A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

Pretty sure I didn't have to warp anything to explain that people living in a machine experienced the physical states of that machine. If I'm being asked to imagine that this is a matter of fact statement about our reality that's a matter of fact statement about their experience. Some other thing, not "The Matrix" and I'd answer differently....

You can say that we don't experience people, but only the physical states of QM particles, but this isn't a very meaningful statement. We experience as human not a collection of QM particles, but the information encoded in their relationship to each other.

But we don't have to go to such a deep virtual reality to see this. We can just experience a video game. There's Mario, jumping around the screen. Does he "exist?" Not in the sense that we normally mean, no. Information about him exists and is encoded in memory, CPU, and GPU. But Mario isn't there. If you want to insist that Mario IS a collection of binary states in the hardware, then I disagree with you-- Mario is a little red-clothed dude with a hammer jumping around the screen. I know, because I observe him. See? There he is.

You say QM particles "really" exist. But a photon has no mass or volume. Where, then, is this mythical physical medium in which information about the photon exists? Is there another layer of physical reality which carries information about "things" which have zero size?

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....for example, if Benny had asked me, what if "we were living, in a non material world" -Then I would be a non material girl.

I'll only accept this argument if you sing it.

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@Rhythm
I pose an interesting question only to come back to 3 pages worth of discussion between you and benny. You're stealing my fun.

If you're asking about the drying paint, I did answer it.

But I'll answer it again (maybe inaccurately as I'm not an expert in drying paint): the heat from the sun or another source excites the water molecules, causing them to break free of the paint and be absorbed into the air. The other molecules in the paint remain behind on the wall, leaving a solid shell.

See, the thing you guys don't seem to be connecting with is that there's nothing described in a physical monism which isn't describable in an idealistic monism, usually in almost the same terms. It is at philosophical boundaries that answers become very different: cosmogony and psychogony, for example, or in looking for the most primitive elements upon which everything we observe supervene.