Physicalism or materialism. The idea that everything there is arises from physical matter. If true would mean there is no God or Free Will, no immortal soul either.
Seems to be what most of academia bases their world view on and the frame work in which most Science is done.
Often challenged by Dualism and Idealism but only by a loud fringe minority.
I’ve heard pan-psychicism is proving quite the challenge, but I hear that from people who believe crystals can cure autism
I hear that “Oh actually the science is moving away from materialism” as well, but that seems to be more crystal talk as well.
So lemme ask science instead of google.
Any reason to doubt physicalism? Is there anything in science that says “Huh well that seems to not have any basis in the physical at all and yet it exists”
Edit: I have heard of the Essentia Foundation and Bernado Kastrup but since it’s endorsed by Deepak Chopra I’m not sure I can trust it
I think it is possible, logically at least, to have gods, free will and souls even if everything were physical matter, unless you define those terms specifically to be metaphysical but then its like a True Scotsman fallacy.
Physicalism might be the most viable, but that does not mean its viable enough. There are huge holes - we have no explanation for consciousness, sentience, free will, physics still doesn’t explain everything physical, and quantum mechanics is such a weird aberration of physical matter I am tempted to not call it that.
However, nothing beats the scientific method for truth finding at the moment. And, at the moment, the scientific method is content with only giving us physical results.
I mean, taking a stance that living beings have no consciousness, sentience or free will totally distinct from inanimate objects would be the simplest hypothesis, and is also what the models predict.
“Has anyone found a viable alternative to falsifiable hypotheses?”
“Huh well that seems to not have any basis in the physical at all and yet it exists”
Observed particles behave different.
No they don’t. Or, maybe, depending on what you mean by “observed”. A consciousness doesn’t have to be involved in any case.
Double slit experiment?
“observing” means interacting with.
Of course interacting with something changes how it behaves. It’s in the name.
Still works if the electron is a wave the whole time. You just get a detector and a physicist in multiple states as well. That’s the multiple worlds interpretation.
There’s a bunch of other models, like collapse existing, but being caused by size or gravity. Collapse by consciousness is a “possibility” really only pseudoscientists are selling. I think OP mentioned Chopra.
The Dual Slit Experiment doesn’t actually work that way
Basically, there’s a little wiggle room left in our current model of the universe, but not much, and absolutely nothing close to human-scale. Dualism is nowhere to be found - we can observe the mind breaking or operating physically - and Idealism better be indistinguishable from materialism to work.
I hear that “Oh actually the science is moving away from materialism” as well, but that seems to be more crystal talk as well.
Yep. The grain of truth here is that materials at really small scale look quite different. At small scale, and in a specific, rigorously defined way. I don’t want your crystals or dog THC Karen.
Umm, I thought there was the concept of antimatter. No?
In the sense philosophers mean it, that’s still material. A visible chunk wouldn’t even look or act different until you graze a few atoms and explode.
I don’t really understand what OP is going for here to be honest.
There’s plenty of things you can’t see but only see the effects of in the universe. Whatever the qualifying thing is I guess needs to sit outside of the universe entirely to qualify, but like some branches of physics and math are talking about things such as higher dimensions and the potential that the universe is a simulation of some sort. But I’m sure that doesn’t count either. I guess it has to not be observable nor reasoned around or something. 🤷
Sure, Materialism is slippery to define. OP gave the counterexamples of Dualism and Idealism, though, so you can just go off of those. Most people still believe in Dualism, even.
No reason to doubt it.
that seems to not have any basis in the physical at all and yet it exists
If it has no basis in physical reality, how would you detect, measure or quantify it? On what basis would you prove its existence?
Tune your consciousness into the vibrations. Duh.
I mean, if spontaneously every person on Earth heard a voice in their head say “I’m God and I love all of you, be nice to each other” in their own languages, but no physical evidence of the event could be found, that could count.
Except that’s a pretty material event. If thing A interacts with thing B there is a material thing happening between them, which can immediately be measured and quantified.
