Posted on 04/04/2005 9:07:44 PM PDT by Ronzo
My previous post was inspired by an old episode of Police Story from years ago (I realize there are adults who have been born since that old series was on TV; yikes!) In this episode a young cop is married to a hippie philosophy major, and as time goes along they have less and less in common. Finally, he comes in from a particularly horrifying crime scene to find her discussing this particular conundrum with her other college friends, and as a put-down they ask him "if the tree falls ...." to which he replies "if a girl is beaten to death in the forest, and there is no one there to hear her scream, is she really dead" (and from the look on his wife's face we can imagine their marriage is pretty much over).
In any case, it pays to keep in mind that events exist outside your ability to perceive them.
If there is no "listener" then there is no sound. Sound is only given substance by a listener who can perceive sound.
This is true. To look at it another way, if there is an event that you wish to monitor, you must find a way to sense the event. If the event makes some physical change, we can devise an instrument that will sense that change, and translate it into a form that our eye and brain can recognize. We can devise a way for the shock wave to generate an electronic signal that will be displayed on my monitor as a sine wave or a flashing red icon. If there is no instrument to sense the event, and translate it into an electronic signal, then there will be no graphic display. But the tree did fall, and the shock wave that our instrument captured or (failed to capture) did occur.
it is simply impossible for a single person to know of everything that exists. Nor is it possible for mankind, collectively, to know of everything that exists, and I'm speaking of just those things that are possible to detect given our limitations.
That would be a truism.
Imagine a non-conscious being that is completely impossible to perceive with our senses, could such a being exist? The answer is no.
I don’t think my existence is contingent on your ability to see me, and atoms didn’t spring into existence in this past century. I might seem deliberately obtuse here, but it isn’t deliberate (I am obtuse, as my friends will attest), but I will reject this point. Those things that exist, existed prior to and independently of my ability to instrument them.
If there is no conscious rational being to perceive a non-conscious being, then it is not possible for that being to exist, it is a logical contradiction.
No.
And if we are using our rational consciousness to perceive a non-conscious being, then that being is being perceived, if only in our mind's eye.
Imagine the shock to the space-time-continuum that must occur each and every time we blink.
The only way such a universe can exist is if there is a rational, conscious being that can perceive it--if only through thinking--that such a thing exists!
No.
the earth, the sun, and even the stars never existed before the first conscious, rational human being! They literally did not exist. Why couldn't they exist before the first human? Because existence and consciousness are bound together, and cannot be logically separated.
This is what happens when you shoot long range with open sights. A very tiny error in your sight picture can lead to a man-sized error at 300 yards, and a Volkswagen sized error at a thousand yards. Existence and consciousness are not bound together. Only your existence and your consciousness are bound together.
The rock does not exist because I saw it. It moved because I kicked it, but it existed whether or not I was ever born.
I am also a platonist, I suppose, I believe that there are principles by which this universe is designed. But those principles and the universe designed by them exist separately from my ability to draw breath or conceptualize them.
Tag, you're it.
Well, the correct answer is "no." Since "sound" is only possible given the following conditions:
The writer begins with the above axiom, as if it were a universal Truth; whereas, it is actually only a tenet (Article Of Faith) within his philosophy/religion.
But there is something we can be sure of: if we perceive that a being exists, it exists,
Dreams, hallucinations, products of the human imagination: all of these can cause us to perceive “beings” which have no counterpart in objective reality.
The only way we can know, for sure, that something exists is through our sense perceptions.
Hallucinations, magician’s tricks, etc.
This piece may be a useful tool for showing those who are mired in Platonism that extra-temporal, extra-material intelligences exist, but it leaves them open to reverence (or worship) spiritual entities which pretend to be, but are not, those beings: which are, in truth, the triune God of the Bible, and His angels.
The initial axiom is a pile of sand, upon which it is unsafe to build a useful edifice.
DG
The most important point to remember is this: consciousness and existence are inseparable, but since our knowledge as human beings of all that exists is very limited, then there must be other beings who are perfect in knowledge, and who act as the means by which our universe exists.
If saying it made it so, you'd be correct. Alas, it doesn't.
Thanks for pinging me.
