tar

DrP,

Well I don't believe our senses are lying to us. What they report is true stuff happening in the real world. If something tastes bitter it is because it has the chemicals in it that activate those taste buds. That I might hate bitter things and you might like them or that I might have fewer of the buds and you might be more sensitive to that chemical than I am, or that I can have a bitter taste in my mouth just by breathing in a few molecules of that chemical, or that I can remember what a bitter taste is like, without even biting into a bitter thing, or that a onion and an apple taste the same with your nose closed, does not mean the chemical is not real and that we really sensed it.

In fact, the fact that we need to smell the onion for it to be identified as an onion and not an apple proves that we notice the world based on a combination of our senses, AND that the onion and apple have real characteristics, that effect the senses of all functioning humans in the exact same manner. The apple is real, the onion is real, the tasters and smellers are real. The senses are not fooled they complement each other. And they do so in a consistent manner across all instances of functioning humans.

Regards, TAR

DrP,

I do not accept that there is no way to tell if you are a simulation or not.

You will have to go through that logic for me again, because I don't see the problem.

So not an attempt at humor, just a statement of fact. If you were a conscious computer, you would be conscious of your computerness because your computerness would be the reality of the situation.

Regards, TAR

DrP,

No, go ahead. This is central to the argument (the question) of what is real.

Regards, TAR

If a person simulator were to be created, it would have to have all the senses of a human, all the capabilities of a human, all the internal timings of a human, all the needs, wants and motivating factors of a human, or it would not act like a human, or be like a human or "think" it was a human. A camera does not think it is at a wedding.

And I don't think the camera will be leaving a gift.

yeah I think the wires and chips might be a tip off to the computer, that it was not a person

dimreepr,

Why yes I have done that.

I can also close my eyes and drive the route to work that I drove for 26 years, even though I quit my job two or three years ago. I can "see" the reservoir, see the swans on it, see the turn coming up where I used to turn to get to one building, where I went straight to get to the other building.

Dreams and imagination are close to reality, because both or all are happening in our brains. That is, our senses internalize the outside, and build a model of the place that we can navigate without actually expending much energy. Its a very detailed and complete model and it matches every aspect of reality that we can sense.

No wonder we can get confused between the waking world and the dream world, it is all happening in our brains. But there is this thing we are modeling. And that this thing is so consistently modeled by all of us is a testament to the fact that the thing is real.

That there is indeed a waking world.

Regards, TAR

 

Take this example. All the inputs that feed into a computer inside a driver-less car are recorded and these are then input into another computer sitting in a lab somewhere, running the same driver-less car software. Can that computer tell that it is not in a driver-less car, controlling it down the road?

 

Suppose all the inputs that a person receives during their life were to be recorded and then played back to a computer running a 'person simulator'. Would that 'person simulator' think that they are alive and real? How would the 'person simulator' know that they are a simulator and not a living creature?

We cross posted. I gave the driving to work example before I read your driverless car analogy. But none-the-less, I can tell the difference between actually driving to work, and imagining I am driving to work. We have a predictive motor simulator in our brains that rehearses combinations of motor signal timings and sets the whole coordinated sequence up, before actually sending the signals. We in essence go through the motions, before we actually move. The driverless car has untold subprograms to run in various situations, just having the program is not the same as moving the car through reality. The driverless car would know what was real and what was simulation. If such an ability to tell the difference was not built into the car, then it would be quite dangerous indeed, liable to do zero turns at 60 miles an hour in the middle of a festival, just to burn rubber.

Regards, TAR

robinpike,

as to how would the person simulator know if it was actually a person or a simulation, I would have to go with consideration of whether or not the thing was conscious of itself and conscious of its position in reality...if it knew what it was, and where it was, had a intuition of time and space and could place itself in context, then I would say it would know it was a person simulator

 

In Strange's example, did it look like the squares were the same shade?

 

 

 

 

But they were, your belief has no bearing on reality, whether it makes sense or not.

