Hi Stephen P. King
Agreed, the constant other observer needed to
maintain the world when I close my eyes need not be God,
But it has to be something like God. Omnipresent, for example.
Plato called it the One.
Nothing would work without physical laws, and these cannot be directly
perceived.
Gravity, for example, cannot be perceived. Force also cannot be perceived,
only its effects. And time and space cannot be observed. cannot
be directly perceived. And do I fall on the floor when I turn out the lights
at night because it is too dark to see my bed ? The list of counterfactuals
goes on and on.
So I say that, whatever the cause, Berkeley's theory is just plain silly.
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Stephen P. King
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2013-01-22, 08:39:30
Subject: Re: Is there an aether ?
On 1/22/2013 7:22 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
If you knew more about the history of philsophy,
you'd know that Berkeley finally had to admit that the world out
there is real prior to our individual observation because
it is all observed by God.
Hi Roger,
This is a good example of the problem that the notion of God has; it server
only to act as an impartial observer "so that everything is real". When we
consider large numbers of observers that can communicate with each other
meaningfully, we obtain a means to define 'reality' and have no need for the
excess hypothesis of God as observer. God's role becomes even less meaningful
when we see that the point of view of such an entity cannot be transformed into
that of a real observer that we can communicate with, as it is somehow special.
We learn from GR and QM that there are neither preferred reference frames or
observational points of view nor measurement basis. This pretty much makes the
God hypothesis irrelevant.
Why people would seek to rehabilitate it to play the same role again for
mathematics puzzles me!
--
Onward!
Stephen
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