Monday, December 01, 2014

All Mind


Physical realists contend that the universe is more or less what physics says it is.  In their view, the universe consists of fundamentally physical objects located in space and time, that exist in natural states, and that interact with each other in various but predictable kinds of ways.  Most importantly, the physical universe is independent of the mind of the observer - it exists and behaves as it does regardless of whether or not one is thinking about it or what one thinks about it.

In other words, physical realism is the view that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone. Most people think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of quantum physics for some time now.  Experimental results that differ when observed from results with no observer, and quantum waves that entangle, superpose, and then collapse, are physically impossible, but no other theory predicts the experimental results, so physical realists are faced with the problem of a quantum theory that's physically impossible but that successfully predicts physical reality.  To put it another way, the unreal explains reality.

If we take the position which initially sounds absurd that the physical universe is just a conception of mind, then the quantum/realism paradox falls away.  In "all mind" theory, things behave the way that they do merely because we think they behave that way.  If we were to think differently, things would behave differently, just as when we dream we can fly, then we can fly, at least in the dream. 

When we think about things that are very, very small, like sub-atomic particles, or things that are very, very large, like galaxies or clusters of galaxies, that is, things very far from our own typical experiential scale, we think differently and then those very small and very large things behave differently.  The fact that the theories of how things behave at our experiential scale and at imaginative scales don't line up is just a problem of logic, which itself is another object of mind.

This isn't to say that reality is like a dream, where the dreamer exists in the state of true reality and the dream-world exists somehow separate from that true reality.  In "all mind" theory, everything, the dream, the dreamer, and the physical realm of the dreamer, is all in the mind.  And not to take things too far (but why not?), then the "mind" is also a product of mind.

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