 

Personally I choose to labour under the belief that we do exist and, mostly, my senses are reasonably accurate in defining the world around me, until I'm shown otherwise; but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

In the shaded chess board example the two same shade of grey squares "look" like different shades to EVERYBODY. This is not an indication that human thought and perception is faulty, or that our picture of the world is therefore somehow incorrect and fraught with error. It is actually quite the opposite, and shows not only do we all see the same reality, but we all see it in a consistent fashion. That is, we make the correction in our brains, each of our brains for the fact that the one square is illuminated in bright sunlight and the other is in deep shadow. We know what a chess board looks like, we know that a white square in the shade will not reflect as much light as a white square in the sun. So an illusion is drawn to convince us that the white square is in a shadow and EVERYBODY is fooled by the same construction. But it is a drawing. There is not real sunlight hitting a real board, and if it where, the black squares in the sunlight might indeed reflect exactly the same amount of light as the white squares in the shade. An argument FOR reality being consistent and understandable in a common fashion. That even though illusions can be created, that they can be created so consistently, across the board, proves we all match the same reality to our internal model in the same fashion.

Regards, TAR

Just thought in addition that the illusion also proves some things about pattern matching and transforms, that are a consistent feature of all humans, and suggests to me that although our models are all independently occurring in our isolated brains, that there is a consistency in both how we match, and the thing that is being matched to. Consider the black square, drawn with a corner in the sunlight and the rest in the shade of the cylinder. There of course is no sunlight, but the artist is constructing the picture to convince us that there really is sunlight and shade, and this square provides the correction factor, that all squares in the shadow of the cylinder will be darkened by this amount.

fiveworlds

in my 12 segments of the sphere thread I was able to determine using an Euler calculator that the areas of my divisions at 15 degree sections were equal, and you could set the digits to which you wanted to figure to 14 or 20 digits or something, but when attempting to figure the areas of my divisions when the sphere is sliced up into minutes and seconds the numbers, even to the highest precision they provided, were way to rough to multiply out by the total number of sections and check that they added back to the total area.

Whatever digit pi was taken to in the calculator, was not enough for my purposes. That is I was having a hard time figuring the area of a minute by minute diamond like section much less a second by second section, to the precision required to then translate these measurement to the globe and come up with a square footage number.

That is the digits to the right of whatever the calculator's precision was, were the ones that made the difference.

regards, TAR

for instance suppose I wanted to figure to 100% accuracy how many yds of thread I would need to weave a tarp that would cover exactly 1/155,520,000th of the globe

how many digits of pi would I need?

Strange,

Maybe this will help.

Your memory of a "real" snake, is not a creation of your mind, it is a recall of the sensory perceptions you had of that real snake. An analog representation of an actual real snake, slithering through actual grass, growing on an actual sunlit field, illuminated by an actual Sun around which our actual planet cycles.

You HAD TO have had your own eyes to see the thing and store this memory in the actual real synapses and cells and chemicals and connections in your actual brain, located in an actual building in front of an actual computer in an actual location on the planet everybody we know of calls their own.

It is the simple explanation of our common experience that according to the ole razor, is probably the correct explanation.

All this "could be" nonsense, is non-sense. It makes no sense and has zero to do with our common condition.

Regards, TAR

 

 

To try and explain why science does not deal with "reality". It deals with things our senses tell us. That is all there is to it. You cannot know anything beyond what your senses tell your (or, more, accurately what your mind tells you that your senses say). Everything you know, all the information you have, is in your mind and created by your mind.

 

 

Why not? How would you tell if there were something out there beyond what your mind tells you?

 

Well, if you are defining "instance" to mean a visual stimulus perceived by a being, then there are an unbounded number. That is not what I understand "instance" to mean.

I agree in principle that there can be only one instance of each event that is currently happening in the universe. But that is in accord with the universal now idea only, which is a mental exercise where we put ourselves in God's shoes and imagine the place as if the speed of light is not a constraint. In actuality the universe really looks as it does, with old stuff close and young stuff far away. But each item is not therefore all ages, because that would require being able to put ourselves in every possible shoe that currently exists, which is way out of our computational abilities, even with super computers, and WAY out of our reach in terms of the information such a picture would require.

what is this insistence that everything could be an hallucination?

it can't be

There is no way such a situation would work out. And it certainly makes no sense.

Strange,

I do not think it is true that there is only one instance of a given star.

