Thanks nhamann. And fair enough. “Tree Falls” has always been a miserable example of what I’m getting at, so I’ll try to be more general.
My question is more like “to what extent does perceiving or not perceiving something determine whether and to what degree it can be said to exist?”. Clearly “Tree Falls” isn’t the right way to ask this, but I can only assume that was the motive of whoever first asked it.
Anyway, the last I’d heard it was still (understandably) an undecided question. It is known though that observation affects reality so I would think it should be given some consideration.
My point as it relates to the original post though, is that if there’s a chance that perception is a prerequisite for reality, then we may still have a chicken-and-egg problem with the idea of a “simulation no one is bothering to run”.
Anyway, the last I’d heard it was still (understandably) an undecided question. It is known though that observation effects reality so I would think it should be given some consideration.
Be careful about how you interpret news stories about quantum physics—quantum physics is a very confusing subject, and is often distorted severely by the reporting process.
Affect and effect have tremendously different meanings in this context—please don’t mix them up.
My question is more like “to what extent does perceiving or not perceiving something determine whether and to what degree it can be said to exist?”.
I recommend looking through the Quantum Physics Sequence, or at least the “Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious” and/or “And the Winner is… Many-Worlds!” subsequences. Aside from the general matters of map versus territory, our specific knowledge of quantum physics indicates that the observer/collapse effects you may have heard about are not part of what the universe is really doing.
As for self-perception… for all the problems with Descartes’s philosophy of mind, “cogito ergo sum” is still a pretty good standard, at least for setting a bare minimum baseline for a definition of existence. (That is, if your definition of existence doesn’t allow you to be pretty confident that you yourself exist, it can’t be a very good definition.) Further, based on the assumptions of materialism and reductionism (see Zombies? Zombies! and GAZP), I concluded that if a being (whether a normal human you’re interacting with, an AI, a person in a simulated universe, etc.) says that they feel conscious, real, etc., and you are confident that they have some mechanism for actually acquiring such a belief that is at least as good as your own (e.g. their program has to actually be mindlike, not just printf(“I experience qualia! How mysterious!”); exit(0)), then you should take their word for it.
Thanks nhamann. And fair enough. “Tree Falls” has always been a miserable example of what I’m getting at, so I’ll try to be more general.
My question is more like “to what extent does perceiving or not perceiving something determine whether and to what degree it can be said to exist?”. Clearly “Tree Falls” isn’t the right way to ask this, but I can only assume that was the motive of whoever first asked it.
Anyway, the last I’d heard it was still (understandably) an undecided question. It is known though that observation affects reality so I would think it should be given some consideration.
My point as it relates to the original post though, is that if there’s a chance that perception is a prerequisite for reality, then we may still have a chicken-and-egg problem with the idea of a “simulation no one is bothering to run”.
Be careful about how you interpret news stories about quantum physics—quantum physics is a very confusing subject, and is often distorted severely by the reporting process.
Affect and effect have tremendously different meanings in this context—please don’t mix them up.
I recommend looking through the Quantum Physics Sequence, or at least the “Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious” and/or “And the Winner is… Many-Worlds!” subsequences. Aside from the general matters of map versus territory, our specific knowledge of quantum physics indicates that the observer/collapse effects you may have heard about are not part of what the universe is really doing.
As for self-perception… for all the problems with Descartes’s philosophy of mind, “cogito ergo sum” is still a pretty good standard, at least for setting a bare minimum baseline for a definition of existence. (That is, if your definition of existence doesn’t allow you to be pretty confident that you yourself exist, it can’t be a very good definition.) Further, based on the assumptions of materialism and reductionism (see Zombies? Zombies! and GAZP), I concluded that if a being (whether a normal human you’re interacting with, an AI, a person in a simulated universe, etc.) says that they feel conscious, real, etc., and you are confident that they have some mechanism for actually acquiring such a belief that is at least as good as your own (e.g. their program has to actually be mindlike, not just printf(“I experience qualia! How mysterious!”); exit(0)), then you should take their word for it.
The Simple Truth is another good place to start when considering these map-territory questions.