David (Platt, Roger, others?),
Thanks for your answer.
You write:
>I'm a little reluctant to voice an opinion on this topic because there
>are quite a few people who share of vision of the MOQ that is very
>different than my understanding. I don't like the idea of stepping on
>anyone's toes, but to be perfectly frank, I think they only share a
>common misconception.
Although my post wasn't so much about the Reality-in-the-MoQ issue,
I know the subject is very close. We have had many different opinions
on that subject and I think my view is close to yours. However, I think
it's a shame that in the group we can't seem to get an agreement
on the premises we disagree on.
David:
>I can't believe that atoms or particles or waves only exist when humans
>look at them. I don't think that our perceptions create reality or that
>reality is an abstaction of experience. Rather experience is fundamental
>to the nature of reality and has, through the course of evolution,
>created humans and their perceptions. Subjects and objects don't pop
>into existence magically because of our experience. I think that view is
>just some kind of fancy Solipsism. Its impossibly wierd.
I tried to come up with some kind of overview in the Reason for Reason-
thread. I proclaimed that the Reality-debate boils down to what you think
deserves the term "Reality".
- One camp argues that we can't refer to an independently existing Reality.
We can only refer to Reality as known/experienced to us. Thinking
like this you have to accept the consequence that one can only refer to
Reality known to him-/herself, because this Reality is in the hard of the
experiencer and every person has his/her own experiences.
As Platt says: "Mine is the only world".
Although this is not my view, I think this view is impossible to proof wrong.
- The other camp refers to Reality as being non-dependent on (human-)
sentience, knowing or not knowing that everything a human can know of
this Reality is 'influenced' by the very structure that accounts for this
consciousness.
Can you find yourselve in this summary?
The latter is my view on Reality and what I think the MoQ means. Again I
want to voice Magnus great quote, because it explains this view the best:
> "The MoQ says that the moon does not exist independent of observation.
> The observer however doesn't have to be a person, or an instrument
> made by man. It can be any static pattern. The moon is very real to a
> meteor coming too close; it makes the meteor stop quite abruptly . . . If
> observation means "someone observing something else," there is a
> problem. Because then the reality for that someone becomes only the
> things that someone observes. But if observation means "two patterns of
> value engaged in a Quality Event," then the ice falling off the edges of the
> Antarctic glacier a few seconds ago are as real as you reading these words."
The issue of if observations changes Reality is linked to the above two
viewpoints. If one refers to Reality as "Mine is the only world", every
observation creates Reality, so what you observe changes by you observing
it. As Roger wrote:
> in the MOQ experience is primary. The thousandth experience is
> quite different than the first, and the subject and object that are created
> from the experience are correspondingly changing.
Though I think Pirsig is wrong in the following:
> (Pirsig) "The most striking similarity between the Metaphysics of Quality and
> Complementarity is that this Quality event corresponds to what Bohr
> means by "observation." When the Copenhagen Interpretation
> "holds that the unmeasured atom is not real, that its attributes are
> created or realized in the act of measurement," (Herbert xiii) it is
> saying something very close to the Metaphysics of Quality. The
> observation creates the reality."
if the explanation of the quantum fysics'-uncertainty principle, I heared from
a famous physisian is true.
That Reality-depends-on-observation is the outcome of the determination
of the position of a quantum in space. To observe them, one has to shine
light on them and subsequently because of the photons in light, the quantum
is not on the same place anymore.
I agree with you saying
> ... existence does not depend on our observing it. Rather it is "that its [atoms]
> attributes are created or realized in the act of measurement".
Whatyethink?
Dtchgtngs
Walter
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