[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

krimel:
I do think there is an external world independent of any observer. But that
says nothing whatever about its nature.

gav: 
i don't think there is an objective external world. and i know it.
 and of course its putative independence does say something about its
nature: IT SAYS ITS INDEPENDENT FOR PETE'S SAKE (happy now pete?). quantum
physics threw the independent objective reality idea out the window about
100 years ago. i mean c'mon! get real.

krimel continues:
 It does now claim that I am a
subject existing independently of that external world.

gav: 
typo?

[Krimel]
Yes, "now" should be "not"
Or we could leave the "now" and change it to:

It does now claim that I am a subject existing interdependently with an
external world.

krimel continues:

 As with all of my
assumptions, it is provisional.

gav:
and wrong....but that's okay cos its provisional.

[Krimel]
Either way its better not to get too attached.

krimel continues:
 I do infer the existence of such an external
world as the overlap of shared experience with other observers who report
commonality in our experience. Such a reality is objective in that sense.

gav: 
okay so you have changed your mind already - nice.
so the objective external world is now the intersubjective world....very
different thing krimel - in fact a totally different thing. an
intersubjective reality is by definition not objective, it is a consensus,
based primarily on culture and language.

[Krimel]
I have said that "objective" means intersubjective early and often on this
forum. I'm sorry if there was some misunderstanding. But what I have said
about it is, that objective reality IS intersubjective reality. That is the
only meaning the term can have.

krimel:
 As
Ham might point out not much can be said about such a reality in the absence
of any observer. But I don't think that the MoQ demands that we discard
inference as a tool for acquiring knowledge. It is after all vital to
pattern recognition.

gav: 
 what are you on about mate?

[Krimel]
I infer that there is a world that exists whether I do or not. I infer this
from the intersubjective agreement that I have with others. I grows from the
overlap in our experience, those things that we talk about, about which we
agree in some measure; from these I infer that there is something that I am
part of but that the whole preceded and will survive me.

gav: 
we are the external world observing itself. perception is synaesthetic...try
separating taste and smell and touch when you eat. what need to reunify a
unity?

[Krimel]
The external world observing itself is our participation in the process of
reality. We are able to observe the world because experience iterates within
us. Memory is recursive experience. We hold the past in mind. We sense the
present. We imagine futures.

In my most profound moments of oneness at the local Cobb Theater, the shards
of light and sound combine, they are not abstracted from some whole.

gav:
you what? you are talking of a (rather confused) quasi-objective external
world that comes to me through my senses, and is then organised into a
picture of the world. how is this not dualistic? it is about as SOM as it
gets: the external world that i sense and organise - object and subject.

[Krimel]
My senses are the product of five billions years of experience on this
planet. They have been honed by my ancestors to tell me what I need to know
to participate in being the part of the universe that observes itself. They
are vital to the observation.

krimel:
What you seem to be advocating is some extreme form of phenomenology that is
indistinguishable from solipsism.

gav:
you just haven't taken the logic chain far enough. it is not that just you
exist and everyone else is imaginary: you are imaginary aswell.

[Krimel]
That is true. I am totally imaginary. I am a virtual wizard. But I'm with
Case, who used to say:

"All I know is, everything I see;
Is partly real and partly fantasy."