That is, take our Sun. It looks younger to a viewer a million lys from here and even younger to a viewer 2 million lys from here. In fact a viewer 40 billion lys from here might look in this direction and see the Milky Way when another star that provided the material for our Sun to get together went supernova...that is, to someone 63.5 lys from here, with a powerful enough telescope, I am just being born. To a current observer 100 lys from here my mom does not exist, yet. To an observer here and now, my mom does not exist either, but she was real while she lived.

So how many instances of a star do you figure there are? I say, only one, but that is not the instance we will see in our telescopes, so that is at least two instances, and counting.

Regards, TAR

For instance, Earth science would be a pretty lean study, without an Earth.

Strange,

I did not pick up, until a few posts ago that you are making an anti-(The Existence of God) argument.

Can we stipulate that there is no anthropomorphic God/Creator, and still stipulate that the world in all its glory, complexity and wonder does exist?

Regards, TAR

 

 

That doesn't seem any different from your other argument.

 

It also the fallacy of begging the question: if you accept that there are other conscious individuals, then this disproves solipsism. But there is no evidence, outside of your own mind, for other conscious individuals. Therefore there is no evidence against solipsism.

 

 

1. It is not a fact that you have free will. Depending on which definition of "free will" you uses, this ranges from impossible, to implausible to meaningless.

 

2. Even if you appear to have free will, it could be an invention of your mind. It says nothing about the existence of anything outside your mind.

 

3. Solipsism does not require an "ultimate mind or consciousness" (whatever that means); only that all the other conscious individuals you perceive are creations of your own mind. At an extreme (idealism) nothing exists except what is crated by your mind.

does this mind then exist? if so, is it a constituent of some greater reality? That is, where, and in what manner does this mind of yours exist?

I had some arguments with my calculus teachers about limits and integrals, that I obviously lost, but never did I understand the principle.

If the whole idea of an integral is to determine the tendency of a tiny slice with which you can then describe the whole by multiplying the slice by the number of slices, then "tending toward zero" is a characteristic of your slice size to begin with. If you need to look at the thing and as you consider your formulae, you make the determination that this or that term is tending to zero...how can you, or at what point is it proper to "call it zero"?

Regards, TAR

Where this comes into LIGO is the fact that in order to sense a GW, space has to contract or expand a thousandth the width of a proton. This is pretty darn close to zero distance. Much tinier than any slice we are able to make.

Which brings up the consideration of the Earth being seeded by some advanced alien race. I bring it up because the logic of such a scenario fails as surely as the logic allowing reality to be somebody's dream fails. Who or what seeded the planet the advanced alien race grew up on?

You have to ignore the word "hypothesis" (twice) and then "assuming" to arrive at the conclusion that there was "no suggestion".


The assumption that there is a reality is not the same as saying that science is the search for what that reality is.

Swansont,

If you read the passage, knowing what you know, you can read the hypothetical nature of statements, you can assess the conditional portions as conditional. But as a laymen I can only read it as this is what scientists that believe the standard model is correct think the place is made of.

Right, we established that science and/or an individual human, can not know the thing in itself. But we can still say a heck of a lot about our models of the place.

Philosophy can talk about "how the universe looks" from a God's eye perspective. Science, bound by the requirement to retrieve empirical data, can not say much about what a star 4 lys from here, is doing now. All science can do is tell us what it was doing 4 years ago, and perhaps predict what it will look like in our sky IN four years and imply that is what it is probably doing now, but there you have two instances of the star. One that exists in our telescopes, and one that exists in our minds. Which one is more real?

Regards, TAR.

that is, which reality does science form its models from, and which reality does a scientist seek to match her model to?

for instance the CMB (or the matter we are currently sensing) was relatively very close to us (the matter that formed the MilkyWay) at the time of last scattering, but that same matter is currently part of some system 46 billion lys from here, and because of the expansion of the universe we will never see what that system is currently doing...NO empirical evidence ever available as to what that system is currently doing, but plenty available as to what the matter was doing at the time of last scattering when the universe came clear...but it is the photons that are hitting us now that are real to us...we have no scientific concern with that system as it ages beyond how it ages in front of us....we will never empirically be able to verify what kind of system it evolved into as it is currently extant

BeeCee,

I read the words and I understood them to say if our model is correct, then putting the measurements we took into the equations, the indication is that the universe is 5 percent normal matter and energy and 95 percent dark matter and energy. There was no suggestion that dark matter and energy were placeholders for a fudge factor needed to have the numbers come out clean.

