The Illusion Of Physical Existence (Part 1 CHAPTER TWO)

[phenomenal_graffiti]

FOREWORD

This Second Chapter to the First Part of the Berkeleyian Realms Series is the point where things get serious. In this part, which features the two ways in which we can know of the existence of something, the philosophy of Bertrand Russell in this regard plays a key role in establishing the defeat of reasonable belief in the non-mental, or that which is not and which is believed to exist in the complete absence of subjective experience or mind itself.

For your edification: This Series is cut into Three Parts with several (brief) Chapters to evenly space out the work. The first part of the Series, presented previously, is actually the First Chapter of Part One. This current work is the Second Chapter, a continuation of the First. A Third Chapter follows, completing Part One, in total a segment of my philosophy concerning the Illusion of physical existence. Part Two establishes the irrationality of belief in Psychophysicalism, the common view that physical brains create or give rise to consciousness. The final Part, Part Three, is a coherent description of a purely mental universe, a universe which is proposed to be an infinite person as opposed to an infinite space.

At any rate, thank you for your attendance to this very important continuance of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy and I hope you will conclude, based on the conceptual evidence presented in these papers, that there is no rational or logical necessity for physical existence, much less is there reason for the physical to have anything to do with that which it essentially and substantially is not.

Jay M. Brewer (Phenomenal Graffiti)
Austin, Texas
June 2, 2012

[Flannel Jesus]

You always have a really interesting visual style. It's like...cheap and plastic-looking. Like it was made on one of the first versions of commercial computers on some outdated page-making software. There's just a pinch of influence from RL Stein bookcover art. It creates a really intriguing and unique atmosphere, hard to acheive. Andy Warhol I think sometimes did work with a similar sort of aura.

I'm being totally serious btw

[Chester]

Yeah, good fun. I too believe that the concept that we live within the mind of God is far superior to the dead end of materialism.

[Amorphos]

hi J

Lets say that there is information about a cup with oatmeal in it, that info is either shared or not shared.

1. We have a world unshared, all informations are your informations, that assumedly you created with magic.
1b. We have a world unshared, all informations are derived ~ discovered, so there is an outer world. At this point irrespective of weather or not that world is physical.

2. There is a shared world be it a dream, informational and/or physical etc. the cup with oatmeal in is shared, the other experiencers out there experience a different view of that same thing from their positional perspective.

Thought experiment;
There is a single information about something [here we have removed the rest of existence], then there is you the experiencer. Is that experiencer the same as the piece of information? You can experience the information but you wouldn’t say the info is exactly the same as either the experiencer itself, or the info as experienced.

So we have two distinct things which share their reality.

Now surely we can add all informations in the same manner, and now we have an informational world + an experiencer.

Lets add another experiencer. His subjective experience of the same piece of information is different to yours, he sees the cup and contents differently.

So now we have two experiential informations, two experiencers and one piece of information.

As soon as experiencer 2 informs experiencer 1 about his perspective based information, a difference is noted between 1’s and 2’s experience. There are now 2 informations and two perspectives.

Point is that neither 1 nor 2 are the authors of those informations. The addition of I info + 1 more experiencer to the single experiencer has already created something of a world of info.

----------------------------------------------------

Or are we to assume that there is a world of information already?

If so then we already have a world, we just need to add other qualities which relate to info, experience, colour, feelings, particles?

So far everything kinda comes out of thin air, something happens and we then have info or consciousness, perhaps the physical originates in the non-physical in the same manner.

Something has to determine difference! What’s to differentiate between one set of informations and qualia, and another set of them, or one info and another info ~ how do we even arrive at cardinality without creating the edges of things. So there becomes a need for that edge and somehow it is arrived at, we know that because reality isn’t one thing only.

It seems to me that physicality [even if we see it as holographic] is the very vehicle of cardinality, its what makes edges in the world.

Quality + qualia = world
_

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Flannel Jesus:

Thanks. I hoped you were serious. I've had lots of influences over the years particularly Jack Kirby, Rick Veitch, and others, who use the same "outside the box" style of artwork. I go by feeling: if what I tamper with knocks me flat on the you-know-what, I use it.

Chester:

Thanks. I've always had a problem with materialism, even at first hearing. And it has always been propounded with such sound and fury and unthinking certainty (and most everyone, unfortunately, has drunk the kool-aid). But when you actually sit down, turn of the telly, and think about it in the dark...well there's all sorts of problems with it. For one thing, it relies fatally upon ex nihilo or ontologically transformative magic. Our consciousness exists, because we are here and we experience (its all we do, and everything that exists to us is, you may have noticed, in the form of our experience of them). In the grand scheme of figuring out what exists and what does not, all one must remember is this: whatever exists is either composed of subjective experience (it is an experience), or it is not experience at all, regardless of what it is. This really is the binary code of all actual and possible existence. My point is that that which is not experience at all (it is not a subjective experience, one who subjectively experiences---as this is an experience, nor the act of experiencing itself) cannot reasonably produce experience out of or from itself (given that we are being asked to believe that something can produce out of itself that which it is not).

That's my philosophy in a nutshell in terms of underlying substructure. We're being asked to believe that something that is not experience somehow, like the magician pulling the rabbit ex nihilo from the hat (in the literal form of the metaphor), can create that which it is not either wholly without the use of already-existing material lying around, or by causing parts of itself to stop existing as itself to transform into that which it previously was not.

J.

And now, ladies and gentleman, for the main event. Good evening....

Quetzalcoatl:

Lets say that there is information about a cup with oatmeal in it, that info is either shared or not shared.

1. We have a world unshared, all informations are your informations, that assumedly you created with magic.
1b. We have a world unshared, all informations are derived ~ discovered, so there is an outer world. At this point irrespective of weather or not that world is physical.

2. There is a shared world be it a dream, informational and/or physical etc. the cup with oatmeal in is shared, the other experiencers out there experience a different view of that same thing from their positional perspective.

Thought experiment;
There is a single information about something [here we have removed the rest of existence], then there is you the experiencer. Is that experiencer the same as the piece of information? You can experience the information but you wouldn’t say the info is exactly the same as either the experiencer itself, or the info as experienced.

So we have two distinct things which share their reality.

Now surely we can add all informations in the same manner, and now we have an informational world + an experiencer.

Lets add another experiencer. His subjective experience of the same piece of information is different to yours, he sees the cup and contents differently.

So now we have two experiential informations, two experiencers and one piece of information.

As soon as experiencer 2 informs experiencer 1 about his perspective based information, a difference is noted between 1’s and 2’s experience. There are now 2 informations and two perspectives.

Point is that neither 1 nor 2 are the authors of those informations. The addition of I info + 1 more experiencer to the single experiencer has already created something of a world of info.

----------------------------------------------------

Or are we to assume that there is a world of information already?

If so then we already have a world, we just need to add other qualities which relate to info, experience, colour, feelings, particles?

So far everything kinda comes out of thin air, something happens and we then have info or consciousness, perhaps the physical originates in the non-physical in the same manner.

Something has to determine difference! What’s to differentiate between one set of informations and qualia, and another set of them, or one info and another info ~ how do we even arrive at cardinality without creating the edges of things. So there becomes a need for that edge and somehow it is arrived at, we know that because reality isn’t one thing only.

It seems to me that physicality [even if we see it as holographic] is the very vehicle of cardinality, its what makes edges in the world.

Quality + qualia = world

Hmm. I think we have a difference of semantic here when it comes to the term: 'physical'. Believe me, I'm all for the existence of 'difference' (in terms of different minds perceiving things from different points of view). Despite the fact that I can only experience my existence, I have faith that others' and their relatively different points of view of the same information exist.

I'm all for the existence of the external world, or something inhabiting that world, determining the existence of: 1) The experiencer. 2) All other experiencers 3) All experiencers' subjective experience of a particular piece of information. In my paper above, I state that Russellian inference infers the nature of the external world from that which is used to 'infer' in the first place. And we 'infer' with conscious experience. In fact, everything we do with do with conscious experience and everything is actually made out of conscious experience, at least to us.

But you refer to 'information' as something that already exists in the form that it is perceived, and somehow you seem to imply that in order to perceive, it is necessary that these pre-existing forms exist. This is pretty much the same type of Phenomenalism (if we're throwing the babies of Non-Experience or Non-Mentalism out the window with the bathwater here) espoused by Ernst Mach, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and others. But when it comes to 'something determining difference' and 'something providing information' (that informs or creates the shape of that which is perceived), it may ultimately come down to whether or not that information existing in the external world itself creates so-called perception of the information. Why should a chair in the external world, regardless of what it is made of, create an experiencer's perception of a 'chair'? The perceived chair is not the same thing as the external chair (as the perceived chair can wink out of perceived existence at the drop of a hat, which the external chair does not depend, for its existence, on the presence or existence of a perceiver at all).

Thus it is, then, in this dynamic, that information in the external world is not in danger: it does not depend upon the existence of the experiencer and the experiencer's perception of "something" that it takes to be the external world chair in the form of its perception of it. But the dichotomy, my friend, has been cast in the ability of the external world-information to happily exist in the absence of experiencers and relative perceptions(!)

Why, if the external world information is non-mental or composed of that which experience itself is not, the dichotomy does not matter: belief that we perceive non-mental or non-experiential things ('non-experiential' meaning that which is not subjective experience qua subjective experience rather than that which is subjective experience but is not subjectively experienced by a particular person) falls before the observation that the non-mental is not experience qua experience itself, thus we have no reason to believe that we perceive that which is not the stuff making up perception itself. I hold that we make this up due to an incredulity that only experience exists. There is no rational or logical ontological, causal, or material relation between experience and non-experience, so it is odd to say that they do or must reflect each other, or that we can 'perceive' that which essentially is not perception or experience at all.

