However, everyone already kind of knows the we can’t definitely show the existence of any objective reality behind our observations and that we can only posit it. This isn’t exactly news.
Un-referenceable objective reality goes rather beyond un-knowable objective reality. The second doesn’t collapse into absurdity, while the first does (note that “un-referenceable objective reality” is a reference!).
The high-level may contain thing like “see”, “object” and “light” as primitives so that we can define an object as transparent if we can see another on the other side of it.
I’m not objecting to an account of physics that takes these things as primitives for definition. The way you’re defining these is very much compatible with how I would, and incompatible with the sort of physicalism that thinks it isn’t meaningful to talk about “seeing” (e.g. consciousness) independent of a physical definition.
We could hypothetically look at a bunch of humans, see how they interact with the world, scan their brains and then define an interpretation scheme of the information in their brains.
“Define an interpretation scheme” is incredibly vague. If it’s a functionalist interpretation scheme then the functionalism section implies.
note that “un-referenceable objective reality” is a reference!).
Says who? It’s a piece of ostensibly interpretable English. Does that make it a reference? .Fine then it’s a reference and there is no paradox. Or does a reference have to latch on to some definite bunch of atoms, somessubset of physical reality? (Ie not be a “dangling pointer”) Then it isn’t a reference,and there is still no problem.
If you try to have it both ways, by insisting that any comprehensible English noun phrase must be a reference (even talk of unicorns or noumena),whilst simultaneously insisting that a reference must be defined narrowly as non dangling pointer that latches on to a physical object,then you have created a paradox. A paradox you didn’t have to create.
This was solved over a century by Frege. There’s Sense and there’s Reference. Even if you grasp the sense,its up to the universe to decide whether an appropriate referent exists.
Un-referenceable objective reality goes rather beyond un-knowable objective reality. The second doesn’t collapse into absurdity, while the first does (note that “un-referenceable objective reality” is a reference!).
We can construct a model were we (the external observers) can reference things that not observer in the model (the internal observers) can reference. Here’s an analogy—we can’t prove an unprovable theorem, but we might be able to prove a theorem unprovable.
Incompatible with the sort of physicalism that thinks it isn’t meaningful to talk about “seeing” (e.g. consciousness) independent of a physical definition.
I’m not familiar with that strain of thought, but I can posit why some people might find that compelling
“Define an interpretation scheme” is incredibly vague
Yeah, as I said, this is just a sketch. There’s a lot more that would need to be said it order to actually do this
We can construct a model were we (the external observers) can reference things that not observer in the model (the internal observers) can reference.
An account would have to be given of how we, as humans embedded in the universe, can speak as any kind of “external observer”. I have not so far seen a coherent account of this. It seems that it would correspond to a view-from-nowhere.
I am not sure how the analogy to theorems applies; this seems to be a case of a given perspective forming an argument that it cannot know some fact it can still define, which doesn’t have anything to do with an “outside” perspective external to the initial one.
“An account would have to be given of how we, as humans embedded in the universe, can speak as any kind of “external observer”″ - If we construct a model that doesn’t contain us, then we are an external observer of that model. We can then be analogy posit the existence of an agent that exists in that relation to us.
Re the analogy: We can’t have an entity that is both internally referenceable and internally unreferenceable. However we can have an external reference to an unreferenceable entity. Okay, maybe the analogy wasn’t quite as direct as I was thinking.
As an “external observer”, we still have a standpoint, e.g. getting visual input from some camera. (This is apparent in movies)
We can look at ourselves from the outside, e.g. from the perspective of a camera placed in a room. However, this is a particular outside (that can be placed relative to us). If the outside could not be placed relative to us, we could not know anything about how we would appear to that outside. It would be kind of like getting lost in a random parallel universe and seeing phenomena totally unrelated to ourselves, if this thought experiment is even conceivable (I’m not convinced it is).
Our ability to imagine data about us being received by some perspective, depends on placing that perspective relative to our own.
Maybe this will help. Consider the characters in a video game. We are an external observer as we can see what is happening in the game, but they can’t see us. The point isn’t that we can see ourselves from the outside, but that we can imagine what it would be like to be seen from the outside.
“Our ability to imagine data about us being received by some perspective, depends on placing that perspective relative to our own”—Yes, there are limits to what we can say about the outside perspective as we can’t reference it directly. We can only discuss it by analogy.
That doesn’t at all contradict what I said. The camera in a video game such as Super Mario Bros is placed at particular space-time coordinates, and for the viewer to see Mario, the camera has to be close to Mario, and in fact the game logic makes sure the camera does not drift from Mario’s position. It isn’t a view from nowhere, it’s a view from somewhere pretty close to Mario’s locality.
The camera Mario gets when (hypothetically) he imagines himself from outside is different than Luigi’s if they are at significantly different locations (hence, multi player games such as Maro Kart have multiple screens even in a third-person view).
The outside perspective is outside but it is not observer-independent.
I guess I should have been more precise. Imagine a game where we can see all the information, but some characters inside only have access to limited info.
“The outside perspective is outside but it is not observer-independent”
Sure, but it’s not subject to the world-internal observer effects
The simulator’s perspective is outside “our universe” but not outside the totality; there are multiple possible simulable universes, like there are different video games. Mario’s (hypothetical) notion of “a view outside this world” refers to a view of the world of Super Mario Bros, and this differs depending on the video game character. Additionally, the video game players / simulators live in their own world, which is part of the totality.
