But then you have two things: the event, and the description of the event. The division of mind and world is assumed, it goes without saying. But that is what is being called into question. You can’t see any event, whether an eclipse or anything else, outside the synthesis of perception and reason which the observer brings to the event.
from an essay on the topic:
In the scientific imagination, we tend to picture a landscape empty but still structured — planets orbiting stars, rocks resting on mountainsides, waves crashing on empty shores. But Pinter (Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order) argues this view is misleading. Without the animal sensorium — the biological apparatus of senses and the nervous system — to perceive it, the mind-independent universe is not an array of distinct objects but an undifferentiated continuum. And if you insist that all of those objects are “there anyway”, you’re drawing on those remembered experiences which were originally generated by the sensorium.
In the unobserved state, there are no boundaries. A rock is not separate from the dirt it rests upon; a star is not a discrete sphere isolated from the vacuum around it. The forms that we presume are inherent in the objects we see are imputed by those cognitive acts which identify and separate them from their backgrounds. In the unseen cosmos, there is only a vast dynamic matrix of quantum fields and energetic interactions. Of course it continues to exist, but not in any way that is meaningful to an observer ~ The Mathematics of Idealism
I question whether there is any objective ‘way that it is’, something against which truth (and not belief) is measured. But such is an unstable stance, since if there is no ‘the way that it actually is’, that’s part of the way that it actually is, so it seems paradoxical for there not to be such a way.
“This car is currently improperly parked.” That has a subjective truth value given the ‘currently’ in the statement, and a non-objective truth value because it concerns a specific car in a specific world. ‘5 is less than 9’ seems closer to an objective truth, and I struggle to find a non-mathematical statement that arguably has similar objective truth value.
But whether or not the eclipse occurred is dependent on observation (or equivalent reference) since without said reference, the world in which the eclipse did or did not occur has not been identified. The statement is meaningless without the identification given by the observation, even if the observer is totally unaware even of the existence of eclipses. So I’m suggesting that the truth that the eclipse occurred requires not a speaker, but a reference at least, typically but not necessarily supplied by an observer.
Disagree, per the above. The presence in particular provides one method of specification of a necessary reference, without which any statement of the existence of the eclipse is meaningless. I can think of different references (not necessarily an observer) where the statement about eclipses is false.
Different usage of objectivity than what I’m using (not-subjective vs my not-just-a-relation). Science operates via empirical measurement, which is subjective by nature. That which is not subjective is completely beyond empiricism and thus beyond the scientific method. So they use a subjective definition of ‘exists’ if they bother to use the word at all.
So for example, it is said that dark matter exists, meaning it is part of the universe that we observe and that it doesn’t matter if it’s part of some other universe not related to the one we see. That’s a very subjective definition of ‘exists’, as it should be. Everybody wants to claim a observer-independent definition, but such a definition is pretty useless to science.
Agree. Being independent of human minds is quite different from being independent of human awareness. The neighbors up the street might not be part of your awareness, but their existence is still mind dependent, as is some random rock slide on some planet 1000 LY away.
I disagree with this. Plenty of science (thought experiments say) take place without a perspective. A simple spacetime diagram has no perspective, and yet it’s a valid model of spacetime.
Yes, thought experiments tend to have supposed observers, but they don’t usually observe anything, and typically just serve as a name-tag for a reference frame, or possibly an entity just to read a dial showing some measurement taken by something other than the observer, something any simple machine can do.
You’ve used the exercise a number of times, imagining a pleasant valley with all these details, but then trying to do so without a perspective. Yea, sure, if you going to describe it from a perspective, it’s pretty unavoidable. So describe the valley without one. It can be done, it just is a very different description. The spacetime diagram is one way to do it.
Both descriptions are two dimensional since a jpg is not 3D.
Common language usage says most of that is yes. Why use a definition that bucks common usage? So one gets into platonism and asks if 13 exists, and the answer seems to be ‘it does or doesn’t depending on your taste’. Nothing metaphysical about it. It’s a label one slaps on per one’s opinion. That’s my take anyway.