If, however, external world-information, or that which "creates the edges of things" is mental in aspect (composed of the same substance that composes subjective experience or the act of experiencing), then this is much more difficult to argue against. Nevertheless, an opponent can simply note the existential dichotomy (mental chairs remain in existence even if perceptual chairs should wink out of existence due to sudden loss of consciousness, if loss of consciousness even occurs).

For my part, we don't need the extra chair for the perceptual chair to exist, and this does not mean an automatic slide to the perceptual chair "forming out of thin air" (in the sense that perceptions are formed randomly ex nihilo by the self or independent of the self). The external chair certainly does not personally create the perceptual chair, as the perceptual chair(s) come in different points of view. The existence of the one does not magically cause or worse, necessitate, the existence of the other. Both are capable of existing on their own without help from (or without the existence of) the other quite nicely, in my view. Holding Berkeley's hand, I state that we do not need pre-existing forms to determine the nature and content of our experience (predominantly visual experience or perception); the forms that exist do not necessarily need be random and meaningless but may be manifestation of mental principles (i.e. intelligent, oppositeness, morality, etc.) in symbolic form, rather than out and out perceptual copies of "stuff" or "objects" that continually sit there and do nothing. Given that the existence of the one is distinct from that of the other, the necessity for the one to exist because of the other does not necessarily follow, UNLESS the one gives of its own substance to produce the second.

With the non-mental this is impossible (without magic). With phenomenalism, who knows?

J.

[Amorphos]

J

when it comes to 'something determining difference' and 'something providing information' (that informs or creates the shape of that which is perceived), it may ultimately come down to whether or not that information existing in the external world itself creates so-called perception of the information. Why should a chair in the external world, regardless of what it is made of, create an experiencer's perception of a 'chair'?

Thus it is, then, in this dynamic, that information in the external world is not in danger: it does not depend upon the existence of the experiencer and the experiencer's perception of "something" that it takes to be the external world chair in the form of its perception of it. But the dichotomy, my friend, has been cast in the ability of the external world-information to happily exist in the absence of experiencers and relative perceptions(!)

My first ontology on the matter is that; ‘there are informations about everything’.
the experiencer is in a void if it cannot know info about itself and other things.

In a non-physical world there may ONLY be informations about the chair, rather than there being a chair itself!

Do we already know all informations such that as they pass through our minds it is as if on a carousel?
Or is the information carousel in god mind, and we experiencers get to see different parts of it at a time?

Rather than a dichotomy, information communicates, you don’t have info without there being a relationship between things. If there were only experiencer 1 [you] and 2 [someone else] the info would be the intimate relationship those entities would instantly be in ~ there would be nothing else to stop them knowing about each other, and knowing is fundamental to the experiencer.

That info is then ‘world info‘, it is not entirely your experience or the others. Equally you are the object to its subject and vice versa. The info about that has grown from a simple recognition ~ the basic element of knowing, to an already more complex set of informations concerning the relationships between you both, and that’s with only two experiencers a short amount of time and knowing.
2 simple entities interacting = a mass of information.

There is no rational or logical ontological, causal, or material relation between experience and non-experience, so it is odd to say that they do or must reflect each other, or that we can 'perceive' that which essentially is not perception or experience at all.

Well perception contains observation and knowing/recognition, informational though is within the context of the experiencer and its perception, but info has to arrive there, it has to join the party somehow. It could be that the mind creates info but we have already seen that other informations occur during the process of knowing and not of the single or combined minds. Said info has formed or is a relationship between other entities or indeed other informations.

The external chair certainly does not personally create the perceptual chair, as the perceptual chair(s) come in different points of view.

If it’s a third party to our two given experiencers [of which there are actually 7 billions on earth], there is a triangle of informations and perspectives/perceptions. The two experiencers would naturally perceive the chair from their different angles of perspective, yet the chair is both of those objectively and neither of them subjectively.

UNLESS the one gives of its own substance to produce the second.

I’d say that’s exactly what occurs and in all cases. There is no DISTINCT. …things, informations or experiencers. no duality per se.

Btw it [existence] may not be physical as such, more holographic. I don’t believe there is a way to conceive the reality map with physical objects occurring as such [as distinct].

_

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Quetzalcoatl:

My first ontology on the matter is that; ‘there are informations about everything’.
the experiencer is in a void if it cannot know info about itself and other things.

In a non-physical world there may ONLY be informations about the chair, rather than there being a chair itself!

Do we already know all informations such that as they pass through our minds it is as if on a carousel?
Or is the information carousel in god mind, and we experiencers get to see different parts of it at a time?

My central argument is that there is no non-mental 'information', as there is nothing about non-mentality (being not mind nor experience qua experience itself) that, absent of magic, can have anything to do with or to contribute to the existence of subjective experience (as it is not subjective experience qua experience).

But I think I see your point: there is the experiencer, there is the closed system of that which the experiencer is currently experiencing at a particular moment in time (which, empirically, is pretty much "cut and dried" in the sense that "it is what it is" irregardless of one's beliefs about what it is, or one's beliefs about what "one is experiencing even while not directly experiencing it"), and there is an external world beyond the deprivation chamber of the experiencer and it's current "now" experience.

You make the point, I think, that there is a relationship between what is and what is going on in the external world and the nature and type of "now" experience currently had by the experiencer, and that somehow the second is what it is because of what is and what's going on in the first.

So we have that.

I, too, possess this simple, basic ontology, but differ, I think, only in the proposition that in principle, you do not need pre-existing 'informations' cookie-cut in the form of the visual objects of perception and that the experiencer's experiences, particularly experiences of objects (chairs, tables, cars, etc.) can be collocated "Johnny-on-the-spot" by psychical 'bytes' that, due to some fundamental causal necessity based on how these 'bytes' fortuitously happen to exist, can only interact in one way to form every experiencer and every type of experience had by those experiencers. After all, in (non-mental) physics, it is held that fundamental particles of the Standard Model accomplish the same thing, in terms of tables, chairs, etc. being put together "willy-nilly" by the fortuitous "just so" nature of the particles themselves and the "just so" nature of how they can possibly interact. Basic "jigsaw-puzzle-ism" at work.

I hold that this is possible in principle, but in practice, my Pantheopsychism insists that there is a basic informational world that pre-exists before the experiencer and what it experiences in the form of the autonomous psychical "carosel" of the mind of God. So in a sense, I hold your view that 'there are informations about everything' in this theological sense (inadvertently following Berkeley, who held the same view, although I formed the conclusions on my own independent of Berkeley).

Thus I hold (and this is just me "holding x to be true" regardless of whether or not it is true "out there" ) that:

"... the information carousel in god mind, and we experiencers get to see different parts of it at a time."

(The other option: "we already know all informations such that as they pass through our minds it is as if on a carousel" would be problematic without the notion of a Freudian unconscious mind: we only know, through Russellian immediate acquaintance, only those experiences that are going on "right now". Everything else is, it seems, outside the mind in that we are not viewing, feeling, or even thinking of those things at the moment in question. If all other information is currently inconceivable, and if we can be said to have it despite its inconceivability, then we have an extra mind that we don't know about or do not experience unless and until the contents of this invisible second mind spill into current experience. But this is the nature of the "unconscious mind".)

Rather than a dichotomy, information communicates, you don’t have info without there being a relationship between things. If there were only experiencer 1 [you] and 2 [someone else] the info would be the intimate relationship those entities would instantly be in ~ there would be nothing else to stop them knowing about each other, and knowing is fundamental to the experiencer.

But the information is, as it actually is experienced to occur, experiential in aspect. These are nothing but experiences (in the fact that we can say they exist because they are experienced). That's the whole point: we do nothing but experience, and anything we say definitely exists can only be known to definitely exist if we experience them. Anything else is fiction. In the absence of direct experience, we create fictions that we have faith exists despite our inability to experience them to explain the "whys" and "wherefores" of actual experience. Regardless, I dont' believe that our experiences randomly pop into magical existence ex nihilo, so it is by reason of this we are forced to invent the fiction of an external world and it's communication with what we actually experience in the form of its fictional creation of ourselves and the things we experience, given the material that happens to fictionally exist "outside" (By "fiction", I do not mean that these things necessarily do not exist---as if I could know that . I hold that the external world and the 'information' in that world--including God--is 'fictional' in the sense that we must imagine them, regardless of their true, actual existence beyond our minds).

I hold that there is indeed an existential dichotomy between the external world and the experiencer and its experiences in terms of the manifest. We are, in a sense, a moving carosel of changing experience: one moment I'm here, the next I'm over there (because I jumped in my car and drove to the other side of town). The external world, however, remains what it is regardless of what's going on within my closed system or deprivation tank of "now" experience. Therein lies the 'duality', in terms of the difference between myself and what lies 'outside'.

That info is then ‘world info‘, it is not entirely your experience or the others. Equally you are the object to its subject and vice versa. The info about that has grown from a simple recognition ~ the basic element of knowing, to an already more complex set of informations concerning the relationships between you both, and that’s with only two experiencers a short amount of time and knowing.
2 simple entities interacting = a mass of information.

True, but the basic manifestation of this new and old information is nevertheless mental in aspect, as the information gained is nevertheless experienced in ground state and principled in highest state. But the principle itself (the principle of a complex set of information formed by the encounter of two experiencers) is itself expressed in experiential form. My view is that 'information' is not that which is the opposite of experience, given that 'information' invariably (and always, at least as it seems to us) eventuates as experience. 'World info', then, is nothing more or less than the total set of experiences or types of experiences that happen to exist, irregardless of the small subset perceived by two or more (or all) experiencers (if it is a subset). As before, I don't disagree with this, save the supposition that it is necessary (to the falsity of all other alternatives) that we need pre-existing external versions of the content of visual perception in order for visual perception of objects to exist (in principle). I do hold, however, in the interest of Pantheopsychism that this may be the case in roundabout causal fashion, as our experiences (according to Berkeley and Pantheopsychism) are transmitted to us from God.