It wouldn’t help that such an event happens only once, but you’ll still have 8 billion data points to draw a conclusion from.
Possibly. Let’s revisit the issue if that ever comes to pass.
It doesn’t mean that there’s no soul, god, or after life, just none that we can prove in any meaningful way.
If you’re okay with an amoral God, that one’s plausible but unfalsifiable, true. To have an afterlife you need a soul, though, and every part of the mind is right there in flesh for surgeons to watch break down.
I personally don’t bother worrying too much about things we can’t prove or disprove like that, but it’s important to remember that just because we can’t prove something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. My philosophy is that if there is some sort of beyond that whatever is out there is similar enough to ours that they’d be able to empathize with the decisions I make and judge me accordingly, assuming there even would be some sort of judgement process. I’m at peace with it. I was raised evangelical, and lots of my friends were. One of my atheist friends used to have nightmares about an eternity in hell. I don’t think anyone who loves us could do that. And if whatever is there is different enough that our decisions don’t matter then it’s arbitrary anyways and there’s no sense worrying. It’s not about “being okay with an amoral god.” It’s just an acknowledgement that the idea of a reality we can’t prove further than our own could exist.
But anyone making definitive statements about something like that shouldn’t be trusted. Which rules out pretty much all religions because many make claims like that.
I’m guessing you knew what I meant there, right? Why would a moral god make a planet where most people die in agony, usually as kids, for most of history? That’s direct evidence against.
If we’re talking about unprovable things literally anything is possible. Because it’s unprovable.
But we cannot believe anything without evidence
You can believe without evidence, belief is an internal process, that can be justified by evidences (that are external) or by other internal processes.
You can have a religion, spiritual beliefs and etc. If that’s make you comfortable and integrates you in a commununity, great! Even better if your community helps outsiders.
What you should not do is expect others to held your beliefs without evidence, or impose into others views that can not be validated by evidence.
Plenty of people do. Whether they should or shouldn’t and whether they should claim it’s objectively real is different. But plenty of people believe in those things without proof.
You spend all day believing things without evidence otherwise you would not be able to go about your daily life. The demand for evidence comes after disbelief or sketpicism and not before it.
No I don’t, for example, I don’t need evidence that my car works, because it just does.
If I interacted with ghosts regularly, then I’d already have proof that materialism doesn’t exist.
If we did not regularly and readily believe things without evidence, we would not ever find ourselves incorrect, but we do, and many times in total. (If you believe yourself never incorrect you are very foolish and charlatans will have a field day with you.)
You are lying to yourself if you think that you do not take your daily life on trust and experience, not evidence. We are the product of evolution and usually spot patterns quickly rather than gather evidence and consider carefully. We make snap decisions all day every day on scant or no evidence. We would be paralysed by indecision if not. This is not wrong, it’s not bad, it’s just quick and necessary.
Your faith in your car is a case in point. You trust that it will work. You don’t think to question it, because you’re familiar with it. You similarly trust, without evidence, the vehicles of your friends and family and of taxi drivers, and any number of buses or trains that you use every day, but as soon as I’m selling you a car, you want proof, and expect documentation, full service history, government checks of whether the vehicle has been written off or stolen (if your country or state provides such things), test drives and warranties. The stakes are higher so you require evidence. You do no such thing before boarding a bus or taxi.
No, we reserve the demand for evidence for things about which we are already skeptical, or things that we doubt, or where we are unsure and feel we don’t know. Not for the rest. Not at all. We just assume our conclusions based on hunches and experience. No one lives their daily normal life as a skeptic about everything they believe, and you would stand out as a very, very strange indeed if you did.
Your evidence is massively, powerfully and overwhelmingly outweighed by your beliefs. Even your beliefs about science are formed through social relationships and third hand “evidence” at best. This is not because you are foolish and credulous, but because you are sensible and pragmatic, and because you are primarily a functioning human animal for more hours a day than you are a lab-closeted scientist or logic-bound philosopher.
Again, the demand for evidence comes after disbelief, sketpicism, doubt or indecision, and not before it.
