Einstein predicted it based on science. Confirming observations were made after the predictions. — Real Gone Cat

Of course. But Einstein was compelled to ask the question 'Doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' There are very deep questions about the nature of scientific realism brought up by modern physics, many of which seem to implicate the requirement for an observer, thereby undercutting the idea that reality is 'just so' independently of any act of observation.

It is based on the converse view, that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. — Banno

It is true that relativity explains the apparent discrepancy of the measurement of objects moving in different reference frames, but notice that it must include reference to the observer - which is related to what disturbed Einstein about later developments in quantum physics.

The dependence of what is observed on the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it gives us. In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words, Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon." ...In broader terms, we find that nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to happen. — John Wheeler, Law without Law

But nobody knew that such a difference could be observed prior to Einstein's theory.

The differences in observations are a product of how reality works — Real Gone Cat

And you know that, how? What unobserved reality can science tell us of, pray?

Such facts are not relative to the observer. — Banno

Odd then that it's called the 'Theory of Relativity'. Perhaps the name could be improved?

you've not even answered my very simple question from pages back about what criteria you're using to judge when something is real. — Isaac

That isn't a simple question. I don't recall the exchange, and I don't want to go back digging for it.

When you look at the apple, your brain constructs a model of the apple. But that model is not what you see; it is you seeing. — Banno

'In Special Relativity, neither objects nor time have the same length for all observers. Here’s an example of how the length of the same object can be a different for two different observers. Let’s say that you’re flying in a rocket ship to Mars at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Traveling at this clip, you pass the Little Prince sitting on his little planet. Let’s say that you measure the length of your rocket ship as you fly by the Little Prince, and he does, too. You might measure it at 40 feet long. But, due to the fact that he is sitting still, the Little Prince would measure it as much longer, maybe 60 feet long.

Special Relativity tells us that the rocket ship can be both 40 feet long to you and 60 feet long to the Little Prince. This is not a visual effect; the same object has two different physical lengths to observers who have two different speeds.'

So what length is it really?

The answer can only be, 'it depends'.

What I was asking is where is the initial point where your respective approaches separate from each other? — Tom Storm

As I keep saying, I'm questioning the culturally-normative sense of scientific realism. As one of the authors I like writes, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.' So it's a real basic disagreement about what is real. And they don't come a lot more basic than that.

Banno said earlier -

I'll note again that I do agree with Wayfarer that physics is not capable of explaining everything. I'm no keener on scientism than he is. — Banno

We agree on that much at least. From my side, Banno's main influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Austin et al, who are influential in analytical philosophy. You could say they're the mainstream. My influences are more counter-cultural and (I think) more existential. I did two years of undergraduate philosophy but ended up with an Hons in Comparative Religion (on the New England Transcendentalists.) I'm generally more small-t theosophical than most people here.

On the positive side, having to respond to others for whom my views seem fundamentally mistaken is clarifying. On the negative, trying to share what strikes me as an important insight (like from the Charles Pinter book I've been talking about) to be met with :brow: is frustrating ('but', says a voice, 'serves you right for hanging around in front of your computer so much.')

it doesn't have a position, it can only be described in terms of the wave equation. It's not hiding there in a position unknown, it doesn't have a position - it is described in terms of super-position. Probably best to stop thinking in terms of minute objects or even particles as these are at best kinds of analogues. But, let's not go further here, it belongs in a different thread. The only current one is this one, take it up there if you like.

I suppose the next logical stop in my reading history was a book called The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. Have a look at this review. Read that when I was first posting on forums. Important book.

I would disagree with the assertion that mind is a different substance to the other things around us. I would agree with the assertion that the way the other things appear via the mind is not how they are - substance-wise. They appear as solid, physical, material objects, but that is just how they are modeled. The model is not solid, physical or material. It is informational. — Harry Hindu

I find myself in the unnaccustomed position of agreeing with you. :yikes: That's the gist of the book I'm reading at this moment.

(Also note the distinction I made earlier about the difference between the philosophical and everyday use of the term 'substance' i.e. it means something very different in philosophy than in ordinary language.)