Yes, but is it green?
As a Flatlander, my first "clue" that space/time is not 2 dimensional - is when the angles of the triangle don't add up to 180.
We, of course, are those flatlanders.
And we are prejudiced because of our limitations. For instance, it is the inability to observe (vision/mind) additional dimensions which causes the presumption that the additional dimensions are compactified strings (Kaluza-Klein theory). Some theorists however do consider the possibility of higher dimensional dynamics. In these calculations, matter of all kinds arise in four dimensions as a result of vacuum in higher dimensionality.
Some physicists - such as Lisa Randall as I recall - also suggest that the reason gravity is so small by comparison to the other fields is that it is interdimensional. Following this open string theory - positive gravity is a space/time indentation and thus negative gravity would be a space/time "outdent" (which curiously corresponds to the acceleration of the inflation of the universe, i.e. dark energy).
Other physicists, such as Cumrun Vafa - suggest that there must be an extra temporal dimension which unifies the various string theories. Again, an extra dimension of time would go a long way to explain non-locality and superposition - but it is vigorously resisted because it would also do injury to physical causality (time being a plane instead of a line).
At bottom, our "vision" into such things is computational - like the Flatlanders in your story who discover their world is not two dimensional after all when they add up the angles on the triangle and it is not equal to 180 degrees.
It seems clear that spatio-temporal existence does not and cannot define “all that there is.” And yet all spatio-temporal existents seem to possess some form of consciousness, be it simple sentience or awareness, to self-awareness, all the way up to self-consciousness – which is generally thought to be the exclusive property of the existents at the very “top” of the hierarchy of being, that is, of man. For if being itself is ultimately conscious – and preeminently so – then its manifested existents will also have a form of consciousness, which enables us to see in 4D the image or likeness of ultimate reality. But what we see is not ultimate reality itself, merely a reflection of/participation in it.
If existence is “restricted” in the spatio-temporal sense, then the types of insight rational existents can have into the nature of universal being, or truth, will be correspondingly restricted. The terms being and truth are synonymous in both the classical and Christian traditions, each of which in their own way recognizes that being is divine – infinite, eternal -- and existence mortal – finite, contingent. This would especially be the case if perception is imagined to be the primary (some might say exclusive) tool of any such investigation. For direct perception deals with physically-manifested bodies only.
Yet it appears the human mind can apprehend realities that are not physically-manifested bodies, realities that transcend our 4D forms/categories. I imagine the reason for this is the self-conscious mind (operating within the existential realm) has extension in a dimension or dimensions that surpass the 4D of common experience. That is, mind can intelligibly, reasonably access the realm of being that transcends the 4D block. Mind has timeless, transcendent dimension and thus extension; similarly, existence has timeless, transcendent dimension and extension – which is called infinite being.
I am beginning to suspect that people need to think in categories/dimensions outside of 4D to come up with even a rough understanding of the world and our place in it. It seems the materialists/metaphysical naturalists want to confine their investigations to the “tip of the iceberg,” so to speak – the visible, i.e., material part of nature only. They refuse to recognize that the very structure of reality may come from depths that the eye can never perceive. (Though it seems the mind can.) Commonly when people say “perception,” what they inevitably mean is “sense perception,” or mental processing of data coming in from the outside (material) world. But it seems clear to me that the source of order/organization in the material world and of the Universe is absolutely undetectable to sense perception.
That’s part of the problem of the “observer”: There is always much more going on than he can physically observe, even within the confines of 4D spacetime alone, let alone its extension in other space/time dimensions. Of course, another key sense of “observer” is the quantum physical one, and it’s a duzey, too: the observer “decides” what to observe; and this is what causes “state vector collapse,” or the reduction of an astronomically large probability distribution of all possible events to one single outcome. I see similar transactions occurring in the macroworld, summed up in statements such as “the thinker intends the object of his thought” (i.e., decides what he will think about, leaving all other possibilities aside at the time).
