"Mind independent reality" requires a definition of mind and reality.
It is interesting that the invariant physical observer has a space-time interval of zero (the apex or waist of the light cone). See https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/our-reality which also defines mind and reality in chapter 6.
I enjoyed this writing immensely! However much I may personally prefer this framing of 'reality' as invariance, limited by but inextricable from observing minds, I am still not convinced that it has much potential to (re)build a world of collaboration through epistemological participation. It seems to me that the current troubles with collective epistemology is driven by other factors unrelated to authoritarian concepts of reality. I do agree that *something* needs to change in the public discourse. But, the popular narrative of a lone, heroic speaker of truth against a sea of delusional conformists is too treasured, the self-serving idea that the one who voices dissent (variance) is noble and virtuous is too appealing, and the conceit that one has a privileged and secret truth most others cannot access is too gratifying, especially for conspiracy theorists. I suspect other factors such as factors involving the balance of human desires for both distinctiveness and group-membership-belonging, bear more responsibility for the mistrust in scientific consensus than the influence of a 'mind-independent reality' framework. But, again, I do appreciate this explanation and agree the shift toward ontological-epistemological integration would cary many benefits. Thanks again for posting this! Made my day better just to read it!
Enjoying this essay a lot though I confess to having a hard time understanding mind invariance versus mind independence. The universe existed prior to earth. So is one wrong to imagine the possibility of traveling back in time to when earth was not yet formed, when no minds existed as far as we know?
Of course this imagined time travel would be mind invariant (wouldn’t matter who travels back in time) but isn’t the fact of the existence of the Universe independent of any mind? Having a hard time with this.
Yes, the existence of the past is a tricky matter for the invariance perspective. I am not sure what to think, but it may be that our emphasis should be on the imagined nature of the past. Time travel is not possible for now, and in my opinion it is too riddled with paradoxes to every be possible. So all we really have is an idealized narrative about the past pieced together from patterns in the present. When we imagine a past without observers, there is still the person imagining things: this is a version of the view from nowhere.
I'm a bit late to the game here as I found your Substack while doing some reading on the internet in preparation for a post I'm working on, which is also about the dubiousness of this notion of mind-independence. Very much appreciate finding your post! I have even used some similar phrasing as what you're saying here; I'm debating whether to call my post "the view from somewhere" or "the view from anywhere". Still contemplating whether there's difference...anyway, I'm saving the title "the view from everywhere" for a future post.
I want to assure you, you're on the right track in your point about phenomenology. They have been throwing into question the notion of mind-independence for some time now. Unfortunately, phenomenologists tend to be atrocious writers and many are associated with existentialism, which can be off-putting for those of a scientific bent. Edmund Husserl would be more acceptable to them if his views were expressed clearly, but unfortunately his writing is so burdened by nuance it's virtually indecipherable (so unfortunate!) Anyway, I'll leave you with this easy to read article I stumbled across which interprets Husserl's notion of intersubjectively constituted objective reality as "trading places". That seems similar to what you express here.
What you say here about 'invariance' reminds me of Husserl's 'eidetic variation'. Husserl was interested in how we constitute the objective world through experience, and eidetic variation is about how we come to see an object for what it is and how that object stays a unified object.
Isn’t this begging the question against the mind-independence view? Presumably those who believe in mind-independent reality would instead define facts as “something that IS true”, with no presumption of a doxastic/epistemic operator.
Secondly, you give the example of the sun being invariant because almost all observers can perceive it to exist in some fashion. But what about cases of possible worlds where nearly all the observers can’t see or perceive the sun in any way due to some inherent observer sense limitation? Maybe, for example, they can only interact with dark matter. The observers themselves won’t know the sun exists, but it seems like the sun should still exist if all we’ve changed are the observational properties of the world.
So it seems like the invariance view must presuppose that we can make changes to the propositional content concerning the physical characteristics of the sun (or the other external objects of the world), without actually changing any of the characteristics of those objects, but instead by changing the properties of the observers themselves. Would you accept this criticism, and if not, how would you avoid it?
