An electron is a posit?

We are getting into non-dualism here. It is a radical perspective, from the point of view of modern west, but it is ultimately true.

"The way we define and delimit the self is arbitrary. We can place it between our ears and have it looking out from our eyes, or we can widen it to include the air we breathe, or at other moments, we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained.

I used to think that I ended with my skin, that everything within the skin was me and everything outside the skin was not. But now you've read these words, and the concepts they represent are reaching your cortex, so "the process" that is me now extends as far as you.

And where, for that matter, did this process begin? I certainly can trace it to my teachers, some of whom I never met, and to my husband and children, who give me courage and support to do the work I do, and to the plant and animal beings who sustain my body.

What I am, as systems theorists have helped me see, is a "flow-through." I am a flow-through of matter, energy, and information, which is transformed in turn by my own experiences and intentions.

To experience the world as an extended self and its story as our own extended story involves no surrender or eclipse of our individuality. The liver, leg, and lung that are "mine" are highly distinct from each other, thank goodness, and each has a distinctive role to play. The larger selfness we discover today is not an undifferentiated unity. Our recognition of this may be the third part of an unfolding of consciousness that began a long time ago, like the third movement of a symphony."

Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self.

I am not saying exactly that. I am not saying things only exist in the mind. Consider it again. I think the depiction of idealism that many have is innaccurate - it is much more subtle than you might think.

I did go off-topic there with that Joanna Macy quote, I agree. Somebody might like it though.

As regards the interpretation of idealism, I don't think your idea of the mind existing 'in the head' makes it possible to explain what idealism actually means. Everything you look at, consider, conceptualise, observe, talk about and think about - all of this exists in the mind. But the mind in which it exists is never itself disclosed to observation. It is not among the objects of consciousness. The mind is not the figure, it is the background. Anything you care to consider is a figure, whether it is mind, brain, star, or whatever else. What is doing the considering? Who is thinking this? If you say 'I am', you are probably again picturing yourself as an object. You are summoning up an image of all you know about yourself. But again, this is not 'what is perceiving' and 'what is thinking'. The process itself is never present to consciousness. Actually it can't be, because much of the process itself is unconscious. The brain can't know itself as an object, not even when you get it out and put it in a laboratory. You won't find any stars in there, or images, or anything else. Just porridge.

Hard thing to get, Mind, I agree with that.

I am not relying on the current definition of 'mind' as 'an activity of the brain'. The understanding I am working with is more like Plotinus' notion of 'intellect' or 'mind' where Mind is the ordering principle of the Universe, and reflected in the individual human.

I know it is not a contemporary or modern understanding of the matter and I do understand why a contemporary or modern person would reject it. You see, I don't believe that 'modern science' has actually proven the Platonic or Neo-platonic account of the issue false. I think it has just ignored it or bypassed it, or assumed that it is no longer current. This is what I call 'cultural chauvinism' (this is not at all personal by the way.) It is just the idea that our modern naturalistic world-picture supersedes that of classical philosophy. I don't think it does. I think it has been forgotten, not superseded.

Anyway that is where I am coming from in this. I am trying to re-discover 'Absolute mind' or 'one mind' as was understood in classical philosophy. It is a very difficult thing to understand.

When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena through the creation of quantum mechanics the concept of consciousness came to the fore again. It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to...consciousness

Have you any reason to believe that none of those interpretation is the correct one?

No, it is not bait and switch. I do understand your trepidation, many share it. But we are going through a revolution in our understanding of reality. This is caused by the discovery of quantum theory. This theory (here we are, back at electrons again) demonstrates that at the most fundamental level, objects do not exist independently from the act of observation of them.

Eugene Wigner, quoted in Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner, OUP, page 5.

Everything you look at, consider, conceptualise, observe, talk about and think about - all of this exists in the mind. But the mind in which it exists is never itself disclosed to observation.

This is the eye of the hurricane. What is consciousness? What is Being?

Vulgar or practical science just goes around this mystery. Francis Bacon, who should count as a "meta-philosopher", is a good example of the retreat from depth. I think that positivism and the reductive linguistic schools were defense mechanisms against the burden of the mystery. (Another chestnut from Keats, who was a part-time philosopher.)

Just as long as it is "at the most fundamental level" (whatever that is). I thought we were talking about stars and chairs. (That is what I mean by "bait and switch". I thought we were talking about stars and chairs (the bait) and now it turns out that we are talking about "the most fundamental level" (the switch). I don't feel trepidated; only gulled. Like any used car buyer.

Very "part"...........The New Organon is a retreat from depth? Well, maybe Bacon fought to the surface for a breath of clear air. Now science is vulgar? I guess that is what Galileo's enemies thought too. That is why they refused to look at Jupiter's moons. Too vulgar.

So let's consider what stars and chairs are made of. The 'most fundamental level' is the atomic level, isn't it? Aren't atoms supposed to be the ultimate constituents of stars and chairs? And it has been in analysing the behaviour of the constituents of atoms that these counter-intuitive findings have been made. An electron cannot be said to exist as a particle until it is observed. When it is not observed, it is only a probability wave, a statistical likelihood that it might be in such and such a place.

And anyway, this is shocking. Neils Bohr said "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it."

It might be that stars are independent of observation, but electrons are not. Better read up on the fallacy of composition and division.

Would that mean that everyone shocked by qm does understand it. And what has shock to do with it anyway? I might be shocked by qm, and still think that there were stars even when there were no people, and that there will be stars even when people cease to exist. You know, I bet that even quantum physicists believe that! Would you find that shocking?

Stars are made up entirely of these particles... how could they not be dependent on our observation of them to "exist"? (existence as the collapse of their probability wave)

So you must think that there were no stars before there were people to observe them? Is that right? So most of astrophysics, you think, is wrong?

Representational realism, related to indirect realism, is a philosophical concept, broadly equivalent to the accepted view of perception in natural science.


Representational realism states that we do not (and cannot) perceive the external world as it really is; instead we know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is. This might be said to indicate that a barrier or 'veil of perception' prevents first-hand knowledge of the world, but the representational realist would deny that 'first hand knowledge' in this sense is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means.