[MD] LC Comments

[Magnus Berg]

Hi again

On 2010-07-12 18:46, david buchanan wrote:
> Magnus said to Dan: Of course the MoQ isn't reality itself, it's an
> intellectual pattern that describes reality in much the same way a
> physical formula does.
>
> However, in the same way a physical formula does its best to reflect
> how physics will behave given certain preconditions, so will also the
> MoQ do its best to reflect how reality will behave.
>
> So, just as it is silly to assume that there *isn't* a sun that is
> shining over us every day, that it's somehow just a grand illusion,
> it's equally silly to assume that the levels doesn't have any real
> correspondence in reality.
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> Well, no. I think it's very important to understand that getting rid
> of this idea of correspondence to reality is part of getting rid of
> SOM.

No. They have nothing to do with each other.

When you say "correspondence to reality", you mean the transformation 
from, say, inorganic experience, to an intellectual understanding in 
your head, right? So, yes, in SOM-land, only an "objective" such 
intellectual understanding of the physical reality is valid.

But if we investigate what has happened from the inorganic experience to 
the intellectual understanding of it, there are lots of steps:

An inorganic "measurement" takes place. This is an inorganic quality 
event where the object is the reality we want to look at, and the 
subject is the inorganic instrument. The instrument shows us the result 
on a display or some such, and we read it using our eyes (which in this 
case is a biological event supported by an inorganic event).

Then the biological "seeing" event is mapped into an intellectual 
pattern via our social language. In that event, the intellectual object 
is the number on the display and the subject is your brain.

When we lay it out like this, we can plainly see that what we ultimately 
get into our heads, is always the subjective side of the intellectual 
experience. *But* since we know that each event requires one subject and 
one object, we can - using the MoQ -, infer that there *was* an object 
and we have measured it.

What we can also say is that the object has been changed by this same 
event. QM has taught us that we can't measure anything without 
disturbing it. The MoQ says a similar thing about the event and that is 
that each object is also a subject from its point of view. Perhaps QM 
and MoQ are actually telling us the same thing, but in different languages.

So in that sense, we have to give up the correspondence between reality 
and our understanding of it. But *only* in that sense. It has nothing to 
do with SOM. And even if we need to nudge on the correspondence a bit 
because of it, we can do pretty much to circumvent the disturbance.

If you disagree with anything of the above, we can start there.

So, what I'm trying to say is that objects and subjects are just as real 
in the MoQ, they just come a bit later in the chain.

	Magnus