Is the universe real.

[StringJunky]

 

Well exactly. But the response is why are your axiomata better than the idealist stance? Berkeley's notion is not so much that there is no external reality - but that we cannot form arguments based on external reality but only on our internal ideas. There is an impenetrable barrier between our internal sensorium and any external reality

We cannot know external reality ourselves because what we perceive is only data, yes, but we can share the data and see where it matches with each other and call that 'reality' ...it's about the best we can do.

 

I'm not familiar with Berkeley so I apologise if I'm way off in my response. I'm not saying my axiomata is better, I put it 'out there' to be attacked.

[cladking]

We cannot know external reality ourselves because what we perceive is only data, yes, but we can share the data and see where it matches with each other and call that 'reality' ...it's about the best we can do.

 

I'm not familiar with Berkeley so I apologise if I'm way off in my response. I'm not saying my axiomata is better, I put it 'out there' to be attacked.

 

So if I'm the only human I couldn't know water was wet.

 

I could only speculate that it seemed that water was real and tended to leave some of itself behind after it came in contact with things.

 

I couldn't dislike wetting wet except in asort of hypothetical sense.

[Implicate Order]

When Samuel Johnson was throwing a hissy fit and kicking stones in his refutation he unfortunately was not adorned with the devices that need Quantum Mechanics to explain their workings such as GPS tracking devices. He was also not aware that the reality he was kicking was an electromagnetic field as opposed to a solid object.

 

When it comes to a question of whether or not the universe is real, we need to appreciate that the 'reality' may be totally different to our intuitive notion of what the reality should be. Provided you can draw a line between an observer and a region external to the observer, then that probably is the safest definition to use in dealing with any possible 'reality' out there. If not, then perhaps it is all in the mind. If that is the case you then have to query how the observer got there in the first place.

 

For this reason I seek solace in the notion that an observer and an external reality exists but I would reason that both observer and any external reality are fundamentally derived from the same 'thing'. A 'thing' as opposed to a 'nothing'. This philosophical stance would denounce that our universe arose from the 'absence of a thing', which is the traditional definition of 'nothing' (being the absence of things), and propose that our universe and it's observers at least sprang from a state (termed nothing) due to its homogenous and timeless/spaceless nature. That way, a classical universe and its observers can at least be derived from a transition of this preceding state to the classical state through transofrmations of the state.

 

When dealing then with an observer and the external context, we can derive clues from cognitive sciences regarding those definitions of 'consciousness' being related to notions of 'self-awareness'. The foundational principle of 'self' arising from the process of measurement, namely deriving information from an external state and comparing that state from the frame of reference of an observer. What we need for a measurement to occur is the use of a contrived wavefunction used by a particular frame of reference designed to extract information from the surrounding wavefunction that relates the frame of reference of the observed to the frame of reference of the observer. The information derived from their interrogation however will relate to the causality of things in their light cone. Each observers light cone will be different. Those observers however that share the same opinion of any classical reality will share the same patches of my light cone. What seperates an observer from their context is a boundary and that boundary is the information that is causally arranged in that light cone. Each frame of reference occupies a different point in spacetime. A measurement entails extracting information from a different frame of reference and measuring how that information 'relates' to the frame of reference from where the measurement originated.

 

Using that foundational principle of 'the act of measurement' amplified billions of times through evolution and the development of advanced brains to process that information and project the observers reality of that external wavefunction in their own frame of reference I think allows us to question the notion of reality today. Provided other observers share patches of the same causality, they will all agree on that interpretation. Those that refute it thus such as Samuel Johnson therefore share parts of my hubble volume.

Edited February 22, 2014 by Implicate Order