How do you know what you claim to know? (Okay, not you, but whoever said this.) Do you have any reproducible experimental proof of whatever violation of physical laws using mental discipline?
To play devils’ advocate … do you have any reproducible experimental proof of believing that an event would happen that would violate the laws of physics, and then the laws were upheld?
Isn’t it suspicious that undisciplined thoughts are enough to create an illusion of physical reality perfectly obeying the physical laws, but are unable to violate the laws?
Yes, I quite agree. It’s also odd that I cannot play the violin, and yet other people can, which would imply that I can imagine people with knowledge that I don’t have. If reality was an illusion, I would expect it to be a lot more like wonderland.
However, we are dealing with priors and intuition here, in that we cannot run experiments, getting disembodied consciousnesses to imagine realities and then observing what they imagine. Its difficult to even run thought experiments, given that you would be trying to model something that supposedly works outside of physics.
So: if you have a prior belief that an illusory reality would be undisciplined (and I agree here), and someone else has a prior that this is not a problem, and that reductionism is highly implausible, how can this disagreement be resolved?
Even if both parties were perfect Bayesian reasoners, Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply, because there is no experimental evidence to update on. How can we determine which prior is correct?
Perhaps we could agree that approximate Kolmogorov complexity provides an objective prior, although I think objections would be raised, but even in that case it doesn’t help in practice unless you can actually calculate approximate Kolmogorov complexity.
So, if you get killed, your mental discipline will improve enough to let you create new reality you can’t create now? Interesting...
I think the mental discipline is supposed to be needed to control reality, not to create it. Nevertheless, anything that allows one to escape death does make ‘motivated cognition’ spring to mind.
To play devils’ advocate … do you have any reproducible experimental proof of believing that an event would happen that would violate the laws of physics, and then the laws were upheld?
Yes, I quite agree. It’s also odd that I cannot play the violin, and yet other people can, which would imply that I can imagine people with knowledge that I don’t have. If reality was an illusion, I would expect it to be a lot more like wonderland.
However, we are dealing with priors and intuition here, in that we cannot run experiments, getting disembodied consciousnesses to imagine realities and then observing what they imagine. Its difficult to even run thought experiments, given that you would be trying to model something that supposedly works outside of physics.
So: if you have a prior belief that an illusory reality would be undisciplined (and I agree here), and someone else has a prior that this is not a problem, and that reductionism is highly implausible, how can this disagreement be resolved?
Even if both parties were perfect Bayesian reasoners, Aumann’s agreement theorem doesn’t apply, because there is no experimental evidence to update on. How can we determine which prior is correct? Perhaps we could agree that approximate Kolmogorov complexity provides an objective prior, although I think objections would be raised, but even in that case it doesn’t help in practice unless you can actually calculate approximate Kolmogorov complexity.
I think the mental discipline is supposed to be needed to control reality, not to create it. Nevertheless, anything that allows one to escape death does make ‘motivated cognition’ spring to mind.