The description is not the event. A description requires a describer, an observation, an observer; but an eclipse requires neither. We do the differentiating in order to do the describing. That doesn’t mean the differentiating makes the difference. There’s a difference between the rock and the air around it whether or not anyone marks it; we mark and name that difference because it’s there, and because it matters to what we do. Same with the eclipse: it’s different from the absence of an eclipse independently of anyone tracking that difference — we track it because it’s worth tracking, not the other way round. You’re treating “we differentiate for our purposes” and “the difference exists only for our purposes” as the same claim. They’re not.
But you’re overlooking the Kantian point that space and time themselves are the ‘forms of intuition’, not objectively existing phenomena. Sure, they can be measured to minute degrees of accuracy, but that’s because we ourselves create units of measurement based on the similarities of our cognitive systems. You can’t describe nor imagine anything without a reference frame of some kind. If you were to imagine it as it is in itself absent any observer, what would you be imaginging? And science is starting to realise this. Notice the special edition of Quanta Magazine ‘the unravelling of space-time’ (which I must now hunker down to read!)
Besides, you yourself say:
The problem that then seems to loom is that of outright relativism or subjectivism. But it’s not that. My claim is only that nothing is purely objective. There is always a subjective element in any statement about what exists. But fire burns, medicine cures, and f=ma. I don’t deny any of that.
In everything you say here, you’re impliciyly accepting the realist stance, that whatever is being described is ‘there anyway’, and would be so, even if there were nobody to describe it. Empirically speaking that is true - but the empirical description is not an absolute.
It’s an opportunity to present a favourite quote from Arthur Schopenhauer:
The First Eye that Opened
We cannot understand how… one state could ever experience a chemical change, if there did not exist a second state to affect it. Thus the same difficulty appears in chemistry which Epicurus met with in mechanics. For he had to show how the first atom departed from the original direction of its motion. Indeed this contradiction, which… can neither be escaped nor solved, might quite properly be set up as a chemical antinomy…
…We see ever more clearly that what is chemical can never be referred to what is mechanical, nor what is organic to what is chemical or electrical. Those who in our own day are entering anew on this old, misleading path, will soon slink back silent and ashamed, as all their predecessors have done before them… Materialism… even at its birth, has death in its heart, because it ignores the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, “no object without a subject,” is the principle which renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them, and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless.
On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.
Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.
Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene — World as Will and Representation
The OP is concerned about the reality of the eclipse, its existence to be precise. Does the eclipse exist? Is there a whole number between 14 and 15? The Eiffel tower definitely exists, but the number being sought does not. In science we talk of observers and experiments and measurements. These constitute an ecosystem for the scientist’s task, which is to figure out how nature works and how we work with nature. The eclipse in question is a natural phenomenon but it’s quite distinct from (say) a committee deliberating on whether to install a new water fountain in the town square, another natural phenomenon. These 2 matters are distinguishable in terms of degrees of subjectivity and even objectivity. Ghosts are also metaphysically important entities. Ask a spiritual person and they exist, ask a mathematician and you get a different answer, ask a physicist and yet another answer. The essential issue is subjectivity of course. Science is subjective to the extent the observer is an integral part of experiments and measurements, and we might be or migh not.
Nice attempt to switch the topic, but too fast. What I’ve said is that there are things that are true, but who’s truth is unverified, unbelieved, unobserved, or otherwise removed from any attitude we might have towards it.
The existence of the whole does not depend on the whole being observed - obviously, since the whole has never been observed. An eye might be the precondition for knowledge, but not for truth. There are unknown truths.
Gamma-ray bursts - are energetic events occurring in distant galaxies.
Supernovas - Powerful and luminous explosion of a star.
Geyser - jet-like eruptions.
Continental drift - when Earth’s continents move to each other over geologic time.
Etc.