Well perception contains observation and knowing/recognition, informational though is within the context of the experiencer and its perception, but info has to arrive there, it has to join the party somehow. It could be that the mind creates info but we have already seen that other informations occur during the process of knowing and not of the single or combined minds. Said info has formed or is a relationship between other entities or indeed other informations.

True. Although I suspect you defend this based on my statement in the last installment that, in the Process of Perception, the percept ultimately arises from within oneself, such that the world, in a sense, arises from within the self. I defend that, but simultaneously append the notion that the percept obviously (or most likely) does not magically pop into existence without cause and is not created by the person, as if the person could choose the type of world that flows out of himself (and is an aspect of himself). The follow-through, then (lamentably left out in the previous installment) is that it is probable that yes, the percept is indeed provided by the outside world, but then flows out of the individual (or "unfolds" from the individual). My point in that installment is that the external world and the experience of the individual are spatiotemporally two distinct entities, even if they are composed of the same psychical (rather than physical) substance (or at least two distinct forms in the same overall psychic "space").

If it’s a third party to our two given experiencers [of which there are actually 7 billions on earth], there is a triangle of informations and perspectives/perceptions. The two experiencers would naturally perceive the chair from their different angles of perspective, yet the chair is both of those objectively and neither of them subjectively.

As long as the external information is not non-mental or non-experiential, I have no empirical grounds to deny this outright.

phenomenal_graffiti wrote: UNLESS the one gives of its own substance to produce the second.

I’d say that’s exactly what occurs and in all cases. There is no DISTINCT. …things, informations or experiencers. no duality per se.

Btw it [existence] may not be physical as such, more holographic. I don’t believe there is a way to conceive the reality map with physical objects occurring as such [as distinct].

The notion that the substance of the one must give of itself to form the second (something in the external world using itself to form subjective experience of 'something') is exactly what I hold as a requirement, if the external world has any rational relation to personal subjective experience. Non-mentality, however, would require substantial and essential distinction. So I think we agree in this regard, that the nature of the one is what it is because of the nature of the second, which uses parts of itself to form the first. This is, I think, the only true fruit to be produced in rational and logical Russellian inference.

And you're right. There would be no way to concieve of reality with physical objects, as physical objects simply are not mental or experiential at all. Experience of such objects, in the form of our experiencing them in the form of imagination of what they would be like, would not be what they are like, as we use experience to imagine that which is not experience at all.

And on and on it goes.

Thanks for this.

J.

[Amorphos]

I hold that this is possible in principle, but in practice, my Pantheopsychism insists that there is a basic informational world that pre-exists before the experiencer and what it experiences in the form of the autonomous psychical "carosel" of the mind of God. So in a sense, I hold your view that 'there are informations about everything' in this theological sense

"... the information carousel in god mind, and we experiencers get to see different parts of it at a time."

Ok, so is that the complete set of information? Nothing is changed ever?
If say god or anyone and anything else delivered info into my internal mental sphere, but I didn’t understand it correctly, then I told you or god said info, would that not be different info?

Perhaps the complete set of informations contains all correct and all false info. God would not create nor contain false info, though he would know false info as he is wise.
I would have to think that at least the false information set is external to gods constitution? Perhaps that all informations are relatively false as compared to gods informations.

Imagine that if everything contains or has info about itself, then the infinite would have a different set, one completely non-understandable from the finite perspective. That also the finite would be false in comparison!

So now the god-matrix would be necessity be placed outside of god the absolute.

I would also thing that if god made two particles and sent them on their way, then when the two particles interact new informations would occur. Same kinda thing to us not being puppets ~ god would not create a puppet universe because it would be futile and unwise. You cannot have life unless you have enough plasticity in an object in order to make it self animate [= life][not puppetry].

See also here;
The difference between AI and consciousness is ‘plasticity’!
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178619

Also see here for how I see information in levels and cycles…
The information sandwich;
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178532

anything we say definitely exists can only be known to definitely exist if we experience them. Anything else is fiction.

Thought experiment; the unintended experience;
If you and I each make a machine, one which we know definitely exists in our experience, then those two machines make a third? We don’t experience the third machine but we know our machines can and did make that in our experience. Surely the un-experienced machine exists as much as those in our experience? …especially if later it came into our experience at some point, or we bumped into it.

I hold that there is indeed an existential dichotomy between the external world and the experiencer and its experiences in terms of the manifest. We are, in a sense, a moving carosel of changing experience: one moment I'm here, the next I'm over there (because I jumped in my car and drove to the other side of town). The external world, however, remains what it is regardless of what's going on within my closed system or deprivation tank of "now" experience. Therein lies the 'duality', in terms of the difference between myself and what lies 'outside'.

As with my thought experiment above, one thing begets another, your experience touches others even if indirectly. You experience an idea in your mind [1. which also exists on the god carousel] which connects to other/and all experiential parties [also ‘1‘], then between you and the next experiencer is the necessary third party experiencer [also ‘I’] which is a non-experiencer! ~ an object being experienced.

I hope this also brings a new perspective to your final point here; -

And you're right. There would be no way to concieve of reality with physical objects, as physical objects simply are not mental or experiential at all. Experience of such objects, in the form of our experiencing them in the form of imagination of what they would be like, would not be what they are like, as we use experience to imagine that which is not experience at all.

- Food for thought!

Thanks J

…and sry for late reply.





_

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Quetzalcoatl:

This is food for thought.

Ok, so is that the complete set of information? Nothing is changed ever?
If say god or anyone and anything else delivered info into my internal mental sphere, but I didn’t understand it correctly, then I told you or god said info, would that not be different info?

Not if the info, in the fullness of the internal mental sphere of God, is isomorphic (an identical twin or clone). My theory of the mind of Christ as he died on the cross (Weird Christianity #4) is isomorphic to the flawed mind of every human being in the course of human existence (past, present, and future). Thus, hypothetically, your incorrect understanding of delivered info (as it were) would be primarily (in the first place) occurring in the mind of the crucified Christ before your hypothetical experience of "misunderstanding" in the future.

Absent this, if Berkeley (and I) are right and we do exist in the mind of God and receive our information from him, then it is necessary to understand the nature of info in terms of its existence, and whether or not that existence is eternal or magically finite (does the info exist forever in some form, is it reduced to some ultimate fundamental "bytes" or psychic particles, or does it magically pop into and out of existence?)

Even if there is different info evolving every time a new experience is born, unless this info magically pops into existence from a previous nonexistence, it is born from something that pre-existed, and one must take into account the nature of its content. If it is related to the info that manifest as someone's (ours or God's) experience beforehand, then it is safe to say that the new info, despite its difference, is a child of the previous info.

Perhaps the complete set of informations contains all correct and all false info. God would not create nor contain false info, though he would know false info as he is wise.
I would have to think that at least the false information set is external to gods constitution? Perhaps that all informations are relatively false as compared to gods informations.

In an 'absolute' sense, this would mean that the totality of reality (as we are imagining it here, regardless of what it is truly like despite what we imagine or believe it to be) is split then, between God and man (truth and falsity), and these exist in separate worlds separate and distinct (one could say that the first distills into the other, but the quality of the other is such that it is always distorted and never truly reflects the information of the first as the first knows or maintains the information).

This could be an eternal situation, or it could be a temporary situation in which the second (the world of Man) evolves or transforms through some natural mechanism into the First, such that falsity evolves eventually into Truth. Indeed, this is what I maintain. But I hold that Man and God, Falsity and Truth, do not exist in separate mental Realms, but that the constition of God that does not and cannot contain false information is merely one aspect of the Total God, that is, the conscious aspect of that fundamental person. The unconscious aspect, then, is the False (or Different) aspect of that being, in terms of that beings unconscious creation of examples of what its True state is not. This may be a matter, ultimately, of the goings-on of the mental material making up the complete mental space, which happens to be the totality of this person.

Imagine that if everything contains or has info about itself, then the infinite would have a different set, one completely non-understandable from the finite perspective. That also the finite would be false in comparison!

So now the god-matrix would be necessity be placed outside of god the absolute.

We have to remember, in this, that info is itself nothing but experience. And that info exists in the form of experience (and experience doesn't exist unless and until it is experienced). Everything that is not the infinite (following your description) would experience only what it is like to be themselves and the types of things they currently experience at a particular point in time. This is basically it when it comes to non-infinite persons. The infinite, on the other hand, would contain the finite (as opposed to being external to or separate from the finite) as well as everything else that is never experienced by finite persons (whatever that may be). So that which is 'non-understandable' from the finite perspective may be so because it simply is not experienced, nor cannot be due to its quality (whatever that may be).

That which is 'false' according to this understanding is simply 'different in content'. In Pantheopsychism that which is 'false' is simply that which is 'different' in terms of being the opposite of that which is True about the conscious (as opposed to the unconsicous) mind of God.

The god-matrix, then, may safely exist within, rather than outside, god the absolute, as god the absolute, by its instinctual definition, should encompass even falsity, with falsity and truth separated by types of mind that only experience certain things which, in the interest of how info exists in the first place, pre-exists in the form of the psychic material comprising the absolute.

I would also thing that if god made two particles and sent them on their way, then when the two particles interact new informations would occur. Same kinda thing to us not being puppets ~ god would not create a puppet universe because it would be futile and unwise. You cannot have life unless you have enough plasticity in an object in order to make it self animate [= life][not puppetry].

But new informations (to us new experiences, as we use experience in order to imagine what 'information' is like in the first place, and use experience in order to conceive of the concept of 'information' and what it is like in the first place), unless they magically come into existence from a previous nonexistence (in which case new informations are not derived from that which already existed before they appeared), are derived from the substance making up 'old' information, in terms of that information existing before and during the interaction of the particles a Planck-second before the new information existed.

