by special relativity. Each of these two may serve exceptionally well (in comparison to older techniques) within their respective domains, but if either is taken as the basis for a metaphysical system, it would be woefully inadequate, due to the falsity.
Notice, you portray physicists and cosmologists as looking for the best way to explain the nature of reality. But special relativity is not based in such a desire. It is based in the desire to measure physical aspects of reality. The metaphysician will be looking for the best way to explain the nature of reality. And the metaphysician will see that the physicists and cosmologists, by adopting the principles of special relativity, are not proceeding towards “a better way to explain the nature of reality”. They have been distracted by the desire to measure.
According to what I explained above, this is a very clear expression of your mistaken starting point.
You present a false hope. The micro/macro division is produced by special relativity’s artificial boundary between the massless and the massive. The massless is the energy of light waves. You cannot get rid of that division unless you can show how the two interact, thus rejecting special relativity with that artificial boundary between them. You see, QM attempts to circumvent the boundary by portraying the light energy as a particle, to be consistent with massive particles, but this only produces the uncertainty principle.
The correct procedure, as most physicists know, is the inverse of this, instead of representing light waves a particles, the need is to represent mass as waves. This would allow wave interaction between what we know as massive particles, and what we know as the massless. Some believe that the Higgs field already does this. However, I believe that the Higgs is also a false hope, because it is not based in any waves of real substance, no aether. Until the substance of the waves can be identified it’s all based in the fairy tale of special relativity, with that self-imposed boundary which makes mass/massless interaction incoherent.
I think you need to clear up some principles, and adhere to what you claim. Phase 1 is pre-conscious choice, pre wavefunction collapse. And conscious choice is the present, now. The past is post-conscious choice. So you have no principles to extend Phase 1 into the past, as you do. You say the “history of the cosmos only existed in Phase 1,” but this is invalid. Unless you project a present, a “now” into the past, and say that there was time passing back then, with a future, there is no basis for a Phase 1 in the past. You use this incoherency, this fallacy, to escape the need to have a consciousness which collapses the wavefunction at the present, the now, in the time prior to there being a consciousness. But when you insist that there was no now, this implies that there was also no future. So we are left with just the past, and no possibility of Phase 1 either.
The problems you claim to have solved are not actually solved, because of the incoherency of your proposed resolution.
This exemplifies the incoherent way that you project Phase 1 into the past. The possibility of selection only exists with Phase 1, and that is a description of what lies ahead of the conscious free willing agent, the possible futures. Now you turn this around to say that history can be “retro-selected”. But in reality, no such retro-selection is possible. The past is only selected for from possible futures, by the conscious agent, at the time of the present, when time is passing. The conscious agent cannot turn around and project one’s presence millions of years into the past, to select for the history at that time in retro-selection. No, any possible selection was done when that time was the present, and time was passing.
This is easy to understand if you think about a recent time, yesterday for example. There was the opportunity for you to make selections yesterday, when that time was the present, and time was passing. But there is no opportunity for you to turn around today, project today’s present to yesterday, and retro-select your yesterday.
This does not answer the question, how consciousness comes into being without time passing. You speak about it as “a logical inconsistency – a mathematical impossibility”, then you claim to resolve it by invoking “the Void”. In other words, you dismiss the logical incoherency by appealing to magic.
OK, at this point I don’t think it is going to be possible to make any more progress, so unless your next reply offers me a clear way forwards I am going to stop. From my perspective you have some extremely strange ideas about science.
Perhaps if you could explain what you think science is telling us about the nature of reality it might be easier for me to understand you. Are you a physicalist? An idealist? a neutral monist? a dualist? Which QM interpretation do you think is correct? None of them? What do you think objective reality is made of?
I asked an AI to analyse your position, and it said you are defending what is essentially a 19th century, pre-QM, pre-Einstein view of physics – that you believe in something like the old “aether”. Is that correct?
Sorry to interrupt an ongoing dialogue, but I wanted to offer a simple comment. Science cannot tell us anything at all about the nature of reality. Science recognises only Apparent Reality, which it studies very successfully, as we all know. But if you want to know of the nature of reality, then you’re outside the bailiwick of science, and you need philosophy, specifically, metaphysics. Yes?
