It means subject observes object. What O is depends on what S is.
And you just ignored my point, which is why I was intending on leaving this thread alone.
Let’s say that you build a closet, and every perceiving being drops dead instantly… the closet disappears?
There can’t be objects without subjects?
What about object permanence? The stage that most people grow out of when they’re 2 years old. If a self cleaning vacuum robot turns the corner, does it unexist?
The lack of object permanence is actually on the narcissistic scale of personality disorder
Is it impossible for this to be the case?
Some reasoning to consider after the following analogue: you place a VR headset on, and in front of you appears a closet. At least in the visual sense, the pattern of photons that hit your eyes and the subsequent electrical response that is interpreted by your brain is loaded into computer memory and displayed before you. When you switch off the headset, the closet code is dereferenced and the memory unallocated, ready to be turned into whatever else in future. If you put the headset back on, it’ll appear right back in the same place though…
My reasoning: I hope you appreciate that sensory experience occurs entirely in the mind - it appears to take “inputs” commonly thought by the layman to be “from out there”, but the exact same experience can be achieved through brain manipulation without any “inputs from out there” at all - only internal tweaking. Dreaming a dream that feels so real at the time is an example of this. Without the mind’s involvement, there can be no experience of the closet or anything at all - it’s absolutely necessary to the process: the subject, that is, and any supposed objects are in practice optional.
There is no way to prove you are not “a brain in a vat” or “in the matrix” etc. where indeed the closet disappears as soon as every perceiving being drops dead - just like in my VR example.
It’s certainly a lot easier, convenient, with extremely sufficient predictive utility, to simply disregard these examples and thought experiments as most people do: living as though such things remain even if all perceivers look away. But when you feel your equilibrioception alter, your muscles contract, such as those of your eyes, neck, face, causing the visual image to change, are you really moving (the layman understanding), or are the objects you perceive moving? An analogue to this is point is two bodies passing each other in space without any other reference point… which is moving? If any? Perhaps it is simply spacetime itself bending? Relativity throws all the layman absolutes out of the water - I’m sorry but it really isn’t as simple as your simplistic and common understanding is assuming.
Human beings [ homo sapiens ] have existed for I00 000 years while the Universe has existed for almost I4 billion years
It is therefore demonstrably true that objects have existed without subjects as they have for virtually all of known time
The Universe had to come into existence from its simplest point of origin before something as complex as human beings could be created
It therefore makes absolutely no sense physically or logically to presume that objects can only exist when they are perceived by subjects
Is your 1 key not working? :-"
Who said it existed for I00 000 years? Humans. What does such a human knowledge statement entail? It is the dialectic result of subjective observation and subjective interpretation feeding back on one other - the understanding of what I4 billion years “objectively is” relies on human subjective understanding - it is reflective of a time dynamic that for all we know only makes any sense from within the human subjective framework… which is subject to potentially improve, potentially shedding truer light on what “I4 billion years without subjects” really means. What if we later realise the nature of an error in perception of time that nullifies the subjective understanding of the objective independent of the subject? The fact may remain in tact but reinterpretted in an improved form of subjective understanding where there is no contradiction between subjectivity and objects apparently existing independently when thought of in that old outdated way.
I have no objections to the claim that according to current human knowledge, our best explanation is that objects must have existed for I4 billion years before any subjective mind ever existed to perceive it.
I’m not going to quote the last three replies, but rather respond to the sense of them.
If objects cannot exist without subjects (and a computer is certainly an object), then this suddenly becomes a theistic thread. (Intelligence never began and will never end)
God. Right?
Actually, I have extremely compelling disproofs of such a being, but actually, an all loving god is certainly not a reality I would despise.
The problem is…
I despise this reality. It’s violating my consent against my consent, every moment of every day.
One thing that is true of all subjects, is that nobody wants their consent violated against their consent ever. If they agree that they do, then we can easily state that they are not mentally competent. For if someone says this, they just gave the universe permission, in a nanosecond to send them to hell forever. Not a rational trade off for a nano second.
So this is a law.
So the question is “if this is occurring to me now and has my entire life, how can I reasonably assume that this won’t happen to me forever, given that all existence is subjective?”
