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RE: WHAT IS REALITY? The most fundamental question 💭 Official MIND UNLEASHED Blog on Steemit 🐣

in #life7 years ago

Thank you for your kind answer. You come across as someone who enjoys a debate and who can put their ideas in a sensible form. There are several aspects of your original post which I can agree with. My issue is precisely with this idea that

consciousness if the fundamental fabric of all experience.

This kind of idealist philosophy could never really convince me. Would you say that when I'm not looking at the moon, it isn't actually there? Or are you trying to say that all my perceptions of the moon are merely a product of my mind and do not bear any relation to objective physical data which my senses are able to collect? What about my perception of another consciousness? Is that other consciousness just a construct inside mine? What is my consciousness to that other one, then? I'd like to see you elaborate clearly on this idea that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary, maybe in a next article.

Regarding your mention of quantum mechanics, the only real conceptual difficulty right now is probably the wavefunction collapse, which is related to the measurement problem. The observer effect is a misnomer for this phenomenon, because it is not the conscious observer which collapses the wavefunction, but the interaction between the quantum object and the measuring apparatus. The double-slit experiment is completely consistent with quantum mechanics and does not represent any paradox, and neither does quantum entanglement; those are strange phenomena from a classical point of view, but very well described within quantum mechanics, and consistent with the rest of its theoretical and phenomenological body. The EPR paradox has never been seen as a real paradox by many quantum physicists, most notably Niels Bohr who explained from the beginning that no contradiction arose between quantum entanglement and the speed limit at which information can travel. Bell's theorem is just an expression of the degree of non-local correlations between quantum objects, and does not represent a paradox. It is as paradoxical as the concept of an action at a distance when Newton proposed his theory of gravitation or the concept of a force field as introduced by Faraday in the context of electromagnetism.

Now, quantum mechanics is firmly based on careful and repeatable observations, while idealist ideas are a metaphysical conception which is either based on tautological reasoning or simply impossible to test. I don't think it is fair to compare the two. Nothing in quantum mechanics or in the empirical experience that is available to us supports the idea of matter as being subservient to consciousness.

Nevertheless, don't be discouraged from my skepticism. Put forward your best ideas in the clearest way that you can and with the soundest justification as you can. Then, this debate will be ever more interesting.

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