Aurocafe: new blog by advanced thinker Ulrich Mohrhoff

Sample thread: "The paradox of human subjectivity - our two selves: containing the world and being contained in it" (at https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/the-para...bjectivity ).

Conclusion:

"Something in the (more or less) self-coherent world we have constructed from our experiences (notably, our sensory organs and brains) points to something beyond this world, something that lies at the origin of our experiences, yet neither do we have the slightest idea of what this is, nor do we know how these cognitive structure fit into the picture. And if we reify this (more or less) self-coherent world with its bodies and cognitive structures, we do not have the slightest idea of how we come to have the experiences that we have.

Most philosophers have found the paradox of human subjectivity intolerable; hence the common attempt to eliminate one or the other of our two selves—the transcendental self for which the world exists, or the empirical self which exists in the world, as an aspect or attribute of a physical body. The common reaction in our own day is to eliminate subjectivity altogether by some kind of physicalist reduction. This inevitably leads to the spurious “hard problem of consciousness” and on to looking-glassing such words as “self” and “consciousness.” (The phrase “looking-glassing a term” was coined by Galen Strawson to mean using the term “in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term actually means.”)"

Mohrhoff always had some very interesting insights, as the physicist who made the Anti-Matters journal years back. (He also wrote one of the well regarded Introduction to QM text books back in the day.)

Good to see him putting his thoughts out in the public.

Sample thread: "The paradox of human subjectivity - our two selves: containing the world and being contained in it" (at https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/the-para...bjectivity ).

Great article on Mohrhoff.

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/s.../mohrhoff/

More on the confirmation in principle by quantum mechanics of virtual reality world simulation theories.

From Ulrich Mohrhoff in his blog Aurocafe, in "Particles: stuff or nonsense?":

(Erwin Schroedinger in 1951, Science and Humanism, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, pp. 103‒171 (Canto Classics, 2014))

"If I observe a particle here and now, and observe a similar one a moment later at a place very near the former place, not only cannot I be sure whether it is “the same,” but this statement has no absolute meaning. This seems to be absurd. For we are so used to thinking that at every moment between the two observations the first particle must have been somewhere, it must have followed a path, whether we know it or not. … In other words we assume — following a habit of thought that applies to palpable objects — that we could have kept our particle under continuous observation, thereby ascertaining its identity. This habit of thought we must dismiss. We must not admit the possibility of continuous observation. Observations are to be regarded as discrete, disconnected events. Between them there are gaps which we cannot fill in. There are cases where we should upset everything if we admitted the possibility of continuous observation. That is why I said it is better to regard a particle not as a permanent entity but as an instantaneous event."

Note that between observations is a "gap which cannot be filled in". It simply doesn't exist in our reality. Exactly as would be expected if this gap constitutes the period (in simulator time) between iterations of the simulation, whether these iterations are regular and periodic or only triggered by observations made from within the simulation. This would presumably be at base at a minimum of the Planck time, which would be the actual "clock rate" of the simulation. This gap bridges a state which literally doesn't exist in the iteratively generated virtual reality of the simulation.