Objectivity

hmmm, that’s an interesting way to put it. i see what your getting at, i think.

let me look more closely at this:

okay, not to detract from what was said in the first quote - i don’t think the two quotes are working together like you think - let me suggest that we’re using the concept ‘experience’ in an inappropriate way. if we were to simplify your argument and just say that all that exists is ‘information’, we’d not need to qualify that proof with the fact that information can be experienced. most eliminative materialists call the notion of ‘qualia’ nonsensical; that ‘experience’ does not add an additional substance to existence and does not change the nature of the substance that does exist (in the form of information). so really the relationship we’re talking about between things that ‘have affectance’ (james) is one of physical interaction, not ‘experience’. that is to say, we add nothing to the interaction between things when we call such interaction ‘experience’… as ‘experience’ isn’t in space/time like the information and its various activities. so to say that something doesn’t exist until/unless it is experienced is to say that it has no physical reality until/unless the property of ‘qualia’ is added to the nature of its activity as information. of course, the physical interaction between humans and particles and anything else that exists can be explained in terms of movement (radiation), but we need not call a particular causal interaction between entities an ‘experience’.

another disputation to that argument is that we are anthropomophizing (pathetic fallacy) the concept of ‘experience’ by using it to describe behaviors of things that dont share our language, and therefore can’t confirm they can experience. it’s then only through a rather shaky analogy that we change the usual meaning of the word ‘experience’ and say that an electron is ‘experiencing’ its relationship to a nucleus in the same way joe experiences a conversation with bob. but again, if we reduce the meaning of ‘experience’ down to simply ‘physically interacting’, then all the information in the universe exists regardless of whether or not the qualia of it can be produced in experience.

so by ‘objective’ we can only mean the state of things with the exemption of experience as a qualifier. using the concept of ‘experience’ in the way you use it first divides this information into two ontologically distinct substances - one of the physical and the other is the immaterial ‘qualia’ (the perception) that is produced when a particular kind of interaction we call ‘experience’ exists between entities… and then it substantiates the existence of one with the other.

but the first quote i can get down with. if we hypothesize everything that exists as set x, there is nothing set x can be relative to, nothing it can be affected by, nothing that’s outside of it. it wouldn’t be interacting with anything. but to say it can’t exist unless it is interacting with or affecting something, doesn’t seem to follow. we simply have a kind of parmenidian block of substance that can’t not exist. our definition of ‘objective’ in this case would only mean; the necessity to exist without any qualification. it’s the properties of this existing block that gives rise to inquires about ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ kinds of knowledge about it… but it doesn’t rely on its properties being ‘known’ to continue having to exist.

All those are subjective concepts regardless of semantics.

you
grow
tree
root
apple
warm
your
dirt
fire
sustained
eating

All those concepts have to be defined subjectively.

I’ve cloned twigs before. Probably could do it with leaves.

Well I eat dirt, air, and sunlight in the form of an apple. It depends what you mean by “eat”. Or what you mean by “root”: the apple is not part of the root? And I’ve seen a guy eat a bicycle before.

Eventually you’ll find one where I can’t worm my way out and then I’ll simply say that wasn’t what I was on about in the first place. Subjectivity isn’t necessarily mere opinions, but how one thing relates to another thing. A charged particle is subject to electromagnetic fields. Neither the particle nor the field exists objectively, but only in relation to each other and subject to the means they have for relating.

The positive charge doesn’t exist on its own; it’s not objective. The positive charge exists only in relation to a negative charge. Then you’ll say the relationship is objective. Is it? Can we have electromagnetic interactions without the particles? What is energy without matter and what is matter without energy? There is no conceivable absolute.

Next you might claim what you meant was that there are physical laws that cannot be broken, but there you’d be wrong too. There are no laws, but just observed regularities. Michio Kaku gives his phd students the problem of calculating the probability that they will suddenly vanish and wind-up on the planet Mars. It’s very much possible for a cold object to make a hot object hotter. It’s possible that you could fall through the floor one day. It’s possible that gravity could suddenly stop working. Anything is possible and there is nothing saying it’s not. The “law” terminology in science is a holdover from religion.

