How many of you believe that matter is the only reality in the world?

Question

In other words, everything that exists is material and every event in the universe results from the activity of matter? That life emerges from and returns to inorganic matter. Mind emerges of matter: All the mental terms such as sensation, will, reasoning and so on have reference to physical events or physiological changes in our material brains. All the diversity of the universe, all the mysteries of our consciousness only come up from some particles of matter combined by chance and necessity. In other words, upward causation? And how many of you believe materialism is a matter of scientific fact?

Answer 1

Does it really Matter materialistically.

Answer 2

I've heard that matter makes less than 20% of our universe, possibly less than 5%. The rest is dark matter, dark energy, the less existing antimatter, and other stuff. But I do believe that matter is "life." It's what causes us to think, reason, remember, etc. Humans are just more complex than other animals, in the brain at least. Other animals can reason, think, "feel," etc. But yes, matter itself, makes this happen.

As far as proof goes, the most common elements found in our bodies are Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. All of which are matter.

Answer 3

I believe this.  And anything that we can not explain at the moment does not mean that it can not be explained scientifically.

Answer 4

Matter is an illusion. Outside of what the mind perceives, there is no evidence that anything exists at all. Reality exists only in your mind.

Answer 5

I believe that you are one piece of work.

Answer 6

I wouldn't say that materialism is a matter of scientific fact.  Scientists ought to be (and most are) careful about not believing anything.  But materialistic explanations of natural phenomena have outperformed supernatural ones by such a vast margin, that scientists are (and rightfully should be) extremely reluctant to propose models based on supernatural explanations.

So if you put a gun to my head, shoved me off my agnostic pedestal, and asked me what I believe, I'd say yes, I agree with that entire laundry list of propositions.  They form the most coherent picture of the universe.

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If you believe that god (meaning a being with human-like intelligence, not meaning just another word for nature as Einstein used the word) has any impact on the universe, then you believe in the supernatural.

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Naturalism vs. a belief in the supernatural isn't a semantic sinkhole--it's a precise description of two opposed viewpoints.  That said, I understand the word supernatural has taken on connotations of nuttiness that I'm not implying.  I mean it in its strict sense--a belief in something beyond naturalism.

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Here's what it comes down to.  If your quantum consciousness has anything resembling a human intelligence, then that is a supernatural belief.  If you could clean that up and tell us what the observable consequences would be of such an intelligence, then we could call it a supernatural model, and it could be judged scientifically.  If you just have some generally fuzzy beliefs that don't have observable consequences, then you are in the same boat (maybe a slightly new-agey version of the boat) with Einstein and are a practical naturalist.

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There's nothing special about the double slit experiment.  Naturalistic models adequately describe the results.

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I'm not sure we can absolutely rule out what you are saying--which is a superstrict version of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM--that you need an intelligent observer to collapse the wave function.  But if you take that seriously, you have to take the Schrodinger's Cat paradox seriously.  Some of the milder interpretations of QM have found ways of sidestepping the issue in a philosophically acceptable manner without having to consider half-alive cats.

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I don't see any paradox in the liar's paradox.  I just read a description of the problem, and I don't see the paradox.

So I make the statement that I am a liar.

L:L is false

There is no meaning to an assertion that comments on its own validity.  Every statement a person can possibly make has the logical preface, "If I am telling the truth".  Therefore, consider what the liar is really saying: "If I am telling the truth, then I am a liar."  If he is a liar, the condition is not satisfied in the first place, and what follows is moot. If he is not a liar, then clearly the last part of the statement is false, so by contrapositive reasoning, he can't be telling the truth and is lying.  But lying this time doesn't make him a liar, so there is no inconsistency.

So when you write L: L is false, what you really mean is

L: If L is true, then L is false, which clearly implies that L is false with no inconsistency.  Trying to make any statement without the implied condition that the statement is true is nonsense.

That said, what the heck does that have to do with QM?

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Now you're definitely off the reservation a bit.  While quantum mechanics is certainly responsible for the underlying chemistry in the brain, it has somewhat less to do with emergent phenomena like how synapses move around the brain and nothing directly to do with consciousness.  You can't apply what you see in microscopic quantum phenomena like uncertainty to something like higher-order brain functioning.  The phenomena you describe could just as easily be the result of a classical mechanism of sufficient complexity.

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Bohm has its own problems like non-locality.  Consistent histories maybe.  Or just the completely agnostic viewpoint that QM predicts ensemble behavior and nothing more (which is what most scientists profess).  Many worlds claims to solve the issue, but trades the question of what collapses the wavefunction to what triggers the universe to split.  And it creates a lot of baggage.

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Because it doesn't apply.  The uncertainty principle is a relationship between specific kinds of variables, and results in effects of very small magnitude.  While chemistry (and therefore everything about the brain) depends on it, I don't see any connection to higher-order brain functioning.  You're drawing an analogy.  You're saying that what you are thinking is like quantum uncertainty.  But it is not itself quantum uncertainty or anything directly related to it as far as I can see (not being a neurobiologist myself, but understanding the basics of how the brain functions).

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It's an extension of the Copernican principle really--a bias that scientists carry along with naturalism--the idea that humans or conscious beings are not special--that we don't interact with the phenomena we observe.  And we carry it for the same reason--that attempts to put humans in a special position in nature have not historically been successful.

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I don't see how the Wigner's friend paradox implies non-locality in any way.  Nonlocality can come in through an interpretation like Bohm's which requires that the hidden variables communicate.  But in no interpretation can actual information can move faster than light speed.  That's a pretty solid result in quantum field theory.

And you're doing the same thing again, you're trying to take microscopic phenomena from quantum mechanics and draw gross analogies with what happens in consciousness, and then say that the gross similarities imply that consciousness is somehow directly related to quantum mechanics.  I just don't see any way that it is.

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Entanglement experiments do not imply nonlocal transfer of information (unless you make a hidden variables interpretation like Bohm).  You can't talk to a friend by using some kind of a telephone that uses wave-function collapse to send information from one particle to an entangled partner.  It's only afterward when you and your friend compare notes that you notice the correlations between measurements.

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The GZ experiment does not have NEARLY the time resolution required to establish a non-local effect.  The guys are separated by 40 feet and the time scale on that graph is in milliseconds.  Light travels 300km in a ms.  And even if there were a correlation between the brain functions, there is no reason whatsover to suspect that the phenomenon is quantum rather than classical.  And even so, I'm deeply skeptical of the results.  Have they been replicated?  How were all the factors controlled so that there wasn't a simpler explanation?  Did they do this experiment a lot of times and just pick out one dataset where the brain functions happened to coincide?  What is the actual probability that those sine-waves could have that degree of coincidence just by chance--ie what is the actual significance of the experiment.  Just by eyeballing the graph, I'm not sure it's that high.  That experiment totally smacks of pseudoscience.

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I don't know most of those words, but Christianity and Judaism are absolutely supernatural.  Miracles are, by definition, supernatural.  The idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being is supernatural.

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I read the wiki, and would describe that Buddhist term not so much as supernatural but as subnatural--not that there is more to the universe than naturalism, but that there is less.

And Quantum Consciousness, as you have articulated it (and as depicted in some of your links), is not supernatural really.  It's an attempt to take a bunch of phenomena that would normally be considered supernatural and give them naturalistic backing by piggybacking on scientific discoveries.  The attempt fails under inspection, though, so it's not really a coherent view of either kind.

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What measurement problem?