I meant to write “we can make changes to the TRUTH of the propositional content”
Another problem occurs to me, and that’s an issue of scope. Let’s say 99% of observers in the universe are dark matter observers but 1% are human observers. How should we calculate the invariance of propositions about the sun in that case? When I say “the sun exists” is that false because this is not invariant among universal observers? If we define invariance more narrowly, among only the human community for example, then I can simply change the terms of the thought experiment (e.g. let’s say I’m the only human left alive) to falsify that definition in turn.
" Presumably those who believe in mind-independent reality would instead define facts as “something that IS true”, with no presumption of a doxastic/epistemic operator."
I guess this is what mind-independent reality entails, but my position is that this is meaningless: truth is a function of statements about the world, not the world itself. Rain is neither true nor false: only some statement about rain, or whether it is raining, can be true, false, or undetermined.
"So it seems like the invariance view must presuppose that we can make changes to the propositional content concerning the physical characteristics of the sun (or the other external objects of the world), without actually changing any of the characteristics of those objects, but instead by changing the properties of the observers themselves. "
Not sure I completely follow what you mean. We do alter the properties of objects smaller than the sun. To keep track of an object as being the same object from one moment of observation to the next, there must be *some* invariant spanning the transformation from one moment to the next. Even saying "the object magically turned into another one" implies some common spatiotemporal location. Otherwise we'd say that one object disappeared and another one appeared elsewhere at a different time.
"Another problem occurs to me, and that’s an issue of scope. Let’s say 99% of observers in the universe are dark matter observers but 1% are human observers. How should we calculate the invariance of propositions about the sun in that case? "
How do we ever construct widespread beliefs? The usual social interaction.
Not sure what conceptual work the 'dark matter' is doing here. Why posit something I cannot observe? It would be okay if such entities helped explain something else... what are unobserved observers helping us to explain?
Since we do not have access to hypothetical/unobserved observers, we cannot make any truth-claims about them. At best, we can define idealized imaginary entities and then study transformations *within* private or social imagination. That's what thought-experiments are. More broadly, this seems to be how logic acquires its value: the entities we work with in logic and pure mathematics are idealizations based on definitions.
An interesting zone here is discussions about dragons or orcs: within some restricted social interaction, it may make sense to say that "dragons breathe fire" is true: the imagined properties of dragons are invariant across some relevant population of 'imaginers'.
Just to be clear, I don’t see the mind-independent view as denying that “truth is a function of statements about the world” or that thought experiments are “idealized imaginary entities”.
Of course truth is a function of propositions, not the world. Of course thought experiments take place in an imaginary reality. The idea is to use the implications of that imaginary reality to assess the impact on our theories of meaning.
The question is whether the truth of propositions is dependent on the conditions of the external world or not. My point is that the mind-independent view asserts that the truth of propositions about reality is going to be necessarily determined by the characteristics and properties of the objects of external reality. For example, according to the mind-independent view, “it is raining” will be true or false depending on whether certain precipitation conditions are actually met in the external world, given a particular context.
I argued that your invariance view must reject the above. Why? Because if most observers can’t see or perceive the sun, then the statement “the sun exists” is false on your view. That statement just asserts a particular invariance condition, which won’t be met in that hypothetical reality.
But notice that we haven’t changed anything about the sun itself. I presume you agree that there is (or could be) an external reality populated with objects like the sun. So it would be weird if the proposition “the sun exists” is false or true irrespective of whether the sun actually exists.
By the way, I agree that we can’t verify or falsify hypothetical conditions involving dark matter observers, but that’s my whole point, I’m trying to show that the meaning of statements about ontology goes over and above epistemology.
To further clarify: the mind-independent view says that a proposition is true or false (or meaningless) irrespective of whether it is known to be true. So I didn’t mean to imply that the mind-independent reality account entails that objects are literally true or false, only that it rejects the epistemic presumption that true facts have to be known to be true.