It’s not physically real, it doesn’t exist on the level of physical things. There’s no literal collapse of anything. What happens is that prior to measurement, all you have a distribution of probabilities or possibilities - the answer to the question ‘where is the particle?’ just *is* the wave equation, meaning, it’s not actually anywhere, all there is, is a range of possibilities where it might be, some greater, some lesser. Then take the measurement, and bingo! - that distribution of probabilities no longer exists, because you definitely know where it is (or was) at that precise moment. That is the ‘collapse’. The scientific difficulty is that there is nothing in the equation that accounts for the act of measurement - which is what forced the recognition of the observer, a.k.a. ‘the observer problem’. But you can’t reify the wave function as something physically existent - which is what you’re doing.

That’s why modern physics forced a reconsideration of metaphysics. As Heisenberg said, electrons stand at a strange boundary between existence and non existence - they kind of exist. But scientific realism can’t deal with that, it wants to say that something either exists or it doesn’t.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/quantum-mysteries-dissolve-if-possibilities-are-realities

Yes I did mention that book. Found it very helpful at the time, but that was a long time ago! Still sitting there on my bookshelf alongside the other dusty tomes.

Currently reading Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter - math emeritus with long interest in neurological modelling. Not a philosophy book as such but with considerable philosophical ramifications. Also an autobiography called Silicon, but not able to post the author name as it sets off the spambot (ironically!)

I get it, you've explained that. Hey I think it's good we've articulated our differences so clearly. And to think that it only took ten years.

I wonder if by using an extremely powerful computer to calculate the wave function of a macroscopic space, — Enrique

the wave function does not occupy space. It's a distribution of possibilities, that is all. There's no such actual thing 'out there'. The 'collapse' of the wave function is likewise a figure of speech. Go read up on the QBism article pinned to my profile page.

That isn't an answer. — Banno

It's the single most important problem in philosophy as far as I'm concerned. It addresses the very question that you and everyone else puts about the 'interaction problem', but it seems to go right by most people.

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

mind is a different substance to the other things around us. — Banno

Just bear in mind, again, the difference between 'substance' in philosophy, translated from 'ousia', 'being' or 'subject', and 'substance' in normal speech, 'a material with uniform properties'. Post-Descartes, these two meanings became confused, so that when 'substance' is spoken of, it's thought to be an actual substance. That's where the problem lies.

Thanks for explaining your position with such clarity.

asking what is really real - that's the stuff of philosophy lecture rooms, seminars and publications. — Banno

And that's not where life is lived.

So for us, for sure too late. — schopenhauer1

But the way to cut the Gordian knot is not by kvetching about it. As some wise sage said, 'the only way out of it is through it'.

Isn't it clear by now that this is a muddled question? — Banno

No, it's not a muddled question, it is crystal clear to me. Just because you don't think in such terms, doesn't mean that it's a muddled question. I was going to say yesterday, the neat summations of all these plain-language philosophers are really designed philosophy lecture rooms, seminars and publications. They don't address existential questions.

If you are going to talk about something's being fundamental, you have to be clear about what it is you are doing. — Banno

What really matters, what counts, what is real. In a philosophical context, not a quotidian context of designing bridges and stowing cups.

That is true, but in that case that genetic line or species gets eliminated. — punos

Darwinian evolution is not an existential philosophy.

A facile dismissal of the entire issue, then. Isn't there more at stake? Doesn't it really count whether you're an aggregation of physical forces, or something more than that, or other than that?

But to bring someone into the world just to gain a higher truth is using/harming them unnecessarily for an/your agenda. — schopenhauer1

That is based solely on your conviction there isn't one.

You simply have to agree that harming people unnecessarily and for an agenda (yours, society's, even what you the parent think is the "best" outcome for the child born), is no good/wrong/misguided. — schopenhauer1

You can observe that being born inevitably entails suffering, without necessarily agreeing that it negates the entire process, that it would have been better never to have occured. Besides, it's too late for that. As I think Schopenhauer saw, we are 'condemned to exist', until such time as we disentangle ourselves from the blind force that keeps driving that existence.

