Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 3:21 am
Skepdick wrote: ↑Sun Apr 16, 2023 9:18 am
You can defend realism till the cows come home, but it doesn't matter in practice because constructivists are ultimately right.
It doesn't matter that the world is independent of human minds, because all knowledge of the world is always a human and social construction.
Pattern-matching and recognition is information processing. It's a branch of computer science, and computer science is recursive/self-referential. It's epistemology, not ontology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition
Agree with the above.
If VA agrees why does he take pains to say that things don't exist when they are not looked at. He does this again below. IOW Skepdick has an epistemological anti-realism. We can't know stuff about that anyway. But VA has an ontological anti-realism. There is nothing there when we are not around to perceive it. Again, see below.
Pattern recognition is basic within the evolutionary and psychological perspectives that are supported by its neural correlates [i.e. human conditions].
Note pattern recognition, not pattern construction. If there was nothing before creatures began to percieve those first perceptions must have been completely construct ex nihilo. But here VA is talking about 'recognition'. Which is noticing what is already there. And it's rather amazing that suddenly there were very complicated organisms ex nihilo that started recognizing patterns, where just before there was nothing.
In theater this is called deus ex machina.
From the initial Big Bang there was this supposedly "primordial particle soup" without "patterns" which is still fundamental at present. A clue [not exactly] is at the below;
From the initial Big Bang. And now VA is referring to something that happened before, long before, there were any humans to recognize it.
And he even provides images.
Why Did Humans Evolve Pattern Recognition Abilities?
https://cognitiontoday.com/why-did-huma ... abilities/
There was no patterns until after 4 billions year and much later when organisms acquired basic pattern recognition abilities where evolutionary adaptions continue to improve on it.
So, here's the hilarity. After four billion years without pattterns, organisms appeared that had pattern recognition (he says 'acquired'....how? from what? from nothing??) There would have been no evolution before these magical organisms arose and had pattern recognition skills despite there being nothing around until they popped into existence. This is creationism.
What are supposedly patterns we recognized from the physical of matters, solid or otherwise are [post hoc basis] ultimately made up of ??? [could be wave or particle as conditioned upon the observer], i.e. no real patterns, thus your point;
"It doesn't matter that the world is independent of human minds, because all knowledge of the world is always [ultimately] a human and social construction."
And again, if it doesn't matter to VA why does he act like he knows and asserts that there is nothing. He should not be able to conclude this given other things he says. Epistemological anti-realism does not allow for his conclusion that there are not patterns without perceiving organisms.
So how did an organism complex enough to be able to perceive patterns pop into existence with no evolution/natural selection before it? Presumably it had DNA or at least RNA. How did these and proteins and nucleic acids suddenly pop into existence out of nothing.......and at that instant start creating things like, for example, whatever it needed for food and the sun to get the temperature right, or the magma and the planet this organism suddenly out of nothing lived on?
And the Big Bang then did not really happen, since this was long before that first organism.
Some people here, probably including VA, think that because I bring up these problems with his position, I must be a realist. LOL. Sure, a realist might well point this out. But my problem with VA is that he is not anti-realist enough. He doesn't seem to notice what his own position entails, so he ends up with this weird self-contradictory and magical blend of realism and anti-realism. A blend that does not fit together.
And then, since Hawking is being appealed to as an authority, Hawking himself, not long before his death..
Page 64, The Grand Design
"One could have a model in which the table disappears when i leave the room and re-appears in the same position when i come back, but that would be awkward, and what if something happened, when i was out, like the ceiling falling in? How, under the table-disappears-when-I-leave-the-room model, could i account for the fact that the next time i enter, the table reappears broken, under the debris of the ceiling? The model in which the table stays put is much simpler and agrees with observation. That is all one can ask."
