People were dying en-masse because you had doctors not washing their hands when moving from autopsies to giving birth.
No one was aware about the germs that are causing this. It still killed people.
This is true for most of the early medicine/illneses/hygiene, this was just an example I remember. Especially in regards to germs and bacteries, the humanity wasn’t even close to getting it right.
Perhaps I just confabulated all that, and your comment. Perhaps in the process, I manifested the history therein described.
The human body needs water to survive. Perhaps you are different.
No, things outside the player’s field of view are unloaded to save memory, obviously.
If that’s the case, would things outside our field of view still have an effect on us? And to what extent?
In a good game they do, but those effects can be abstracted rather than simulated to save processing power.
Yes. You aren’t the main character of reality.
Obviously they’re not, because I am.
Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren’t observing them.
There’s also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that’s a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.
The results of the axiom are that things do exist when we are not observing them. Our observations don’t back propagate to retroactively bring them into existence. We can’t prove that however, though it’s fundamental to a lot of science making sense (quantum mechanics being the oddball).
Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.
One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.
E.g. we couldn’t do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can’t prove the universe isn’t a computer program, only rendering what a “conscious” entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.
How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn’t affect the model’s ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.
I think you might be confusing statistical with stochastic. Quantum mechanics makes incredibly precise predictions about the statistics of particle interactions. A stochastic model implies an experimental result could change depending on what day it is, when in fact quantum mechanical principles are relied upon every day for modern technology, and the screen you are reading this on is likely lit up because of the small but predictable chance an electron in an LED has to overcome an energy barrier it classically could not.
Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn’t guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be “a function of the date” or something that is “conditional on the date”. This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling
date.today().dayin Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from0todate.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between0anddate.today().day).Edit: I think what you’re talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that “stochastic” too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.
No, that’s exactly what I mean and exactly what I think you are missing: quantum mechanical experiments have been reproduced thousands of times, and even as measuring instruments became sensitive, the predictions have held true. The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable, and an experiment proving a different statistical value of an event than QM predicts would be world news.
The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable
Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn’t mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.
Bacteria and viruses existed for billions of years before humans ever existed and the majority of the time since. Dinosaurs existed before we were aware of them. Lots of things have.
This isn’t a very well thought out Shower Thought
Dinosaurs have conscious awareness. They were “anyone”. Some evidence suggests that consciousness is a fundamentally intra-cellular process that became inter-cellular, and that even the simplest organisms exploit some form of consciousness.
That’s what you think, but as soon as I leave this comment thread and become unaware of it, I’m sorry to say, but you will stop existing. Tough luck.
Well I exist, despite it seeming that no one else in the world is aware of my existence.
You’re ruining it.
Write your definition for “things” and that’ll answer your question for you.
This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?
Next, ask yourself “do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?” What about Mickey Mouse?
Then you move on to questions like “does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?”
And finally, the psychiatric ward. 😜
Obviously, yes. But now the question is, can you be aware of things that don’t exist?
As fiction exists but describes things that may not exist, I think the answer is also yes.
Maybe we’re not aware of a non-existent thing itself, but of an idea or perception in our minds.
Actually this is the right answer, and doesn’t deserve the downvotes.
I think me and Ahmed gave the same answer, but with mine being indirect using an example, and Ahmed’s answer being direct, so maybe people had a harder time understanding Ahmed’s answer.
How does this differ from having an idea or perception in our minds about existing things?
purely imaginary things exist only in the mind.
But are we aware of existing things in themselves, apart from the idea and perception in our minds?
That’s solipsism
Why do you think it’s solipsism? Can you explain your reasoning?
I mean, they don’t have to think it’s related to Solipsism, by definition Solipsism id an answer to your question
Why are all your responses in bold, you mad lad?
Yes, they necessarily do.
Animals are sometimes declared ‘extinct’ (no one is aware of any living examples) while they still exist (sometimes for decades).
Until 1967, noone was aware of the existence of gamma-ray bursts, the result of the biggest explosions in the universe. The bursts were only visible to specialized satellites.
Right now, people are suffering from diseases caused by unknown viruses.
Your question is a lot like this thought experiment:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Whatever your answer is to the above text can be applied to your question.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
Yes. Because people are not the only observers.
What qualify as observers though? Or, how far divorced from an event counts as unobserved?
If a tree falls in a forest and scares a rabbit which a dog barks at which I hear… is that chain of observation enough to grant existence to the tree?
Does existence only count if there is an observer to observe it? I don’t understand this notion.
I think about this every time I drive long distances, passing through forest.
“That tree over there is just standing there, all hours of every day, winter and summer, just waiting. Then I drive by it for 2 seconds. Then it still stands there, waiting.”
Similarly I think of rocks rotating in silence around planets, stars. Or orphan rocks around galaxies, in darkness, and also silence. They’re just there, for millions of millennia. Without anyone’s knowledge. But surely they exist.
By definition, we don’t know
I know this example, but I want to see what people think from their own point of view. Like,Do things exist independently of our awareness of them?
This morning I met a man I had never seen before. I was not aware of him. Are you asking me if I think he existed before I met him?
Yes they do. Otherwise we would never discover anything. Unless one would mean that the people who have discovered everything that has ever been discovered were also the creators of those things. And that seems far-fetched.
BUT IF YOU READ IT YOU WILL FIND OUT THAT PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED OVER THIS ISSUE. SO THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE ANSWER.
