a guy on another forum and i were have a conversation about morality,
and i brought up objective morality.
in the course of events,
he said this:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“While I was conducting experiments to make ’spineless’ cacti, ” he continued, “I often talked to the plants to create a vibration of love. ‘You have nothing to fear, ’ I would tell them. ‘You don’t need your defensive thorns. I will protect you.’ Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety.” Luther Burbank – A Saint Amidst the Roses
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ursa/philos/ty99.htm#argument
In any normal case, it will be quite clear what a physical proposition denotes; but it is not always obvious what a particular statement of the proposition refers to. The conventional view, of course, is that it refers to some instance of what it denotes. When a physicist makes an assertion about, say, an electron, the statement has the character of an hypothesis because (as the physicist will acknowledge) there is an element of inference, which may prove to be mistaken. In the physicist’s opinion, however, she is not fabricating a fiction about the electron, rather she is putting forward a statement about a state of affairs that she thinks is actual. That opinion is wrong, for the following reason.
In order to ascertain whether a physical statement is true, you would perform an experiment and then consider your observations. That is to say, whether the physical proposition is true is inferred from your perceptions of the outcome of the experiment and, moreover, it can be inferred only from that source. Therefore, the meaning of the proposition does not lie in the physical domain but in the perceptual, which indicates that a physical proposition is meant metaphorically, not literally.
When we apply this criterion, it brings out the looseness of a good deal of everyday speech. An example of this concerns the photograph: I might say, "I see my mother in this photograph", and it is understood that this is an idiomatic way of saying, "I see a pictorial representation of my mother in this photograph". What I am now saying is that the proposition "I see a table" is an idiomatic expression of a state of affairs that can roughly be summarised by saying "I experience a visual image associated with the physical nearness of a table to my body".
The argument presented above pivots on a linguistic point: how we actually use words that denote physical things. This does not mean that I am concerned merely with language and not with reality. On the contrary, I think the mind-body problem poses a substantive question that is very serious and worth while trying to answer. Language is, nevertheless, the medium in which we articulate and then examine our thoughts, and it is therefore possible that an incorrect use of our language could have led us to an incorrect understanding of reality. This, in turn, could have created the mind-body problem.
The world that is described by physics consists of entities and operations that are defined wholly by their logical relations with other entities and operations within that world. A number of fundamental terms are allowed, such as mass and space, and all others are derived from them by declaring formulaic relationships between them.
Terms which denote things that are defined by their intrinsic qualities, as opposed to being defined by logical relations, do not and cannot feature in the language of physics. The immediate conscious sensation of seeing the colour red, for instance, is not something that is defined by its relationship to other things. There is a qualitative aspect that cannot be captured by relations. The terms that denote things of this kind can be defined only ostensively, not formally. We can do no more than say, "There! Look at that - that’s what I mean by ‘red’!"
Hence qualitative mental experiences can, by definition, never exist in the physical world. This is a metaphysical claim, but it is also a claim about language - the deeper reason for this is that the physical world itself is a fiction, a verbal construct.
The physical world is, necessarily, derived by construction from the conscious world.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ursa/philos/ty99.htm#argument 2.1
In set-theoretic terms, the mental universe or ‘metaverse’ is defined as the union of all existing minds. So, it contains the conscious minds of all human beings and all animals in the world we see around us. It will also contain any disembodied minds, if they exist. It also contains streams of mental activity that govern the complete panoply of what we think of as natural phenomena, such as the weather, geology, chemical reactions, and the movements of the heavenly bodies - which are obviously not governed by any ordinary mind.
