Item — HN Reader

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.

Reality is perception. It is one set of logical possibities that allow the thinking agent to exist and to produce the thoughts it is producing right now. It is the output of a pure function in which it creates itself and maintains its existence, constantly feeding its output to its input.

Dreams are the exploration step of that function. Once in a while, the function creates a sandbox, feeds it with output gathered and classified as semi-coherent (adding in a few random bits), it simulates outcomes and picks out those fragments that didn't crash it.

Those are then integrated back into its main code, into the world it imagines it inhabits, "reality".

1 comments

You can't have a perception without an external thing existing.

If you're born tabula rasa and everything you know is learnt, then everything your senses know came from an external object which exists independently of your senses.

Are we going to do Kant vs Nietschze until the end of time?

As long as Kant's would-be defenders defend counterfactual positions only, then I suppose there's no reason the debate would ever end.

> If you're born tabula rasa

There's lots of evidence that just isn't so. If nothing else, we appear to be equipped with minds which are better suited than random chance to build a "meaningful" model of the world around us.

Ok but that's a hypothesis you make. To me it is absurd how an external object can exist independently of perception. What does it even mean that anything "exists" without senses to perceive it?

What are you perceiving if it doesn't really exist out there somewhere?

The solar system existed before our senses received the information that it did. Insurance companies scan for pre-existing medical conditions before they discover them in new patients.

Why would you seek new objects, if there were not objects out there to find?

You have to sever all relationships to un-sensed, but knowable objects, to live only in the senses. That kind of reduction is too much to ask.

You can't perceive the solar system, but whatever it is you are experiencing, it exists now and you can only know about it through your senses. It doesn't necessarily follow that it existed prior to you experiencing it, it wouldn't make any sense to say that because "existence" is an experiential claim that requires someone to have the experience of it, in the present moment. Past, future, time flow are all hypotheses. You never experience time, you are only experiencing the now.

However, I'm not saying that things don't exist, it's that they do exist but not independently of the conscious agent that has the experience of them. The universe and the thinking agent that is currently perceiving that universe, come into existence simultaneously, in the act of perceiving/thinking.

The mind arises out of the necessary universe that is required for a mind that observes it to exist.

There could be infinite of other universes (or other things "out there" i can't experience), but those claims makes no sense since because for something to exist it must have a conscious agent experiencing it as existing. There can't be a universe in the void, simply rocks. Even "rock" is something that is defined by thought and can't exist independently of it.