But neither can you discredit anything without evidence. The basis of science is falsifiability. That is, we have to be able to prove it wrong.
Hitchen’s Razor says otherwise.
Assuming that the universe actually exists outside ourselves and that our perceptions can be explained by some set of rules (that we call “physics”) seem like necessary axioms to get anywhere in science. You could reject those assumptions, but then I don’t see much of a compelling reason to accept anything beyond solipsism if you don’t believe in reality.
That said, I’m not sure that physics will ever be able to provide a good, complete explanation of qualia.
What about biology? What if one day a neurologist finds the brain part that creates the illusion you’re not just a brain?
Consider this: I seem to be just a collection of cells interacting in a complicated way. I know that I have subjective experience. We’ve observed that ant colonies, companies, countries, etc. have complex behavior beyond what any individual alone can do; do they also have subjective experience independent of their constituent individuals the way that I seem to have subjective experience independent of any individual cell in my body?
I think there probably is an answer to that question, but I don’t know if it’s possible to answer from the limited perspective of a human in the universe.
I would love it if there does turn out to be a good explanation I’m just not clever enough to come up with, by the way – it would be fascinating! – but I don’t think biology alone is going to answer how subjective experience is derived from physical materials interacting. A complete theory of qualia should be able to answer whether an ant colony, a country, or a computer program (which could be simulated by other computer programs arbitrarily deeply) have their own subjective experiences in addition to why I perceive red the way that I do, and why it’s not the way I perceive blue.
I know that I have subjective experience.
Yeah, but that’s the thing. How do we know that? There’s no evidence, nobody can tell you how there’s more to red or blue than the words, even if everyone agrees on it. Aside from occurring in “normal” people, it doesn’t seem any different from the next psychological fixed belief. Even if you’re a Platonist or similar and don’t need evidence, a concept defined by what it’s not is challenging to justify.
You mention emergence here as well, but I’m not sure that’s either required or implied by qualia. In many cases it can actually be modeled mathematically, as well, while qualia hasn’t been touched.
I meant that as essentially a variant of the cogito; I can determine for myself (only) that I have subjective experience because I experience it. (Presumably you can do the same for yourself – provided that you’re not a bot, p-zombie, or such; I’m not a solipsist.) I think we agree that it’s not currently possible to convince others of the existence of our own subjective experiences since we cannot directly share subjective experience, and no one has come up with a convincing workaround – and we might not ever come up with such a thing.
You mention emergence here as well, but I’m not sure that’s either required or implied by qualia.
What I mean is that accepting what seems to be correct, more or less, from current understanding of science, we seem to be composed of interacting cells and yet have subjective experience. If someone does, somehow, come up with a good explanation for why we have subjective experience, that explanation ought to be able to allow you to determine, at least in principle, whether any kind of matter interacting does or doesn’t have subjective experience – whether that’s another person, or a piece of software running on a computer, or something even weirder like an entire country operating collectively through the behavior of its constituent citizens.
I never understood the point of “qualia” and “p-zombies”. To act exactly as a human does, you need the internal voice that is among your motivating factors to act like you do.
Consider being shown a video feed of people talking on your monitor. You’re told that the feed is being live streamed – but in fact it’s actually a recording, and everyone whose behavior you’re observing actually died a week ago. If you want to know what’s really going on, how would you tell the difference between a live stream and a recording with just the video feed on the monitor? Going further, how would you tell the difference between a recording of actual people and a really good generative AI clip? If all you have is the video feed without access to the source, it seems impossible to distinguish those cases – but there really are different things going on in all three scenarios.
p-zombies are a thought experiment along those lines. All we have are observations of someone’s behavior; how can we tell if that person really has subjective experience? An LLM can claim it has the same subjective experiences as us, but the mechanisms by which it produces those claims are very different to how a human being does it and likely do not include anything remotely similar to our experience of colors, taste, etc. even if they claim they do…
Hope that helps a bit.
