Makhnov

Is reality made up of separate parts or is it a single whole?


Arguments in favor of Reality as parts

• Our brains perceive differences because those differences are actually there.
• Difference seems intuitively true, especially in the framework of a materialist paradigm. For the purposes of this thread, "Materialist Paradigm" means that every phenomenon has a preceding cause from the past, and that the universe is physically deterministic.
• There must be differences because it is blatantly obvious from common sense. This common sense can be "verified" by looking around the room you sit in now.
• I don't feel what others around me feel. I don't know what they know. My mind is separate from their minds.
• The fundamental particles are fundamentally different.

Arguments in favor of Reality as a whole

• To prove how separate you really are from everything around you, stop eating food. See how "separate" you really are. If you want even faster verification, stop breathing the air. Oh .. you're not so separate as you thought!
• The fundamental particles that make up matter are not actually different, they only appear different. They are all the same vibrating string in 11 dimensions. The different particles are simply different vibrational modes of that self-same string.
• The fundamental particles that make up matter are not actually different. They are all symmetries of an exceptional simple Lie group called E8. This gives rise to their apparent difference. The self-same particle is merely rotating through spacetime on a different axis-of-symmetry.
• The differences we perceive are created through the act of perception itself. The dividing lines between these things we call "objects" are arbitrary distinctions. What motivates our brains to create these divisions is a necessity in ancestors to propagate their genetic material to offspring. This necessity is not written into reality itself, but is created a posteriori by those ancestors who happened to have reproduced. (I.e. the accidental success at reproduction later created the so-called "necessity").
• The arbitrary divisions in reality created above are projected onto the outside world, not the other way around. The first projection of "difference" came when early bacteria differentiated food from its own waste matter. This distinction, as "real" as it seems, is not contained in physics per se.
• Physicists at CERN believe the four fundamental forces of nature are all actually a single Master Force. It appears in different guises only because something called spontaneous symmetry-breaking takes place at lower temperatures. By "lower temperatures" we mean energy is not as hot as the universe was in the first second after the Big Bang.
• Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes form. The total energy of the universe, then, must be some constant exact number. Different 'stuff' is not different, it is the Same "Stuff/Thing" in different guises.
• From thermodynamics. A system that has reached equilibrium cannot be used to tell time. This suggests that time is not an aspect of physics. Time is not inherent in nature, but instead is a byproduct of relationships of the "Energy Stuff/Thing" (see above) as it coordinates itself in space.

Some afterthoughts.

(On the fundamental particles arguments. If I hold a guitar string still, versus plucking it into a vibration, noone would ever suggest the vibrating string is not the same object as the same string when sitting still. Vibration certainly does not make something not be itself!)

I see a lamp in the room right now. Is it not the case that I say the word "lamp" because I am a human who interacts with reality with a human body in a human environment? Would a small ant see a "lamp"? Probably not. Immanuel Kant suggests that we do this naming game because of mental categories that must be there for thought to take place at all, or perception for that matter -- if "perception" is meant to be a place-holder for the entire conscious act of a percept, rather than say, light falling on retinal cells. We see "rocks", "chairs", "leaves" because those things are approximately the size of our hands, and when we toss them around they stay together rather than flying apart. So the biological pre-conditions are always haunting the meaning of these objects, whose existence we refuse to question. But the same could be said for "communities" or "civilizations".

If this seems bizarre, the alternative is far worse. The alternative that I can think of, superficially, is that we see lamps in rooms because there exists a PLATONIC LAMP in a realm of perfect forms. In my opinion, this alternative is far more mystical than what Kant suggested.

Ourcrazymodern?

Lacking words to name,
the most productive thinking's
not thinking at all?

Knowing this is WAY over my head, I wade fearlessly into the quicksand, confident that concrete is no more supportive. I believe that reality consists of parts whose existence isn't reliant on thinking's perceptions to form the whole of which it too is a part.

Imagination is thinking's most glorious exercise, but I absolutely mistrust the idea that our senses are not to be trusted in perceiving our environment.

I don't really understand the question.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Jinn

You'll notice your arguments for a whole require incredible verbosity compared to the arguments for reality in parts.

Likewise, your arguments for 'reality in whole' are wholly unconvincing. Not to particularly pick on you, but I have to reject it outright (then again, I subscribe to the "materialist paradigm"). Many of them are simply misunderstandings of the science involved.

This belies interdependence, not 'wholeness', for me. Certainly we are connected via ecosystems (food pyramid?) but that does not mean we are a unified organism; our diet is an apt example of this - we can easily replace foods with other foods and not suffer any ill effects. Even a properly prepared 'stew' of essential acids and vitamins would be sufficient to keep us in proper health.


Is this an attempt at string theory? From my vantage point, that doesn't describe the situation accurately at all.

And this? What's the origin here?

