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?
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.
If we cannot currently influence this interface, and as of our current perception it is effectively one and the same with reality, why is this at all relevant to Marxist materialism?
It wouldn’t be relevant if we couldn’t influence it, but we can influence it.
Wait, so, on what grounds does this author you mentioned make the argument of evolutionary fitness over truth? How did they even come to the conclusion that evolutionary fitness is a real thing? The existence of their argument seems heavily reliant on the existence of at least an environment which selects for things in a way similar or identical to evolution, implying an objective reality which can kill, regardless of how hard a subject tries to banish it with their mind
https://hexbear.net/comment/3894130
You could literally argue that anything is real or anything isn’t by that logic. It’s unfalsifiable, and therefore not provable, either
There has to be some existence in which evolution selected for things for it to work
Either way, the argument defeats itself. If we cannot know reality, then there is no reason to believe this aspect of reality is true either, and therefore no reason to believe that we cannot know reality etc etc
Some, yes. But not one that carries the cultural baggage with which you associate the term “existence”. It does not imply that there exists matter, or nonconscious entities.
If we are to propose that reality exists, then we must have some consistent theory of reality that does not invalidate itself. Hoffman proves that mainstream realism invalidates itself. In the absence of a coherent model, the null hypothesis of solipsism is supported by Occam’s razor. You seem to think realism is the null hypothesis, which is as strange as it is to say that a teapot orbiting mars is the null hypothesis.
How would the last human see anything without any data being transferred between their “simulation” and the other people’s “simulations”? Some sort of non-conscious property must exist for that to work