Thanks, I get all that. I’m just saying that if something really observably behaves like a human when interacted with – complete with behavior that’s consistent with an internal world model, long term planning, and so on – that’s a sapient real being in my book.
That’s my point – if something is an “imitation” good enough that it behaves like the actual thing, is it still only an imitation, or is that just prejudice?
Of course if something is just an inferior knock-off, that’s something else.
Of course it can. We are biological machines. Not every machine is perfect copy of another. Differences in the organs that perceive the world will lead to subjective experiences. There’s no “mystery”.
Does an LLM have subjective experience? The characters in The Sims – or the game itself? A thermostat? An ant colony, collectively – separate from its individual ants? The entire country of, say, Honduras, collectively? A corporation? A database? Bacteria? A human skin cell? A tumor, independent of its host? A traffic jam? Grains of sand in an hour glass? A tree? A flea? A dog?
Why is my perception of the color red the way that it is? You can swap the red and blue components of an image around and things are just as recognizable, but the experience of it is noticeably different… Why does red look like red instead of red and blue being the other way around in my subjective experience? Is your experience of red the same as mine, or are red and blue swapped for you relative to my perception of them? We know from people with color blindness that not everyone experiences the color red the same way, but how can you probe whether the perception of the color wheel is rotated by, say, 90 degrees in hue between two people with otherwise compatible perception of color?
Why don’t I experience heat on my skin the same way that I experience vision? Or touch, for that matter? People with synesthesia can have radically different subjective experience; perhaps we’ll uncover some answers from probing that – since people can talk to us – but how can we ever probe the similarities and differences in the experience that bats and dolphins may have of echolocation? If bats and dolphins could talk to each other, would their differences in the experience of echolocation be like red-green color blindness, or like vision and touch?
There probably are answers to all those questions, but given that subjective experience can only be experienced by the subject, how would you test for it? Even if there are answers, I’m not sure if it’s possible for us to know them from our point of view in the universe.
Does an LLM have subjective experience? The characters in The Sims – or the game itself? A thermostat? An ant colony, collectively – separate from its individual ants? The entire country of, say, Honduras, collectively? A corporation? A database? Bacteria? A human skin cell? A tumor, independent of its host? A traffic jam? Grains of sand in an hour glass? A tree? A flea? A dog?
You are asking questions that seem unanswerable. In order to know whether something is having an experience, you’d have to first define what an experience is. Is it possible to define something that fundamental like that from the perspective of a biological machine for everything including non biological machines and everything in between? It’s much easier to define particles than such fuzzy things.
Once you define them, you will have to conceive experiments to test whether those definitions are wrong.
Why is my perception of the color red the way that it is?
You are different from other beings. You are an amalgamation of mutations of your parents, your environment, your upbringing, your place in time and space, the contents of body, and everything else. There is no need to invoke something extra-physicalist to explain that.
You are asking questions that seem unanswerable.
Yes! That is my point. I’m not sure that explaining qualia properly is possible from our limited vantage point in the universe – even though I think there probably are actually answers to the questions I’m asking.
I content that the questions I quoted in my first part of the response are logically not answerable. It’s not a matter of being unanswerable by physicalism.
There are other questions you posed in the second part that are answerable and they are answerable I the realm of physicalism without adding any other realms.
Not sure what you are talking about. Science isn’t philosophy or religion, you can’t make choices what’s true or isn’t. A fact is a fact.
Right, so is it a fact that nothing can exist outside of the physical world?
No it isn’t, because you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. However, everything which has been shown to exist (is detectable by scientific experimentation) is part of the physical world.
If you are talking about things which aren’t detectable, then science wouldn’t be concerned with those things because they aren’t worth thinking aboutThis is kind of wrong, and is a common conflation with respect to science. First, scientists do talk about things that cant be proven, string theory being just one of them. It’s an idea of the physical world that cant be proven. If we have a way to actually test a hypothesis of string theory, it will get more attention. But if you don’t have people thinking about these things, we won’t have better models for describing the universe, such as relativity. Similarly, science can’t prove a negative. Science will never tell you God doesn’t exist or can’t exist, only that we have no proof that God exists and that we have no model where he could. But our knowledge has been less complete before, and our models have been updated as knowledge is gained.