No laws eh?

How about this:

You are a subset of existence. If YOU ever get completely destroyed before you were born, you wouldn’t be here right now. This is proof that you weren’t unexisted from the past. If anyone travelled to the future to undo your entire existence, YOU would not be here right now. YOU know for a fact that YOU are never unexisted.

That’s a law.

You’re also simply stating that otherness needs to exist in order for existence to exist, which is true, and is a disproof of god, that’s another law.

Non existence is the absence of all existents, the reason we exist is because absolute nothingness is defined as: isn’t — this is the opposite of isn’t, thus why existence exists instead of not existing. Another law.

I can go on…

If all that exists is information, then what is the information about? If the information is about how to do X, then X must not be in the set “all that exists”, but you stipulated all that exists is information, so X must be in the set “all that exists.” What good is information without something on which to apply that information? What use is a gardening book without a garden? If there were no gardens, then the information would not be information. Energy needs matter to exert itself on, and matter needs energy to assert itself. Vibrating electrons cause electromagnetic radiation, but the electrons are themselves also energy.

There is no way to make logical statements about all things.

If everything that exists is god, then how does god experience himself as god if there were not something that’s not god?

If all things were moving in a certain direction, then how could you know unless there be one thing that is not moving? But there can’t be anything not moving because it was stipulated that all things are moving.

Right. The only refuge is to posit a “spirit” bestowed from outside the universe that qualifies experience as something more than an artifact of physical interaction.

The word “experience” contains connotations that only serve to confuse. Atoms experience their world, molecules experience their world, proteins experience their world, cells experience their world, organisms experience their world and all of them do it in accordance with the means they have to experience what there is. Dark matter, for instance, has no capability to interact with light since it contains no charge. Dark matter only exists in terms of gravity, but if it were void of that, could it be said to exist? Could there be a thing that doesn’t interact with anything? And that’s how James discovered his affectance ontology.

It follows if the axiom is true: that which has no affect does not exist. Is the axiom false? Can things exist outside of any context?

That seems correct.

Something exists, but it cannot step outside itself to know what it is. God/the universe cannot be an object of his own knowledge. An eye can’t see itself; a knife can’t cut itself; teeth can’t chew themselves.

Yes, it’s a law

If I were to ever be destroyed before I was born then I would have never existed and none of these posts would have existed. Not only would I not be here right now, but I would have never been here.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. How does one travel to the future to arrive at the past in order to destroy me?

Not necessarily. If we traveled to the past, we would have no consciousness of it; it would be simply playing your life out in reverse and then stopping only to play it out forward and it would seem like normal everyday life. You’re thinking of traveling into the past as if it were the future for you, but that’s not the past.

And yet T has no other, yet exists.

If law #1 says there can be no self without other,
And if law #2 says there can be no other (nonexistence to be the context of existence)
Then the laws conflict.

There is something in the middle of nothing because we can’t have something without nothing. But nothing also isn’t a thing by definition.

Go ahead.

In case people haven’t figured out yet on ILP, I’m horrible with the quote function.

So anyhow.

If someone travelled to your exact past and killed one of your parents, you wouldn’t be here. This, as a law, is proof that you never were or never will be unexisted… 0% probability.

Now, since YOU are a subset of existence, if YOU are ever destroyed as a continuity of consciousness, and your continuity of consciousness is a superset of your existence, YOU couldn’t be here now. Meaning, you can never be unexisted by any means in the future as well.

So… that’s a law.

God doesn’t exist. God is defined as omnipresent, you need to be omnipresent in order to be omnipotent and omniscient. If god is omnipresent, it is impossible to generate the concept of “outside of me”, this would make god point left when the sun was setting to the right and say, “look at the pretty sunset”, because god wouldn’t know that left was outside of right.

Non existence : isn’t … it’s not a thing with which to we can state existence is different than it. Existence is defined by other existents, not non existence.

Let’s straighten these out first

I don’t mind.

