It's all in your head

[Philip Thrift]

On Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 2:37:52 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 3 Sep 2019, at 10:55, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

... Michael Forrest's paper [ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294721340_God_is_a_Vacuum_Fluctuation ] should have related something more naturally plausible:

cosmopsychism

   - https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life

At least we know consciousness exists in at least one place

(inside our skulls, though there are deniers)

    - https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

but no evidence of God has ever been observed.

It does not make sense to say that my consciousness is located in my skull, no more than to say that the number 2 is in my fridge, even if exactly two bottles of fresh water is there.

Then, how do you define God? I agree that there is no evidence for Santa Klaus, but I would say that with the original conception of God given by Plato (which is simply the fundamental truth, with the insight that it is above us), there are some evidence, ...making it for me the second thing close to the indubitable.

Now, I do think that there are no evidences for a primary physical universe. And there are evidence that it does not exist: mainly that it can be proven that that it is incompatible with Mechanism, for which we do have evidences, like the evidence for evolution, molecular biology, or the computability of all known Lagrangian or Hamiltonian (quantum or not).

Bruno

There is arguably arithmetical/mathematical language hidden in natural things, but it is certainly in brains (as a human invention).

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

To explain the brain I need to assume at the least elementary arithmetic, and it happens that when I assume this, I get all universal machine/number, and an explanation of where the belief in brain comes from, and why that belief is phenomenologically correct, but ontologically … only in the head of the universal machines.

Then, I claim only that science has not decided between Aristotle (what we see touch observe = reality) and Plato (what we see, touch, observe might be the shadow, or projection, or border, or symptom, … of something else).

The Church-Turing thesis rehabilitates Pythagorus, as:

- 1) all computations are emulated in arithmetic

- 2) a physics is recovered by the internal statistics on those computations.

So we can do the comparison. My main point is that we can have both primary-matter and mechanism, and that we can test this, and that quantum mechanics without collapse fits remarkably well with the prediction given by the universal machine/number in arithmetic.

No doubt is put on the physical reality, nor on the interest and importance of physics. On the contrary, as physics becomes a theorem in a deeper yet simpler theory, it is made more solid than empirical extrapolation. 

In soccer term:  Plato 1 Aristotle 0.

I don’t claim this is the last match, obviously an infinity of work has to be done. 

We wil never known for sure. That is the price when doing science. We can only evaluate the plausibility.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

It was the Hydroist Thales who was the 'principle' materialist (followed by the Atomists). Aristotle and Plato only confused things.

For Thales, this nature was a single material substance, water. Despite the more advanced terminology which Aristotle and Plato had created, Aristotle recorded the doctrines of Thales in terms which were available to Thales in the sixth century B.C.E., Aristotle made a definite statement, and presented it with confidence. It was only when Aristotle attempted to provide the reasons for the opinions that Thales held, and for the theories that he proposed, that he sometimes displayed caution.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/thales/

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

Thales could be said to have foreseen Aristotle’s primary matter, but there are many others. Aristotle made the point explicitly, although in his metaphysics suddenly he get the point of Plato, and get unclear after that, making Gerson believing that Aristotle was platonician. But in all his other books, Aristotle take Nature as granted, and Aristotle can be considered as the father of Logic, rationalism, empiricism, and naturalism/materialism (in the weak sense of belief in “primary matter” (a concept that he introduced explicitly, unlike Thales who was just doing physics, and proposing water as main constituent of matter, without explicitly telling that matter is existing “metaphysically” or ontologically”.

To be sure, I use “Aristotle” symbolically, to ease the metaphysical point. When you look at history from an historian of philosophy perspective, it is much more complex and confusing, but that sort of confusion is not really relevant for the main issue.

Bruno

@philipthrift 

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