Puppetry can be redefined as "isomorphism" (identical twin-ism), and we really can't assign, because we don't like it, an 'impossibility' to the notion of puppetry. It may be that things are in such a way that this is the only thing that is accomplished or can be accomplished, in terms of how things are made to exist, or how they happen to come into existence. 'Self-animation' may actually be an illusion hiding actual manipulation by external forces, as the 'self' does not exist in a vacuum and is constantly a product of the external existence in which it is derives and entrenched.

See also here;
The difference between AI and consciousness is ‘plasticity’!
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178619

Also see here for how I see information in levels and cycles…
The information sandwich;
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178532

I perused the topic posted. You guys are pretty esoteric and "out there" on that front. But I, in my humble and 'non-expert' way, am forced to turn my gaze toward the very beings coming up with such stuff, and find myself fixated upon the basic substance of which these beings are made. And it seems that we are, and these amazing concepts are, ultimately composed of nothing but experience, as we do nothing but experience, and we can say nothing of non-experience because it is not an aspect of our being in the first place. Thus code words such as 'information' etc. must refer only to experience or the mental, if we can trace the nature of the external world and the 'absolute' or the 'infinite' to the nature of ourselves. If we cannot, then we cannot rationally claim what it is in lieu of being the same thing we are, because one would attempt to use what one is to describe that which one is not. As Adolf Grunbaum states:

At this point, the argument is sometimes abandoned in favor of claiming that creation out of nothing [or 'information' or anything described or proposed to be something other than or something not composed of subjective experience] "passes all understanding" and that scientific theories of cosmogony leave much to be desired in the way of providing answers to well-conceived questions. To this I say: If the creation hypothesis is indeed beyond human understanding, then it cannot even be meaningfully taken on faith without evidence, and it becomes completely hopeless to try to give a causal argument for it. After all, if the hypothesis itself is beyond human understanding, then even the person who is willing to believe it on faith admits that he or she does not know what is to be believed. Our human species may well be limited by intrinsic intellectual horizons of some sort, just as theoretical physics, for example, cannot be understood by dogs. Yet the fact remains that one can meaningfully believe only a claim whose content one understands, even if one is willing to believe without evidence on sheer faith. If the belief-content is incomprehensible, what is it that is being believed?

Therefore, if creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) is beyond human understanding, then the hypothesis that it occurred cannot explain anything. Even less can it then be required to fill explanatory gaps that exist in scientific theories of cosmogony. Indeed, it seems to me that if something literally passes all understanding, then nothing at all can be said or thought about it by humans. As Wittgenstein said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Dogs, for example, do not bark about relativity theory. Thus, any supposed hypothesis that literally passes all understanding is simply meaningless to us, and it certainly should not inspire a feeling of awe. To stand in awe before an admittedly incomprehensible hypothesis is to exhibit a totally misplaced sense of intellectual humility! It is useless to reply to this conclusion by saying that the creation hypothesis may be intelligible to "higher beings" than ourselves, if there are such. After all, it is being offered to us as a causal explanation!

-Adolf Grunbaum

Thought experiment; the unintended experience;
If you and I each make a machine, one which we know definitely exists in our experience, then those two machines make a third? We don’t experience the third machine but we know our machines can and did make that in our experience. Surely the un-experienced machine exists as much as those in our experience? …especially if later it came into our experience at some point, or we bumped into it.

As the now-deceased character Shane (Jon Berthal) from the AMC series The Walking Dead would say: "Nah, man."

Or at least...not necessarily.

The un-experienced machine need not exist in the first place. Nor is it absolutely necessary that our experience of oneself (or each, if done in the same room) making a machine magically possess a power to create a third, un-experienced machine. Why? Because the contiguity must be explained by derivation (i.e. the third un-experienced machine must somehow play a direct role in the existence of the two experienced machines from two different perspectives). Without this simple derivation (or "equation of derivation" as mentioned in the main article above), the third machine, if it exists, happens to exist by random chance outside the minds of the two individuals and has absolutely nothing to do with the fortuitious formation of the experience of the machine (in terms of the shape, form, and experienced substance of the machine) within the two individuals.

And unless we're talking a heretofore unknown or inconceivable form of backwards (or a new type of forward) causation here, our experience (form one's unique perspective) of the machine in our personal experience is usually the end result of some collocational machinization in the external world: but I forget, this is a thought-experiment.

Nevertheless, the pertinent theory is that the third chair, if it exists, must somehow cause the existence of the two individual's experience of creating the machine, as it must form by reason of a zombie (philosophical rather than "horror movie" type) version of the two individuals making the chair in the external world. But we must be clear on what's at stake here: the individuals and the machines as they appear in the individuals' distinct experience are composed (at least) of subjective experience. Russellian inference of the substance of the third, non-experienced machine (as stated in the article above) must rationally indicate that the substance making up this third, external chair must also be composed of subjective experience (and subjective experience is inseparable from a subject of experience), or the two individuals' experience of the machine is derived by the external machine (and vise versa!) by magic.

As with my thought experiment above, one thing begets another, your experience touches others even if indirectly. You experience an idea in your mind [1. which also exists on the god carousel] which connects to other/and all experiential parties [also ‘1‘], then between you and the next experiencer is the necessary third party experiencer [also ‘I’] which is a non-experiencer! ~ an object being experienced.

Bloody good point (seemingly) with the third-party 'non-experiencing experiencer' there. In Phenomenalism, this would pose a good problem for Idealism. The Idealist, however could respond to this by stating that the third party experiencer is simply an aspect of the experiencer, and has no 'outside' existence on its own independent of all experiencers. Thus it is, ultimately, a vivid phantasm of the experiencer, created of the experiencer's own subjective substance and accompanied by a (ultimately false) belief that it has objective existence (in some form) beyond the experiencer. Reality, then, may only be composed entirely of persons (regardless of whether or not these persons exist within a larger, surrounding Person) surrounded by a larger "mist" of potential psychic substance (instantiating its own bizarre form of internal experience) and that 'objects' (machines, chairs, cars, Playboy magazines, etc.) are extensions of the person (supplied by the outer "mist") and are not independent entities capable of existence separate from the existence of the "mist" or the individual.

Or something like that.

Thanks J

No, thank YOU, Q.

Jay.

[Amorphos]

J

Not if the info, in the fullness of the internal mental sphere of God, is isomorphic (an identical twin or clone). My theory of the mind of Christ as he died on the cross (Weird Christianity #4) is isomorphic to the flawed mind of every human being in the course of human existence (past, present, and future). Thus, hypothetically, your incorrect understanding of delivered info (as it were) would be primarily (in the first place) occurring in the mind of the crucified Christ before your hypothetical experience of "misunderstanding" in the future.

Absent this, if Berkeley (and I) are right and we do exist in the mind of God and receive our information from him, then it is necessary to understand the nature of info in terms of its existence, and whether or not that existence is eternal or magically finite (does the info exist forever in some form, is it reduced to some ultimate fundamental "bytes" or psychic particles, or does it magically pop into and out of existence?)

Even if there is different info evolving every time a new experience is born, unless this info magically pops into existence from a previous nonexistence, it is born from something that pre-existed, and one must take into account the nature of its content. If it is related to the info that manifest as someone's (ours or God's) experience beforehand, then it is safe to say that the new info, despite its difference, is a child of the previous info.

Some very good points there. I had thought that information always exists, otherwise history has no record of itself and hence doesn’t exist et al? …how can history not have existed.
What I now think is that there is no such thing as information alone, that there is something we can think of as info as if like an entity or something ~ as you say like bytes. What is a piece of information?

For me if you take any two things - lets take two items of experiential thought, a single information doesn’t mean anything, it is not until it relates to something else e.g. another piece of info, that it makes any sense or even exists.

Indeed information probably only arises as part of a relationship between two or more things, and when there is a communication either in that or between that and another set of informational relationships. This is how language and concepts are strung together, even in the physical world.

So now your god-matrix is doing something! The whole experiential thing is live.

This could be an eternal situation, or it could be a temporary situation in which the second (the world of Man) evolves or transforms through some natural mechanism into the First, such that falsity evolves eventually into Truth.

It could be that, and/or that could be within every process. When we learn about a thing we go through a set of thought processes until we arrive at a resolution on a given matter. We could say that there are the resolved and unresolved sets, though perhaps the unresolved sets are not information ~ they are unmade or being formed and they don’t become info until made. That describes thought as I see it, most of what we think doesn’t become ‘full’ until resolved, no?

We have to remember, in this, that info is itself nothing but experience.

I don’t know, that’s a massive debate in and of itself. I think things outside of experiencers may contain info as noted early in my thought experiment. Data is one such kind of info. Hmm I suppose in theory god can be experiencing informations that we are not, but you’d still arrive at a third party between him and us by the same logic.
However, I would say that ‘communication’ is universal, in us informations communicating are thought, and that we experience. Does that mean communications are always experienced? For me there is a level of pure thought where the experiencer is pure mind and without communication, info etc. this is what gives us the ability to be detached, and I assume means we are speaking about different worlds or different universals.

For me a ‘god-matrix’ comes in layers, the world or the matrix itself is its body, as like our bodies are to us.

It all seems to come down to weather or not the ‘god-matrix’ is or contains the ‘information carousel’ [and indeed we its puppets], or weather or not it is a set of instructions which loosely define things - like a guiding hand, such that we exist in a living organic, plastic free universe. For me it’s the latter most definitely.

“Therefore, if creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) is beyond human understanding, then the hypothesis that it occurred cannot explain anything”.

Infinity is a kind of nothing, it has no thingness or parts. Yet it would have both information about itself and also its relationships with universe and us. The singularity [universe] could collapse into ‘nothing’ and re-emerge ~ or indeed originally emerge, from that instruction set.

Why? Because the contiguity must be explained by derivation (i.e. the third un-experienced machine must somehow play a direct role in the existence of the two experienced machines from two different perspectives).

There are two know derivations and two unknown derivations, one cannot experience the unknown. Same applies in terms of what is being experienced, one does not experience the other except from ones original perspective. If the machine makes another machine, would that exist even though it would not be experienced et al?