Watts said he was the evil gleam in his father’s eye, so if you had killed his parents, he would have grown out of the universe in some other way.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNd6rH2GGz8[/youtube]

Me as a consciousness is a character expressed as a pattern by the universe itself. The experiencer precedes the consciousness. Consciousness is just memory, but experience doesn’t require memory to experience. Memories are lost, but experience goes on.

I don’t know what the law insists be true; there is only what is. You say if we go into the past and do x y and z, then this conclusion must happen, but that’s just what happens to happen and there is no law in the background orchestrating it; it’s just subject to what is. The universe is probabilistic and fundamentally causeless.

The universe is omnipresent and has nothing outside of it, how is that different?

I disagree because if there were nothing but something, then something would be ubiquitous and have no contrast, so it wouldn’t exist. Something requires nothing in which to exist.

Instinct is memory … there is no experiencer, even if it’s a tree, that doesn’t at least have instinct built into it. I don’t believe (because of this) in your hypothesis of the non conscious experiencer.

The law works through a few propositions using the law of contradiction to show that it is a governing principle to all existents, regardless of opposing positions. There’s even a further law that opposing positions to immutable laws are used as conspicuous consumption for attention … so even these types are explained through natural law.

The universe is fractured, it is not omnipresent, one of the ways I’ve described this, is to imagine an infinity processing itself, not as a sentient being, but more like old computers. What happens when it’s omnipresent in infinity? An error! BUT! The beauty of this error is that it forces motion to occur, and thus existence to exist, as it always has. Omnipresence is still a function, self aware or not, and that function errors.

Something else is not the same as nothing.

True but it’s not conscious memory.

Well if you put lines between life and nonlife then you have a tough problem to solve.

None of that is law. Things can be in two places at once, go through walls, go back in time… all sorts of absurd things happen. And what about causeless events?

Infinity doesn’t exist but where infinity occurs, it’s evidence that the universe is looking at itself.

No-thing is lack of things, but is also context for something.

I’m going to let my former posts stand on their own, as this wasn’t really a reply to them.

If you reflect harder on the above, you will note the above ‘points’ are only valid as long as there are humans [DNA wise].

Therefore whatever the ‘objective reality’ that YOU claimed with other humans on the like, the fundamental basis of this ‘objective reality’ is still subjective, i.e. intersubjective.
There is no way humans can arrive at the above cognition [conclusion] without being humans individually and collectively grounded on its evolution.

Note Wittgenstein’s;
'Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’
To know what is going on after the human species is exterminated or extinct is an impossibility, thus “whereof one cannot speak thereof” or thenoff, “one MUST be silent.”
If one were to speak about it then it has to be qualified to the speaker[s] subjectively and intersubjectively.

Thus absolute objective reality is an impossibility.
The only objective reality is a subjective or inter-subjective one.

No! we are not pushing reality-as-it-is into Bekerley’s Subjective Idealism which require a God’s mind to sustain it.

Our focus is on the subject engaged in reality i.e. within Empirical Realism, btw, not philosophical realism.

Precisely! it is because the real nature of things, i.e. its absolute objectivity is ontological that Science [which is not Philosophy] has to make as assumption of it so that it can proceed to explore empirically whatever is on hand.

It is because objective reality is ontological that Science need to make an assumption of it.

Science has to assume there is something out there external to the subject that can be studied.
Philosophy for eons had raise issues, perhaps there is “nothing” [philosophically not empirically] at all out there.

Note Russell’s

So the point is we humans cannot be so certain as if we are omniscient. Thus whatever is the most objective conclusion we can come up with, it has to be grounded subjectively and intersubjectively.

Kant had proven Plato’s forms were merely ungrounded illusions. Note,

Obviously Plato was highly intelligent but at the most refined level of philosophy, his mistake on the Universals and Forms, in principle, is the same as the following;
it is equivalent to a schizo claiming the gnomes in his garden are real because those gnomes has a conversation with him, i.e. ungrounded without support but merely in his mind.

Theistic religions are based on a necessary illusion but not non-theistic religions like Buddhism which are more realistic and not grounded on an ultimate illusion.

I believe ALL religions has their optimal pros and cons relative to time, but ALL religions [organized] must be weaned off when their shelf life [cons exceeded pros] has expired [soon will be] with priority on theistic religions.