2.6 Metamental objects
While an ‘ordinary mind’, as the name suggests, corresponds to what we normally think of as a sentient being, a ‘metamental object’ corresponds to what we normally think of as an inert object, such as the writing desk I am sitting at. In the theory that we are deriving from Berkeley’s ontology, however, each such object is not inert but active. It contains a basic pulse of consciousness and volition, although it is not developed into anything remotely as complex as a sentient being. It is, in fact, a component part of the metamind, or Berkeley’s ‘God’. The reason it must be active is that it has to respond to requests from sentient beings. To put it very crudely: if you want to know what a desk looks like, you telepathically ask it; and it replies by projecting a visual image of itself into your stream of consciousness. To anyone who is familiar with modern computer programming methods, this will seem strikingly similar to ‘object-oriented programming’, which is used especially in virtual-reality systems. This similarity is not a coincidence: it just follows from the fact that the metamind is carrying out informatically similar tasks to those performed by man-made computers. (And, in fact, the terminology I am proposing is borrowed from the computing paradigm.)
This is how things have to work in the Berkeleian universe, because there is no material desk sitting there inertly reflecting light, which your material eyeballs can pick up whenever they point in a direction toward the desk. Recall that, in the Berkeleian universe, things exist only when they are perceived: hence, the image of your desk exists only when you or someone else perceives it, so if you want to see the image of the desk, you have to tell the desk (or, more properly, the metamental object of the desk) that you are looking at it. An interesting consequence of this basic consideration is that an object always knows when it is being observed, and who is observing it. This has implications for the understanding of psi phenomena, which will be discussed more fully later.
This use of metamental objects as an explanatory hypothesis is a refinement of Berkeley’s one-step model. According to Berkeley, whenever we look at the desk, ‘God’ gives us an appropriate image of the desk by referring to His ‘archetype’ of the desk. Here, I are dividing the metamind (Berkeley’s ‘God’) into functional components that I am calling ‘metamental objects’, each of which contains an ‘archetype’ in Berkeley’s sense. I am suggesting that each Berkeleian archetype is wrapped up in an active metamental object. As we go along, we shall see that this refinement brings considerable explanatory power when we look at psi phenomena, and that it affords an elegant economy for the whole scheme.
Let us start to define these objects more technically. Any act of perception by a sentient being has the effect of conveying a ‘request signal’. (I am using the word ‘signal’ in the abstract or automata-theoretic sense, without implying the existence of a transmitted entity that is the signal.) A ‘metamental object’ is a subset of the metamind, which receives request signals from an ordinary mind and responds by projecting imagery into it, in a ‘response signal’.
On this view, each object in the world is represented by an object in the metamind. When you look at an object, such as the desk, or reach out and touch it with your hand, your mind conveys a signal of some sort to the metamental object, which in turn delivers directly into your mind the visual or tactual imagery, as appropriate.
If you modify a physical object in some way, such as carving your initials into the desk, you send a ‘volitional signal’ to the metamental object, which is incorporated into the object in such a way that subsequent observers will detect it, and perceive the desk as modified.
It is well known to philosophers that objects are not natural kinds. Look at your desk again: is it one object (‘the desk’) or five objects (‘the desk top, and four legs’)? Do the drawers count as different objects, or are they parts of one unitary object (‘the desk’)? A more extreme example will be found by looking at waves in the sea. Undoubtedly each wave is a physical thing, and you can point to it and touch it, but the boundaries that separate the wave from the rest of the sea are not physical but psychological. You cannot discover the true edge of the wave, but rather we say, pointing with the hand, that the wave is this bit of sea water. There is no definite answer to questions about slicing the world into objects, as far as the physical matter is concerned. You cannot, for instance, look down a microscope and discover the boundary between one object and another. The division of the physical world into objects is not a physical fact but a psychological projection. (This, by the way, is what leads postmodern philosophers to make the misleading claim that objects do not physically exist, even within the discourse of physical science. In fact, within that discourse, what is denoted by a word like ‘desk’ does physically exist, even though the boundaries implied by the concept of the desk are not physical but psychological.) So, how could it possibly be that the metamind has a separate metamental object for each physical object? If the division of the world into objects is subjective, which division would the metamind take? The answer is that the metamind chooses one canonical partitioning of the world into objects, which optimally suites its computational strategy, and constantly reviews and revises its working partition. The criterion for the metamind’s dividing the world into objects whilst generating it is much the same as our criterion for dividing it into objects whilst perceiving it. Namely, aggregates of matter that cohere as units in our perception and handling are deemed to be objects. The desk is a single object when you are writing on it, or moving it around in your study. It would have been separate objects if you assembled it from the factory in a kit comprising desk top, legs, and so on. Thus metamental objects can merge together, or split up
What happens when you modify something, such as carving the initial letters of your name on your desk? There is no underlying substance to undergo a change of state: the mental items are themselves the base reality. So, when somebody else comes along and looks at the desk and sees the carved initials, how are we to explain this? As I said above, the way is barred to the conventional physicalist explanation, that the substance of the desk has been modified, as there is no substance in this model. Rather, some extra functionality has been added to the metamental object. By Ockham’s razor, the simplest way to model this is to suppose that the carver’s intention is added into the object. So, when someone comes along and looks at the desk, they send a request signal to the desk’s metamental object, which is now a complex that comprises the original object and the carver’s intention, glued together.
