'm still unclear on what you mean by 'inherent or intrinsic reality'. — Isaac

Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.

I asked that way round because I'm already aware of things you think are inherently/intrinsically real (numbers, lass of logic) but I still can't see from those examples alone where you're drawing the line between real and not-real. — Isaac

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

information-gathering tiny probes. — universeness

If one wants to argue (as some do) that there's no external world, — Isaac

1) a Bayesian predictive modelling stage where the cause is inferred based on prior expectations (and, importantly) data is filtered according to those prior expectation as means of noise-reduction) — Isaac

Along with the researchers Carlton Caves and Rüdiger Schack, he interpreted the wave function’s probabilities as Bayesian probabilities — that is, as subjective degrees of belief about the system. Bayesian probabilities could be thought of as gambling attitudes for placing bets on measurement outcomes, attitudes that are updated as new data come to light. In other words, Fuchs argued, the wave function does not describe the world — it describes the observer. “Quantum mechanics,” he says, “is a law of thought.”

Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism as Fuchs now calls it, solves many of quantum theory’s deepest mysteries. Take, for instance, the infamous “collapse of the wave function,” wherein the quantum system inexplicably transitions from multiple simultaneous states to a single actuality. According to QBism, the wave function’s “collapse” is simply the observer updating his or her beliefs after making a measurement. Spooky action at a distance, wherein one observer’s measurement of a particle right here collapses the wave function of a particle way over there, turns out not to be so spooky — the measurement here simply provides information that the observer can use to bet on the state of the distant particle, should she come into contact with it. But how, we might ask, does her measurement here affect the outcome of a measurement a second observer will make over there? In fact, it doesn’t. Since the wavefunction doesn’t belong to the system itself, each observer has her own. My wavefunction doesn’t have to align with yours.

Water and carbon are the most plentiful substances in the universe, — Enrique

There are possible worlds that don't contain me. — Tate

I can imagine a world that contains no conscious entities. — Tate

The concept of existence is a concept. It does not follow that existence is a concept. — Cuthbert

Our place as the only species in the universe, as far as we know, that can build something like the James Webb telescope and find out a little more about the universe. — universeness

As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe — in a few of us human beings. Perhaps it has been realized elsewhere too, through the evolution of conscious living creatures on the planets of other stars. But on this our planet, it has never happened before. — Julian Huxley

In a world stripped of concepts, there is no existence as existence is itself a concept. Therefore, a fundamental prerequisite for existence is the existence of concepts. Concepts however cannot exist without a conceiving entity. Therefore, existence requires consciousness.

The natural conclusion is that either universes cannot exist in any other way but one that leads to an observer, or the observer has always been there (enter theology and/or panpsychism), and that life is simply the most physical and particulate (individual) state to date through which said observer or observers exist. — Benj96

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.

From a scientific point of view, — Angelo Cannata

The story is well-told by now how the cocksure dreams of AI researchers crashed during the subsequent years — crashed above all against the solid rock of common sense. Computers could outstrip any philosopher or mathematician in marching mechanically through a programmed set of logical maneuvers, but this was only because philosophers and mathematicians — and the smallest child — were too smart for their intelligence to be invested in such maneuvers. The same goes for a dog. “It is much easier,” observed AI pioneer Terry Winograd, “to write a program to carry out abstruse formal operations than to capture the common sense of a dog.”

A dog knows, through its own sort of common sense, that it cannot leap over a house in order to reach its master. It presumably knows this as the directly given meaning of houses and leaps — a meaning it experiences all the way down into its muscles and bones. As for you and me, we know, perhaps without ever having thought about it, that a person cannot be in two places at once. We know (to extract a few examples from the literature of cognitive science) that there is no football stadium on the train to Seattle, that giraffes do not wear hats and underwear, and that a book can aid us in propping up a slide projector but a sirloin steak probably isn’t appropriate.

We could, of course, record any of these facts in a computer. The impossibility arises when we consider how to record and make accessible the entire, unsurveyable, and ill-defined body of common sense. We know all these things, not because our “random access memory” contains separate, atomic propositions bearing witness to every commonsensical fact (their number would be infinite), and not because we have ever stopped to deduce the truth from a few more general propositions (an adequate collection of such propositions isn’t possible even in principle). Our knowledge does not present itself in discrete, logically well-behaved chunks, nor is it contained within a neat deductive system.

