yes that's what I was saying. So the universe will have lost something without that additional aspect.
You seem to have missed my point -
you can't lose what you never had.
As far as I can see this supports my point that consciousness has to be considered as part of reality. If consciousness does have some effect in the world then the this undermines the materialist view and the assumption that reality is fundamentally matter and all causes are naturalistic.
Of course consciousness is part of reality - we are conscious, and our consciousness has some effect in the world, for example, it allows us to discuss it. But to say that this means that it "
undermines the materialist view and the assumption that reality is fundamentally matter and all causes are naturalistic" is begging the question - all the scientific evidence tells us consciousness is a
process, a brain function; it is material in origin and entirely natural. What's the problem you have with that?
Again, if you want to talk about whether reality is fundamentally matter or not, you need to define what you mean by 'matter' and 'reality". Colloquially, 'matter' is stuff made of fermions, i.e. solids, liquids, gases, & plasmas (+ a couple of exotic states); no one would argue that's all there is to reality when we can reliably and repeatedly observe the effects of gravity and electromagnetism.
What scientists think are fundamentally material matter may be immaterial in nature. This may open the door for understanding reality differently or in more depth and provide alternative understandings of reality that seem to fit what we are finding better.
You keep making vague statements like this without argument or evidence to support them. Scientists don't talk about what is fundamentally material or immaterial, they talk about what can be observed, inferred, and deduced. How you wish to categorise it is immaterial (see what I did there?).
If you want to suggest '
alternative understandings' that '
fit what we are finding better', perhaps you could give some examples of things you feel need 'better' explanations, why you think so, and what a 'better' explanation might look like (I have previously described what makes a good explanation -
#1146).
I did try to describe it a few pages back. I think its a slippery and ambiguous concept. Its not just one thing like 'the physical stuff' like particles and even fields as fields are still seen as being a physical naturalistic cause.
What else is there? What argument or evidence do you have to support this? How is this not just you wishing for magic?
In any case, if reality is such a slippery and ambiguous concept that you can't even define what
you mean by it, it seems perverse to make claims about what it does or doesn't include.
I think reality includes our experiences. Perception alone is too ambiguous. There are multiple interpretation of observed phenomena. How do we know we are even seeing things in a neutral way in the first place. Then there are subconscious and even unconscious processes that influence how we see the world.
There's a lot we don't know which can affect our perceptions so they are too unreliable. Even the way we choose to measure things is subject to these same influences.
I agree; experiences are real, perceptions can be misleading, and interpretations can be mistaken.
That's why I think the most relevant measure of reality is subjective conscious experience. There are common experiences we all have that reveal truths about who we are and our place in the world/universe and thus give us a deeper insight into what is reality.
You just pointed out that our perceptions and interpretations are unreliable, now you're saying that our subjective experience, which is based on our perceptions and interpretations, is "
the most relevant measure of reality"?
The great thing is we can imagine and create testable scenarios which can show that the settings were primed for intelligent conscious life in our universe.
For example? Citation?
The only explanation for this so far is that our universe may be one of endless other universes and we just happen to be in the one that has our particular version of life. But that is just as hard to verify as consciousness.
A bit harder, I think - consciousness has been verified by every conscious human. But, IIRC, there is a big bang theory that predicts the effects of the quantum interference of our entangled pre-inflationary universe, and those predictions match otherwise unexplained anomalies in the earliest CMB radiation, which is provisional evidence for a multiverse.
In fact as far as I can see the multiverse is poor science by adding more than is necessary to explain things (Occam's razor).
This is a misunderstanding. In science, it is an abductive rule-of-thumb that prefers the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions. If an explanation involves a state that generates, or has the potential to generate, many elements or items, then suggesting it may have generated many elements or items clearly doesn't fall foul of Occam's razor.
By analogy, if your theory involves a bottle of champagne, it is not valid to complain that, when it is uncorked, the large number of bubbles that appear make it a poor theory because it's in breach of Occam's razor. In that situation, it would be absurd to suggest we should only observe a single bubble. If it is a poor theory, it is for other reasons.
[btw - This is partly why the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is falling out of favour - it requires the ad-hoc additional assumption of wavefunction collapse]
It is claiming (wishing) that there is something more than what we can observe/measure, deduce, and infer that breaches Occam's razor. Adding something inexplicable that can 'explain' anything and everything is no explanation at all, it's magic.
Many say that consciousness in some form seems to fit what we see in simple terms thus being a better explanation for fundamental reality.
Who says such vague gibberish?
If you can't define 'reality', how can you discuss 'fundamental reality'? The fact that we experience consciousness, i.e. we are conscious (some of the time) says nothing about 'fundamental reality' - as you pointed out above when you said both our perceptions ('
what we see') and our interpretations are unreliable.
In '
simple terms' logic, 'fundamental reality' has no deeper explanation - it's
fundamental - the clue is in the name.
So if our universe is the only one then it was inevitable that conscious life would eventuate because we can trace our beginnings back to the beginning of our universe. It wasn't no accident. Something had to have installed the ingredients from the beginning.
Same old same old. As I said before, the fact that conscious life was
possible doesn't make it
inevitable. As for the fine-tuning argument, we don't know the probability distributions for the values of the constants, because we only have a sample of 1.
There's reason to suppose that a high-energy universe was the most probable outcome of the big bang, and that, contrary to popular belief, a vast number of possible configurations (e.g. constant values) would be compatible with life, assuming that life requires stars that persist long enough to produce heavy elements. It may eventually be possible to apply QM to the early universe and get some idea of the probability distributions for the constants, but that will also require a number of assumptions.