2.8 Structure of metamental objects
Following the analogy with man-made software, we may imagine each metamental object as comprising two components: a core of private, internal information that only the object itself has access to (which is pretty much what Berkeley thought of as the ‘archetype’ of the object); and a number of access functions, which receive and deliver public data to the observer, on request. As a first approximation, we might suppose that each sensory modality (sight, hearing, touch, and so on) corresponds to an access function that delivers outputs, but the only access function that permits inputs into object is that of muscular action (touching or hitting something, or speaking).
We must beware of falling into the trap of thinking of the private data as forming a static entity, as they would in a man-made computer. For it is in this connection that the metaphor breaks down: a man-made computer has a material substrate, a substance such as a silicon chip or a magnetically sensitised disk, that suffers modification when data are written into it. Nevertheless, at the abstract level of computer science, rather than computer engineering, the analogy still holds.
What we take to be the private data of the metamental object are all really volitional signals, initiated at various times in the past, stretching back to the first creation of the object. When I say ‘volitional signal’, I do not mean something separate from, and produced by, the volitional act, I mean the volitional act itself regarded as an element of the private data.
Your mind is a subset of the metamind, but the singular agency of volition and perception is one and the same. In that sense, when you see a blue sky, ‘you’ are both generating that sensation of blue colour, and perceiving it, but ‘you’ do not notice that ‘you’ are generating it.
This, I believe, is the insight that Vedantic mystics attempt to articulate by saying that Brahman (God or world soul) is the same thing as the Atman (personal soul), the apparent difference being a delusion.
Generally speaking, nature does not invent new mechanisms when it can re-use an existing mechanism in a new role.
3.1 Telepathy
Normally, we think of people as communicating through a physical medium of one sort or another. For instance, you talk to someone by sending sound waves through the air; or you write to someone by leaving ink marks on a sheet of paper. In the Berkeleian universe, these forms of communication are construed as using the metamind as an intermediary. When you speak, for instance, you send a volitional signal to the metamental object that represents your physical body, which conveys a signal to another such object, representing the listener’s body, which then projects the auditory sensation into her mind. Those metamental objects are components within the metamind.
In telepathic communication between people, that indirect route is by-passed and experiences are conveyed directly between two minds. It must be emphasised, though, that nothing is literally transmitted though any intervening space. Rather, what happens is that an access link is established between two minds. Whereas normally each ordinary mind is closed under operations of mental access (indeed, this is part of the definition of an ordinary mind), there seem to be specific methods by which an access route is set up, and experiences can be shared.
All things in the metaverse, including all our private minds, are inter-penetrating.
When you look at an object, such as a desk, or reach out and touch it with your hand, your mind conveys a request signal to the metamental object, which in turn delivers a response signal directly into your mind, containing the imagery -visual or tactual, as appropriate.
I will suggest the following principle: the metamind determines physical facts as and when they are observed by conscious beings. I shall refer to this as ‘just-in-time object generation’.