We humans created them, but they are not arbitrary… it is a utility driven project.

You’re making my point… that’s an ad hoc utility, winning a random internet debate. However the moment you have to go live your daily life, you’ll revert back to the most practical conception of the world available to you… the reason you WILL do this is because there is an objective reality that doesn’t give a damn about your whims and wants, you know it because you’ve suffered disappointment…

You say “anything is possible and there is nothing saying it’s not.” that’s fascinating… prove it

I can only know what’s possible by what has been demonstrated… I can’t say that it’s possible for gravity to suddenly stop working, I’ve never seen that happen.
I don’t have special knowledge about the nature of reality so as to know what is and isn’t possible unless I have been shown… so how did you come by this knowledge?

See the problem you’re expressing is a real one, in that there are nearly infinite ways in which we can categorize and conceive the world.
And yes it takes religion to believe that objective reality is shaped in the image of ideas so as to expect there to be a “true” conception…

Reality might not conform to any concept… but our concepts can conform to reality, their utility is a measure of their conformity.
That is a means by which we may approach reality… even if there is no “true” conception to be had, there necessarily are more useful ones, and by extension perfect conceptions.

All of our modern science is rooted in this basic recognition… paradigms that are subject to change, models that are subject to revision, based entirely on their utility in providing us predictive power.

A scientific LAW is no different to a mathematical one, in that they are foundational to that particular framework or conception of the world.
You cannot assume gravity only works SOME of the time, yet maintain all the rest of modern physics… you would have to re-imagine physics from the ground up with this new conception of gravity.
That is not to say it can’t be done, only that it would have to be competitive if not superior to modern physics in terms of predictive power…

Now you can rattle on about gravity glitching out randomly being a real possibility rather than an imagined one…
But I won’t be bolting down everything in my house for fear of them randomly floating away, and I suspect neither will you…

So, the post where I basically quit, I saw periphery answers that would require a huge response, and I just wasn’t in the mood.

One thing that can be said about objectivity, is that it’s objective that everything is subjective, using the same definition that objectivity is: it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, it’s still true. Even the rabid subjectivist is by their own fault, an objectivist.

But I wanted to return to serendippers trick here.

Everything is interconnected, so you can’t draw boundaries … actually, I agree with this, but that’s now how reality is constructed … the only way that I see to make categories out of the muck, the amorphous blob of interconectedness is through the existence of eternal forms outside this dimension.

It’s well known in some circles that the human body contains at least some molecules of every conceivable element. According to serendipper, I am gold, or rather, gold doesn’t stop outside of me. The serious flaw in this has been noted by others in this thread about the absolute interconectivity, rather than the fragmentation that I propose, is that when (and that’s not even possible, as I explained earlier) serendipper ceases to exist, gold ceases to exist. If gold doesn’t cease to exist after serendipper dies, then there is a proven objectivity to gold. The question is, does serendipper truly believe that he’s interconnected with everything, rather than a fractured being in a fractured cosmos?

Now, I stated earlier, that if serendippers continuity of consciousness ever dies in the future, that his present state is a subset of that continuity of consciousness, and that he couldn’t exist now, if it was ever destroyed in the future.

Continuity of consciousness in an objective reality is: “I was 5 years old when I learned to tie my shoes” from an subjectivist point of view it’s " the universe learned to tie its shoes when it was 5 years old" get it?

Now there was a section that serendipper scoffed at where I explained the phenomenon of perceptual acuity and medians in order the determine separateness from the amorphous blob using eternal forms.

I’ll just leave it there for now.

Edit: Edited significantly since first draft posted

Information is like energy because it cannot be destroyed

Any so called act of destruction is simply the rearranging of atoms into some other form
So what you call destruction is just tranformation from one state of matter into another

If information could truly get destroyed then ultimately so too would the Universe but it isnt actually possible
For there will still be something even when the Universe reaches a maximum state of entropy with heat death

If information can’t be retrieved, then, yes, it is destroyed. So that means that there is an eternal access to all information in order for its retrieval.

