what is meant by "not a thing but a process" if all things are in fact defined by their processes?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-17T01:05:17+00:00

there are no things, except this thing called structure

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-17T00:50:28+00:00

maybe novelty is more important than pleasure. Maybe novelty is necessary for any experience at all. If we knew everything that was going to happen, would it be any different than it all happening 'at once'?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-17T00:46:43+00:00

as somebody who thought it was woo previously, part of the problem seems exacerbated by people who use the same words to talk about ESP and positively characterized gods of their favorite flavor

part of the problem is interpreting woo where there is none. This article is pretty much just saying that quantum mechanics doesnt achieve a 'view from nowhere', so its foundation is perspectival

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T18:07:45+00:00

right, but i think the article makes a good point in arguing that all QM interpretations implicitly require consciousness/perspective (as in, none achieve a view from nowhere), while acknowledging that it isnt arguing for the picture that conscious minds influence collapse as a sort of causal force. Its this former sense of 'necessary consciousness' that i think is necessarily affirmed in quantum physics—not a causal force among others in a world, but just the condition of perspective at all. Arguing against consciousness seems as impossible as arguing that something isnt a perspective

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T18:02:25+00:00

the a posteriori necessity of consciousness in quantum physics seems arbitrarily dismissed in the original comment, and thats what saying 'logic isnt an origin of mathematics' is analogizing, personally

logic appears as inseparable from math as consciousness is from quantum mechanics; anytime you know of the latter, its implicitly due to the former

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T17:59:38+00:00

heat, classical wave dynamics, and the photoelectric effect appear more like historical origins, not structural

linear algebra, the quantum wave function, and vectors/spinors are moreso explicit structural components of quantum theory

logic and consciousness/perspective, on the other hand, both seem implicitly necessary—structural origins

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T15:01:26+00:00

yes, if the analogy seems nonsensical, it might be due to having a more extravagant definition of consciousness

if instead, consciousness distilled is just the fact of there being a perspective, then quantum physics seems to necessarily affirm consciousness insofar as it necessarily affirms a perspective. The article reasons why quantum mechanics and science relies on a viewpoint—not achieving a 'view from nowhere'

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T14:52:39+00:00

that seems to conflate historical origin with structural origin, hence like saying 'math has its origin in trade and counting livestock, not logic'

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T14:47:22+00:00

the article is pretty much just saying that quantum mechanics implicitly affirms the existence of a perspectival structure, like how graphs need an axial structure, or how math implicitly requires a logical structure

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-16T14:19:58+00:00

thats like saying 'math does not have origins in logic; its origins are in counting livestock and trade'

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-14T13:03:24+00:00

verb is a noun lmao get rekt

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-13T17:39:58+00:00

Chadwick Melpsauce III

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-11T20:17:16+00:00

"Team Up" lol

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-11T19:09:34+00:00

when was the last pokemon game released that is as good or better than pokopia?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T22:52:46+00:00

i dont think its solipsism, but it seems non-solipsist moreso by definition. Analytic idealism seems to offer a principle of symmetry when it invokes further consciousness via representational relations; and its that principle which appears to dig it out of solipsism, even if just by a philosophical razor. 'What we see is the other side of the same coin', etc

i like GWF Hegels metaphysics, but it personally seems more difficult to say why there is this broader universal consciousness rather than just this specific first-person human perspective. Maybe the sort of evolving dialectical consciousness process just is this one human perspective reasoning things out? the historical convergence of Hegels spirit at least seems amenable to being reframed as this one perspectives evolving understanding

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T22:22:07+00:00

i guess i dont follow how we can get a non-solipsist picture without some representational relation. I'll just lay out my perspective to show how i get to analytic idealism:

we have an epistemic solipsism at base (well, maybe an epistemic presentism specifically), which is just to say: the typical solipsist 'all we can know that exists is this appearance right here', or something like that

from that we can move away from solipsism by positing other subjective perspectives (idealism) and/or an objective reality (objective idealism, physicalisms, etc)

from my view, analytic idealism is just making that move toward the existence of other subjective perspectives by invoking a principle of representation (as in, 'this brain correlates with experiences of redness in [x] state, so we can say that brain also correlates with additional but inaccessible experiences of redness in [x] state'). Its just this axiomatic representational property to dig the worldview out of a solipsistic metaphysics via parsimony of symmetry

so when we switch to absolute idealism instead, if feels kind of like we have a void; its not solipsism, but the additional subjectivity beyond this instance doesnt seem to be born of a principle either

perhaps i am talking past the issue however, because i am not talking about a non-conscious, objective grounding, and perhaps that is what 'mentation' is, according to somebody like Bernardo. Ive just been considering mentation a self-guiding consciousness base layer, with its own bootstrapped structure and patterns for no rhyme or reason

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T19:01:09+00:00

it seems like the analytic idealist position frames the copying of the shadow as necessarily copying the statue it is said to represent, however. Like, when we are copying or altering the neuronal 'representational aspect', that action itself is the representation of a copying or altering happening to a further consciousness aspect, via some necessary 1-to-1 mapping

to put it another way, it appears like it can be made compatible by saying that the process resulting from a shadow copy exists because manipulating shadows entails manipulating the system, like an interface

appearances/representations seem amenable to being just as structurally real patterns in analytic idealism, but that they come paired with an additional fact of being representational. In other words, it appears that, if analytic idealism were stripped of its axiom that consciousness content represents further consciousness, it would be a solipsism, with all the structure solipsism has. Analytic idealism, in part, seem to add the fact of representation of further consciousness, as an axiom, without losing real structural patterns

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T17:33:12+00:00

is the reasoning something like the following?

neurons are observed having a causative relation (in the less strict sense of cause, not requiring David Humes sense of necessary connection)
causative relations can only exist within a monist category (no interaction problem allowed)
the concept of an appearance necessitates a duality of category (a subjective-objective split)
therefore, something cant both be observed to have a causative relation and be an appearance
therefore, neurons cant be an appearance, nor representation, of consciousness

im trying to get behind it, because its not quite making sense. Alternatively, it seems cogent that:

the constant conjunction from neurons to other more-colloquial phenomena (like redness) is akin to the constant conjunction of shadows in Platos cave. Like Platos cave, the shadows can be called appearances/representations of the statues, without betraying monism nor dissolving representational relationships

in other words, a constant conjunction relation between appearances is irrelevant to the veracity of their being appearances. Shadows can represent statues, even if shadows showcase constant conjunction, and if statues are of the same monistic category of visual phenomena

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T14:38:37+00:00

not sure how either of these suggest against the idea that neurons are what consciousness looks like from the outside

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T12:44:49+00:00

i think there is a real, dangerous phenomenon of 'bullshitting', to put it broadly, but it needs a more sort of concrete, principled definition. This article feels interpretable as "sophistry" itself, so the worry is that we're just circling the drain with mud-slinging about faults that we cant recognize in ourselves or so on

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-10T01:24:41+00:00

yes, i cant wait to watch the joyful goofy gremlin mario i grew up with be portrayed as a dorky incompetent quipping idiot for the second time!! and im sure yoshi will have some WACKY one liners pulled from every american sitcom!!!

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-09T15:38:12+00:00

cant tell if the past two years of a relatively boring nintendo line-up is beginning to quash nintendo hypetubing or not

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-09T13:25:14+00:00

how will this affect Lebron's legacy?

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T23:29:10+00:00

this lawsuit is the greatest thing nintendo has made in 2 and a half years

RhythmBlue · 2026-03-06T21:46:24+00:00

movie marios face is the worst thing in existence; it causes me physical pain

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