Do Our Questions Create the World?

Where was the word before the first question is asked?

In a way he supposes minds as entropy inducing entities.

Why this life, why is this the one I have? Where did all of this come from? How did all of this happen?

Life is a waking dream, because we often completely forget that we really just don't know at all why we are here. But we pretend, we forget, we make up stories, we do anything we can do to run away from that question. Why. How did all of this happen? Why does everything happen the way it does? What does that mean, for what I am, all the way at the core?

It's not really nihilism, but it sort of is. It's just, that's the perpetual question that never gets answered directly.

I've thought of myself before as a monad - a being so fundamentally lonely in their own existence that they split themselves up into infinite pieces, just to forget, there's nothing more than what they are. Maybe some buddhist influences, but, we all have our struggles in life. It's not really intended to be sophistry. It just is a very beautiful, but very chilling awareness. What if I go back into what I was when I die?

You could see this as a mental metaphor my mind has arbitrarily made up for all events I've witnessed and been a part of, some sort of perpetual social ostracism I keep walking myself into. But I still think it's more than just that. I loved science growing up. But I can never answer that question - and I know absolutely, that I never will. What happened before 'I exist'?. For any of us. My father often has had a variant of this question, and in the past, it's rubbed people the wrong way because, only a fraction of it gets expressed. We all wear masks. Sometimes there's just a profoundly deep sadness that no one can see.

Chilling, and lovely. In perpetuity.

The past was created when people started probing it, in the same sense that the present is.

This is the reason that a lot of people don’t like philosophy - because people hide behind verbal tricks which have little meaning beyond sounding “deep”. Green ideas sleep furiously

I'm sorry but this is just dumb. Things existed before the author was born, and the author doesn't question that. Are philosophers really so far detached from reality that they can't imagine that maybe the simple answers to things are the right ones? I think xkcd's squirt gun is a genuine solution for an existential crisis like this. Reality is what's around you, and getting lost in deep and complicated thoughts doesn't change what's actually real outside your mind.

This is an answer in the guise of a question, and the answer (belief) being that the universe is finite. Let me offer a better question: is the universe finite or infinite?

- Objective truth: the physical world as it is. There are no "chairs" in this world (would an ant recognize a chair, or a bacteria?) - only data from which we can derive patterns.

- Consensus truth: what people have agreed to be true, often via perception or abstract logic. This is math, that is red, this is a chair, that is democracy.

- Subjective truth: what I believe to be true, by my own rationality or my own perception. This can sometimes deviate from consensus truth (eg. optical illusions).

There must be a term for this philosophical position, but I haven't found it yet (or the thinker associated with it). Obviously this is due to my ignorance because this is not a particularly profound metaphysical position to take.

Does anyone know the name of this?

If so I need to read that book.

With political and other scandals where you get into believing the propaganda but then there are awkward facts that just can't be erased. Yet the world goes on ignoring the facts that, if taken into consideration, mean the convenient narrative verging on a fable can only be a lie.

The fact that disproves everything could be a five second clip from headline news reporting made decades ago, only broadcast live. Or the first edition version of a newsprint article revised in the 'final edition' that did make it to microfiche. Or a forum repost from a decade ago, now lost to a content management system update. These clues are everywhere, sometimes ignored due to 'fast moving events' where we are collectively still trying to learn the story and pertinent details and little clues are lost to the big picture we are still trying to see.

Maybe only with sci-fi can this be told, with real events too much opinion shaped by TV and the PR companies gets in the way.

Consider the differences between these claims:

"My reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"Your reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

and bonus:

"Fantasy is that which, no matter how much you believe in it, doesn't come to be."

http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

> "Can the theory that reality is a simulation be tested? We investigate this question based on the assumption that if the system performing the simulation is finite (i.e. has limited resources), then to achieve low computational complexity, such a system would, as in a video game, render content (reality) only at the moment that information becomes available for observation by a player and not at the moment of detection by a machine (that would be part of the simulation and whose detection would also be part of the internal computation performed by the Virtual Reality server before rendering content to the player). Guided by this principle we describe conceptual wave/particle duality experiments aimed at testing the simulation theory."

Here's the kickstarter they (successfully) ran to fund some of the experiments: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simulation/do-we-live-i...

Science is vitally important to understanding things, making progress (however humanity defines it), building things, etc. But deep insight philosophically, I mean in my opinion, that's just as important, because they go hand in hand. One becomes a tool for the other. Or a tool turns into an awareness.

As someone whose had more than their fair share of experience wading in the somewhat deep (as in 'crazy') parts of the conscious pool of thought, yea, reality, comprehending it in the same way it's known to others - absolutely vital. But also not.

Doesn't make it pseudoscience. Just different questions, different things being noticed, taken apart, figured out, asked about, pondered on. Just like anything else, like ants on a trail to Feynman. Just because it looks 'weird', misinformed - whatever - for a brief instant, doesn't mean that's what it's going to turn into.

Playing Devil's Advocate here, but moralizing such things is indeed the product of subjective human imagination. Nature doesn't moralize, though it does appear to seek balance on some levels while at the same time violently evolving.

If we look into our own body's on a micro scale, we see the same mass conflicts of micoorganisms massacring and genociding eachother. Is that injustice? Without it human beings and living things in general wouldn't exist.