Which goes directly to several points of disagreement on the thread, and to the OP questions.

"This topic talks about the relationship of philosophy, science and reality.
I will expound it thru questions:
1. Is philosophy more advance than science in understanding reality because it can form ideas even when there is no experiments performed or observations (While science on the other hand can't step forward because it relies on data)?
2. Is philosophy always correct? Are there instance that science prove philosophy?If philosophy always correct, we can rely solely to philosophy than science.
3. Is philosophy as accurate as science?
4. When can we say that a question become philosophical? Can we say that philosophy is an advance science? If yes then we can conclude that the only task of science is to prove philosophy ( is it correct?).

I hope you understand my points. If you need clarifications, just ask me. Thank you..."

To these questions the status of reality is important to get straight between us, to begin with. If you can't assume reality is real, then all discussions concerning the nature of it, are put on hold until you can determine or stipulate that reality is real. That there is something "out there" beyond our fingertips to model. So we have to logically stipulate the place exists and we have to stipulate that we notice the place, and we have to stipulate that each of us indeed has fingertips for everything else to be beyond. If these things are not "assumed" to be true, then there is no discussion.

Regards, TAR

Even if the place is an elaborate dream or a virtual reality episode, there is still TAR to account for. Either TAR is someone else's illusion, in which case that someone else is real, or EVERYBODY is someone else's creation, in which case THAT someone else is real.

 

 

Nope.

 

Reality is inherently unknowable. All we can know is what our senses tell us (actually, the idea that we have senses could be an invention of our mind!).

 

 

You seem to be missing the key point about science which is that it tests its models. (And that works, whatever the nature of reality, or even if there is no such thing.)

I am missing no point. The reason that the models work is because reality works first. If you think that the models cause reality to work you are giving science too much credit.

Regards, TAR

BeeCee,

One of my own scientific searches has to do with the meaning behind language. When WIKI uses declarative statements, that is universally understood to be the sharing of information. "The world IS this way or that." "This what I am saying is true." And wiki articles are suppose to be unbiased. "This is not how I feel, this is what I know to be true" And to me, information is the internalization of the outside world. We have no direct access to the world beyond our fingertips, but we have myriad ways of getting outside and even distant or unseen "forms", "in".

Earlier I claimed that the point of science was to confirm reality. And I still think this is true. The information process is fraught with dangers. Bias, imprecision, limited reach, limited storage capacity, errors of all sorts...but our human information process is pretty amazing. We can drive down the street, avoid collisions, get where we are going without injuring anyone or destroying anything, AND we can notice at 60 miles an hour the new siding on the old barn we pass every day. We have an excellent model of the place, built in the synapses and cells, chemicals and connections in our brain. Instant, or at least really fast updates of our model of the place, continuously.

Now you and I have a different personal model. It is not false because it is different. Each is true. Mine might include the mineral museum in Franklin, and an old Edison iron mine back in the woods behind Lake Arapaho, and these real places might not be in your model. But both are real and are of real portions of our common world. When I say there is an old iron mine in the woods behind Lake Arapaho, you can pencil that in to your model, and might check it out for a match if you happen to be wandering on a trail behind second lake, near lake Arapaho in NJ. It is a declarative statement of fact, of truth, a facet of our common reality.

Science's job, in my estimation is to facilitate the information process. To catalog and measure and record the place in a common, sharable language. To experiment, to discover, to focus on this or that aspect of reality and inform the rest of us of how the place works, how the place is, the reality of the place, in clear and precise declarative language.

We individually can notice stuff about the world, manipulate it to our advantage and enjoy the place and seek to arrange things in such a manner consistent with the continued survival of ourselves and those we love. Science is, to me, how we do this noticing of reality and this experimentation with reality, and this manipulation of reality, together, in an agreed upon manner, and report the facts to each other in a common language.