And much of philosophy has no basis in the physical world, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t worth thinking about.
Ok so firstly, no theory can be proven. You’re thinking of theorems. One of the tests of a scientific theory is its falsifiability. A simple example would be that if a single apple floats upwards from the tree instead of falling to earth, that would falsify the theory of gravity. In string theory, the falsifiability lies in the predictions of quantum mechanics. A falsification of QM would collapse string theory immediately. Of course, you’ve chosen this particular theory because it is at the fringes of current understanding and there is debate over whether it’s a legitimate theory. However, it is actually founded on rigorous study, and its predictions are exactly as consequential as its falsifiability is agreed upon.
While it cannot be proven using current methodologies, that problem puts it in such distinguished company as general relativity and even Galilean relativity were in terms of the experimental technology available to natural philosophers at the times of conception. The theory can be proved, or disproved, just not yet. So we don’t write it off as academic, but we file it under “pending”, until such a time as we are able to test it. This is absolutely the astute thing to do.
If you have a test for God, please propose it. It seems that this particular question is beyond both practical and philosophical technology at this point in human history. There is no theory about God that can be tested, falsified, repeated and scrutinised as far as I know, so why would science waste time on this question? Maybe in the future we will have a knife of some kind that can carve meaning into this question, but we don’t at the moment. There’s a separate discipline for pondering abstract questions which we can’t test, it’s called philosophy. And it pushes science, when the time is right, to find evidence. But until philosophers find a way to test their suppositions, they are not worth thinking about,for a scientist.That’s precisely why I chose string theory, because it does have value, even if it can’t be tested at this time. Yet, even though little can be done to advance it, shrugging and ignoring it won’t change that state, if you’re a scientist.
As for the pondering of philosophers, there is a good chance that many of their questions will never be answered, and yes, there would be little value to study them, as a scientist. But that qualifier has a dramatic effect on your previous statements.
So the thing is, like other commenters have said, you’re asking metaphysics things through the prism of science, which does not work because by nature, science uses the (mostly) objective scientific method, while metaphysics is based on subjective assessments.
You have to separate the physical, material universe as being in the domain of what can be known, from the rest, which can not be, and never will. This does not mean it doesn’t exist, just that it can never be studied or proved in any way, so anyone can believe what they wish about it without leaving rationality (as long as the belief does not imply things concerning the material universe)
We do not have enough evidence to conclude that subjective experience will never be objectively measurable, sufficiently advanced neuroscience absolutely could reach a point where every aspect of human experience could be measured observed and compared. We almost certainly won’t live to see it though.
Any reason to doubt physicalism?
Describe “doubt” in purely physical terms.
A possibility which an intelligent organism discounts in decision-making.
Those are conceptual terms.
What is doubt’s shape? Its size? Its mass? Of what elements is it composed?
If physicalism is true, then either those questions have answers or doubt does not exist.
Any reason to believe there’s anything at all outside of the physical universe or exists but is not tied to anything physical. Anything at all.
Like what?
I don’t know that’s why I’m asking
Then I don’t know either, and I don’t think either of us can know. Because if it’s knowable, it’s measurable, and physical. If it’s not knowable, not measurable, then you can’t show that it exists.
Any reason to doubt physicalism? Is there anything in science that says “Huh well that seems to not have any basis in the physical at all and yet it exists”
If it had no basis in the physical, then what would it mean to say that it “exists?” How you define “existence” is a very big philosophical question. Excuse me while I nerd the fuck out about something.
Physics tells us that the observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter. However, we can sometimes observe objects leaving the observable universe. This is because of complicated physics reasons:
Physical space is expanding with time. Everything is getting farther apart from everything else, and the more distance there is between two points, the faster the space in between them is expanding. At a sufficiently large distance, the rate at which the distance between the two points is increasing, is faster than the speed of light. Neither point is actually moving faster than the speed of light, it’s only the space between them that is expanding. This might be hard to understand, but think of it as if you drew two dots on a balloon and then inflated it.
