(Jan 9, 2023 09:35 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [...] So right now, is it true there’s only one universe? Unobserved reality?
The "world" of
scientific realism is and will continue to be as weird as current and future physics make it (i.e., that's an evolving story). The latter is never going to be the reality that our brains depict us as environmentally occupying (i.e., classic phenomenal substances cognitively discriminated into ground, trees, rocks, etc -- instead of, say, particle excitations occurring in 24 quantum fields).
All the brain cares about is producing a representation according to its own evolutionary carved and installed guidelines, that serves practical purposes of survival.
The "cat" in the non-represented "world" can be in as many different states simultaneously or be co-existing in as many parallel universes as the eggheads of today or tomorrow want it to be. Just as long as the brain gets to depict its single cat abiding in a definite context.
Where brains don't exist at all -- like the past of billions of years ago or on Pluto, there obviously are no representations of non-represented existence. Just like when a person dies, the manifestations of sight, hearing, feeling, etc cease. There's not even blankness, since that would still be a manifestation and psychological conception of a state, an appearance.[1]
Accordingly, the non-represented world exists in its usual manner under those circumstances, that is devoid of the manifestations of mind. IOW, physicists can populate that non-conscious version of the world with "invisible" abstract cats that are both dead and alive or countless "invisible" universes or whatever roads their mathematical dictates and whims take them down.
Erwin Schrödinger:
The [phenomenal] world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --
"What is Life? Mind and Matter"
- - - footnote - - -
[1] Let's not splinter off into afterlife speculations, Ernst Mach's panphenomenalism, idealism, etc -- since we know very well that either contemporary science or materialist philosophy doesn't brook such.
Jan 10, 2023 03:07 AM