Now imagine that we the experiencers come after the machines in the material world!

The Idealist, however could respond to this by stating that the third party experiencer is simply an aspect of the experiencer, and has no 'outside' existence on its own independent of all experiencers.

Hmm intriguing. Well I imagined all the machines and any thereafter in my mind, so I suppose the very same thing could occur idealistically.
I had not expected to consider an extra experiencer in my mind or the other experiencers mind. Perhaps though, experiencers are equivalent to perception from a given perspective, and we can take one such perceiver and view ourselves ad infinitum.

This leaves us here…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178657

There are perceptions, observations and experiencers, all are probably variations of the one kind of thing. ‘When they look upon themselves there are no others, when they don’t there are only others’.

It seems that beyond perspectives there are ‘others’? there are non-mental objects and informations out there ~ other things.

Thanks J

WOW!

_

[Ierrellus]

Geeze, I thought abstract idealism died in the 1970s! Neither scientists nor mystics buy that anymore.
Nietzsche did in Hegel--remember? Russell changed his mind several times.
I'm Spinozan simply because his beliefs include what is, not speculation on what could or couldn't be in some imagined absolutist world-view. We live in a world of experienced processes, with evolving consciousness.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Ierrellus:

Geeze, I thought abstract idealism died in the 1970s! Neither scientists nor mystics buy that anymore.

Even if they don't buy into the notion that the external world is purely mental (experiential) in nature, they must, or should, buy into the fact that reality as it actually occurs (as it is experienced to occur) nevertheless consists of nothing but experience, as existence is experienced as a particular person and the current experiences of that person. Nothing else can be known to exist independent of being experienced by a particular person (all other forms of "knowledge", are actually make-believe or magical thinking). From here, one can induce Idealism, as nothing other than experience or experience-material can rationally explain the existence of experience.

Nietzsche did in Hegel--remember? Russell changed his mind several times.

Even Nietzche must concede to the point made above. Heck, everyone should. Russell may have changed his mind about things, but he must have held on to the notions of Immediate Acquaintance and Inference: these are just plain elementary, when it comes to how we know of the existence of something.

I'm Spinozan simply because his beliefs include what is, not speculation on what could or couldn't be in some imagined absolutist world-view.

Sure. And beliefs that include what is must contain the experienced fact that everything, to oneself, is composed only of one's experience. This is what is. Speculation on what could or couldn't be, on the other hand, involves anything that is not oneself and one's own personal, private experience. That which we claim to be something other than ourselves, curiously, exist in the form of our personal experience of the thing from our perspective or point of view. This is what is. What it is like when we no longer experience it, however, is speculative, and exists in the field of make-believe of "what could or [might, may] couldn't be".

We live in a world of experienced processes, with evolving consciousness.

But those processes are only known to exist as, or in the form of, one's experience. External to our experience, if the processes even exist, they must be composed of the same substance that composes the very act of experiencing, or we lapse into magical thinking; that which is not made up of experience or the act of experiencing cannot non-magically produce that which is not what it is from itself: if cannot use itself as the source of the very opposite of itself, if the opposite did not pre-exist before production.

J.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Quetzalcoatl:

I had thought that information always exists, otherwise history has no record of itself and hence doesn’t exist et al? …how can history not have existed.

Amen. The very notion of existence ex nihilo or the very notion of coming into existence from a previous total nonexistence is problematic at the onset. There's no pre-existing substance or creative/transformational process that can be deduced or traced "up" to the presence of the existing entity. It cannot be explained as a product of something existing before it. I shoot slingshots at ex nihilo creation and explanation.

What I now think is that there is no such thing as information alone, that there is something we can think of as info as if like an entity or something ~ as you say like bytes. What is a piece of information?

For me if you take any two things - lets take two items of experiential thought, a single information doesn’t mean anything, it is not until it relates to something else e.g. another piece of info, that it makes any sense or even exists.

Indeed information probably only arises as part of a relationship between two or more things, and when there is a communication either in that or between that and another set of informational relationships. This is how language and concepts are strung together, even in the physical world.

'Communication' for me, is ultimately just collocation, or jigsaw-puzzle-ism, disparate parts existing in such a way that they, fortuitiously link up with other jigsaw puzzle pieces in certain ways to create a coherent 'whole' at the end of the process. 'Communication' aside from this is pretty imaginative, as if two slices of reality actually 'talk' to one another and it is by this 'talking' that they form a third entity (which is ultimately an amalgamation of the two or something that is an amalgamation of the two that exist separately as different perspectives. Hmm. I think I get what you were saying before. ). But yes, the nature of our experience is, I believe, nothing but the result of collocation or relationship between two separate things.

Look at a t-shirt or a human face. Every single point on that shirt or on that face is unique to every other point on the shirt or on the face. There is not something that is itself making up another point on the object. All these unique points, which are sui generis from every other particle or component making up the macroscopic portrait, combine and 'communicate' and 'relate' to each other (by squeezing into their 'assigned' places, without which we would not have the t-shirt or the face as we experience it but something totally messed up or different) to produce that which we currently experience.

So now your god-matrix is doing something! The whole experiential thing is live.

As it is a product of disparate psychic "bytes" fortuitiously existing in such a way from the jump that they must form the relevant God and man experiences that happen to be.

Phenomenal graffiti wrote: This could be an eternal situation, or it could be a temporary situation in which the second (the world of Man) evolves or transforms through some natural mechanism into the First, such that falsity evolves eventually into Truth.

It could be that, and/or that could be within every process. When we learn about a thing we go through a set of thought processes until we arrive at a resolution on a given matter. We could say that there are the resolved and unresolved sets, though perhaps the unresolved sets are not information ~ they are unmade or being formed and they don’t become info until made. That describes thought as I see it, most of what we think doesn’t become ‘full’ until resolved, no?

In a collocation way, yes, thoughts do not become 'full' until they are a coherent thought (or even 'coherent' irrational or jumbled thoughts) experienced by some being. Independent of this full formation (in whatever form) my guess is that they are indeed 'unresolved'. My point about the 'false' becoming 'true', however, refers to man becoming a psychological reflection of God as opposed to our current state, in which we (most of the time) are a reflection of the opposite of the moral and existential nature of God. However, this moral evolution is, in a sense, a "learning about a thing until we arrive at a resolution".

Phenomenal graffiti wrote: We have to remember, in this, that info is itself nothing but experience.

I don’t know, that’s a massive debate in and of itself. I think things outside of experiencers may contain info as noted early in my thought experiment. Data is one such kind of info. Hmm I suppose in theory god can be experiencing informations that we are not, but you’d still arrive at a third party between him and us by the same logic.
However, I would say that ‘communication’ is universal, in us informations communicating are thought, and that we experience. Does that mean communications are always experienced? For me there is a level of pure thought where the experiencer is pure mind and without communication, info etc. this is what gives us the ability to be detached, and I assume means we are speaking about different worlds or different universals.

Well, by 'experience' I did not mean the specific experience of an experiencer but experience qua the act of experiencing itself. Its an induction based on experience of reality as it actually (rather than speculatively) occurs: reality actually is and actually occurs as subjective experience (that is, reality is primarily ourselves, and this is the only reality that manages to actually rather than imaginatively exist, or at least it is the only reality that is actually experienced to exist).

'Data', 'information', 'communication', 'relation' all exist, non-imaginatively and speculatively, as someone's experience as far as we are concerned, and relevant reality (and more importantly, rational imagination of the origin of ourselves) is reality that produces us and what we are like or imagination that uses oneself and that out of which one is made to hypothetically create the nature of that outside oneself. Everything else is unknowable and part of Hume's "fairy land". Using oneself as the base, one can homogenize reality so that it's intrinsic substance is, and reliably explains, the nature of oneself.

We are composed entirely of experience (or we experience the existence of nothing save our personal experience), thus one can induce that reality must be composed entirely of experience, and this easily (rather than magically) explains why we are made up exclusively of subjective experience such that we experience nothing but personal experience. For me, there is not some non-experiential 'other' (something that is not the act of experiencing nor composed of the act of experiencing) that is somehow linked to or formative of experience itself. The two cannot possibly relate, because one simply is not the other, and cannot produce from itself, using itself as the base material, that which it is not.

For me a ‘god-matrix’ comes in layers, the world or the matrix itself is its body, as like our bodies are to us.

As long as its made up of nothing but experience or the substance of the act of experiencing, I can't argue with or deny your model of the world (I may have my own model, but I cannot outright deny yours).

It all seems to come down to weather or not the ‘god-matrix’ is or contains the ‘information carousel’ [and indeed we its puppets], or weather or not it is a set of instructions which loosely define things - like a guiding hand, such that we exist in a living organic, plastic free universe. For me it’s the latter most definitely.

The important thing is that we cannot logically and rationally deny either state of affairs. This stuff exists (if it exists) outside ourselves, and we only experience ourselves (even 'ourselves' in the form of our imagination of what's going on 'outside'). Trapped in this deprivation tank or bubble of personal experience, we have no right or sufficient knowledge to claim that there definitely is not puppetry or that there definitely is not loosely defined laws of resolution leading to a plastic reality or universe. For all we know, one or the other may nevertheless exist.

Thus, as you may have noticed, I do not deny your view of reality. I can't (rationally). I simply have my own.

Infinity is a kind of nothing, it has no thingness or parts. Yet it would have both information about itself and also its relationships with universe and us. The singularity [universe] could collapse into ‘nothing’ and re-emerge ~ or indeed originally emerge, from that instruction set.

Once again, I must take this at face value as a logical possibility and refrain from denying it outright. But honestly, it is your imagination of what's going on or what exists 'outside'. Same thing with my view of God and Pantheopsychism. These, following Kant's lament, are ultimately matters of faith (no shame nor harm in that 'neither.)

