I like simple stories. There was an eclipse. It occurred, unobserved or observed. This is how our language, and the world, works.
yes, and you can sleep soundly knowing that your coins are all safe 
Cheers. I hope yours do not cease to exists when you look away.
Oh mine are long spent, regrettably. Fortunately for me, philosophizing is inexpensive. (“Like a Sunday in TJ, it’s cheap but it’s not free.”)
Nice of you to hope, downright neighborly I must say, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need it.
He will know, or he will not, given the heavy lifting……
(See what I did right there???)
…….metaphysical pursuits invite, without voicing those mere logical inferences, the formulation of which makes explicit the necessity for a proof not included in it.
Is it just me, or doesn’t the proposition “X” is true iff X, stipulate the necessity of a proof? I mean, how else to eliminate all exceptions to a rule, such that all ifs are negated. Then it becomes “X” is necessarily true because X, which is logically superfluous. Who cares if “X” is true, or rather, who cares that “X” is true if, when he still needs to find out what the if is all about, in case “X” never was true at all?
And what of the hole in the pocket, such that the coin fell out. “The coin is in the pocket” is true iff the coin is in the pocket, but it might not be in the pocket, having dropped out somewhere around 48th St, which makes the “The coin is in the pocket” nothing more than it ever was, an inference in need of proper justification.
Odd innit? The world gets smaller and smaller, people get closer and closer in ways not related to size or distance, so an eclipse for one is understood as an eclipse for all, yet the eventual reduction is to the single individual subject, exactly that which is neglected in statements regarding how language and the world work, in which case an eclipse for one is not necessarily an eclipse for all.
I like simple stories too. It is simply the case reason rules the human intellectual roost, how language and the world work, are slaves to it.
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It (earthquake, 15 Aug 2026) is a matter of intersubjective agreement, which is fact only among the intersubjective group. My 3rd person has no intersubjective relationship with us, so the earthquake in question is not fact.
In quantum terms, the two of us are entangled with the earthquake event in question, and the 3rd guy is entangled with a ‘no earthquake that day’ event.
One requirement for it to be fact is for it to be a counterfactual (true relative to anything that hasn’t measured it). OK, the two of us have measured it, hence the agreement, but not hence the fact.
You seem to fall back to your ‘that which concerns me directly’ usage of language, where I’m trying to reach beyond that. I’ve given my definitions, so you must know what I’m talking about when making statements like the one you quoted above.
Again, pressure has been specified. More generally, one might say that the phase diagram of water is some fixed chart, anywhere in our spacetime.
A fairly interesting ‘fact’ (independent of environment) is that water has a critical point at around 22 MPa, 374 C beyond which the difference between a liquid and gas is indistinct. Water has around 14 phases, not just solid, liquid, or gas.
Impurities make it cease to be water, becoming something like say sea water. The phase diagram of sea water is different, and not universal.
But the point I’m trying to make is that the phase diagram of water is not an absolute truth. It’s a truth relative to our ‘universe’, our spacetime. See below:
There is a very narrow range where matter forms. I’m keeping my hypothetical ‘slightly’ well within that range, so I can have a universe with water boiling at a different temp.
Funny, but that seems to describe your usage of ‘objective’. The way I use it (a far more absolute sense) is mind independent, so it has nothing to do with it being collected by anything.
Maybe I did. Quote? I suspect you said something else.
Science is all about empirical evidence and predictions and measurements. While science can be done strictly by devices that you probably wouldn’t qualify as a mind, that doesn’t stop it from being done.
So take special relativity, a scientific theory that was published pretty much without doing any empirical experiments. OK, they were done, but much earlier. Michelson/Morley in particular. The theory was published, and only thereafter were empirical experiments devised to test it. So yea, the observation was done at some point, but Einstein performed science from a desk, imagining some things that lacked a point of view. He put fake observers on trains and such, and they didn’t observe anything. They just served as a way to verbally label a point in space (Alice’s frame) and to read output from hypothetical devices that were doing all the work.
Not that I know of. Like I said, I have little use for philosphers that don’t know their science or v-v. I’ve done a bunch of queries trying to find a published work that strives say for a real mind-independent view, and nobody does it. Their idea of independence goes only so far as to say the cup would still be there if I wasn’t, but too late. It’s existence was already asserted by a mind and continues to be so. That can’t be undone.
Another one defining eclipse as perspectival and not as a celestial event, contradicting all the early definition of ‘ecliplse’ you find online. And again, I’m sure one can find a phenomenal definition.
The eclipse occurred on Earth and was observed, even if you didn’t see it. As you say, you are mistaken. The shadow may not have fallen on Australia, but there very much was an eclipse.
@Banno also seems to have noticed that inconsistency in your statements.
You read me totally wrong. I’m giving examples of non-perspective ways of say doing science. I’m striving for a mind-independent definition of reality, which cannot rely on a perspective. The relational definition does rely on interaction, at least one-way. The earthquake happened relative to you and I, even if you and I were puddles instead of people. Subjectivity gone, but the relation still works because it’s not mind dependent.
I’m not contending that, but I’m searching for a definition consistent with it. I wouldn’t use such a realist definition since I find (absolute) realism meaningless. Only relational realism seems to make any sense at all.
