RE: What We Can Know About the World

From: Jesse Mazer <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:32:35 -0400

Lee Corbin wrote:

>
>Jesse writes
>
> > > I meant that your perceptions have physiological causes
> > > because your brain is a part of an obviously successful
> > > survival machine designed by evolution.
> >
> > Sure, but all of this is compatible with an idealist philosophy where
> > reality is made up of nothing but observer-moments at the most
>fundamental
> > level--something like the "naturalistic panpsychism" discussed on that
> > webpage I mentioned.
>
>The disagreement I have with what you have written
>is that I do *not* see observer-moments as the most
>fundamental entities. It's just so much *clearer*
>to me to see them arising only after 13.7 billion
>years or so (locally) and that they obtain *only* as
>a result of physical processes.

Ok, but even if you don't agree with this speculation about observer-moments
being the most fundamental entities, criticizing this speculation on the
basis of it being anti-realist seems misguided. Also, as I said, my idea is
that *all* possible causal patterns qualify as "observer-moments", not just
complex ones like ours. And I don't disagree that complex observer-moments
are generally the result of a long process of evolution in the physical
universe, it's just that I think at a most fundamental level the "physical
universe" would be reducible to an enormous pattern of causal relationships
which can be broken down into the relationships between a lot of
sub-patterns, each of which is an observer-moment. The idea that physics
should ultimately be explainable in terms of nothing more than causal
relationships between events, and that higher-order concepts like
"particles" and "spacetime" would emerge from this level of explanation, is
an idea that some approaches to quantum gravity seem to favor, like loop
quantum gravity--it's at least not out of the question that a final
"physical" ToE would be about nothing more than causal relationships between
events. If so, it would just be a different "interpretation" of this theory
to say that each sub-network in this universal causal network would be an
observer-moment of some kind, and my "meta-physical" speculation would be
that you could *start* by looking at all possible finite causal networks and
finding a unique measure on them, and the appearance of the huge causal
network we call the "physical universe" could be derived from the
relationships between all the sub-patterns implied by this unique measure.
Obviously I don't expect you to agree with this speculation, but I'm just
pointing out that it isn't anti-realist, nor does it contradict your
statement about our particular type of consciousness being the result of a
long process of evolution.

>
>When in the laboratory we examine the concepts mice
>have of the world, we can easily see their limitations.
>What would we think of mice who attempted to found all
>of reality on "mouse observer moments"?

Since there is nothing specifically human about my idea of
"observer-moments" this analogy doesn't really work.

Jesse
Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 09:34:18 PDT