Once an object gets far enough away from us that the space between is expanding faster than the speed of light, it becomes impossible for us to make any further observations about that thing. This is actually what defines the bounds of “the observable universe.”
So, what happens to objects that leave the observable universe? Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to say. Intuitively, we would expect that they’re still there doing their thing and obeying the same physical laws as when we could observe them. But, if you told me that the stars simply vanish, or that they magically transform into butterflies as soon as they leave, there’s no evidence that anyone could ever produce that would falsify that belief, because, by definition, there is no way to observe what happens outside of the observable universe. If we are defining what exists based on what is physically observable, then it follows that things outside the observable universe do not exist, even if it really seems like they should.
My conclusion from this line of thought is that existence is a relational property. I am not prepared to reject the idea that a thing has to be in some way observable in order to exist, but in that case, nothing can exist in isolation. Because for a thing to be observable means that there must exist a being which could observe it. This could be said to contradict physicalism, because physicalism would say that the material world exists regardless of our senses. I would say that the physical world only exists so long as there are beings capable of sensing it, and, should all sentient beings ever become extinct, the physical world would no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
I think the main problem with this sort of logic is that it presumes that what we see is reality. This isn’t necessarily true.
Evolution has shaped us to see that which is most important for our survival. If seeing things as they truly are would interfere with our evolutionary fitness, then our brains would filther that out. In fact, this seems very likely, evidence being the many illusions that can be used to fool our senses.
If this was the case, then physical objects may not exsist at all, they would just be an artifact of this filtering effect. Roland Hoffmann is a great resource for understanding this sort of theory.
I think the main problem with this sort of logic is that it presumes that what we see is reality. This isn’t necessarily true
What could possibly be considered more “real” than that which we can observe and experience?
How about the spheres in this image? Which colors do you observe? And which colors are they really?
I’m not trying to be condescending, it’s just an example of how our senses do not necessarily display reality.
I think people are completely misunderstanding me. I am fully aware that optical illusions exist, I don’t see how that has any relevance to what I’m actually saying.
How do you know what colors they really are? You know by making more detailed observations than you might at first glance, for example, by zooming in. What exactly is that meant to demonstrate?
If a whole bunch of different people are all misunderstanding you in the same way at the same time then the obvious explanation is that you’re failing to communicate clearly
I encourage you to go to a honky tonk and try to explain Marxism to people and see if you still feel that way afterwards.
Refer to anything that I actually said and show how you could logically draw the conclusions you made about my positions from that.
I could absolutely explain Marxism to people at a honky tonk, wouldn’t be any harder than explaining Marxism to people in any other location. Already did that once, keep up
I don’t think either of us is getting anything out of this conversation. Let’s just leave it, ok?
Not sure what the point of this was then.
Finally, something we agree on.
We observe solid matter to not be composed mostly of empty space, that observation is verifiably incorrect. Our senses evolved to help us survive in our natural environment, being able to perceive empty space between/within atoms would do fuck all to help us survive seeing as how we can’t meaningfully interact with that empty space on our own. We invented devices to compensate for the limits of our senses and discovered that reality often differs drastically from our experience. To answer your question, it’s what we can prove.
Of course, our observations can show that other observations are incorrect. But that’s still relying on senses and observation. That doesn’t change the fact that reality consists of that which can be observed.
No, there are actually a lot of things we can measure and study that are unobservable with our senses, and a shitload of verifiable ways in which our senses either misinterpret reality or completely fail to perceive it
No, there are actually a lot of things we can measure and study that are unobservable with our senses
The way we measure things is by making them observable to our senses. I can’t see radiation, but I can read a Geiger counter. Radiation is, therefore, capable of being observed.
and a shitload of verifiable ways in which our senses either misinterpret reality or completely fail to perceive it
Again, everyone seems to be reading this as, “Actually, senses are perfect and incapable of being fooled.” Which I never said anything remotely similar to. No shit they can be fooled. This has zero relevance to the discussion.