This is more on topic to the thread though and I don’t want it to get buried: viewtopic.php?p=2722710#p2722710

A “utility driven project” is arbitrary and subject to the utility.

You missed the point. If I suffer disappointment, it’s the same supposed “objective” reality that positive attracts negative, correct? Well that’s actually “popular subjectivity” where it’s merely coincidental that every positive attracts negative subject to the mechanism they have for interaction because there is neither a such thing as “objective positive” nor “objective negative” nor “objective electro-mechanical interaction”.

You’re confusing subjectivity with opinion.

Subjectivity is where the subject determines what the object is just as much as the object itself determines itself, and vice versa.
Objectivity is the object existing independent of any subject.

Can I suffer disappointment if I don’t exist as a subject in relation to a place in which to suffer disappointment? Objectivity states there could be disappointment in absence of subjects to experience it, which is absurd. Objectivity states that murder is wrong even if no beings exist in the universe. Objectivity doesn’t depend on anything.

Objectivity states the sun would give light even if nothing else existed in the universe, and that’s as absurd as a battery only having one terminal. The sun only gives light because there is something with capability to receive it just like a battery supplies electricity because there is an opposite pole with capability to receive it. If the subject lost its capability to receive light, then the sun could no longer give it. So what the object is, is determined by what the subject is. That’s subjectivity.

Why should I have to prove an absence of existence? If you’re positing there’s an objective and absolute law regulating all behavior, then prove it exists. So far the experimental evidence is contrary to that idea and I can’t see the prudence in jumping to the conclusion that the speed of light will be the same tomorrow as if governed by a law. That doesn’t seem scientific to me. Perhaps the speed of light is variable en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light

If you don’t know what causes gravity, how can you draw any conclusions about its further existence? Why jump to conclusions and decree gravity a law? Probably because science grew out of religion.

Predictive power is a function of probability rather than certainty. We can say it’s “essentially certain” for all practical purposes, but for philosophical discussion concerning the nature of reality, absolutely anything is possible regardless how infinitesimally small the chance. So, no, we won’t bolt our furniture down, but we also can’t claim gravity is objective.

Math is asserted into existence by authority independent of reality. Math isn’t an observed phenomenon, but is defined to be objective and true regardless if subjects exist.

Okay, you tell them this. Then from conflicting perspectives come arguments that insist not only is this not true, but it can’t be true because they have already discovered the objective truth. Their own of course.

The bottom line [if only mine] is that you can’t possibly know for certain if, in the context of existence itself, there is or is not an objective morality. Rooted in either God or reason.

Or, if human interactions [and arguments] are ever in sync with a wholly determined universe, than nothing is not objectively true.

The irony then being that just as with those who insist that their own moral narrative reflects the objective truth, you insist that there is no objective moral truth.

In other words, what you all share in common is what I construe to be the objectivist mentality.

Or [perhaps] as Wittgenstein put it: ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’.

So, what is it that we cannot speak of because we have no capacity to grasp in its entirety? Well, sure, different things for different people.

But surely the very nature of “objectivity” itself is one of them.

And yet not contemplating it [and speaking of it] is not likely to be an option for folks like us.

And this explains what exactly in regard to any particular relationship we wish to grasp or speak of objectively?

Everything is directly / indirectly connected to everything else within the Universe. Death of biological organisms is merely transformation or change. When some
thing dies the atoms it is made from are simply rearranged into another form. Atoms and sub atomic particles have cosmic lifespans greater than the bodies made from them. And some elements have half lives greater than the actual age of the Universe. All a human being is is a collection of atoms that came from dead stars millions of years before they were born and will carry on existing millions of years after they die

When stars can no longer form no new atoms can be produced and this will the point at which the Universe dies. But that will be trillions of years from now. But even then there will be something rather than nothing because absolute nothing cannot persist indefinitely [ only infinitesimally ] A human beings existence in such a time frame is completely and utterly insignificant and does not matter in the slightest - not even remotely

There is no such thing as eternal forms and whenever you are asked for evidence of them you consistently fail to produce any
And there is also no such thing as outside the Universe because the Universe by definition is all there is - there is nothing else