Came across a curious short video that helped catalyze some evolving observations toward philosophy and philosophers. Prior to that I read Dennett’s explanation of colors so was primed. #12 Qualia, and #12- 2 Why are there colors, from his book “Consciousness Explained” ©1991. But I’ll save that jazz for later.
I think I’m finally arriving at the big problem with philosophical musings about reality, or consciousness for that matter. > Specifically, Scale Matters! < But philosophy seems blind to that.
Without the slightest scruples observations and rules from the tiniest realms, right at the boundary of matter and energy, are invoked. Mixing and matching scales to suit the story, which is too often tailored to explain away aspects of our macroscopic reality.
Mach made the important observation that nothing is free of the environment (gravity) it is embedded within. Not coincidentally, this echos a fundamental biological realization that “an organism can’t be understood without also understanding the environment and circumstances it exists within.”
— The questions we ask ourselves, limits the answers we can arrive at.
The question: Are “time, space, motion absolute” (in this universe of infinite folds within folds of harmonic cumulative complexity flowing down the cascade of time), is silly.We live in a universe of vast range that started from a single point 14 some billion years ago, so of course everything is relative to whatever you want to compare it to.
Why expect physical reality at our Earthly scale,
to be somehow analogous to, or explained away by observations made at the very edge of matter and energy?What’s the mystery?
Or the shock?Accumulation happens.
Emergent properties happen.Just because photons can shoot through extremely thin gold foil,
doesn’t justify it being called nothing, or empty, the electrons aren’t little planets, they are smeared out force fields, pile on a few layers of foil and gold becomes solid every bit as real as the apparent space between electrons when reduced to Planck Scales.
Pretending those accumulated itty bitty force fields don’t add up to solidity at our scale of physical reality is basically crazy making. It’s really disturbing that so many go along with it. I’ll bet the younger crowd, the future survivors, won’t be quite as gullible, or humorous.Our future would have worked out much better had philosophers spent the past century trying to get us in touch with physical reality down here upon this Earth that provides our life support (and which, after all, created us.).
Rather than philosophy our time would have been better spent studying evolution, we would have learned a lot more of the important stuff in life, rather than all this high brow trivia.