Regards, TAR

 

 

Do you have some examples of science not being the best fit, and still conforming to the protocols of science? Making ideas fit to our notions, to please us, is regularly rejected by science.

So no, I do not have any specific examples...except most all that conform to the standard model, or the simple gas laws, or Einstein's field equations, or Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics, provide a certain joy to the scientist, when a match is found. I am not saying the match is false. I am saying the match is true, but it pleasures a person to find their model matches the place.

Regards, TAR

Makes a person feel somehow in possession of the truth. That they know reality a little better, their model fits the place and life is good. People like to be right about the world.

There is however a little bit of difference between finding your model works, and finding out something new about the place. Discovering that the world fits together in some way that you were not aware of is joyful. It is also joyful to solve a problem you had with your model...but just finding that solution is not the end, you still have to check it out and see if it works in reality. Then when it does, you feel great.

"Assuming that the standard model of cosmology is correct, the best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68.3% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe. The mass–energy of dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contribute 26.8% and 4.9%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons contribute a very small amount.^[3][4][5][6]The density of dark energy (~ 7 × 10⁻³⁰ g/cm³) is very low, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it comes to dominate the mass–energy of the universe because it is uniform across space.^[7][8][9]"

So I am guessing most people here take the standard model as being correct, and the rest are implications of exactly what the measurements must then indicate.

Epicycles were probably to explain the observed retrograde motion of nieghboring planets.

The math worked...if you understood it.

I was not a participant in that discussion.


Epicycles were abandoned after a mechanism was identified.

You said not the best fit. What is the better fit for dark energy and dark matter? They are placeholders. There can't be alternatives as they do not represent anything resembling a theory.

Sorry, I was just going by the recent arguments in the thread.

So its not a theory, yet Wiki talks about it like it is accepted fact, and they don't mention the placeholder bit.

​"Assuming that the standard model of cosmology is correct, the best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68.3% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe. The mass–energy of dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contribute 26.8% and 4.9%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons contribute a very small amount.^[3][4][5][6] The density of dark energy (~ 7 × 10⁻³⁰ g/cm³) is very low, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it comes to dominate the mass–energy of the universe because it is uniform across space.^[7][8][9]"

Regards, TAR

^​

What if, for instance the universe is dynamic and undulating like a huge soap bubble in the wind. Then what we saw at 1 million ly is representative of the going away or coming closer of an area of space measured by its redshift/blueshift but representative of the motion that part of space was undergoing 1 million yrs ago, and we actually have NO measurements to look at concerning what that portion of space is doing now.

Not a thought out theory, just a placeholder to explain the redshifts we measure at different depths of space.

If the model we are going by had inflation followed by expansion that would indicate a mechanism slowing down growth of space, and the expansion of space would more sensibly slow to a stop and perhaps then retract.

Can you explain to me how redshift measurements of different depths of space lead one to hypothesize that the place is currently doing any one thing?

Regards, TAR

What relevance does that have to the discussion?

Just the solipsism argument. It seems to me that the reality of others is unquestionable. I don't see how someone can say there is no proof of others when there is nothing but proof. So I was wondering if you had any reason to doubt that others exist.

As for examples of something not being the best fit I would say things like epicycles, that explain the behavior but are too convoluted to be really the way things work. Personally I think dark energy and dark matter, are not a very good fit. Science had a pretty good series of explanations without what appears to be 95 percent of the place accounted for. I do not see where dark energy has been "fit" into our understanding of our immediate surroundings.

Regards, TAR

SwansonT,

As a person who was taught logic and who has mused about life and meaning quite considerably, I have always thought what is important in ones own worldview, ones own philosophy is that it be internally consistent. A consistent worldview does not mean it is the best or the only worldview, it just means it is consistent. I see a direct analogy to the science that we talk about on this board, from various angles, in that​ ​a scientific model does not have to be the best fit, or the only fit, it just has to work theoretically under the constraints and assumptions agreed upon and be useful in predicting how reality is going to behave next time we encounter it, applying the same combination of variables in the way we did last time, when it behaved in a recorded manner.