Facts are metaphysical. Truth is epistemological. Propositions about reality can either be true or false. The reality of whether or not your looking at a computer screen or not is factual. Something is a fact whether or not anyone knows it. You got it wrong from the start. Invariance is a great concept though, but it has more to do with to the problem of universals. Concepts are invariant referents, and we use concepts to make truthful propositions because they can refer to facts of reality.
This is a very open comment that could be pursued through the whole philosophy of mind :)
Looking at a computer screen may not happen in one slice of a multiverse but happen in another slice............
Truths are accurate descriptions of the relations between events where ‘accurate’ means that a match between the description and an observed relationship between events is extremely likely.
Perhaps we can start from our observation.
Many truths are highly likely but they are not certain, however, we can be sure that our current Experience exists. The current description ‘Experience containing this description is occurring’ is a personal certainty: ‘Cogito ergo sum’. This description is true because events in Experience are extended in time and so are continuous and simultaneous through the observation point so that ‘occurring’ is present (See Our Reality for how these terms can indeed coexist). The relationship between the occurrence of the description and Experience is true because otherwise there would be no description.
We currently know the relations between events in Experience. Events and relations being ‘currently known’ is identical to events and relations being in Experience.
Very informative. Thanks. Coincidentally a video with some similar and dissimilar ideas on this subject landed in my inbox today. It deals with "quantum physics meets Vedanta". I'm posting the link below. It may be of interest.
Interesting article. In fact the "observer effect" on wave function collapse can be understood with this approach. Objective reality is ultimately a subjective experience. Similar approach is discussed in "My View of the world" by Schrodinger. He takes it further to conclude that non duality (Advaita vedanta) gives more convincing explanation of the reality.
"Mind independent reality" requires a definition of mind and reality.
It is interesting that the invariant physical observer has a space-time interval of zero (the apex or waist of the light cone). See https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/our-reality which also defines mind and reality in chapter 6.
I enjoyed this writing immensely! However much I may personally prefer this framing of 'reality' as invariance, limited by but inextricable from observing minds, I am still not convinced that it has much potential to (re)build a world of collaboration through epistemological participation. It seems to me that the current troubles with collective epistemology is driven by other factors unrelated to authoritarian concepts of reality. I do agree that *something* needs to change in the public discourse. But, the popular narrative of a lone, heroic speaker of truth against a sea of delusional conformists is too treasured, the self-serving idea that the one who voices dissent (variance) is noble and virtuous is too appealing, and the conceit that one has a privileged and secret truth most others cannot access is too gratifying, especially for conspiracy theorists. I suspect other factors such as factors involving the balance of human desires for both distinctiveness and group-membership-belonging, bear more responsibility for the mistrust in scientific consensus than the influence of a 'mind-independent reality' framework. But, again, I do appreciate this explanation and agree the shift toward ontological-epistemological integration would cary many benefits. Thanks again for posting this! Made my day better just to read it!
You may be right!
On the topic of group-membership and distinctiveness, you might like this essay I wrote.
https://yohanjohn.com/axispraxis/from-cell-membranes-to-computational-aesthetics-on-the-importance-of-boundaries-in-life-and-art-3/
Enjoying this essay a lot though I confess to having a hard time understanding mind invariance versus mind independence. The universe existed prior to earth. So is one wrong to imagine the possibility of traveling back in time to when earth was not yet formed, when no minds existed as far as we know?
Of course this imagined time travel would be mind invariant (wouldn’t matter who travels back in time) but isn’t the fact of the existence of the Universe independent of any mind? Having a hard time with this.
Yes, the existence of the past is a tricky matter for the invariance perspective. I am not sure what to think, but it may be that our emphasis should be on the imagined nature of the past. Time travel is not possible for now, and in my opinion it is too riddled with paradoxes to every be possible. So all we really have is an idealized narrative about the past pieced together from patterns in the present. When we imagine a past without observers, there is still the person imagining things: this is a version of the view from nowhere.