Some of the early gnostics were antinatalist, mostly i think because they thought it evil to trap a soul or spirit in a physical prison like a flesh body. — punos

Exactly! But lets not forget, they also believed that there was an escape from that, a higher truth.

So do you accept that the fundamental furniture of the Universe is material in nature? Whatever that turns out to be? And that humans, and the mind, are the product of these entities?

Yes, 'Alvin Plantinga'. And no, I don't believe in Reformed Theology. Here I'm interested in the technicalities of the arguments, from a POV other than 'presumptively materialist'. I have another of his books, and it's a dull slog, but I accept the basic validity of his 'evolutionary argument against naturalism', and frequently invoke it.

(In fact it would be interesting to compare that argument with Donald Hoffman's Evolutionary Argument against Reality.)

The connection being this: that naturalism (or physicalism) claims that the brain produces or causes mental events. Mental events include rational inferences of the kind 'because X then Y'. However (1) if logical necessity and physical causation are independent, as many contributors argue in this thread, then that is not a valid inference, and (2) if it is true, then the conclusion is the consequence of a physical cause rather than logical necessity, so not a valid inference. This is the gist of the 'argument from reason'.

And an innocent person 'just is' a person who does not positively deserve to come to harm. — Bartricks

I think you're confusing the notion of legal innocence - of not having committed a crime - with an existential question - what is the cause of the suffering and harm that all humans are susceptible to.

If your logic followed, then no harm would happen to anything that was born - including animals, who are also innocent by the same criteria. So you're arguing for more than 'anti-natalism', you're actually arguing that existence is evil. (Hey that's why Schopenhauer1 likes your post!)

Innocent = not guilty of a crime or offence.
"the prisoners were later found innocent"
Similar:

2. not responsible for or directly involved in an event yet suffering its consequences.
"an innocent bystander"
noun
1.a pure, guileless, or naive person.

2.
a person involved by chance in a situation, especially a victim of crime or war.
"they are prepared to kill or maim innocents in pursuit of a cause"

setting up loans for people who could not afford them — Janus

Indeed, but that article I linked to says a major factor was Bill Clinton's aspiration to provide home ownership to larger numbers of people. Or that was one of the factors - it also notes there was 'plenty of blame to go around'.

The merits or otherwise of home ownership is a question of political economics. The point I was making was more about the influence of wishful or magical thinking on a large scale and how this can resemble religious belief, even if the object is not at all associated with religion.

Here is a well-regarded book, The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga, which analyses many of the themes explored in this thread. (There is a .pdf out there.)

ABSTRACT
This book is a study of the concept of necessity. In the first three chapters, I clarify and defend the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto. Also, I show how to explain de re modality in terms of de dicto modality. In Ch. 4, I explicate the concept of a possible world and define what it is for an object x to have a property P essentially. I then use the concept of an essential property to give an account of essences and their relationship to proper names. In Ch. 6, I argue that the Theory of Worldbound Individuals—even when fortified with Counterpart Theory—is false. Chapters 7 and 8 address the subject of possible but non‐existent objects; I argue here for the conclusion that there is no good reason to think that there are any such objects. In Ch. 9, I apply my theory of modality to the Problem of Evil in an effort to show that the Free Will Defense defeats this particular objection to theism. In Ch. 10, I present a sound modal version of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Finally, in the appendix, I address Quinean objections to quantified modal logic.

We live in a new era of super charged tribalism that can readily be organized and inflamed by social media and Murdoch. — Tom Storm

One small win for the Justice system against Murdoch's institutionalised mendacity:

Fox News’s parent company can be sued by a voting-machine maker because Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with “actual malice” in directing the network to broadcast conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis on Tuesday denied Fox Corp.’s motion to dismiss the suit, saying Dominion Voting Systems had shown that the Murdochs may have been on notice that the conspiracy theory that rigged voting machines tilted the vote was false but let Fox News broadcast it anyway. — Bloomberg

Maybe part of Trump's appeal is that he exemplifies 'you can create your own reality, never mind facts'. He plainly lives in a kind of fantasy world, in his own mind he was the greatest of all presidents and is wrongfully maligned and scorned by an ignorant world. His followers buy into that fantasy. Behind its malignant scowl, it's magical thinking. That's what makes it so dangerous - complete disregard for fact.