PG wrote: Because the contiguity must be explained by derivation (i.e. the third un-experienced machine must somehow play a direct role in the existence of the two experienced machines from two different perspectives).

There are two know derivations and two unknown derivations, one cannot experience the unknown. Same applies in terms of what is being experienced, one does not experience the other except from ones original perspective. If the machine makes another machine, would that exist even though it would not be experienced et al?

Now imagine that we the experiencers come after the machines in the material world!

If the machine makes another machine even though it is not experienced by anyone, I would hope that the substance making up the first machine and its creation is nevertheless made up of, as John Stuart Mill put it: "the permanent possibility of experience". Otherwise, we're talking magic. And it is not that I can deny external machines exist, I just have faith they do not (even if in fact they do). My point, however, is that we don't have the wherewithall to impute necessary relations given our epistemic situation. We cannot impute that certain things in the external must obtain in order for our experience to exist or manifest a particular way. We can't know that this is a necessity, or that the contents of visual perception necessarily exist in the absence of visual perception itself (particularly if the external objects, being things that hypothetically can exist in the absence of the experiencer and his/her experience of a mental percept of the object, are not one and the same thing as percepts).

Well I imagined all the machines and any thereafter in my mind, so I suppose the very same thing could occur idealistically.
I had not expected to consider an extra experiencer in my mind or the other experiencers mind. Perhaps though, experiencers are equivalent to perception from a given perspective, and we can take one such perceiver and view ourselves ad infinitum.

I hope this isn't the case. But one can't help but to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes, in the supposition of sub-dimensional mind or "people living within people".

This leaves us here…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178657

Copied.

There are perceptions, observations and experiencers, all are probably variations of the one kind of thing. ‘When they look upon themselves there are no others, when they don’t there are only others’.

It seems that beyond perspectives there are ‘others’? there are non-mental objects and informations out there ~ other things

Good description of an Idealistic world. One must believe in the existence of others, and there is good reason to believe in them (God, no solipsism here). However, if by 'non-mental' you mean 'non-self'? Sure. If 'non-mental' means 'non-the act of experiencing', well....we have the problem the main article above chafes about.

Good thought-workout for today, Q.

J.

[Ierrellus]

I'll bow out of this thread so as not to sully the angel dust with my clay feet.

[Only_Humean]

Even if they don't buy into the notion that the external world is purely mental (experiential) in nature, they must, or should, buy into the fact that reality as it actually occurs (as it is experienced to occur) nevertheless consists of nothing but experience, as existence is experienced as a particular person and the current experiences of that person. Nothing else can be known to exist independent of being experienced by a particular person (all other forms of "knowledge", are actually make-believe or magical thinking). From here, one can induce Idealism, as nothing other than experience or experience-material can rationally explain the existence of experience.

If there is nothing to experience, we don't experience it. I don't experience a cat on my lap at the moment, for example, or a glass of beer at my desk. This implies that something is experienced; usually, the experiences we have are of something.

It seems you're saying that "only experience can cause experience" is the only rational way of looking at it, that everything else is magical. That nothing can create or be created by that which it is not. If that's what you're saying, it's not the case at all.

[Amorphos]

J

'Communication' for me, is ultimately just collocation, or jigsaw-puzzle-ism
'Communication' aside from this is pretty imaginative
But yes, the nature of our experience is, I believe, nothing but the result of collocation or relationship between two separate things.

Hmm well the communication in our imagination isn’t simply collocation, is it? If it were I don’t know how the mind would know what’s being communicated. Collocation arises in the patterns in the world which do act kinda like jigsaw-ism, computers probably communicate like this.
Info in the mind occurs in the fluid exchange of communications, derived of the mind and brains plasticity.

Somehow we have to get from info carrying signals in the brain, to an ability for the mind to recognise that collocative info ~ as mental information! The latter being very different to the former, such that we should probably have different terms for them both.

It could be that the mind simply matches the pattern or shape of the info derived of the signals delivered by the senses, then it finds some manner of ‘match’ for that in mental-informational terms. However this delivers the same problem as we ever get in making two disparate things correlate, when, if they are different, how can they relate ~ communicate!?

There must be something in each of the two different kinds of information which forms the match. Indeed if my ontology is correct; ‘everything has or contains information about itself’, then information of the second or mental kind [hang on I’ll get back to that] exists as concerns information of the first kind [patterns, shapes, DNA etc]. …I say of the ‘second kind’ because I have already [and I think you agree] noted that mental info is not purely pattern like.

Now we may go on to state that this ‘mental information’ is the same as information that’s ‘out there’, or we wouldn’t be able to say what’s out there. Yet the info which is out there is assumedly not mental information [even in the god matrix, for reasons stated before], so I’ll go all out and state that;

‘Information is a non-mental thing’.

Communicative but non collocative information is even in the mind non-mental! The mind can produce it simply because ‘there is always information concerning a thing’.
The mind can experience said info because there is a relationship between any things and the object of that thing.

My point about the 'false' becoming 'true', however, refers to man becoming a psychological reflection of God as opposed to our current state, in which we (most of the time) are a reflection of the opposite of the moral and existential nature of God. However, this moral evolution is, in a sense, a "learning about a thing until we arrive at a resolution".

There will be advancement imho, but if god has a purpose designed into us or otherwise, that to me amounts to puppet strings, which renders it pointless - if I may. Perhaps all he needs to do is set the conditions and intelligent beings will naturally rise to that. A final resolution may be an ability to understand things extremely well, though I’d expect there will always be new challenges and things to learn ~ even if we all become geniuses or whathaveyou.

We are composed entirely of experience (or we experience the existence of nothing save our personal experience), thus one can induce that reality must be composed entirely of experience, and this easily explains why we are made up exclusively of subjective experience such that we experience nothing but personal experience.

Hmm I suppose that if we considered all info as gods experience when it is not ours, then I too cannot deny your view of reality. Depends if information is part of the experience/r [as above].

Once again, I must take this at face value as a logical possibility and refrain from denying it outright. But honestly, it is your imagination of what's going on or what exists 'outside'. Same thing with my view of God and Pantheopsychism. These, following Kant's lament, are ultimately matters of faith (no shame nor harm in that 'neither.)

This is the part that I feel philosophy needs to get beyond; the imagination is informed. We don’t make up the world without knowledge of it, though that knowledge could come from the god-matrix in your theory. It is not faith, it is being informed either by god or as a function of the world and us.

The machine made by the machine made by us, could be in the experience of god as we and all things would be, it depends if there is only experience as you say. The problem is that we have to place everything else into that one thing [experience], I don’t see how we can do that, there would be no un-experienced things in reality?

If I experience a thing and god experiences that thing when it goes out of my experiential sphere, there must be a point when our experience is shared, part of the same entity. Or, there would be a point of non-experience.

I hope this isn't the case. But one can't help but to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes, in the supposition of sub-dimensional mind or "people living within people".

Or experiencers [us] within the experiencer [god] ~ that sounds a bit better eh!

thanks.



_

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Only Humean:

If there is nothing to experience, we don't experience it. I don't experience a cat on my lap at the moment, for example, or a glass of beer at my desk. This implies that something is experienced; usually, the experiences we have are of something.

It seems you're saying that "only experience can cause experience" is the only rational way of looking at it, that everything else is magical. That nothing can create or be created by that which it is not. If that's what you're saying, it's not the case at all.

But you can't know that its not the case at all.

Typical defense of non-mental externalism insists that we experience 'something' in the external world, and that, as you said above, if this 'something' does not exist we do not experience it. This belief proposes that what we experience (visually) has an external analog that continues to exist even if visual perception of this object does not. That is, if no one sees a certain chair sitting in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie, New York, this chair nevertheless exists and is capable of being perceived should a human being accidentally stumble upon it. At best, this belief answers John Stuart Mills phenomenalistic description that in the absence of experience there nevertheless exists "the permanent possibility of experience".

But it is not a logical necessity (although a logical possibility in the Stuartean sense mentioned above) that there should be correlation between visual perception and a pre-existing external analog. We can't establish the metaphysical necessity of that, given that we do not experience the pre-existing external model (if it exists) in the way that it actually (hypothetically) exists in the absence of any and all perception 'of' it. In the end, we merely take our visual perceptions as they are and we then form an imagination that it mimics something external to it. That is, we merely imagine the nature of the external world, come to believe that this imagination is the absolute truth, and insist that what we imagine must be necessarily true, despite the fact we do not and cannot experience it in its true form, as this is not and is outside the experience of anyone (if it can exist in the absence of anyone, it is of something that, barring a purely mental world, something that is not the same thing that makes up anyone, as that which makes up 'anyone' is current subjective experience).

But we are not qualified to assert what exists in the external world nor any 'necessities' between that world and our experience. As Kant lamented, our imaginations and beliefs about the external world and its relation (if any) to our personal, ongoing experience must ultimately be taken on faith. Thus it is logically possible that our experiences are formed by fiat by an external mental substance in the form of mental particles or even mists that happen to collocate our experiences on the spot independent of external models. After all, we have no problem with the notion that physical objects independent of perceivers collocate by fiat by physical particles, such that at one time there were disparate physical particles that, through the fortuitous action of electromagnetic and gravitational fields come together to form everyday physical objects. It is difficult to see why it is impossible for experience or perception to form the same way, through just the happenstance collocation of psychical 'bytes', particles, or undulating psychic mist (Idealism).

When it comes to the notion of that external, pre-existing models somehow create and relate to the content of visual experience, one must take into account the nature of the substance making up the external model and the substance making up visual perception itself. If the substance of the external model is not that of the substance of the act of experiencing itself (as perception is experience), then the substance, whatever it is, cannot produce the act of experiencing, as it is not experience qua experience. Thus, even in the process of perception (in which external models emit a force that initiates the contraption formed by the peripheral and central nervous system), the external model does not 'personally' create the percept that supposedly mimics it: the external model merely, like the hand outside the machine flipping the switch that activates the machine--leaving it to do its 'dirty work' independent of the person that cuts it on---initiate a process that eventually leads to the circuit that does the actual 'creation' of the percept.

