On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:31:16AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: > Ghibbsa and Russell, > > There can be absolutely no doubt of an external reality independent of > humans. As I said, all of common sense, and all of science makes this > fundamental assumption. >
It might be common sense, but I don't see "all of science" making this assumption. Science usually does not need to make this assumption. > We have eyes, and other sense organs, so we can sense that external > reality. Do you deny we have eyes? If not, then what are they for? > > We have hands so we can manipulate that external reality. Do you deny we > have hands? If not then what are they for? > > We have legs so we can move around within that external reality. Do you > deny we have legs? If not then what are they for? > These are all phenomena, which need to be consistent with our qualia by the Anthropic Principle > Evolution assumes an external environment that we survive within by > adapting to. Do you deny evolution? Not at all. It is the only way to generate complex worlds from the high measure simple ones. > > Houses are constructed so we can live within these places in an external > reality. Do you deny the existence of houses? If not then what are they for? > > We wear clothes so as not to freeze when the external environment becomes > too cold. Do you deny clothes, environmental temperature? > > All of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, sociology and every science > assumes an external reality in which humans exist. Do you deny all of > science? Of course not. I just deny that assuming an external reality is a useful thing to do in science. Of course scientists (the practitioners) probably do this often, just as everyday people do - evolution would have programmed us that way. But for just about all of science, it doesn't matter whether you think there is a reality out there you're describing, or whether it is just some shared hallucination. All that matters is the phenomena. How it is described, and how productive the theories are for generating new descriptions and predictions of it. > > We were all born from our mothers who are thereafter part of our external > realities. Do you deny human reproduction? Do you deny you had a mother? > > This is like arguing with the inhabitants of an asylum! > None of what you mentioned above _requires_ an external reality. It may seem exasperating to you, but it just aint so. All that is required is for phenomena to be be self-consistent, and for our own conscious entities to be embedded within that self-consistent phenomena. Why that should be, I just don't know. But I would expect that cognitive science reason will surface sooner or later. > OF COURSE when we become unconscious our INTERNAL MODEL of external reality > disappears, but to assume that means that external reality itself then > disappears is insane. > > > So the question is not whether there is an external reality, but what is > its nature. It is easy to show that the true nature of external reality is > not the world our minds tell us we live within, but pure abstract > computational information. > No, the question is what is phenomena, and what is its nature. That's what counts, ultimately. All else is theories, speculations, stories. Some more usful than others. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