(I sometimes wondered, and it was commented, that the global financial crisis was created in part by the Bill Clinton's belief that everyone was entitled to own a home. Magical thinking, again.)

Religions don't have a monopoly on belief.

You may be aware of the testimony at the Jan 6 commission by Rusty Bowers, a Republican electoral official, who stood fast against Trump's demands to help with falsifying the 2020 election results, and suffered greatly as a consequence. His was very moving testimony and an example of stalwart devotion to duty.

Which makes it even more distressing that, in a post-appearance interview, Bowers said that if Trump were to stand in 2024, he'd vote for him!

Gone are the days when one could presume that 'reason will prevail' or 'the truth will out'. American Republicanism really is a brain-eating virus or profound cognitive disorder, a symptom of a society that is literally destroying itself.

So junk bonds, asset-stripping, war-profiteering, etc, as distinct from straight economics where there is production or services that folks want. — unenlightened

add cryptocurrencies to that list.

Which premise do you dispute? — Bartricks

that natural persons are born innocent.

Right. The process of enculturation, language, social practice, and much more, which collectively comprise the meaning-world in which humans dwell. And of which physics, and the physical, is one parameter.

the meaning you give it will be similar enough to the meaning I give it — Isaac

And where does that originate? What is the medium through which that is transmitted? I say that meaning, as such - the basis of rational inference, 'if this is the case then that must be' is internal to thought. You will not observe it anywhere in the objective domain - which is the point at issue.

Throwing cliches isn't an argument. — Isaac

But if you don't understand an argument, then you can't be said to have refuted it.

This exchange started with:

Thoughts aren't entities capable of possessing inherent properties, and even if they were, what kind of analysis produced the conclusion that they had inherent meaning? — Isaac

to which I responded:

Your question has 'inherent meaning' doesn't it? You didn't just blurt out random sounds. — Wayfarer

And then again, you responded

I don't see how our thoughts are any different to the "marks or shapes or whatever" in that they lack 'inherent' meaning. We might find meaning in them on reflection, but I don't see any evidence that the meaning is inherent. — Isaac

In which case, how can you argue that you are asking a meaningful question? Because if you say that thoughts don't have any inherent meaning then neither does your asking of this question. That is what I mean by 'sawing off the branch you're sitting on'. It's not a cliché but an analogy.

In ↪Wayfarer's quote — Banno

As that was a passage from one of Edward Feser's blog posts, I think I should include a link to the original. Incidentally it was posted as an argument for dualism, not idealism as such.

Can a spaceship conceivably use this mechanism to transport humans? — Enrique

Not physically. The idea I had for the sci fi story was about the discovery that some lifeform was able to transmit itself via electromagnetic radiation, manifesting as extremely subtle genetic mutations in humans and other species (among other things). The originating civilisation had worked out how to harness a supernovae to broadcast packets of data that could interact with any suitable life-bearing planet. It turns out that it was possibly the origin of life on earth in the first place. (It ties in to the intriguingly-named panspermia theory.) The problem for the hero of the story is that all the data is ambiguous and nobody believes him, they think he's talking about an occult force (which may not be that far from the truth.) But physically shunting actual matter around the universe - forget about it. The only thing that can be transmitted at lightspeed is information.

Always the same with Trump - although you think you've seen the worst, heard the worst, something comes along that is even more despicable than all the many despicable things he's already done. It's a bottomless pit of depravity.

Today's installment was groups of thugs and rabble-rousers standing outside the homes of election officials, or driving around video trucks calling them paedophiles and perverts. This, directed in many cases, at lifelong Republicans, one of whom was at the time caring for a terminally-ill daughter inside the house, while the mob stood outside chanting slogans. (She has subsequently died.)

If everything simply is as it seems,
— Wayfarer

That's not what was claimed... — Banno

That is what I thought you meant, when you said

What you see is the apple. — Banno

To procreate is to create an innocent person. — Bartricks

so you don't accept the doctrine of original sin, then?