Soul of Toby Shorin
@toby
My dad got this “Harvard 5 foot shelf of books” for like 100 bucks when I was a kid. Barely read any of it back then - what a resource I wasted! But I managed to read some metaphysics from it over Christmas
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Dean Pierce 👨💻🌎🌍
@deanpierce.eth
So things don't exist unless someone is thinking about it, so the reason rooms don't evaporate when you walk out of them is that there is an all knowing omnipotent being thinking about the room? Seems like such a weak argument 🤦
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Soul of Toby Shorin
@toby
Tell me Hylas, what is a room made of?
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Dean Pierce 👨💻🌎🌍
@deanpierce.eth
Okay 😄 We live in a universe made of ✨matter✨ with properties we haven't fully figured out. Over time, some of that matter has collected into entities that are able to observe their environment, and collect useful resources for self propagation. Eventually some of those entities developed the ability to communicate abstract concepts with each other. A "room" is one of those abstract concepts that has a generally understood meaning that can be communicated. A "room" is an abstract concept that an observer builds out of millions of individual observations, most of which would be corroborated by any other observer, but observations are inherently subjective. Observations can be inconsistent for any number of reasons, from unexpected physics quirks to impaired observation tools. I don't think it's possible for us, a society of observers, to build a fully accurate model of the universe around us, but we can get close enough to keep extracting energy and propagating, which is really all that matters.
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Soul of Toby Shorin
@toby
You’ve jumped many levels of abstraction in one post which makes it somewhat hard to reply and carry on the dialogue. But I think you’d enjoy reading this! You should give it a shot
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Dean Pierce 👨💻🌎🌍
@deanpierce.eth
I read the Wikipedia and watched a 10 minute YouTube summary when you first posted this thread, which seems like it hit at the core argument 😄 https://youtu.be/fs1MeDUgEOA?feature=shared Lex Fridman and Wolfram round 4 had a really good discussion around the usefulness of various levels of abstractions of reality.
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