Let me explain this again.
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Stars that leave the observable universe, by definition, cannot be observed. There is no way to verify or falsify any claims that are made about them.
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Physicalism states that matter continues to exist regardless of our ability to make observations about it.
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Therefore, physicalism claims that stars that leave the universe continue to exist, even though there is no way to verify or falsify this claim.
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Therefore, either physicalism is wrong, or verificationism, the idea that our claims need to be supported by evidence and be falsifiable, must be false.
I resolve this contradiction by sacrificing physicalism and saying that matter must be observable. That does not mean observable by the naked eye, or that our senses are somehow infallible, both of which are strawmen that have nothing whatsoever to anything I’ve said.
This argument is more of a philosophical argument than a scientific one. It reminds me of the classic “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, then does it make a sound?”. The purpose of this statement is to question whether the observer is a requirement for something to be real.
Ultimately, I think science doesn’t have a solid answer to this question. Quantum mechanics might suggest the answer to be “no”, since matter exists as a probability function until something measures (observes) it. This would suggest that a lack of observer would leave matter in an exotic state which would not allow such a definite process as falling in the woods. On the other hand, general relativity would suggest that the tree would make a sound because all matter affects the spacetime continuum whether an observer is there or not. This would suggest that the tree’s existence is independent of an observer.
Of course, the big issue in science right now is that we have failed to disprove both quantum mechanics and general relativity; but these two primary theories of science are incompatible with eachother. Ultimately, this means that this question regarding physicalism is presently unanswerable by science.
A Geiger counter doesn’t make radiation physically observable, it just gives you information about it, your senses are still 100% incapable of detecting it. You chose the exact words “What could possibly be considered more real than that which we can observe and experience?” and I responded by accurately pointing out that our senses are imperfect and our experiences frequently fail to accurately represent reality. You should leave the explaining to people who are better at it.
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To be clear, the observable universe is centered on Earth (technically, on you). For a being that is closer to the object that leaves your observable universe before it leaves theirs. It can still be observed by them. There is no objective point at which something becomes unobservable by the expansion of space.
Excepting maybe the big rip.
There is no objective point at which something becomes unobservable by the expansion of space.
Yes, but this is assuming an objective, universal frame of reference, and that’s not really a thing. For example, things like time dilution mean that there is no universal “clock.” There is an objective point at which things become unobservable to my (Earth’s) frame of reference.
It’s true that there could be some alien halfway across the observable universe that could observe the stars that have exited our observable universe. But, we could not observe the alien observing them, because information still can’t travel faster than the speed of light.
Yes, but this is assuming an objective, universal frame of reference, and that’s not really a thing.
Not really. Nothing I said has any dependence on a universal clock.
It’s true that there could be some alien halfway across the observable universe that could observe the stars that have exited our observable universe. But, we could not observe the alien observing them, because information still can’t travel faster than the speed of light.
Right and this is my point. Any philosophical theory that has anything to do with the observable universe is inherently self-centered. Not even Earth centered. Not even conscious-being centered. Literally self-centered. The observable universe is subjective. And so that puts it in the class of philosophies that insist that the universe arises from your own consciousness.
Which is not to invalidate it, but it’s not objective, and it has nothing to do with science.
I think this makes a lot of sense:
I think the framing of questions like this assumes that there are certain “physical” things that follow one intrinsic set of laws, and certain other things that follow a fundamentally different, incommensurate set of laws.
But we don’t actually have direct knowledge of any intrinsic laws, physical or otherwise—the best we have are a set of purely provisional laws we’ve made up and regularly revise on the basis of cumulative evidence. And our method for revising these provisional laws requires that any new evidence that contradicts a law, invalidates it—provisional laws must apply to everything without exception. If we give ourselves the out that contradictory evidence can be attributed to “non-physical” causes, we can never invalidate anything nor update our models. So dualistic models are inherently unscientific—not because they’re wrong, but because starting with such assumptions is incompatible with the scientific method.