Most of the facts of the physical world will never be observed by anybody. For instance, the precise distribution of temperature in the middle of some planet millions of light-years away. If the metamind is running economically, it will not bother to compute the modelling for unobserved parts of the universe. Likewise, for those parts of the world that we do observe, it does not need to model them until the moment we make the observation. Even then, it does not need to model the object in any more detail than is required to deliver the perceptual experiences that make up the observations.
At large distances, just-in-time generation may apply to whole planets or even whole solar systems. Closer to home, it will apply to the extensive details of the world around us that we assume are there, but we never observe them. Such as, how many cornflakes there were in your breakfast bowl this morning: the metamind needs to model only the ones at the top of the pile, which you actually saw. If, out of curiosity, you pull the cornflakes out one by one, the metamind will determine the position of cornflakes in each newly uncovered layer as you come to observe them.
The status of these unmodelled physical facts is that they simply do not exist. This is a generalisation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy: if a particle is in a superposition of two states, then there is no fact of the matter whether it is in one state or another. Berkeleian indeterminacy, however, applies to things of all <myspace>size</myspace>s. For instance, when a spacecraft first flew around the dark side of the moon, that surface of the moon had previously not existed, and the metamind decided at the time of observation time what it would look like.
The preceding sentence contains a subtle shift between language-games. Saying the spacecraft flew around the moon is in the language-game of physics. Saying the dark side of the moon did not exist is in the phenomenological language-game. I hope that the only people who will be confused by this are philosophers who wilfully choose to do so for doctrinal reasons.
Telekinesis, I suggest, acts upon the elements of the metamind that correspond to the parts of the universe that are not yet observed, and which are therefore indeterminate. For instance, when dice are cast, the way they fall depends on tiny details in the dice themselves and their environment - details that the mind can change before their effect is observed. From the perspective of the physical observer, it looks as if the telekinetic action has changed the probabilities of seemingly random events.
Your mind is a subset of the metamind, but the singular agency of volition and perception is one and the same. In that sense, when you see a blue sky, ‘you’ are both generating that sensation of blue colour, and perceiving it, but ‘you’ do not notice that ‘you’ are generating it.
RETROKINESIS
It can be helpful to think of this in relation to man-made virtual reality systems. Those parts of the virtual world that have not yet been rendered and presented on the screen need not have become fixed and determined by the computer. If you are exploring a virtual building, say, opening doors and going from room to room, there may be some rooms that you have not yet visited. So, the computer may simply not have decided what it is going to put in those virtual rooms. The relevant part of its computer memory may just be blank. There may be no fact of the matter as to what is in the unopened rooms. Now, in this situation, the computer may decide to play tricks on you. If you decide to carry (in your virtual hand) some particular device such as a particular big key, then when you open a previously closed room, you may find inside a treasure chest whose lock is fitted by the key. In this encounter, you might think, "What a coincidence!", or even "What synchronicity!", but in fact the computer itself engineered the situation. When it detected what you were carrying, it secretly decided that it would put something relevant in the unopened room. It had complete freedom to do so, precisely because you had not yet observed the contents of that room.
My claim here is that the metamind may be playing precisely the same ‘trick’ when we encounter real-life synchronicity and visualised manifesting. The metamind detects what we are thinking, what we are intending or wishing for, and modifies those parts of the physical world that nobody has observed yet, but which will turn out to have significant implications.
To pick out a telepathic target or a telecognitive target, you just focus your mind on some distinctive detail of the required target, and it will be selected by a universal pattern-matching power, and the target will automatically respond.
In the extratemporal domain of the metaverse, those links are always accessible. As extraphysical time is cumulative, the links persist forever. Hence a subject can at any time connect into any such links that have been established,
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my response was,
"even if that were the case,
even if our perceptions were just this big intersubjective thing,
what does that change about anything?
that just means we have to redefine 'objective',
because it still obviously exist,
just in a different way than we thought."
what are your thoughts on this?