Here is a specific audio video you might find quaint. Long before computers.. — Gregory
Quaint indeed! Berkeley's Idealism was, in part, a justification of Christian Catholic theology --- yet, influenced by ancient Pagan Platonism. My own thesis is similar to Plato's Idealism, but it is grounded in the strange conclusions of modern Quantum theory,
that the foundation of material reality is immaterial. As one physicist exclaimed, "A quantum particle is nothing but Information"! He was referring to the frustrating fact that the localized particles they hope to study tend to vanish into a fog of non-local mathematical waveforms --- neither here nor there, but floating aimlessly in a Field of probabilistic Potential.
However, most scientists are not comfortable with the notion that the foggy foundation of our material world is actually mathematical, instead of material. Yet,
since Mathematics has no physical properties, but only mental qualities (ratios, proportions, equalities), I --- along with physicists Tegmark, Davies & Lloyd --- conclude that the world is essentially mental. But then, the question arises, whose mind : the local observer or the universal observer? Hence the poem about the tree in the quad.
Personally, I don't go to the extreme of Tegmark's Mathematical Universe. And I don't dismiss "immediate experience as unreal". Instead, I think that,
for all practical purposes, the mental picture of the world, in the mind of each observer, is as real as it gets. However, for impractical philosophical purposes, we can imagine what our world would look like to an observer outside of reality. It might look something like Plato's Ideal world of abstract potential Forms. Now, isn't that Quaint? :joke:
Quaint :
having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm; oddly picturesque: a quaint old house. strange, peculiar, or unusual in an interesting, pleasing, or amusing way
Mathematical Universe :
the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics (specifically, a mathematical structure). Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathemati ... hypothesis
Mathematics & Reality :
The easiest way to see what is wrong with this extreme mathematical realism is to examine actual examples of mathematical physics. . . .
The challenge of metaphysics must be to see how these different kinds of truths relate. This does not mean either on the one hand siding with the deliverances of immediate experience against those of mathematical physics, or on the other hand dismissing immediate experience as unreal.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/102/Ma ... nd_Reality
