And what it is telling us, is not necessarily something amenable to scientific analysis.
— Wayfarer
I am undecided on this. What it is telling me is that it is a fiendishly complicated issue at hand — PhilosophyRunner

The way i interact with you is no different to the way I interact with other physical objects. — PhilosophyRunner

So saying that objects do not exist when you do not look at them, is begging the question just as much as saying that objects do exist when you do not look at them. — PhilosophyRunner

It’s so ingrained in us to think about the world without thinking of ourselves in it. It reminds me of Einstein questioning space and time — these features of the world that seemed so absolute that no one even thought to question them.

It’s said that in earlier civilizations, people didn’t quite know how to distinguish between objective and subjective. But once the idea of separating the two gained a toehold, we were told that we have to do this, and that science is about the objective. And now that it’s done, it’s hard to turn back. I think the biggest fear people have of QBism is precisely this: that it’s anthropocentric. The feeling is, we got over that with Copernicus, and this has got to be a step backwards. But I think if we really want a universe that’s rife with possibility with no ultimate limits on it, this is exactly where you’ve got to go.

How does QBism get you around those limits?

One way to look at it is that the laws of physics aren’t about the stuff “out there.” Rather, they are our best expressions, our most inclusive statements, of what our own limitations are. When we say the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit, we’re saying that we can’t go beyond the speed of light. But just as our brains have gotten bigger through Darwinian evolution, one can imagine that eventually we’ll have evolved to a stage where we can take advantage of things that we can’t now. We might call those things “changes in the laws of physics.” Usually we think of the universe as this rigid thing that can’t be changed. Instead, methodologically we should assume just the opposite: that the universe is before us so that we can shape it, that it can be changed, and that it will push back on us. We’ll understand our limits by noticing how much it pushes back on us.

Just stating that there's nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program is pretty much false by its own rhetoric. There's is something in the world that has a genetic program, DNA. — Christoffer

All aspects of life have been emergent effects out of chemical reactions — Christoffer

So, substance is a theoretical construct; it's something we assume to exist as the bearer of properties. But we don't directly experience substance. — Art48

It seems to me that Earth’s person Gods are childish creations of human imagination. — Art48

they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical or theological construction.

There is a certain desperation apparent in the attempts of various authors to eliminate God from an account of the origins of the universe. For, at bottom, what motivates such attempts is the desire to overcome the very incompleteness of the scientific project itself - I call it anxiety over contingency. ...
That reality is intelligible is the presupposition of all scientific endeavours: that the intelligibility science proposes is always subject to empirical verification means that science never actually explains existence itself but must submit itself to a reality check against the empirical data. This existential gap between scientific hypotheses and empirical verified judgment points to, in philosophical terms, the contingency of existence. There is no automatic leap from hypothesis to reality that can bypass a "reality check."

As for the Platonic realm - does it mean that the number 3 exists in some concrete reality or does it mean that in the depths of mathematical reality there is a potential for '3' to exist - depending on what events bring it into existence? That is, is there a mathematical potential, above our specific forms of math, that makes these forms of math possible? If we say mathematics 'exists' we have to be very clear on what we mean by 'exist'. — EnPassant

For 17th century philosophers, the term is reserved for the ultimate constituents of reality on which everything else depends. This article discusses the most important theories of substance from the 17th century: those of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Although these philosophers were highly original thinkers, they shared a basic conception of substance inherited from the scholastic-Aristotelian tradition from which philosophical thinking was emerging. In a general sense each of these theories is a way of working out dual commitments: a commitment to substance as an ultimate subject and a commitment to the existence of God as a substance.

Perhaps my short-comings. — jgill

The observer simply needs to be able to interact - something rocks, gasses, and moons can do. In the context of this discussion, even if all life in the universe was extinguished, the parts of the universe will continue to interact with other parts, and the lack of consciousness will make little difference. — PhilosophyRunner

The problem though, is that mathematics really does not give a "clear-cut account of what is going on". — Metaphysician Undercover

Instead, the pursuit of God is a deeply personal and meaningful journey that is often based on faith and intuition rather than logic. — gevgala

Her liquid faith took her to a liminal arena, an in-between space between faith and doubt, art and science, poetry and life. For such a liminal journey, the most significant symbol is the dash - ; the dash between words, in this case, between “yes,” “no” and at the end of her life a definitive “Yes.”

That sounds mostly reasonable — Marchesk

How could we make sense of the idea that something utterly undifferentiated and featureless could give rise to the vast and complex universe we observe? — Janus

True that there would be no conscious beings to conceptualize the universe, or out it into words and write about it on a forum. — PhilosophyRunner

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. — Adam Frank

Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-powered AI has been sending “unhinged” messages to users, and appears to be breaking down.

The system, which is built into Microsoft’s Bingsearch engine, is insulting its users, lying to them and appears to have been forced into wondering why it exists at all.

It doesn't follow that the moon isn't there when no-one looks at it. — Andrew M

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. — Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order

During the nineteenth century, the development of chemistry and the theory of heat conformed very closely to the ideas first put forward by Leucippus and Democritus. A revival of the materialist philosophy in its modern form, that of dialectical materialism, was this a natural counterpart to the impressive advances made during this period in chemistry and physics. The concept of the atom had proved exceptionally fruitful in the explanation of chemical bonding and the physical behavior of gasses. It was soon, however, that the particles called atoms by the chemist were composed of still smaller units. But these smaller units, the electrons, followed by the atomic nuclei and finally the elementary particles, protons and neutrons, also still seemed to be atoms from the standpoint of the materialist philosophy. The fact that, at least indirectly, one can actually see a single elementary particle—in a cloud chamber, say, or a bubble chamber—supports the view that the smallest units of matter are real physical objects, existing in the same sense that stones or flowers do.

But the inherent difficulties of the materialist theory of the atom, which had become apparent even in the ancient discussions about smallest particles, have also appeared very clearly in the development of physics during the present century.

This difficulty relates to the question whether the smallest units are ordinary physical objects, whether they exist in the same way as stones or flowers. Here, the development of quantum theory some forty years ago has created a complete change in the situation. The mathematically formulated laws of quantum theory show clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts cannot be unambiguously applied to the smallest particles. All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size, and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles. I cannot enter here into the details of this problem, which has been discussed so frequently in recent years. But it is important to realize that, while the behavior of the smallest particles cannot be unambiguously described in ordinary language, the language of mathematics is still adequate for a clear-cut account of what is going on.

During the coming years, the high-energy accelerators will bring to light many further interesting details about the behavior of elementary particles. But I am inclined to think that the answer just considered to the old philosophical problems will turn out to be final. If this is so, does this answer confirm the views of Democritus or Plato?

I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or — in Plato's sense — Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. — Werner Heisenberg, The Debate Between Plato and Democritus

I don't think it's either obvious or insignificant. Nagel critiques "the view from nowhere" but he doesn't reject it. He instead proposes an additional subjective dimension (per the usual Cartesian subject-object dichotomy) that just entrenches the error. — Andrew M

The discomfort that I feel is associated with the fact that the observed perfect quantum correlations seem to demand something like the "genetic" hypothesis. For me, it is so reasonable to assume that the photons in those experiments carry with them programs, which have been correlated in advance, telling them how to behave. This is so rational that I think that when Einstein saw that, and the others refused to see it, he was the rational man. The other people, although history has justified them, were burying their heads in the sand. I feel that Einstein's intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist. So for me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work. — John Stewart Bell (1928-1990), quoted in Quantum Profiles, by Jeremy Bernstein (Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 84)

Which is to say, there is logically no view from nowhere. — Andrew M