I feel like I understand communist theory pretty well at a basic level, and I believe in it, but I just don’t see what part of it requires belief in an objective world of matter. I don’t believe in matter and I’m still a communist. And it seems that in the 21st century most people believe in materialism but not communism. What part of “people should have access to the stuff they need to live” requires believing that such stuff is real? After all, there are nonmaterial industries and they still need communism. Workers in the music industry are producing something that nearly everyone can agree only exists in our heads. And they’re still exploited by capital, despite musical instruments being relatively cheap these days, because capital owns the system of distribution networks and access to consumers that is the means of profitability for music. Spotify isn’t material, it’s a computer program. It’s information. It’s a thoughtform. Yet it’s still a means of production that ought to be seized for the liberation of the musician worker. What does materialism have to do with any of this?
Outside of a misunderstanding of materialism, what does this mean? Like, do you not believe that time is a dimension of space? That was the big breakthrough of Einsteins theory of relativity. He proved that gravity only works if time is a dimension of space.
Oh, Einstein’s theory is beautiful. It’s elegant, and there’s a lot of truth to it. It accurately predicts our future perceptions within relativistic situations, far better than Newton’s theory. However, that’s all it is - perception. Einstein accurately described the interface of our minds and created a model we can use to better use that interface. But understanding an interface is not the same as understanding the truth beneath the interface. That’s probably why Einstein’s theory can’t account for quantum science.
What? It’s not just perception, it’s repeatable measurements. Anyone on earth, even a machine, can run the same experiments (or for astrophysics, observe the same phenomenon) and get the same numbers.
I suppose technically it’s just a model, but if it answers all of our questions it seems to be correct.
No, that’s because that’s a different problem entirely. Though all models of quantum physics assume that time is a dimension of space as well.
A repeatable perception of measurements. To think that perceiving something enough times in a row makes it true is a fallacy. Every time I load this here silver disk into my DVD player, I perceive Luke Skywalker lifting a rock with his mind. That doesn’t make my perception true, no matter how repeatable it is.
You mean you can perceive a machine running the same experiments and you will perceive the machine agreeing with your perceptions. That’s hardly an unbiased experiment.
No you don’t. You perceive a person standing next to a rock that is lifting upwards. More accurately you perceived photons hitting your sensory neurons that made a pattern that your brain interpreted as a person standing and a rock floating. A narrative told you it was Skywalker picking up a rock with his mind. If the narrative was that the rock was angry and was going to attack Luke, you would interpret that instead.
A repeatable observation does not change no matter the narrative that is assigned to it. I see no other possible explanation for that that besides the observation being the truth, or close enough that any distinction is inconsequential.
So if I were able to present a narrative which changes my observations of the world’s existence, then you would be wrong to say the world’s existence is true?
If you presented a narrative such that the measurement of a phenomenon changed, that would call certain things into doubt. I want to be clear, in the domain of scientific inquiry we are discussing an observation as a measurement of some kind. It can be quantified as a number. The narrative should be effective on anyone taking the observation.
As for the world’s existence, I can very clearly touch things outside of myself, I have nerves that are designed to send sense information to my brain. I can clearly measure the location of my desk in my room and my distance from it using a tape measure. There is no narrative that would, given a tape measure, cause anyone to observe a different distance between me and my desk.
While some have remarked on the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics at representing the natural world, it is not perfect. For example, numbers are hardly useful in the field of psychiatry. Given that we are entering into an investigation pertaining strongly to the mind, I believe we should adopt at least some practices from psychiatry, including the practice of taking qualitative measurements.
Anyone who is capable of actually entertaining the narrative, you mean. No scientific proof will ever convince a flat earther that the horizon is curved, because they are incapable of entertaining the competing narrative. Likewise, my experiment ought to work on anyone, as long as they are capable of taking my narrative seriously. If they’re unwilling to keep an open mind, of course they’ll keep perceiving the same thing, just like the flat earther.
No we aren’t. You asked about a narrative that changed the observation of the world outside of the mind. Measurement is all that matters in this realm of epistemology.
I suppose, yes, the observer does have to accept the narrative. That being said, a flat earther running an experiment to test if the world is flat does make the same observations as someone who believes the world is round, they just either contort their worldview to match or reject the observation entirely. They don’t run an experiment and get different results. Such as in this clip in which a flat earther observes the exact same phenomenon as everyone else. He may choose to reject it, but the observation is the same.
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It wouldn’t be relevant if we couldn’t influence it, but we can influence it.
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https://hexbear.net/comment/3894130
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