ΛCDM is not just science. It physicalism+science, and if the metaphysics is incoherent (which it is) then no amount of science can result in a coherent model of reality. That is why the absence of a quantum theory of gravity is such a serious problem. Quantum mechanics demands a metaphysical interpretation, but scientists cannot agree on an interpretation, and they can’t integrate any existing interpretation with General Relativity.
Science defines the problems that need to be solved (or at least it defines some of them).
Science recognises only Apparent Reality, which it studies very successfully, as we all know.
That was true until 1925. QM forces us to re-evaluate that question, because it describes something very different to the “Apparent Reality” science had previously always dealt with. “Apparent Reality” is classical. It involves ordinary objects in singular locations with singular velocities and only one set of properties. Quantum mechanics describes a set of possibilities – and not just classical possibilities. The wavefunction describes all kinds of other possible realities which aren’t classical at all (this sets up another major conceptual problem in physics called the “Preferred Basis Problem”).
So quantum theory broke this pattern, and the scientific community has never known what to make of this. It has never digested and internalised it. Instead the problem has just festered for 100 years. Quantum mechanics literally describes a world that lies beneath the appearances, and scientists have spent a century being unable to find a way to reconcile this with their sacrosanct metaphysical assumptions (physicalism, naturalism and causal closure).
I don’t think I’m anything special, I just have a lot of patience What often seems to happen is that people are ever so eager to critique an idea that they start dismantling it before they’ve fully listened to what it’s actually trying to say.
Yes it does, I think that you’ve outlined your whole system. Now I have a lot of questions, I am at a loss on where to begin.
Here I guess: Are all values, the whole spectrum of human emotion, the polyvalence of experience and so on, are they somehow encoded in the qubits of the pythagorean ensemble? If so, they must reside there in latent form, in proto-form, or Ur-image as some might call it, much as the self-model and consciousness, as much as anything else. In other words, how do dry formal mathematical structures are brought to life?
You specify that your framework is neutral (quantum neutral monism). However evaluations towards the “best possible world” seem to defy this neutrality. I can only suppose that your framework is ontologically neutral as to matter and mind, that the fundamental reality is neither mental or physical, so that neither side is privileged, that they both emerge and are derived from an underlying monistic prinicple. Granted this, I don’t see how it can be neutral as to a whole lot of evaluations towards a “best possible world”, the minimization of “logical pain” (whatever this means) meaning, synchronicity, and last of all, how does this structure reflects to us anything like a “sacred structure”. How does sanctity enter the game?
And how does the framework account for a time when a worst possible world was selected?
The desire to understand the nature of reality is a very specific goal, intention, or purpose. It may be the defining feature of philosophy, which is commonly called the love of wisdom. What we call “science”, as defined by the scientific method, used to be known as “natural philosophy”, the philosophy of natural things. The design of the scientific method was inspired by philosophy.
Science today has strayed from that goal, and is no longer guided by the desire to understand the nature of reality. Without that one unifying goal, a number of different goals have taken its place. I already mentioned the capacity to measure as a goal, but there is also the capacity to predict which has taken a prominent place, and of course the capacity to make money is closely tied to the capacity to predict.
I think I made it quite clear that I believe quantum mechanics as a whole is misguided. That’s why I said that the paradigm change which we really need is the one which replaces the flawed wavefunction representation.
Do you understand what a “wave” is? A wave is an activity of a substance, or medium, by which energy is transmitted through the movements of the particles of that substance. Do you also recognize that electromagnetic energy is transmitted as waves? There is much evidence of this, refraction, interference patterns, etc..
With these two true premises, a wave is an activity of the particles of a substance, or medium, and electromagnetic energy is transmitted as waves, we can conclude that there must be a substance, or medium within which electromagnetic waves exist. This is commonly called “the aether”. Some people deny that there is such a thing as the substance or medium within which the electromagnetic waves exist. But as you can see, such a denial is illogical, being contrary to a sound conclusion.
What often seems to happen is that people are ever so eager to critique an idea that they start dismantling it before they’ve fully listened to what it’s actually trying to say.