The point being, there is no actual relationship, save random chance, between the external model and the percept (visual perception 'of' the external model) that supposedly mimics it, precisely because the external model does not give of its very substance to form the percept. If the substance making up the percept (fundamentally the act of experiencing) does not pre-exist before the act of visual perception as part of the substance of that which supposedly can exist in the absence of experiencing itself (and experience only exists when and if it is currently experienced by something that experiences), then the very notion that something can be created by that which it is substantially and essentially is not is a magical concept, because the supposed creator (the external model or even a process in the brain itself) is creating something whose substance previously did not exist before it is 'created'.

If there is no one looking at the abandoned chair in in Poughkeepsie, visual perception of the chair does not exist. It can potentially exist, but it does not as yet exist in all of reality because in all of reality there is no actual perception of the chair (for the sake of argument, there is not a single observing entity: human, animal, or insect, in visual proximity to the chair). If the chair nevertheless exists, its substance is either that which is not experience itself or its substance is experiential in aspect, and thus can be used to create visual perception of the chair (this is the gist of Ernst Mach, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill's Phenomenalism---but not Idealism, which states that we do not need external models at all).

We, however, are composed entirely of experience, and the nature of our reality is such that everything that is known to exist (that is, that which is known to exist because it has been sensorially experienced) is known to exist precisely because it is experienced, and it appears only as someone's experience of it.

The upshot is that there is no absolute necessity for external models of experience to exist in the first place, such that our experiences can, in principle, form without pre-existing models. Why? Because the models, absent Phenomenalism, are not composed of the substance of experience itself, and thus cannot non-magically play a role in the existence of experience (as in Non-Mentalism the substance of experience does not exist as part of the substance of the external model and presumably does not exist until it appears as the actual experience of an actual person). Thus we do not and cannot know, given our epistemic situation as experiences (being composed only of experience) that the non-mental even exists, much less that there 'must' be external, pre-existing models of experience in order for there to be experience in the first place. This connection is not, absent Mach's, Hume's, and Mill's Phenomenalism grounded in any rational mode of connection, derivation, and relation (i.e. connection, derivation, and relation between substances---in which one substance actually pre-exists within and can be "pulled" from another) and is simply a product of magical thinking used in order to save a particular belief in the nature of reality.

J.

P.S. To Quetzalcoatl: WIll respond to your post this evening. Off to work.

[FilmSnob]

Dude, could you post a link to chapter one?

I can't find that shit.

[Only_Humean]

Dude, could you post a link to chapter one?

I can't find that shit.

Here you go.

[FilmSnob]

Thanks. I'll read all of this the next time I feel in the right mood to give it credence.

[Only_Humean]

Hi pg,

Thank you for the time you took to respond. I understand the basic tenets of your view, although I think that logical necessity is missing from all of the metaphysical options, and pragmatic efficiency and intersubjective agreement favours constant external objects; I think there's a mangling of the use of the word "imagine". But that wasn't my point. My point is:

the very notion that something can be created by that which it is substantially and essentially is not is a magical concept, because the supposed creator (the external model or even a process in the brain itself) is creating something whose substance previously did not exist before it is 'created'.

It's stated as a logical requisite, but I don't see any requirement to accept it... could you elucidate? It's just... I don't buy it. As I see it, certain chemicals can affect and even create perception/experience, for example.

I don't follow how "act of experiencing" can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.

Similarly:

The point being, there is no actual relationship, save random chance, between the external model and the percept (visual perception 'of' the external model) that supposedly mimics it, precisely because the external model does not give of its very substance to form the percept.

Does an object give of its very substance to form a shadow? Or is there no relationship besides chance between the two?

We, however, are composed entirely of experience, and the nature of our reality is such that everything that is known to exist (that is, that which is known to exist because it has been sensorially experienced) is known to exist precisely because it is experienced, and it appears only as someone's experience of it.

I know I have a television in the next room. I'm not experiencing it now. If you don't think I know that, then I don't think you should use the "know" that I highlighted above, or the following perfect tense (has been... experienced). If I do know that, then memory plays some role in things; in which case, how far removed are we from continuous objects?

We all make predictions all the time, thousands of times a day, using the "rule of thumb" of constant external objects. The computer that you use to communicate on works (perhaps I should say 'nominally') using abstracted theories of physical matter, while none of its transistors are observed - millions of unobservable, unexperienced operations take place each second just for you to read this. I hope it's worth it Given the remarkable predictive power that it affords us, what reason do we have not to accept it? Ultimately, the substance of experience will turn out to be identical to the substance of matter, except with a different name. I suppose if you're going for panpsychism, that's an angle.

[Moreno]

I don't follow how "act of experiencing" can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.

This seems like an appeal to common sense (as it is embedded in language). Perhaps we made some ontological booboos when we set up language OR when we started taking language as describing ontology rather than some ad hoc thing that elicited certain processes.

[Moreno]

Occam's Razor gives preference to Phenomenalism.

Breaking down phenomena into subject and object isn't as parsimonious.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Quetzalcoatl:

Not too soon after work do I reply, eh? Got home, then became obsessed with design for cover of Berkeylian Realms Part One, Conclusion (Chapter 3).

PG wrote: 'Communication' for me, is ultimately just collocation, or jigsaw-puzzle-ism
'Communication' aside from this is pretty imaginative
But yes, the nature of our experience is, I believe, nothing but the result of collocation or relationship between two separate things.

Hmm well the communication in our imagination isn’t simply collocation, is it? If it were I don’t know how the mind would know what’s being communicated. Collocation arises in the patterns in the world which do act kinda like jigsaw-ism, computers probably communicate like this.
Info in the mind occurs in the fluid exchange of communications, derived of the mind and brains plasticity.

Somehow we have to get from info carrying signals in the brain, to an ability for the mind to recognise that collocative info ~ as mental information! The latter being very different to the former, such that we should probably have different terms for them both.

It could be that the mind simply matches the pattern or shape of the info derived of the signals delivered by the senses, then it finds some manner of ‘match’ for that in mental-informational terms. However this delivers the same problem as we ever get in making two disparate things correlate, when, if they are different, how can they relate ~ communicate!?

I would say that the communication in our imagination is caused in the first place by collocation, or the coming together (through Frederick Hayek's polycentric order or through some teleological, either conscious or unconscious, polycentric order?) of smaller elements to form one larger object or entity. I would think that collocation, in your paradigm of external to internal passage of communication (in which the external world communicates what's in it to the internal world of the experiencer), gives us the stuff in the external world that's being communicated to the experiencer. This is what I meant. Thus there is jigsaw-ism (I like that better than my previous "jigsaw-puzzle-ism" )even in the external world of the source of info. With this collocation not applicable, I think, at some basic level.

I believe what you mean by all this is that our experiences are what they are because they are messages, so to speak, received by the experiencer by the external world, such that by nature we are mirrors of the larger world outside our current experience, and our current experience is a true (more or less) reflection of the nature of that world. We communicate with the external world in the sense that it sends us 'pictures' of what its really like in the symbology of forces and moving electrons, until those moving electrons (impelled by force) reaches that part of the brain that mimics the symbolic info. Amazingly, the brain is set up statistically and probabilistically with neurons and synaptic connection that just happen to be able to visually mimic or represent the objects existing in the external world. No brain, no communication.

It's an elegant theory to be sure, but I still say that we are simply looking at ourselves (as we have only ourselves as a base for knowledge of the external world) and simply "making it so" that the content of visual perception must be a reflection of the appearance and behavior of the external world. But this reflection must be by chance if the very existence of visual perception is not derived from the external world itself. We only experience our experience, and it must come from somewhere if it did not magically pop into existence ex nihilo. The brain, a mass of cells within a bony skull, is ultimately mere symbology, and if it somehow contains experience (in phenomenalism this is easier to envision and accept) the a priori relationship between neurons and conscious experience is representationism: neural circuits giving rise to specific experiences must exist before the experience and represent or symbolize the experience in neural/synaptic form (the function of the neural circuit, reduced to the forced motion of electrons through the structure of every involved neuron, is a given).

In phenomenalism, brain, neurons, electrons, and experiences are composed of the same basic substance, so it is easy to see how neurons can come up with experience in the first place. In Idealism, the brain is merely an symbol of God's intelligence and may function in the same way it does in Phenomenalism, but is generally thought to be a false machine in that it only appears to give rise to consciousness, when external psychical phenomena actually does the work.

In Non-mentalism ("non-mentalism" in the sense that something is not made out of or is something other than experience or the potential to experience altogether, not "non-mentalism" as that which exists but cannot experience), the relationship between that which lies within the skull and conscious experience requires magic, as the substance making up the brain is not the substance of experience itself.

There must be something in each of the two different kinds of information which forms the match. Indeed if my ontology is correct; ‘everything has or contains information about itself’, then information of the second or mental kind [hang on I’ll get back to that] exists as concerns information of the first kind [patterns, shapes, DNA etc]. …I say of the ‘second kind’ because I have already [and I think you agree] noted that mental info is not purely pattern like.

Now we may go on to state that this ‘mental information’ is [my interjection: apparitionally the same?] the same as information that’s ‘out there’, or we wouldn’t be able to say what’s out there. Yet the info which is out there is assumedly not mental information [even in the god matrix, for reasons stated before], so I’ll go all out and state that;

‘Information is a non-mental thing’.

But in the end, you're simply assuming that there is an 'everything' shaped like the content of visual perception and that it contains information about itself that can translate into the visual perception of a specific experiencer from that experiencer's point of view. The only thing we experience is the experiencer (oneself) and the visual perception of something that exists as something seen from the perceiver's point of view. We do not experience its supposedly external counterpart. However, some, coming to believe that a counterpart exists, create fictions of the existence of the counterpart and a fiction of the necessity for the existence of the counterpart in order for there to be the existence of the experiencer and the experiencer's visual perception.

