On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:06:30PM +1300, LizR wrote: > Surely you need something to synchronise the perceptions of different > observers? And I assume external physical reality is the simplest > hypothesis for what that something is? > > Not that that ia an argument in its favour, I suppose (doesn't make > testable predictions different from other ontologies). I can't offhand > think of an experiment that would definitively show there is an > external material reality. (Kicking a stone ... which causes some > virtual photons to be exchanged between particles that may be > mathematical objects, some sort of Poincare group thing perhaps... and > is in any case "only" a series of sense impression... etc) >
I would agree that an objective external physical reality is the simplest explanation of the anthropic principle, and that idealist theories have some catching up to do. This problem is described in Theory of Nothing (p82, p164, p183). However, such objectivist ontologies have problems of their own, such as the incompatibility with COMP that Bruno uncovered. On the whole, idealism tends to fair better than physicalism over a range of topics, just not in the particular case of the Anthropic Principle. There seems to me to be a big confusion between intersubjectivity and objectivity in general. Most of the evidence presented in favour of objectivity is actually evidence in favour of intersubjectivity. The confusion is probably because as far as evolution is concerned, they are the one and same. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