Any given perspective can imagine zooming out by a given “distance” (in terms of space, time, simulation level, multiversal branch, perhaps others). This yields a sequence of views, each of which is dependent on the initial perspective. Perhaps the “view from nowhere” may be considered as the limit of this process. I am not convinced this limit may be coherently reified as a referenceable thing, however. In addition, such a view would be infinitely far from our own, and it would take an infinite time to zoom in from there to our actual here-and-now location.
Some comments:
Un-referenceable objective reality goes rather beyond un-knowable objective reality. The second doesn’t collapse into absurdity, while the first does (note that “un-referenceable objective reality” is a reference!).
I’m not objecting to an account of physics that takes these things as primitives for definition. The way you’re defining these is very much compatible with how I would, and incompatible with the sort of physicalism that thinks it isn’t meaningful to talk about “seeing” (e.g. consciousness) independent of a physical definition.
“Define an interpretation scheme” is incredibly vague. If it’s a functionalist interpretation scheme then the functionalism section implies.
Says who? It’s a piece of ostensibly interpretable English. Does that make it a reference? .Fine then it’s a reference and there is no paradox. Or does a reference have to latch on to some definite bunch of atoms, somessubset of physical reality? (Ie not be a “dangling pointer”) Then it isn’t a reference,and there is still no problem.
If you try to have it both ways, by insisting that any comprehensible English noun phrase must be a reference (even talk of unicorns or noumena),whilst simultaneously insisting that a reference must be defined narrowly as non dangling pointer that latches on to a physical object,then you have created a paradox. A paradox you didn’t have to create.
This was solved over a century by Frege. There’s Sense and there’s Reference. Even if you grasp the sense,its up to the universe to decide whether an appropriate referent exists.
I can follow your argument, but could you clarify what you mean by Sense and Reference?
It’s not something I invented,it’s the foundation stone of the Analytical philosophy project.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_reference
PS having taken a look at the wiki article,it’s crap...or I have a different take on the subject.
We can construct a model were we (the external observers) can reference things that not observer in the model (the internal observers) can reference. Here’s an analogy—we can’t prove an unprovable theorem, but we might be able to prove a theorem unprovable.
I’m not familiar with that strain of thought, but I can posit why some people might find that compelling
Yeah, as I said, this is just a sketch. There’s a lot more that would need to be said it order to actually do this
An account would have to be given of how we, as humans embedded in the universe, can speak as any kind of “external observer”. I have not so far seen a coherent account of this. It seems that it would correspond to a view-from-nowhere.
I am not sure how the analogy to theorems applies; this seems to be a case of a given perspective forming an argument that it cannot know some fact it can still define, which doesn’t have anything to do with an “outside” perspective external to the initial one.
Maybe I’ll write a post on this sometime.
“An account would have to be given of how we, as humans embedded in the universe, can speak as any kind of “external observer”″ - If we construct a model that doesn’t contain us, then we are an external observer of that model. We can then be analogy posit the existence of an agent that exists in that relation to us.
Re the analogy: We can’t have an entity that is both internally referenceable and internally unreferenceable. However we can have an external reference to an unreferenceable entity. Okay, maybe the analogy wasn’t quite as direct as I was thinking.
As an “external observer”, we still have a standpoint, e.g. getting visual input from some camera. (This is apparent in movies)
We can look at ourselves from the outside, e.g. from the perspective of a camera placed in a room. However, this is a particular outside (that can be placed relative to us). If the outside could not be placed relative to us, we could not know anything about how we would appear to that outside. It would be kind of like getting lost in a random parallel universe and seeing phenomena totally unrelated to ourselves, if this thought experiment is even conceivable (I’m not convinced it is).
Our ability to imagine data about us being received by some perspective, depends on placing that perspective relative to our own.
Maybe this will help. Consider the characters in a video game. We are an external observer as we can see what is happening in the game, but they can’t see us. The point isn’t that we can see ourselves from the outside, but that we can imagine what it would be like to be seen from the outside.
“Our ability to imagine data about us being received by some perspective, depends on placing that perspective relative to our own”—Yes, there are limits to what we can say about the outside perspective as we can’t reference it directly. We can only discuss it by analogy.
That doesn’t at all contradict what I said. The camera in a video game such as Super Mario Bros is placed at particular space-time coordinates, and for the viewer to see Mario, the camera has to be close to Mario, and in fact the game logic makes sure the camera does not drift from Mario’s position. It isn’t a view from nowhere, it’s a view from somewhere pretty close to Mario’s locality.
The camera Mario gets when (hypothetically) he imagines himself from outside is different than Luigi’s if they are at significantly different locations (hence, multi player games such as Maro Kart have multiple screens even in a third-person view).
The outside perspective is outside but it is not observer-independent.
I guess I should have been more precise. Imagine a game where we can see all the information, but some characters inside only have access to limited info.
“The outside perspective is outside but it is not observer-independent”
Sure, but it’s not subject to the world-internal observer effects
See this thread on Game of Life.
The simulator’s perspective is outside “our universe” but not outside the totality; there are multiple possible simulable universes, like there are different video games. Mario’s (hypothetical) notion of “a view outside this world” refers to a view of the world of Super Mario Bros, and this differs depending on the video game character. Additionally, the video game players / simulators live in their own world, which is part of the totality.
Any given perspective can imagine zooming out by a given “distance” (in terms of space, time, simulation level, multiversal branch, perhaps others). This yields a sequence of views, each of which is dependent on the initial perspective. Perhaps the “view from nowhere” may be considered as the limit of this process. I am not convinced this limit may be coherently reified as a referenceable thing, however. In addition, such a view would be infinitely far from our own, and it would take an infinite time to zoom in from there to our actual here-and-now location.