There is no logical connection at all between consent violation and being sent to hell
The Universe does not care about these things because its sole function is to exist and nothing else
Hell is an imaginary concept created by human minds - it has nothing at all to do with the Universe
Two things about this that are wrong.
1.) Consent violation against consent is the definition of hell.
2.) hell exists. It not only exists, as Shakespeare said in a paraphrase, the universe is greater than all of your philosophy. Meaning, there is genius of hell, that not only has never occurred to you, but as you suffer eternal torment, will never occur to you. I know. I’ve been to hell.
Mental hell does exist although only for the ones experiencing it at the time
A real hell that souls suffer in for all of eternity however is pure imagination
And according to you, existence is pure imagination.
Nah.
The above is common sense but not philosophically true.
The point is the object and subject co-exists and co-create reality that enable reality-as-it-is to emerge spontaneously.
Here is on example of spontaneous emergence - Einstein Mask in 3D;
youtube.com/watch?v=ORoTCBrCKIQ
To insist the common sense perspective is the truth or absolute truth is purely due to one’s psychology.
Note Hume’s explanation that the common sense of causation, i.e. cause and effect [that one marble caused the other to move] is due to psychological based on habits, customs and constant conjunctions.
You’re still not understanding that I don’t consider subjects to necessarily have minds (nor that “mind” is anything specific to animals). The dead bodies are still subjects, the atoms are subjects, the opposite sides of the closet are subject to each other.
An especially unusual version of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as best demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. Physicists have found that even passive observation of quantum phenomena (by changing the test apparatus and passively ‘ruling out’ all but one possibility), can actually change the measured result. A particularly famous example is the 1998 Weizmann experiment.[1] Despite the “observer” in this experiment being an electronic detector—possibly due to the assumption that the word “observer” implies a person—its results have led to the popular belief that a conscious mind can directly affect reality.[2] The need for the “observer” to be conscious has been rejected by mainstream science as a misconception rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process,[3][4][5] apparently being the generation of information at its most basic level that produces the effect. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics
And I can simply say, “that’s just subjective”, using your own logic.
What about Descartes demon?
A being more powerful than all of us who just controls matter to make you believe (and countless others) what they believe?
In a subjective universe, Descartes demon can easily describe the subjectivity of your proof for your belief here. That doesn’t rule out objectivity.
Right it’s subject to the logic.
That would be the Brahman in Hinduism: the player of all the parts.
I’m not ruling out objectivity except in terms of logic as I understand it.
Hey Ecmandu
The Sky is red, all squares are circles and my pet elephant wrote this message!
Do you think you can prove me wrong?
Well you can’t…
Let me show you how this sausage is made:
I’ve defined red to mean blue, circle to mean any object subject with 4 corners and I call myself “my pet elephant”
You can’t win a language game… it produces only losers.
Language is like a finger pointing at the moon.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM4n1Jntqw0[/youtube]
Nah, that’s just like solving a crypto quiz in th paper.
Once the substitution is known, it’s still easy to communicate. That’s why on this board, we make people define their terms in really technical arguments. Instead of assuming we’re all using the same definitions.
“So you’re linguistic token for blue is red, ok, let’s assume that and go from there”
I wish that were true.
Enjoy your game.
Much more devastating than that problem is this problem:
“Well, I guess we just agree to disagree”
This is what subjectivists are doing:
Well it’s only subjective that everyone on earth needs to drink water when they’re thirsty, to survive a maximum of two weeks.
If everyone NEEDS to do it, it’s not subjective, but rather, objective!
“Well, I don’t need to drink water to not die of dehydration” (as they’re drinking water in front of you)
“It’s just subjective that you think you’re seeing me drink water right now, I’m really not”
So… there’s a meta analysis of this:
Men need to conspicuously consume rationality to appear fit sexually to a female.
Females don’t have a motive for self contradiction, they are evil just for evils own sake. You probably could assign a motive, that females don’t want to be caught for being so evil, so they gravitate to self contradiction (subjectivity) for that reason.
The short of it is, this behavior can all be explained on a meta level, objectively.