"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Similar thing here. A mystery is a concept which can only occur within human consciousness.
Similar thing here. A mystery is a concept which can only occur within human consciousness.
There is an unremarkable planet orbiting a regular star a thousand and two light year away from us. On that planet there is a somewhat deer-like species descendant from a prey animal. They are masters of mathematics, philosophy and technology. Their cognition is so advanced that they would only politely smile at the notion that "human consciousness" is the greatest mystery of all. One of them between two ritual playfights took a dust bath on the meadow. It was thinking about the atmosphere of gas giants, when he come up with a question. There is not even a point in trying to explain to humans what the question was. We don't have the capacity to comprehend it. That question was the greatest mystery of all. Pity that they all went extinct before coming to terms with their own inability to find their answer.
The strongest argument for modern materialism (in the philosophical sense of the term) is that it doesn't matter if it is true unless we discover a way to observe or interact with something beyond - as long as all we observe is a materialist representation of the world, we have no other meaningful choice than to act as if it is true, because we can but guess at what else might exist and the options are infinite.
The first one is that I think it's a matter of _models_. What I mean is that digging under the surface of materialism, what we'll find is pure physics, and currently physics is based on incomplete models or models based on unreachable or non-interactive constructs. Many-universes, 26 dimensions, dark energy, collapse of wave function... Placeholder ideas to make the math work. So, idealism is preaching that there could be the possibility that our current holes in knowledge and understanding might be filled with mind stuff rather than matter stuff. Sure, it might require us to flip the causality relationship between the two, but I don't see that as a fundamentally different way of guessing at what else might exist, and just as materialism has descriptive and predictive power based on abstract, unreachable constructs, so can an idealist worldview.
With regards of having to act as if materialism must be true, I would agree but it depends on at which scale we operate. Meaning, I doubt there could be any other functioning paradigm to go about our daily life and to progress practical science. But for things such as "why is there stuff instead of not" or even more tricky questions such as "what's the meaning", I'd look elsewhere.
Buddhists might tell you we've already discovered a way to pierce the veil ("enlightenment").
Recently I saw a video of Shinzen Young [0] describing his experience of this, and it sounds a lot like this observation of something beyond.
Regardless of whether it's really seeing the nature of reality or just a trick of the brain, I find it fascinating that so many people (throughout history) have very similar [1] experiences and it's given me a lot of motivation to meditate more...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPnLDtHLymo
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-does-i...
"In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid"
"In human physiology and psychology, sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain"
I guess it depends on your definition.
If our reality is simulated, or if the idealists are right, then physics might well have temporal and spatial anomalities dependent on observability.
Ironically I've just elsewhere on this thread argued that materialism makes sense as long as we can not observe anything to violate it, and as such idealism is largely pointless. I should perhaps have added a qualification that this is true in terms of practical application.
That is, we have every reason to assume that the laws of nature are universal, but if they are 'just' universal within the constraints of what we can observe, then while we can continue to act as if they are universal, we may have no way of determining if they are.
As such I do think the question has no practical bearing. Yet we can not dismiss the possibility that what we observe as reality takes shortcuts when we're 'not looking'
Yes, you were actually replying to me above. We do already observe plenty of things that violate our current understanding, quantum entanglement being the first that comes to mind, but we definitely do not lack paradoxes as of now. Sure, as I stated earlier, they might just be knowledge holes which we might fill once our experiments become more sophisticated, but then I can't help but sensing faith.
If the simulation only aims to be convincing, it can take all kinds of shortcuts.
In the latter case it only matters if it is directly or indirectly observed. A simulation might choose to resolve that lazily in the case of indirect observations, in which case it'd only need to determine the proximity of entities deemed to be observers.
We have plenty of cases of that in games already, where events only take place if a player entity is present.