On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 06:37:16AM -0700, 1Z wrote: > > You are playing on two meanings of "fact"; that something is not > known until time T does not mean it pops into existence at time > T. Truth is not existence.
Existence is a muddy concept. Truth (even relative truth) is certainly a possible model of existence. > > The evidence that reality exists independent of out minds > is just the evidence that other people's brains exist and > work in such-and-such a way. No scientific evidence can disprove > reality, including evidence about brains. > Reality, like existence, is a confused concept. No scientific evidence can disprove a muddy concept - the concept will simply morph to be compatible with the evidence as it is acquired. Brains are classical macroscopic objects - of about the same ontological status as my laptop and the table it is resting on. Our current best scientific theories relegate these phenomena to being emergent from microscopic phenomena, such as electrons, quarks and fields. Not fundamentally real at all. Of course, Bruno's ontology goes further, to suggest that electrons, quarks and fields are not fundamentally real either, but are rather emergent phenomena from arithmetic (or some other ontological subtrate capable of supporting universal computation). I don't think scientific evidence at present is capable of ruling this out. My own position is that whatever is really real, it is probably completely unknowable (like Kant's noumenon). We can only know about phenomena. This leads me to the radical proposal that perhaps all of phenomena can be explained by reference to the process of observation. Certainly some things are. If any phenomena turns out to be irreducible to observation, then this would afford us an opportunity to peel back the veil on the Noumenon. I'm not sure how one could establish beyond doubt that a particular phenomenon depended on something not related to observation, but I'll concede the possibility for the sake of argument. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