So in both cases one looks for agreement. One looks to please something, to match something, to find something fits. My insight into this situation, that I have not, up to now, properly shared, is that we as humans want to please objective reality by agreeing with it, and we want to please ourselves by having a model that securely fits the world. We want the model to fit the world and the world to fit the model.

If this is the case, then philosophy and science are married. It is not a situation of philosophers are like this and scientists are like that. It is a situation where both philosophers and scientists are human.

Regards, TAR

We want to please ourselves, we want to please those we consider part of our feeling of self, and we want to fit the world, and we want the world to fit with us.

Yes interesting.

Do you, as a scientist believe that other scientists are real?

By confirm I am not talking confirmation bias, where you look at things in a way that confirms your preconceptions. I am talking about looking at things and confirming that they look the same as they did last time you looked. Confirming that your model matches reality, or importantly that your model and reality do not match, informing you of a change in reality. That is, a very important component of human consciousness is pattern recognition. Being able to see a whole deer hiding in the woods, even though only a piece here and a piece there is visible through the brush. We fill in the blanks with deer parts we only know are "supposed" to be there because we have seen whole deer.

Strange,

I was trying to show that using more than one sense was how we operate and each sense helps complete the model of the world that we build internally. I understand that hallucinations could involve multiple senses, I was saying that if someone gave me a real example of this occurring I would believe it, because a report of this happening would be an example of taking someone else's word on what is real. I would not need to actually interview the guy that had such experience, I would trust that he told somebody what he experienced, knowing in retrospect it was a hallucination, or the person he was with at the time determined what he was experiencing was not real. But in either case somebody would have to make the determination that there is a difference between experiencing reality, and having a very real feeling hallucination.

5 years ago at work one day I had a situation for about 3 minutes where I saw edges and colors around everything. I experienced it as if it was actual. No difference between what I saw that I knew was the way the world looked and what I saw that I knew my brain was manufacturing. It looked real, yet I knew it wasn't because I knew from prior experience what these things looked like, and the fringes "made no sense". I looked it up later and my experience was much like the reports of "visual migraines". So visual migraines are real, but they are not as true to reality as the way a thing looks to me, when I am not having a visual migraine.

Kant believed that you could not know the thing as it is. But you could say something about the thing. That is all we can do as individuals, and that is all science can do as well...but since that is the best we can do, and we all have the same limitation, AND we are able to, through language tell each other things about the world, then the things we tell each other about the world, as long as we are not lying to each other, are true. They are at least true things you can say about the world. Even if we don't have access to the thing as it is, and we only get the "image" of the thing, there is still something casting the shadow on the wall and we can talk about what might make such a shadow. The thing casting the shadow is still real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

Regards, TAR

charony,

"such as reduction of fundamental research vs applied​"

This is an argument that realistically goes on in every institution, and why most successful companies apply considerable funds to Research and Development.

Our universities are already in the research and development business, and they receive considerable funding from students and alums and business and military and NASA. I am satisfied that good science will still be accomplished, without specifically directed federal funds.

The big federal push under Obama was to concentrate on STEM to stay competitive with the rest of the world. Mostly applied science by the time the rubber met the road, anyway.

Regards, TAR

your average citizen might want to sacrifice to pave the roads, or to gain protection from an enemy or a disease or starvation, or exposure, or even to fly to Mars, but few care about finding a neutrino, or a gravity wave, or the Higgs

We found the Higgs a while back anyway, and things look pretty much the same around my neighborhood as before.

Maybe Iran and North Korea have a better idea as to how to create nuclear weapons, but that would be an argument against nuclear ​​physics expenditures, not an argument for.

saw a piece on the news where a governmental entity out west rejected the findings of a university study because it did not align with their narrative on the issue, so they questioned the methodology and commissioned another university to do the study so the results might come back in alignment with their policies

the results happened to be contrary to the progressive narrative, but judging by the politics of the majority of members of this forum, I do not think they, the members, would be in favor of our current president cherry picking studies, anyway, so I don't think that closing down a politically motivated office is entirely a bad thing for science...in fact it is potentially a good thing, if funds continue to flow toward scientific pursuits that are important to science and industry and not flow toward pursuits meant to "fix" people that don't have the president's political views