I'm a bit late to the game here as I found your Substack while doing some reading on the internet in preparation for a post I'm working on, which is also about the dubiousness of this notion of mind-independence. Very much appreciate finding your post! I have even used some similar phrasing as what you're saying here; I'm debating whether to call my post "the view from somewhere" or "the view from anywhere". Still contemplating whether there's difference...anyway, I'm saving the title "the view from everywhere" for a future post.
I want to assure you, you're on the right track in your point about phenomenology. They have been throwing into question the notion of mind-independence for some time now. Unfortunately, phenomenologists tend to be atrocious writers and many are associated with existentialism, which can be off-putting for those of a scientific bent. Edmund Husserl would be more acceptable to them if his views were expressed clearly, but unfortunately his writing is so burdened by nuance it's virtually indecipherable (so unfortunate!) Anyway, I'll leave you with this easy to read article I stumbled across which interprets Husserl's notion of intersubjectively constituted objective reality as "trading places". That seems similar to what you express here.
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/duranti/Husserl-Intersubject-AT.pdf
What you say here about 'invariance' reminds me of Husserl's 'eidetic variation'. Husserl was interested in how we constitute the objective world through experience, and eidetic variation is about how we come to see an object for what it is and how that object stays a unified object.
“A fact is something that is known to be true. ”
Isn’t this begging the question against the mind-independence view? Presumably those who believe in mind-independent reality would instead define facts as “something that IS true”, with no presumption of a doxastic/epistemic operator.
Secondly, you give the example of the sun being invariant because almost all observers can perceive it to exist in some fashion. But what about cases of possible worlds where nearly all the observers can’t see or perceive the sun in any way due to some inherent observer sense limitation? Maybe, for example, they can only interact with dark matter. The observers themselves won’t know the sun exists, but it seems like the sun should still exist if all we’ve changed are the observational properties of the world.
So it seems like the invariance view must presuppose that we can make changes to the propositional content concerning the physical characteristics of the sun (or the other external objects of the world), without actually changing any of the characteristics of those objects, but instead by changing the properties of the observers themselves. Would you accept this criticism, and if not, how would you avoid it?
I meant to write “we can make changes to the TRUTH of the propositional content”
Another problem occurs to me, and that’s an issue of scope. Let’s say 99% of observers in the universe are dark matter observers but 1% are human observers. How should we calculate the invariance of propositions about the sun in that case? When I say “the sun exists” is that false because this is not invariant among universal observers? If we define invariance more narrowly, among only the human community for example, then I can simply change the terms of the thought experiment (e.g. let’s say I’m the only human left alive) to falsify that definition in turn.
Just some food for thought!
" Presumably those who believe in mind-independent reality would instead define facts as “something that IS true”, with no presumption of a doxastic/epistemic operator."
I guess this is what mind-independent reality entails, but my position is that this is meaningless: truth is a function of statements about the world, not the world itself. Rain is neither true nor false: only some statement about rain, or whether it is raining, can be true, false, or undetermined.
"So it seems like the invariance view must presuppose that we can make changes to the propositional content concerning the physical characteristics of the sun (or the other external objects of the world), without actually changing any of the characteristics of those objects, but instead by changing the properties of the observers themselves. "
Not sure I completely follow what you mean. We do alter the properties of objects smaller than the sun. To keep track of an object as being the same object from one moment of observation to the next, there must be *some* invariant spanning the transformation from one moment to the next. Even saying "the object magically turned into another one" implies some common spatiotemporal location. Otherwise we'd say that one object disappeared and another one appeared elsewhere at a different time.
"Another problem occurs to me, and that’s an issue of scope. Let’s say 99% of observers in the universe are dark matter observers but 1% are human observers. How should we calculate the invariance of propositions about the sun in that case? "
How do we ever construct widespread beliefs? The usual social interaction.
Not sure what conceptual work the 'dark matter' is doing here. Why posit something I cannot observe? It would be okay if such entities helped explain something else... what are unobserved observers helping us to explain?
