wonderer1

That's an interesting way of looking at it. It reminds me of recent discussions on TPF, of variation in the extent to which people experience an inner...

By a physical reference I mean a physical system used in comparing a second tier reference standard to the current definition of a physical unit (e.g....

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Fallacy of composition or division? I could see it as a fallacy of division, i.e. 'thought is language all the way down' or "In the beginning was the ...

I'm not seeing any very good analogy.

From my perspective the standard metre is an agreed upon physical reference as to what distance is to be considered 1m. It seems to me the point of a ...

So a connotation of animism? :wink:

Something obvious to me is how much is not being talked about with a statement like "Things we perceive present themselves to us." There are a lot of ...

Well, another problem would be that human experts tend to be continually learning, so the system you describe would seem to inevitably lag behind huma...

Sounds like a wildly unrealistic goal to me. I'd have to say that there is a lot of variation from human to human and subject to subject.

Why is what is "general knowledge" so important? Typically, when I am talking about sailboats, I am talking with fellow sailors who understand "cat" i...

Cats are my favorite kind of sailboat, because they are fast.

I don't think our science is so incomplete that we can't determine that there are regularities in nature independent of our cognitive faculties. For e...

I would think the representation is some collection of neurons in our brains firing with some relationship to a brainwave phase. However, I don't thin...

Saying "I see Mars" is in effect saying that the photons which cause me to recognize that I am seeing Mars were reflected by Mars. I'm afraid that it ...

Is it inconceivable that there are naturally occurring negatively charged particles called electrons and positively charged particles caller protons t...

Does Barad claim a scientific justification for the claim?

Very well said.

Did you read the last paragraph?

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In the case of scientific understanding, a spectrum from naive to well informed to me seems more relevant than a true false binary. Along the same lin...

I'm not sure how we could say we know that.

First off, I don't know what you might be referring to with "really rational". As members of a social primate species go, (a social primate species wh...

:up: And not just the number and variety but also the complexity of the arrangement.

Consider the degree to which people interact with the the world, including each other, avoiding circularity seems rather unrealistic. Just try to comp...

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I personally think, that in your specific case, it may be best to leave you thinking so.

Boltzmann brains don't involve disembodied cognition. Cognition embodied much differently than ours for the most part, but not disembodied.

Did you read the full paper? If so, do you think that you followed Carroll's reasoning well? It would be a straw man to claim that your argument and p...

No, but just think about it. To have strong empirical evidence of BBs fluctuating into existence would require gathering evidence from the future, and...

Nah, it's a matter of my understanding of the strength of the evidence.

No. I am claiming 1-4 are insufficiently justified given the present state of scientific knowledge and my ability to distinguish well evidenced scienc...

My view is along the lines of Sean Carroll's. (Again, from The Big Picture.)

Whether (1) is true is unknown. As far as I know, the universe as we know it might end with a false vacuum decay tomorrow.

It's hasn't been clear to me that when you say, "or our science is incorrect", that you recognize the relativity of incorrectness.

Are you familiar with The Relativity of Wrong?

Okay, show your math.

Exactly.

As an explanation for our observations, yes.

That is not nearly as self defeating as a scientific hypothesis.

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What you put in quotes there was something that someone wrote on Wikipedia. Can you quote a physicist making such a claim?

Those are people who have considered the possibility that we are Boltzmann brains. Not people who claim what you attribute to them. I already quoted S...

What scientist makes the claim that we have scientific evidence that we are most likely Boltzmann brains?

That's a false dichotomy, and things aren't nearly that black or white. There are areas in which I can and do trust my scientific knowledge with my li...

They are entailed by extrapolation of some scientific theories to a future universe we don't find ourselves in a position to observe. There are lots o...

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BB speculations are scientifically self defeating. We only take such evidence seriously on the assumption that humans actually make empirical observat...

I'm not suggesting it is simple speculation, but it does depend on assumptions such as that the universe is eternal. Furthermore, science is hardly ex...