Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindok | Hacker News Reader

How can you conceive of bosons or gravity without consciousness? How can you possibly prove objective reality through the filter of subjective consciousness?

View on HN

It doesn't matter how I conceive of anything. They existed for billions of years before I came around.

Even if, like, I take a solipsistic approach to life, objective reality has a sort of object permanence to it that's more stable than e.g. my dreams. So even if everything is a hallucination, the mechanism for preserving the information is the closest to "real" I can identify.

And from studying the things we call real, we understand physics. And from physics, I see nowhere that necessitates consciousness at a super low level.

Care to cite and explain the specific mechanisms that I'm not aware of that do necessitate it?

Just consider that everything you come in contact with, including the assertion of the sense-data that led you to the conclusion of "billions of years", is contaminated by the fact that is utterly impossible to disprove consciousness. Everything else that comes in through the senses can be doubted, but consciousness is the only thing you are in direct contact with. But I agree partially with you that there may be a form of consciousness that is more primary than our subjective consciousness (I think we agree that reality is a "real" logical system, probably infinite, and possibly intelligent itself). But we have a relationship with reality, in fact we may be a kind of accelerated rotation of it with reincarnative compartmentalization.

I've only read the first couple of chapters, yet, but this book lay out the philosophical problems with physicalism: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CGNXWTBN

> Everything else that comes in through the senses can be doubted, but consciousness is the only thing you are in direct contact with.

Every functioning human learns relatively early in life that certain experiences they have are simply fake - dreams, at the very least. Many people who suffer from hallucinations can also learn to trust that their own internal experiences are less valid than what others tell them is true.

Just as much, we may one day come to learn that our internal experience of consciousness is an illusion and that reality is we are all p-zombies. Of course, a physical theory of consciousness has to explain why and how we have this false subjective experience, but it's certainly conceivable that this might happen one day.

> They existed for billions of years before I came around.

And how did you come to learn this? Through your consciousness

Everything that you can know or experience is mediated through your consciousness

Anything you believe to be objective truth or reality, you came to believe through consciousness

There is no way for you (or anyone else for that matter), to know if anything really exists outside our own consciousness

While you are right in some sense, your position is solipsistic, and solipsism is not considered a fruitful line of inquiry even in philosophy or religion. It is a conversation ender: there is nothing more to add to the conversation if I believe that I am the only thing that exists and there is no objective reality behind my consciousness. Even logic wouldn no longer be usable in arguments in this world view.

This makes for an interesting philosophy discussion, but is not a useful observation about physics.

Physics is philosophy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37721284

You might not like it and prefer to focus only on the models and the math

But fundamentally, all of our knowledge, including physics only really exists in our consciousness

You might also not find it useful, but that’s your own personal subjective opinion, not a universal objective truth (same goes for anything I’ve said)

Not even that. There is really nothing to discuss if the only thing I believed is that I exist, and anything else is potentially a hallucination. Even p ^ ¬p could be true, perhaps I'm just hallucinating the rule that says it isn't.

In a way yes, your whole reality is your own internal hallucination, and there is no way to break out of it

That doesn’t mean you can’t explore anything within that

In fact a lot of eastern philosophical and religious traditions focus exactly on that, how exploring your inner self is a valid and very good way of discovering reality

Not sure why you fixate on “nothing to discuss” or “conversation ending”

Neither the ideas above nor solipsism are dead ends, there’s plenty of exploration to be had within those

Now if you don’t like them or want to dismiss them, you are free to do so, that’s your own personal take, but that’s not an objective absolute truth

This argument leads to solipsism, so it's not very fruitful. That is, you can easily replace "bosons or gravity" with "everything in the universe except myself, including other humans" and your argument doesn't change.

But then you actually can't say anything about anything, since you're the only thing that really exists and everything else is a just a figment of your mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com