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Originally Posted by ldsoftwaresteve
About the rainbow, no, unless there's someone perceiving it. The construct is created by the observer and by the positional relationship of the observer and the light passing through the water droplets. Good example by the way. When we project it into existence as an actual object, we might conclude that we can slide down it.
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Actually the rainbow might be a very confusing example as far as explaining what the epistemological analysis is about, because it is sort of a special kind of "thing" in the common physical worldview; an observer-dependent "thing". That is why I said
"not having that much to do with the epistemological analysis but with your debate about what we should mean by "real".
Soooo, for this thread forget I ever mentioned it
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Mentally, I suppose we can but not ontologically, if I understand the meaning of the word as you are using it. Could I have substituted the word, 'epistemologically' in place of 'Mentally' in the previous statement?
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No I don't think so.
Epistemology commonly refers to the study of knowledge. I.e. what does it mean to "know" or to "understand", and how does one acquire "knowledge". Especially that first bit of knowledge that allows one to interpret any data at all in any sense at all.
Ontology refers to the study of "existence", i.e. what actually exists in reality as oppose to only in our conception of reality (e.g. is "soul" or "mind" or "self" or "spacetime" or "wave function" or "shadow" or "electron" ontologically real entity, or are they rather mental concepts - imaginary entities - that we use as part of our model/conception of reality)
Note that physics is (or should be) different from ontology in that it seeks
valid models; valid for making predictions. The entities that are defined as part of a valid model are far too often taken as ontologically real more or less tacitly (and completely unnecessarily), but that's just where a strong sense of ontology (philosophy) comes in handy.
(Funny sidenote; often the original author(s) of a new model see the entities they invented as completely imaginary tools, but then many people who interpret and/or validate their work slowly start conceiving them as ontologically real entities just because the model works, i.e. "it explains what they see")
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For example, if the math checks out, it proves unequivocally that it is valid to model reality relativistically, predictionwise. But at the same time it implies strongly that the source of the relativistic description is not relativity of simultaneity or relativistic spacetime construction in any ontological sense, since completely epistemological standpoint already makes that sort of description valid.
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Assuming, of course, that the 700 pound gorilla is consistent. Still, just so I don't screw this up, please restate this another way.
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Yes... I think I very definitely should
(btw, 700 pound gorilla = one's worldview?)
So let me restate with some more detail.
I referred to Doctordick's presentation as "epistemological analysis", in an attempt to underline the fact that it only deals with the constraints regarding our
conception of reality, instead of constraints to reality itself. Too many people erroneously interpret the analysis as if it referred to
how reality is (and tune out having decided it doesn't make sense).
The analysis is about properties found from our
models of reality, and if such an analysis happens to show that;
1. A certain way of classifying reality (=making definitions) into "intelligible entities" leads inevitably to
relativistic description being valid
AND
2. That "certain way of defining entities" is forced upon us as long as we don't want to make undefendable assumptions about reality.
Then it means that a (predictionwise) valid relativistic conception of reality can always be built
regardless of what the true ontology of that reality is. Let me reinforce that it can always be built because "we can always define entities that way", i.e. we can always tack identity to the patterns of noumena that way. And not only we "can"; devoid of undefendable assumptions, we MUST.
That means there is absolutely
no reason to place the concepts associated with relativity up to any ontological status, or to choose between any ontological views of relativity. You still can make all sorts of ontological assumptions, but it would be somewhat amazing co-incidence if you happened to land upon correct ontology (not to mention you would never be able to know)
I.e. if the math checks out, reality is what it is, and time dilation etc is brought through to our models by how we have defined (many) things in our worldviews (from the very bottom of our worldviews).
If that sounds like I'm saying the same thing over and over, it's because you probably understood what I tried to say ;D
And let it be said this is just one small (but interesting) part of the analysis.
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or refusing to believe that (initially) completely unknown data stream can be predicted meaningfully
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I assume you mean the future, when you refer to completely unknown data stream.
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No I mean, ~when you are born. When you don't yet know jack about how reality is, and you are supposed to start building a worldview. Imagine a brain that has not got a clue what the alien patterns mean, e.g. how to interpret the impulses so to conceive it in a form of a 3D environment, or to "hear sounds" or even "words" and "language". Before that brain has even formed a conception of such a thing as "self".
I suppose the reason some people think such data cannot be predicted is because they think that the meaning of some small part of the data must be first known before we can use that knowledge to interpret other parts of data and figure out new information. Think of a book in alien language. That is how our own learning of anything is often seen; we must first know some information, and then use that to interpret new data and recover new information from it. (Think about how we build physics models, make experiments, interpret the experiments according to those models, etc.)