Your “tree in the forest” example suggests that, for some people, if there is no one to perceive the tree crashing down, then it’s still standing up. Which is to say that if an observer wasn’t there, then the event didn’t happen. Yet it seems the most we can really say about this is, if an observer wasn’t present, there would be no way for us to learn about the supposed happenstance, or to validate it. To say more than that would be to make all of phenomenal reality dependent for its existence on a consciousness “exterior” to itself, and a human one at that. Yet the human observer is never really “external” to that which he perceives. That is an illusion, “albeit a persistent one,” as Einstein might say. For human existence is “internal” to the world process, a part of it.
And so I like the way George Berkeley, the Irish empiricist, handled this problem: He said that all the existents in the universe are what they are because God is observing them. If God were to withdraw his constant observation/perception of his creation, then immediately it would cease to exist. All of reality would instantly fall apart, dissolving into the nothingness from which it originally arose. I hear resonances to Sir Isaac Newton’s sensorium Dei in Bishop Berkeley’s insight here.
Well, so much for my maunderings. Thank you ever so much, Ronzo, for your penetrating and provocative essay!
Thanks for the ping!
BTW, I figured out in 5th grade that only I exist and everyone else is just a figment of my imagination.
No offense...
Oooooops!
No offense...
None taken, RobRoy. :^)
Dinosaurs leave fossil tracks too, even no one made plaster casts at the time. Fossil wind patterns can be seen at Canyon de Chelly (which has an interesting pronunciation.) Fossil bark beetle tracks in petrified wood is amusing as I just had to remove 13 piñons due to beetle damage (fortunately FEMA paid and put a restriction on planting more); seems like beetles have been eating bark for a long time.
PING!
Just thought you'd like to see that someone is boldly going where we have already transcended before.
"The initial axiom is a pile of sand, upon which it is unsafe to build a useful edifice."
I believe you have it. Sound is a physical phenomenon and the sounds made by non animate objects are independent of animate objects. A rock roling down a hill on Mars is making a sound whether we are there to hear it or not.
As to whether consciousness and existence are separable, consider brain dead, but otherwise "alive" people - a topic related to certain recent news. A brain dead person that is still biologically alive, exists, without consciousness.
Then there are so many organisms that have no way of being conscious such as bacteria, but they certainly do exist (I know BB and AG may not agree).
If one were to say that Man loses his humanity when he loses his consciousness, I might buy that.
Perhaps the biblical among us will remember why Peter was chosen to build Christ's church. DG - you are right, the foundation for this whole thing in not only rotten, I don't think it actually exists.
I assert that the color red cannot be destroyed, regardless of whether all manifestations of "red" are destroyed.
"Red" refers to a range of frequencies of light. Light is composed of photons. Although it is not always (or, in a finite universe, ever) possible to talk of THE frequency of a photon, nevertheless I can confine its spread of frequencies so that they are contained within the red band, thus, a "red" photon.
Now assume a universe where, in your frame of reference, all "red" photons cease to exist. Does "red" exist? Of course it does: any given photon can become, for you, a "red" photon, if only you move in the right direction at the right velocity. You simply Doppler shift the photon to the proper band.
So in order to destroy "red", we must first destroy all photons. Unfortunately, this is also impossible, because the vacuum itself is, in a deep sense, composed of virtual photons. As long as there are charged particles around in the universe, it is inevitable that some of the virtual photons will become realized, sprayed from the vacuum like a wake on the Dirac Sea. Every charged particle will have to go too, in order to destroy "red".
But if there are no charged particles, the weak force must go, too, because the W bosons are charged. Even the neutrinos must go, now, because in principle, they can radiate W's.
The strong force, I'm afraid, must also be lost, because in order to be finite, the gluons must pry quark loops from the vacuum, and quarks, being charged, must be forbidden, lest "red" exist.
So what's left? Gravitons. That's pretty much it. But if the Grand Unification Theories are correct, they too will couple to electromagnetism, so they may have to be eliminated to destroy "red". At that point, I submit that it is tantamount to a nonexistent universe.
The animals in the fossil record, could we say they were able to perceive their environment? The creatures studying the fossil record, can we say they are conscious and intelligent enough to understand their research? ... Are we so certain that our perception level is as far as it will ever rise?... If there are Angels, we certainly don't perceive them on a regular basis, but that doesn't preclude their existence, it just defines the limits of our perception abilities.
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