Don't get me wrong: its an elegant theory, but all we have...all we experience is the second part, not the first. We simply come to believe (if we do come to believe) that the second is the first or that the second indicates the first. There is, I believe, a 'first' of some kind, and in the interest of Pantheopsychism I am bound to your informational theory in a theological sense, but in practice it is not at all necessary that there be pre-existing, external copies of the content of visual perception in order for visually perceived objects to exist. These can in principle be created by fiat by an external something or state of affairs that looks nothing like visual perception. It may ultimately just come down to collocation, akin to the "just so" collocation or piecing-together of macroscopic everyday objects by disparate energetic particles in physical theory. It is not necessary that there be a pre-existing model to the content of visual experience in order for the content of visual experience to be what it is---unless the model plays a direct role, giving of its own substance, in the very creation of an experiencer and that experiencer's visual perception of the model, which "reaches in" to "portray" itself within the experiencer.

In the end, this point is (it seems) quite clear: the information that's 'out there', in order to reasonably have anything to do with the mental information 'in here' (the experiencer and that which it experiences), must have the same substance as that which is 'in here', if it is truly responsible for the existence of the experiencer and that which it experiences. It is ultimately a question of the existence of subjective experience, the existence of the nature of our experience (the seven modes of VAGOTET), and the condition under which subjective experience exists (if it is not magically conjured or randomly pops into existence ex nihilo, it is somehow eternal, and has always existed in some form). Experience must come from somewhere, and there is a reason it takes the shape that it does (in the form of the experiencer and what its currently experiencing at a particular moment in time). This means that the substance of experience, if it does not emerge or is created ex nihilo (wholly without the use of any pre-existing material or substance) must exist before Russellian "logical constructions of sense-data, feeling, and thought" (aka an experiencer and its current experience) in the external world itself, and must make up the structure of the external world. There is the question of third-party experience, which you raised before. One knows that oneself exists, and that one is an experiencer that has experiences, with visual experience being something that appears to oneself and appears only in the form of how it is to your point of view. But:

(i) Does an external counterpart to your visual experience exist (such that, in principle, it does not require your looking at it to exist in the first place, and continues to exist when you're no longer looking at it)?

(ii) If it does, does it experience?

(iii) If panpsychism (in which everything experiences, even if it is not a person) is false, then it does not.

(iv) If it does not experience, is it then non-mental?

(v) Does something have to experience in order to be mental?

In the end, says the Idealist, this assumes that there is something that is not a person in the first place, as that which is not a person is not a part of the person and exists separate from the person and its experiences (it must, if it can exist in the complete absence of persons without need for disconnection from the person!). But if only persons (with the experiences of those persons coming from or being a direct adjunct of the person) exists (with the substance of an infinite, fundamental person forming the 'external' warehouse that supplies the experiences of internal 'micro' persons), then there is no such thing as non-mentality, and objects of perception do not have independent existence, but are aspects of experiencers. However, there is a quasi-non-mentality in the sense that objects of perception do not have their own experiences because they are ultimately phantasmic extensions of the experiencer, but this is just to say that non-person experience simply does not exist because there simply does not exist anything save persons.

PG wrote: My point about the 'false' becoming 'true', however, refers to man becoming a psychological reflection of God as opposed to our current state, in which we (most of the time) are a reflection of the opposite of the moral and existential nature of God. However, this moral evolution is, in a sense, a "learning about a thing until we arrive at a resolution".

There will be advancement imho, but if god has a purpose designed into us or otherwise, that to me amounts to puppet strings, which renders it pointless - if I may. Perhaps all he needs to do is set the conditions and intelligent beings will naturally rise to that. A final resolution may be an ability to understand things extremely well, though I’d expect there will always be new challenges and things to learn ~ even if we all become geniuses or whathaveyou.

I used to think that overall, God has a purpose designed into us and that we do run on deliberate puppet strings, but in recent years the idea that we reflect (positively or negatively) rather than are deliberately controlled by God seems to have taken hold. Following Berkeley (inadvertently), I think that we are walking, talking, positive or negative symbols of God and God's nature, and that we are autonomously (a quasi-puppetry here in the form of the fundamental mechanics of our being) 'made' so to speak, to be these symbols, and it is the only thing we can do. Thus we reflect God's intelligence (in the form of our own intelligence and in the regularities and relative predictabilities in nature), God's morality (in the form of our own morality or internal move to generate and foster positive experience and emotion) and God's negativity or what it is to be the opposite of God (God's Jungian Shadow in the form of or propensity and will to generate and foster negative experience and emotion, and the world's generation of negative experience by quasi-unthinking mechanics). God, in this sense, is the background nature and mechanic of our being that, by fiat, sets the conditions. Our so-called 'self-development' is actually a process of being an internal barometer of God's evolution from Jungian Shadow to pure Superego.

PG wrote: Once again, I must take this at face value as a logical possibility and refrain from denying it outright. But honestly, it is your imagination of what's going on or what exists 'outside'. Same thing with my view of God and Pantheopsychism. These, following Kant's lament, are ultimately matters of faith (no shame nor harm in that 'neither.)

This is the part that I feel philosophy needs to get beyond; the imagination is informed. We don’t make up the world without knowledge of it, though that knowledge could come from the god-matrix in your theory. It is not faith, it is being informed either by god or as a function of the world and us.

Well its a safe bet that the imagination is collocated or pieced together to form what it is, at the very least (if not, it popped wholly into existence ex nihilo). But as for it being informed by something outside itself, in the sense that it appears as it does because of the appearance of that which informs it? In principle, this may not necessarily be so: it could have simply formed, collocated, out of something and by something that's nothing like it apparitionally. This is never out of the question. And we do not experience information transfer between the external world and ourselves because we only experience ourselves, not the external world. We only experience the 'message' that is received, not the giver of the message (Although we may confuse the giver of the message for the message, confuse the external world for ourselves. I get into this in the Conclusion of Part One of the Berkeylian Realms series). Thus, what we make of ourselves and what lies outside ourselves is, and must be, operationally just a matter of our imagination. We can't really know that our imagination and our knowledge of the external world is informed to us by the external world---we just believe it is. Heck, it may be, but from our vantage point we only believe in things that may not be true in the objective. We only know (through Russellian immediate acquaintance) of the existence of one's own experience and oneself. We only experience one's own experience and oneself. What's going on outside ourselves is speculation. One only believes that one is informed by God or the world outside oneself (in the absence of gods).

Empiricism (the belief that knowledge is derived only from experience) v.s. Innatism (the belief that some knowledge is innate, or given from above: revelatory knowledge and such), I suppose. I believe in revelatory knowledge, being theist, but I play devils advocate for Empiricism as something that could be in principle if not in practice. I do not deny your ontology of external informing the internal in its structure: I simply deny that this information is, or worse must be, in the form of the content of visual perception, and that this must be in order for the content of visual perception to exist as it does.

The machine made by the machine made by us, could be in the experience of god as we and all things would be, it depends if there is only experience as you say. The problem is that we have to place everything else into that one thing [experience], I don’t see how we can do that, there would be no un-experienced things in reality?

Not if, by chance, the only things that exist are persons. It's not a matter of what we can do or what we can imagine. Its a matter of what actually manages to exist, despite what we can imagine, or not. It may be that there are nothing but persons, and that before there were 'others' there was the one fundamental person. Or there have always been persons within the fundamental person, though not human. Or there may be un-experienced things. But the un-experienced, if it is not composed of the same substance of the experience of persons, cannot rationally play a role in the experience of persons, as it substantially is not experience or the act of experiencing at all. If it exists, we can say nothing about it, precisely because we do not experience it at all and it has nothing to do with experience itself.

If I experience a thing and god experiences that thing when it goes out of my experiential sphere, there must be a point when our experience is shared, part of the same entity. Or, there would be a point of non-experience.

I suppose so. But we cannot say what that point of experience is actually like. It cannot inform us, being not experience itself.

PG wrote: I hope this isn't the case. But one can't help but to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes, in the supposition of sub-dimensional mind or "people living within people".

Or experiencers [us] within the experiencer [god] ~ that sounds a bit better eh!

Concise and to the point. Like it.

Very good discussion. Lots of things still to consider, but at the end of it we must start with ourselves, because the only thing we experience is ourselves.

J.

[Only_Humean]

I don't follow how "act of experiencing" can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.

This seems like an appeal to common sense (as it is embedded in language). Perhaps we made some ontological booboos when we set up language OR when we started taking language as describing ontology rather than some ad hoc thing that elicited certain processes.

It's an appeal to meaning. If language is insufficient, explain why, but don't use it knowing it's broken and leave everyone else to just fill in the gaps. If you prefer that approach, I can only suggest you grape fiduciary through cat severaltimes to up. You know what I mean.

Seriously, we all manage to communicate. With abstract nouns, I can parse such a phrase - "love is the act of giving freely", "respect is the act of empathising with another as an equal", such things. With a concrete noun, that doesn't work: "my shoes are the act of walking to the shops" "cats are the act of contempt for humans". So I'm asking clarification, because as it stands it seems senseless to me. And if you can't explain precisely what pg means without heavy caveats on "my interpretation" and so forth, it might indicate the same for you.

Occam's razor appeals to the -explanation- with the fewest entities/classes, not the description. Why would physicists bother with neutrinos, bosons and quantum mechanics when "god did it" is simpler? Because we can do nothing with the latter.

If it appears there's a continuous external reality and we can live by that, what is conjuring these impressions each time we return to a room and find it the same? Is a Berkelian Thinker (for example) that intercedes on every moment of our waking lives, tracking the aggregate of our expectations and predictions and supplying us with the appropriate experiences -really- more parsimonious than a physical universe?