But those people fail to recognize that one can always build
a valid model about that data (for example making assumptions until they yield meaningful interpretation) without truly and explicitly knowing the meaning of any single pattern in that data. Without ever becoming completely certain about the meaning of anything in that data! But still being able to make reasonable predictions. That is how you know your native tongue; no one explained you what the words mean when you were a baby, you made assumptions that yielded reasonable interpretation of what you heard (like in the duck example Doctordick just gave)
And still one more important point; people often think that "immediate perception" is not part of "interpreting sensory data according to one's worldview". When I refer to interpretation, I don't necessarily refer to a conscious process. And when we perceive anything at all, that is always a pattern being recognized as something that is defined in our worldview. I.e. what makes a perception is some pattern having been "understood" as "something".
Also it makes no difference - as far as this analysis goes - how much of that interpretation is hardwired in us at birth and how much is result of our building of a worldview. For all intents and purposes, we can here consider a learning process that starts with sensory data patterns whose meaning is initially completely unknown, and yet it manages to start building a worldview (~form ideas of what such and such data patterns might mean), and start interpreting further data accordingly (and recover further information from that data, so to build a larger worldview). All that "modeling of reality" is done so that predictions can be made about the data, without ever knowing the explicit meaning of any of it.
Interesting property of such worldview is semantics. There's no information about the "real meaning" of any of the data to be found from that worldview at all, there is only a large self-coherent set of definitions or "set of assumptions that support one another and yield sensical interpretation of incoming data". When some learning system uses such a "circle of beliefs" to "understand" its sensory data and to further work on its worldview, it amounts to
semantical understanding, even if all that further learning and interpretation is done in completely mechanical manner. That right there is a solution (in principle) to a very perplexing problem of AI, how could a machine understand semantics? Short answer; by not allowing it to "understand" any bit of reality explicitly, but force it build a model
about the data from complete scratch.
Notice the parallels to how we don't know the reality itself, but instead our awareness is our mental model of reality; it is how we conceive reality.
...aand that's what I meant with "initially completely unknown data stream", i.e. data stream whose meaning is completely unknown.
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Also note that people tend to base their query of reality on their perceptions, as if there is something ontologically given in the meanings that have been assigned to some otherwise unintelligible patterns. Let us not forget that any sort of perception of anything, no matter how simple, entails that the perceived thing/pattern/noumena had already been defined. I.e. some sort of identity had been assigned to some spatial/temporal pattern. When you make a definition, allowing you to tack identity on some pattern/noumena, it does not mean that suddenly ontological reality exists accordingly.
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Agree. You say, 'rainbow' and I know what you mean.
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Now I regret I ever said rainbow
I hope with the above you have a, let's say "more detailed" idea of what I meant.
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Does the analysis still hold water if the worldview is weak? Or do you mean if it is self-coherent, it isn't weak?
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Well any actual worldview that any actual person carries, is probably quite incoherent. It is impossible to keep such a huge amount of associations or assumptions coherently together, especially when the worldview is changing all the time. That is, we often make logical mistakes. Btw, that's a solution to another perplexing problem of AI; how does a machine make logical mistakes? Well, its logical problem solving does not come about the behaviour of logic gates (transistors) like is the case with calculators. Instead it has built a model of logical relationships; it's understanding of logic is part of its huge semantical worldview.
About whether the analysis "holds water", I can only point out that it does not even attempt to uncover properties that would be found from "all possible worldviews", but let's say properties that are to be expected from a hypothetical self-coherent worldview.
The purpose being that if such properties are found, and if those properties just happen to look exactly like some things or relationships that are commonly taken as "ontologically real", then one might want to re-check their ontological perspective on reality, I would say.
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This conversation is good on many levels. I think that mankind has made a habit of projecting into existence things which exist only in our minds.
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Yes, very annoying habit. "Naive realism" it's called. Almost no one thinks they abide to naive realism, yet most insist certain definitions in their worldview are also ontological things by themselves.
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And I suspect that somehow that mistake is the cause of a lot of pain and misery. The one big example I can think of besides 'time' is 'God'.
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Yes, what I'm saying above is also reflected in issues of religious faith and on many things. This mail is so lengthy because this issue has so much to do with just about any human activity one way or another, and I just keep pointing them out, hoping people can interpret me more properly.
It is easy to misunderstand a lot of things I'm saying above, especially as I am being rather careless in some assertions (don't have time to try and remove ambiguities more). If something seems incredibly odd, ask me and I'll try and clarify it for you.
I hope this has been helpful for anyone trying to figure out what this thread is all about. It would be good to have more people to really understand the conversation.
Doctordick, I'll have to get to your post tomorrow, it is once again very late
-Anssi
Re: What can we know of reality?
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