It is no surprise, then, that the contextual coherence of things — how things hold together in fluid, immediately accessible, interpenetrating patterns of significance rather than in precisely framed logical relationships — remains to this day the defining problem for AI. It is the problem of meaning. — Logic, DNA, and Poetry, Steve Talbott

What can be its significance? — Art48

For Spir the principle of identity is not only the fundamental law of knowledge, it is also an ontological principle, expression of the unconditioned essence of reality (Realität=Identität mit sich), which is opposed to the empirical reality (Wirklichkeit), which in turn is evolution (Geschehen).[26] The principle of identity displays the essence of reality: only that which is identical to itself is real, the empirical world is ever-changing, therefore it is not real. Thus the empirical world has an illusory character, because phenomena are ever-changing, and empirical reality is unknowable.

At some point, there was a spark that produced an "inside" and an "outside", a perception that perceived a subject and a verb. It's hard to think about this, but what do you think could have been that first primordial and irreducible unit of consciousness? — Watchmaker

Subjective and objective things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such things are not to be said, but shown. — Banno

I can't be bothered looking it up. — Janus

, because doubting, it is claimed, presupposes certainty. — Metaphysician Undercover

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219

The fact-value distinction creates an apparently insuperable obstacle for philosophers, but not for ordinary people. — Srap Tasmaner

This scientific and philosophical revolution - it is indeed impossible to separate the philosophical from the purely scientific aspects of this process: they are interdependent and closely linked together - can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the dissappearance from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, the conception of the world as a finite, closed and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres), and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound toether by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all those components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorisation of being, the divorce of the world of value from the world of facts. — Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe

Another problem of considerable interest to me is the fact that animal vision is invariably in the form of comprehensive, integrated perceptual groups or scenes — never of isolated single objects. In fact, when vision of extended displays fails, this is a token of severe pathology. This aspect of animal vision — the fact that multiple objects are perceived simultaneously — is profoundly mysterious, and has been almost entirely neglected in current research. — Charles Pinter (personal website)

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world.

We normally make about three saccades per second and detailed vision is possible only for about 1 degree at the fovea. ...There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience. The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem”. There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene. That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the neural binding problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. — Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem

What art do you like? — Jackson

Is there any way at all, to reconcile the glaring contradiction in that statement? — Mww

In the absence of features of any kind, it is impossible to describe individual objects and characterize them. What can be done instead is to compare things with one another and define them in terms of each other. For example, a straight line looks a certain way to the human eye—a way that makes us recognize it as ‘straight’—and a heavy object makes itself known to our senses by being hard to lift. But the ideal of objectivity requires that we reject these interpretations of physical phenomena, because they rest on the idiosyncrasies of sensory impressions. Instead, we must treat the objects of study in a neutral fashion, based on the way they relate to one another. For instance, we perceive a straight line as the shape of a dangling plumb line. The path of an object in free fall is also a straight line, and so is a taut string. In order to be “neutral”, you take the notion of straight line to be an undefined concept, and record the fact that taut strings, plumb lines and the paths of objects in free fall are straight lines. If you aim for objectivity, you must then go one step further: When you speak of a straight line in science, you must suppress the image of the taut string in mind. You must force yourself to forgo any mental picture of what a straight line looks like, and instead, think of it as nothing but an empty word. When you use that word, you may hold the image of the taut string in mind, but that’s for your own benefit: It may guide your intuition but should not participate in your reasoning. In order to carry out such a program, it is essential that the basic notions (distance, mass, and so on) be treated as undefined concepts related to one another by formal relations. Within the confines of scientific reasoning, these entities must have no meaning. If you yield to the temptation to imagine them in mind with a concrete meaning (for example, to imagine a line as the shape of a taut string), you must be careful not to allow the meaning to slip into your reasoning and play a role in your conclusions. For suppose you slip, and continue to identify a straight line with a taut string. Suppose furthermore that you make use of your mental image in scientific reasoning, so the validity of your conclusion rests on the intuitive image. If that were permitted, then the laws of science would depend on the meanings we attach to concepts—on the mental images we hold in mind.

And if some scientist does question it, I don't know if he could keep his job or even belong to the scientific community anymore. — Alkis Piskas