This is the best argument so far, for me. Certainly, we create divisions and boundaries exist, primarily because of the way our cognitive abilities are subdivided into discrete calculations. I'm not sure an easy rebuttal for this argument exists. There is no denying the 'schema' model of our brain; things are organized by their constituent properties and divided into groups by any number of characteristics, arbitrary or not. Separating ourselves from our own perception of the world is nigh impossible. If this claim is true, I have a hard time being interested in it because it's simply untestable. And as an adherent of the "materialist paradigm", that makes it largely useless. In short, if it's true, we'll never know and so I have a hard time caring.


I'm not sure here. I don't see how bacterial food selection is not 'contained in physics per se' ?

I'm not sure this is accurate either. CERN is looking for (among other things) the Higgs-Boson, and I haven't seen any reputable scientist advance that this is self-same with another particle or force at different temperature/pressure.

Second best argument. I think conservation of energy is a solid case for 'wholeness', at least given a near-infinite timeline. As my hero was fond of saying, "We are stardust." We are indeed, on a long timescale, made of particles that originated with the creation of the universe, galaxy, and ultimately planet. The molecules which formed our first DNA (from which all the rest of us is synthesized) originates with our parents, which originated with their parents, etc. The only limitation is timescale, so it's again a difficult proposition. Arguing that we're "whole" on an infinite timeline is not terribly meaningful to me, considering the discrete (and short on celestial timescales) lifetime of the average human.

True, time is not a fundamental force, and a simple measurement of seconds elapsed from a human perspective. Our perception of time could be (and likely would be) dramatically different than the perception of time by any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial race. I'm not sure that indicates we're "whole" in any sense, only that having memories requires a non-arbitrary scale of elapsed time to give them meaning.


Read more: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/newrepl...#ixzz17WwK40Lw

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

roachboy

i like most of what jinn says above and had thought along similar lines, though without the notion of "materialism" that somehow precludes recursive thinking about, say, the relations between categories and definitions of objects of knowledge (say for example the notion of scale, which creates an idea of discreteness, of separation between scales--turns out that among the most vexing problems for understanding complex systems is how different scales interact---and it's possible that the problem follows from the ways in which the category "scale" creates boundaries that result from the category rather than from what is categorised. but i digress).

seems to me that the part/whole distinction presupposes that "reality" can be understood as a thing.
i don't buy it.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

The parts make up the whole.

Some parts disappear forever, some parts are created anew.

The parts and the whole are one and the same. It's the perspective that shifts.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Makhnov

The sun must go around the earth, cuz look, it clearly does from simple observation. (right?) Now provide your "verbose" explanation for why that's not right.



You did not follow up with this claim later in your post.




Untestable and useless?

I was not arguing for solipsism. I was merely arguing that those divisions our mind project onto the bulk of atoms are not objectively there. Those divisions come to be there because we are organisms about 1 meter tall who have an imperative to reproduce our genetic material. We all kinda-sorta know, in the backs of our minds, that we are always ever dealing with atoms outside of us. Instead we "play a game" that we are not dealing with atoms only, but these "objects" instead. If you are male, you perceive attractive young females, and unnattractive fat old ladies. Is that distinction objectively outside you, or does this distinction instead derive from your own inner sensibilities? A solipsist would claim that there is no reason to play this game and the dividing-up into "objects" is arbitrary. I do not take that stance. I say the game is played because the distinctions are motivated by the reproduce-your-genes imperative that exists for all animals, and bacteria and any other living organism.

To illuminate the above paragraph I will use the example of the Robot Camera. Say we have a robot, whose size I'm not going to tell you at this time. I will tell you that this robot is equipped with a camera for vision. The camera gives to this robot a grid of colored pixels. Of course there is an infinite way to interpret a grid of distinct, colored pixels. In what way should the robot divide up this grid?

I turns out you cannot begin to answer that question because you lack two essential pieces of information required to form an answer. Inevitably, if I ask you how the Robot's vision system should divide up the grid, you will come back with two questions:

1. How big is the robot?
2. What is it the robot is supposed to accomplish?

If you do not have these two pieces of information, you really do not have any idea how it is supposed to divide up the world. It is easy to believe fallaciously that living organisms on earth are somehow exempt from this logic. They are not. And neither are we. There are birds-of-prey whose eyes see the world far clearer than ours. They see colors we cannot see. They can see tiny details from large distances. Atoms were not discovered by humans until the 19th century. In what way were our eyes/brains/minds not supposed to realize they exist until that time?

Our whole biochemical, mental apparatus divides the outside world up in a way that is very rough, very quick and dirty. It was effective enough to keep our ancestors alive. I can't accept your alternative because I cannot believe that this human-laden version of dividing up the world into these "objects" is somehow objectively there outside me.


This is the second time in your post you have conceded to "not meaningful to me personally as an average human". That is the entire argument in a nutshell! You divide the world up into objects in such a way that those divisions are meaningful to you as a human. You have it right in your hands. We are in agreement.