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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Joy of this, Joy of that
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2024 13:22:06 +0000
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 06/12/2024 17:18, D wrote:
>>
>> Its not that the real world is not at some level most usefully 
>> regarded as a fact, it is that the more subtle question is whether 
>> what we *perceive* is in fact the real world *at all*. Or simply a 
>> construction in our own minds that maps what is *actually* there 
>> (maybe a probabilistic entangled quantum soup) into a recognisable 
>> world of objects and events linked in space time by natural law and 
>> causality.
> 
> I'd say it is an obvious fact and not a subtle question if we look at the
> limited spectrum of our senses, and our limited compute resources. I 
> think in terms of reality, it can be seen as a spectrum of probabilities 
> about
> things in the world. Many clever people cling to this, and think it 
> means that no world exists, or that nothing can be proven.

Well the concept that no world exists is called Idealism.  It's all in 
the mind. Mine  alone [solipsism],  Gods [monism], or some other 
arrangement. It explains everything but predicts nothing. Like Islam. 
Inshallah. If it is Gods Will. Great, But not very *helpful*.

'Nothing can be proven' is in fact the case, and the whole problem and 
the disjunct between the mind of the ordinary person and that of 
philosophers.

Only deductive logic is provable, But all science and everyday life 
rests on inductive logic and inference.

On 'probable cause'.

My late mother was convinced that people were coming in to her house and 
hiding her car keys. So she started putting them in places no one, 
including herself, would think to look.

But with short term memory loss, she couldn't find them again, thus 
reinforcing the original belief.

The neighbours were a plausible if somewhat paranoid explanation. For 
someone in her condition.

It's the same with conspiracy theories. They are plausible to people 
without the background to reject them as extremely unlikely. How many 
people believed in WMD in Iraq?

  I reverse
> that, and say that any proposed alternatives to the real world should be 
> proven, and if they are not, the real world is a perfectly reasonable 
> default assumption.

The problem is that no alternatives can be *proven*,  and indeed while 
the 'real world' is a perfectly reasonable *assumption*, it starts to 
crack a little under the strain of modern physics. And indeed some 
psychology and other pressures. It cannot be 'proven' *either*.
It is as you correctly say a default *assumption*.


Left wing idealists would argue that the world is simply what you think 
it is and can be changed by 'magical thinking'. To them this is more 
than plausible, it is self evident *fact*.

My point in advocating the philosophy of Kant et al, is that it solves 
problems that mere materialism does not.

Neither can be proved correct, but in the context of modern  life 
'transcendental idealism' may prove to be (sic!) more *useful*.

It accounts for the subjective element of experience. It allows time to 
pass differently for different observers.

Pure materialism insist that time and space are immutable, they are 
there as the framework of all material existence. Einstein says that 
they are in fact relative to the observer.

Oh dear.


-- 
"Women actually are capable of being far more than the feminists will 
let them."