These, among eclipses, are natural phenomena. They exist, happen or occur independently of our awareness or validation. Perhaps we could say that we are there to “observe” how they work, trying to figure out the world we live in.
Rather, I think the precise element would be to understand the consequences of those phenomena. Maybe, here (in this context) it would be relevant the presence of an observer.
However, stars fuse hydrogen, rocks erode, and planets orbit without needing a mind to validate them. Furthermore, there is evidence that prove some complex events (like glaciation) occurred long before humans existed to witness them.
Otherwise, it would be argued that those natural phenomena never occurred because we hadn’t witnessed or “observed” them. Something entirely false because it is obvious how they shaped the Earth we live in.
Imagine for a moment that humankind disappears, followed by a glaciation that lasts for many years. Then, due to random circumstances, other human-like beings begin to flourish as the glaciation ends, creating more “livable” conditions. However, the new humans would never be aware of the previous glaciation.
Did the glaciation happen anyway? I think so, and therefore, it existed.
A quantum brain is a superposed, non-local informational brain, not a classical grey blob of meat. It is therefore more like a quantum computer than a regular computer. It contains a dynamic self-model which spans quantum branches.
The line is what I call “the Embodiment Threshold”. In plain language it requires the most primitive sort of brain (the first organism to cross the ET kicked off the Cambrian Explosion). Technically the brain needs to model the world, with the agent/self/organism in that model as an entity persisting over time, it must be aware of multiple possible (superposed) futures, and be able to assign non-computable value to them. It must be able to prefer a specific future, and the selection must be based on Penrose-style non-computable valuation. This makes MWI-style mind-splitting logically impossible (because the wavefunction is computable), so becomes a logical trigger for wavefunction collapse, while the valuations themselves determine which physical outcome is selected.
The position I am defending is a synthesis of MWI and von Neumann (consciousness is collapse). Instead of MWI splitting the persistent observer, in this model it is the presence of a persistent observer which triggers wavefunction collapse. In terms of cosmological history, MWI was true until a brain evolved in one branch (a logical inevitability), which then selected that branch into classical reality. This is a mechanism for Wheeler’s Participatory bootstrap, and Nagel’s teleological evolution of consciousness.
But even when we look close, we still only see a classical reality. It is just that when we look close, we see things which don’t make any intuitive sense to us. Maybe this is a pointless line of argument though.
OK…I think this risks being a mere semantic argument about what “classical” means. The important question here is whether you can understand the synthesis of MWI and VN I am describing. I am rejecting Wigner’s and Stapp’s adaptations of VN and going back to the man himself. VN never said “consciousness causes collapse”. What he actually said is that consciousness is the only place you can end an infinite chain of physical observers. That is consistent with consciousness being the same process as collapse, and the trigger being the need to avoid a logical contradiction – to maintain the coherence of reality when it contains a non-computable conscious agent of free will.
“Does the moon exist when we’re not observing it?”
Ties up with the observer effect of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. The electron becomes a particle when you observe it, is a wave when you don’t. The wavelength of the moon is too small to observe \lambda = \frac{h}{p}.
I’d say Michael Dummett, but I’m not confident enough to confront his works because neither I have the knowledge and enough information to do so, honestly.
I ask because I wonder if you’re not debating a straw man - a kind of anti-realism that nobody really defends. So I thought perhaps an example might help. But never mind if you’re not so inclined.
“Name one” asks for an observation of an unobserved truth, not a demand we need meet, it’s a demand that refutes itself. The number of follicles on your head right now is either odd or even, yet no one has counted, hence it is unknown; a truth absent of anyone’s attitude toward it, named without being observed.
It is still something you have to bring to mind. You haven’t pointed out a truth existing outside of cognitive architecture—you’ve just pointed to a rule of human logic.
The statement “It is either odd or even” is a tautology. To make that statement, you have already imported the concepts of discrete objects (“follicles”), number theory (“odd/even”), and the law of excluded middle. It is not something existing independently of any mind or framework