That counter would be self contradictory. If it’s around ‘us’, it’s observed, or at least measured. ‘Observed’ has a component of epistemology about it that ‘measured’ (quantum definition) doesn’t.
Well, AFAIK the phase diagram of water graphs (temperature, pressure, maybe other variables) and the (phase/state of water). I don’t recall seeing (universe) as a variable in the phase diagram. Here we see the phase of water as a function of the variables I mentioned above. We can triangulate water’s phase with a phase diagram.
The phase diagram of water is the phase diagram of water, not lead or mercury, etc., which have their own phase diagrams. The phase of water may change with temperature and pressure and other variables but the phase diagram of water doesn’t. We specify the variables that are relevant (temperature and pressure and maybe something else) in a phase diagram. Which universe water is in, its spacetime features, has no bearing on the phase diagram - so far as we know only pressure and temperature and maybe something else affect the phase/state of substances. In that sense it is absolute, not relative.
Yes there are points/regions of interest on the phase diagram of water or any other substance. Water can be in all 3 states at its triple point. I mean ice melts at 0 degree Celsius and also water freezes at 0 degree Celsius.
Need it be said that puddles are insentient….?.
Oh, never mind…..
It need not be said at all. When going for mind independent definitions of stuff, sentience plays no role at all.
‘Intersubjective agreement’ becomes more of a quantum ‘mutual entanglement’ since language and epistemology also play no role.
But it does. I explicitly mentioned a universe with a very slight difference in the fine structure constant (without so much a difference that water/matter doesn’t form at all), and the phase diagram is not the same there.
In that sense, it is relative, not absolute. If it’s absolute, it’s arguably not tied to any ‘sense’ at all.
Other than recognizing and defining it.
This is hypothetical physics and chemistry. It maybe interesting to wonder about such worlds but what you’re doing is comparing the facts of this world to a world that may not exist, a fictional world and claiming relativity. I could do that too. The mass of an electron could be different in the LOTR middle earth or the speed of light could be a greater or lesser that 1860000 mps in Alice’s Wonderland. So everything is relative. 
There are solid grounds for saying that were the fundamental constants minutely different matter would not exist.
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That’s a controversial statement according to one astrophycisit. We haven’t worked it out yet. Someone has to actually sit down and do the computations, check what kind of physics, chemistry and biology will be allowed. What maybe correct though is that this universe is fine-tuned for carbonaceous life. So fine-tuned for life is carbon-centric.
Just Six Numbers, Lord Martin Rees
The point being the values can’t be changed arbitrarily.
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Good book. It should be recommended reading. Per the book the values of the 6 constants are restricted to a sliver. Even the minutest deviation, per the book, would result in no universe. One of the constants D = 3, the number of dimensions, stands out - it simply can’t be any other number since dimensions are whole numbers, which is interesting.
Why wouldn’t they be arbitrary?
But mind independence wouldn’t require its ‘laws’ to be recognized or stated. You keep adding in a role of an observer when no such role would be required.
BTW, I’m not asserting the truth of any such definition. I don’t have one. The best I can do is a relational one. X relates to Y. We do not relate to the world where water has a different phase table since the two worlds do not interact at all.
You’re almost certainly using a mind dependent definition of ‘exist’ when I’m not, so it’s not really a counter to what I’m saying. You see this world and not the other, so by definition, this one exists and the other probably not. I’m guessing here. You’ve not stated by what means you declare X to exist but not Y.
Hossenfelder? The argument is thin there, her point being only that one cannot just
sit down and do the computations
Yes, it’s not possible to exactly quantize the improbability, but that’s not grounds to assert that it isn’t improbable.
There are perhaps around 20 constants, few/none of which are mentioned by Rees. His are chosen for being dimensionless (not all are), but some can be derived, and he definitely missed some.
Speed of light is one, but it has units. In natural units or Planck, it’s just 1, a starting point relative to which several other constants get derived.
Nonesense. Any one of the can be set to almost anything. Not ‘changed’. Set. They’re constants, unlike say the Hubble ‘constant’ which does change, and has also been measured by 2 methods to be two very different numbers (67 or 73) with no overlap in error bars.
3 Dimensions. Sounds like units to me.
It can be 2, or 17. Time dimensions can also be other than 1. Why doesn’t Rees mention that one? For instance, a world with 1 space and 3 time dimensions is dominated by tachyons. Maybe some complexity can arise in a world like that. Who knows?
Why are no constants related to immaterial mind listed? If magic is a critical part of our world, then it needs to be in the list.
A summary of Just 6 numbers. Errors are all mine
| Sl. No. | Constant | Less than current value | More than current value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | N (the ratio of electric force to that of gravitational force) | The universe would have collapsed much earlier | Stars would not form |
| 2 | \varepsilon (nuclear efficiency) | Large molecules wouldn’t form. Complex chemistry not possible | Stars would burn their fuel too fast |
| 3 | \Omega (ratio between density of the universe and critical density) | The universe would collapse too early | Runaway expansion |
| 4 | \lambda (cosmological constant) | Runaway expansion | Early collapse of the universe |
| 5 | Q (amplitude of density fluctuations in the early universe) | No interesting spots like stars and galaxies | A universe dominated by black holes |
| 6 | D (number of dimensions = 3) | Unstable gravity | Unstable gravity |