tecoyah

If indeed, as we now understand, at a subatomic level all things become only possibilities (Quantum Mechanics) at what point do things simply cease to exist in the context of our reality. If I can type on this keyboard, and feel the plastic, yet I know the keys are made up of Atomic particles which are made up of Quarks, which are made up of something even smaller which eventually leads to Quantum fluctuations, undefined until I notice them.....what makes my keyboard real?

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Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

Kadath

The four fundamental forces. Strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational. That's all I've got for you. All you're touching is "matter" created from energy by forces we don't understand.

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Cervantes

Now this is an interesting idea.. As far as I could tell (and I'm probarbly waaay wrong on this one) is that stringtheory says that as of yet, the smallest calculable entity (dunno if you can call it a particle) is the super string, which is both energy, matter and dimensions at the same time. (stringtheorist are going to lynch me when they read that).

So in the end we are all made up of compressed space, time, plus 7 or so additional dimensions (string theory needs 11 dimensions to work properly).. or.. *shakes head* this one is just too wierd..

I dunno.. is probarbly the correct answer.. and will be for the forseable future..

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- "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.."
- "Religions take everything that your DNA naturally wants to do to survive and pro-create and makes it wrong."
- "There is only one absolute truth and that is that there is only one absolute truth."

Mantus

What comes first, our metaphors or the reality they are based on?

roachboy

metaphors.
ask nietzsche, he'll tell you.
wittgenstein is better, though--read some of the tractatus.
the idea that the relation goes metaphor-"reality" rather than the other way round is kind of unnerving, when you think about it.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pig

as far as the language vs. reality issues, i think that's unpossible to definiatively prove. which is why its a good question, i suppose.

in terms of the OP question, my personal answer is that much like everything else, your keyboard is what it is.

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

Mantus

Exactly. I was asking a rhetorical question. To say the keyboard is un-real does nothing to change that it is what it is.

Zyr

Nietzsche also went insane.

Something that keeps coming up for me when I think about any kind of skeptical theory, those calling into doubt those things we take for granted, is whether oe not it even matters. Sure, it's interesting, but would the answer change anything? Would you behave differently?

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"Oh, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83 when I was the only practitioner of it, and I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

Omnia mutantu, nos et mutamur in illis.
All things change, and we change with them.
- Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602

asaris

I suspect that the quantum theoretic notion, that at some level 'reality' is just probabilities, is more a heuristic based on our own uncertainty. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says only that we cannot simultaneously measure a particle's position and velocity, not that that particle doesn't have a position and velocity. This might just be an epistemological boundary we are unable to cross.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

roachboy

stepping outside of the model for being-in-the-world staged by propositions is easier than you make it sound, zyr: think about your everyday life, and the fact that you hear sound, for example: sound is an eminently temporal phenomenon--propositions cannot stage time except as a series of states---but time is simply marked as a series of states (clocktime) but is and is not a series of states (time is not an object---if you think about it, the idea that you can examine time is a function of how you can use the word time in a propositon)

propositions model the world.

if you think about perception as a process that unfolds time/unfolds within time, you are bumped onto a different logical register that lets you see pretty directly (if my experience is any guide) that propositions describe aspects of existing states of affairs--but these descriptions are not and cnanot be exhaustive.

another way of thinking about this: propositions stage epistemological relations: questions about propositions stage ontological problems.

moving out from under the veil of propositions is not particular difficult: what IS difficult is trying to work on how to speak or write from that viewpoint. this is the place where merleau-ponty's last work found itself trapped and spinning (visible and invisible and teh working notes in particular)

sorry for the namedropping in place of arguments---i am in between things---i'll try to post more/other stuff about this later---i am really interested in this kind of problem.

meanwhile, other views please.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ch'i

Very good question. I have a hard time keeping track of ideas like this as well

When they say "The probablity of a quantum fluctuation changes upon observation" what is meant by observation? Is it literally looking at an object, or thinking about it? What if a blind person were to encounter something no one else has ever seen? Does it apply to humans only, and if so, is it because of our ability to conceptualize, or our conscience? I can see how easy it would be to spin around in circles with this topic...
I'm afraid I can only add more questions than answers, but I'll try to think of some.

roachboy

there are any number of ways to think about the heisenberg principle: the simplest one might be in relation to its putative object--if you think about human beings in neuroscience terms, we are a complex of systems for conducting electricity--it would follow that any such complex system would have leakages (if you assume that the body should be discrete---that is if you assume that your perspective on your body--which operates within one scale--should obtain across all scales) or that the boundary between such systems and their environment is difficult if not impossible to determine.
so your physical presence would distort the space observed because it would be the entry of an energy-generating system into the space being observed.
i would expect that directing your attention toward that space would trigger additional disruptions (asuming that intentionality has a neurological substructure) and so on.

scale is strange.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

shakran

You might be interested to know that you never touch your keyboard, or anything else. What you feel when you "touch" something is the electrical fields of the atoms in your fingers repelling the electrical fields of whatever you think you're touching. You never actually get close enough to touch it.

Oh, and what you see as your keyboard is actually your brain's interpretation of stimuli from your various sense organs. So for all you know your brain's "interpretive center" for want of a better term, is screwed up, and what you see as a gray keyboard, looks to me like what yellow looks like to you.



Get down to the infinitesimal level and it's easy to mess with people's perceptions

Ch'i

I wonder... If you trained your mind at an early enough age do you think that it could be possible to alter your methods of interpreting the electical stimuli and thus alter your perception of reality? I hear so many old philosophers talk about "shunning illusion for reality" and things of the sort; maybe those phrases go deeper into science than we gave them credit for... science and philosophy do seem to share many fundamental ideas.