Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 89. July 4, 2019 continued . . .

  Reality is Ideality

   Private Reality?

 Another objection to idealism is the “private minds” puzzler. If the “ocean” of consciousness is continuous & universal, why can’t we read each other’s minds? Here, Kastrup returns to the analogy with Multiple Personality alters in one body. That psychological example is long & technical and abstract, so I’ll use some more physical visual aids. Each MPD alter is function-ally separated by a metaphysical “wall” with “doors”, which allows only certain “stuff” to come in and go out. For example, a biological cell maintains its identity & integrity by dividing inside from outside with a porous cell-wall “membrane”, self from non-self. Rather than a physical partition though, the mental “brane” is logical & statistical. It’s like the IF-THEN operator of a computer, which allows only specified kinds of data (inform-ation) to pass the logic gate. Thus, the solo Self is still plugged-in to the external environment, but retains its autonomy by selective two-way communication. Each gated-mind is like a private world unto itself, but there is a public reality beyond the cell-self wall.

The next problem the author addresses is called the “stand-alone world”. It asks, “if the world is nothing but a projection of consciousness, how does it continue to exist when I am not paying attention?” A typical formulation has been, “is the moon still there when I’m not looking?” Such “gotchas” may sound silly, but philosophers & scientists have seriously searched for a reasonable alternative to solipsism : I alone exist, and create my own private realm. Quantum theory has now corroborated Berkeley’s logical deduction that perceived reality is just a construct in a mind.  Subatomic particles were found to be literally unreal (undefined) until a perception (measurement) is made. But the question is by whom? Does each human mind create its own little world? The simplest answer is to assert that reality is created by the universal mind, and we merely tap into that pool of information. But Kastrup gives a much more complex response, again based on the abstruse notion of multiple personas in a single body. Personally, I prefer to think that both world and witnesses are concepts in the cosmic imagination — characters in the same movie-like divine dream, or a Matrix-like simulation. What it lacks in technical rigor, is made up in intuitive appeal.

Most of the other objections are based on the same com-mon misconception : that Idealism means we each imagine our own little world, which just happens to share natural laws with everyone else's dream-world10. I try to avoid such erroneous side-tracks by asserting that reality consists, not of high-level human “Consciousness”, but of fundamental “Information” (data bits). In other words, I am like an avatar11 in a video game who inhabits a particular game-world along with many other characters. For multi-player games, those other avatars have their own free-will, which adds an element of surprise & unpredictability. Kastrup says, “Idealism acknowledges that there is a world outside personal psyches, since personal psyches are but dissociated segments of a broader universal consciousness.” In my version, the universal conscious per-spective is that of the original game designer & programmer. So I sometimes refer to G*D as the Great Programmer12. In The Matrix movie, it was The Architect, but even he was created by the machines. G*D is self-existent.

Post 89 continued . . . click Next

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality
Slone Crosley

10. Mis-conception of the Idealism concept :
   That’s why I say that generic Enformation is the essence the real world, and that Consciousness is derivative. Kastrup may be following A. N. Whitehead’s notion that “occasions of experience” are the “foundational elements of reality”. But ANW wasted thousands of circuitous words to dispel the notion that such atoms of experi-ence are equivalent to human consciousness. In the Information Age, we don’t need to confuse the issue with ambiguous term-inology. That’s because Information Theory has given us more concrete ways to imagine the elements of abstract information.

11. Avatar :
   In a video game, a digital representation of a human player. In the physical world, a material form representing G*D, which plays a role in reality. It’s like an actor in a play, who impersonates a character in a script created by the author, who sits out in the audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(computing)

12. Computation Theory vs Psychological Theory :
   As a computer scientist, I’d think that Kastrup would be more qualified to discuss the notion of digital avatars than imaginary alters. Other scientists (Tegmark) have explored the idea of an abstract mathematical reality. But Matrix-like computed reality might be more intuitive for most of us non-mathematicians.

The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal

“Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experi-mentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.”
Sabine Hossenfelder is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she works on physics beyond the standard model,

Computational Physics
The cutting edge of Physics is Computation, which allows us to explore quantum & cosmic realms  that are not accessible to the 5 senses. Computational Physics allows research-ers to leverage the sixth sense of Reason, and to go where Mechanical Materialists feared to tread, in the fringes of Science & Spiritualism