Since we do not have access to hypothetical/unobserved observers, we cannot make any truth-claims about them. At best, we can define idealized imaginary entities and then study transformations *within* private or social imagination. That's what thought-experiments are. More broadly, this seems to be how logic acquires its value: the entities we work with in logic and pure mathematics are idealizations based on definitions.
An interesting zone here is discussions about dragons or orcs: within some restricted social interaction, it may make sense to say that "dragons breathe fire" is true: the imagined properties of dragons are invariant across some relevant population of 'imaginers'.
@Yohan John:
Just to be clear, I don’t see the mind-independent view as denying that “truth is a function of statements about the world” or that thought experiments are “idealized imaginary entities”.
Of course truth is a function of propositions, not the world. Of course thought experiments take place in an imaginary reality. The idea is to use the implications of that imaginary reality to assess the impact on our theories of meaning.
The question is whether the truth of propositions is dependent on the conditions of the external world or not. My point is that the mind-independent view asserts that the truth of propositions about reality is going to be necessarily determined by the characteristics and properties of the objects of external reality. For example, according to the mind-independent view, “it is raining” will be true or false depending on whether certain precipitation conditions are actually met in the external world, given a particular context.
I argued that your invariance view must reject the above. Why? Because if most observers can’t see or perceive the sun, then the statement “the sun exists” is false on your view. That statement just asserts a particular invariance condition, which won’t be met in that hypothetical reality.
But notice that we haven’t changed anything about the sun itself. I presume you agree that there is (or could be) an external reality populated with objects like the sun. So it would be weird if the proposition “the sun exists” is false or true irrespective of whether the sun actually exists.
By the way, I agree that we can’t verify or falsify hypothetical conditions involving dark matter observers, but that’s my whole point, I’m trying to show that the meaning of statements about ontology goes over and above epistemology.
To further clarify: the mind-independent view says that a proposition is true or false (or meaningless) irrespective of whether it is known to be true. So I didn’t mean to imply that the mind-independent reality account entails that objects are literally true or false, only that it rejects the epistemic presumption that true facts have to be known to be true.
Facts are metaphysical. Truth is epistemological. Propositions about reality can either be true or false. The reality of whether or not your looking at a computer screen or not is factual. Something is a fact whether or not anyone knows it. You got it wrong from the start. Invariance is a great concept though, but it has more to do with to the problem of universals. Concepts are invariant referents, and we use concepts to make truthful propositions because they can refer to facts of reality.
This is a very open comment that could be pursued through the whole philosophy of mind :)
Looking at a computer screen may not happen in one slice of a multiverse but happen in another slice............
Truths are accurate descriptions of the relations between events where ‘accurate’ means that a match between the description and an observed relationship between events is extremely likely.
Perhaps we can start from our observation.
Many truths are highly likely but they are not certain, however, we can be sure that our current Experience exists. The current description ‘Experience containing this description is occurring’ is a personal certainty: ‘Cogito ergo sum’. This description is true because events in Experience are extended in time and so are continuous and simultaneous through the observation point so that ‘occurring’ is present (See Our Reality for how these terms can indeed coexist). The relationship between the occurrence of the description and Experience is true because otherwise there would be no description.
We currently know the relations between events in Experience. Events and relations being ‘currently known’ is identical to events and relations being in Experience.
Food for thought?
Very informative. Thanks. Coincidentally a video with some similar and dissimilar ideas on this subject landed in my inbox today. It deals with "quantum physics meets Vedanta". I'm posting the link below. It may be of interest.
https://youtu.be/MI3TXsPtOAE
Interesting article. In fact the "observer effect" on wave function collapse can be understood with this approach. Objective reality is ultimately a subjective experience. Similar approach is discussed in "My View of the world" by Schrodinger. He takes it further to conclude that non duality (Advaita vedanta) gives more convincing explanation of the reality.
Right. Shrodinger's book 'Mind and Matter' is quite interesting.