Objective reality

What is it that makes the perceived "objective reality" within the Matrix any less objective than that perceived outside the Matrix?Surely the universe within the Matrix just forms a natural (constructed) extension to our own Universe, and is just as subject to scientific invetsigation from within and without.

For myself, and many other mathematicians/theoretical physicists - err, of course! Do you really think that alien intelligence will not know of pi, e, i, etc? Now I do not believe in a duality of Platonic and "real world" - for me, it is all the same.

As Morpheus said, "What is real?" What about the reality of the WoW universe? For me, objective reality seems to be shared experience of minds. I'm not sure that the underlying substrate is that important, whether it be the physical world or a computer-based simulation. I agree - but we're discussing the nature of "objective reality", not the goals of science. I think both have something to offer. I have spent literally weeks exploring the Mandlebrot set. I can do that in either. And remember the "Holodeck Dilemma"? As soon as we have affordable holodecks, we as a species are fucked...

Certainly not from my perspective. When I speak of mathematics, I am refering to the formal systems, constructs, and relationships that lie behind the language. But Pi does not exist in your objective reality (at least not at the level we are considering here.) Pi is the idealisation of the approximations found in the physical Universe. And it is this idealisation that is shared by us and the aliens. But it is an idealisation that DOESN'T exist in the Universe, other than in our minds, and I can devise physical experiments designed to demonstrate that the idealisation doesn't exist! So does it exist?

Yep, you've definitely been thinking along the right lines Hopefully you are starting to realise the difficulty in expressing some of the ideas you have been having in standard language owing to the levels of ambiguity inherrent in most of our words. I do feel that this is largely the issue between you and nwr. In years past at EvC I have found it infuriatingly impossible to have a coherrent discussion on this topic, so I tended to avoid the subject. We found it difficult enough back at the department when we had endless coffee and blackboards at our disposal!

And I'd agree, but what we're calling "Allah" here is whatever it is that causes the shared experience. This could be a deity, or it could be a meme. The shared experience of Christians is definitely evidence of *something*. I can still speak in tongues Yes, almost the same as considering quantum physics and chemistry. Ok, taking the UK population - what will be the male female ratio left outside the holodecks once they're switched on?

The Matrix does not vanish when just you are unplugged - it continues for all others, we assume. And how does the ability to switch on and switch off the Matrix differ from say the rather larger scale Big Bang, Big Crunch?

Why ever not? Esepecially as you follow with this... A very good question, which seems to demonstrate that questions concerning the reality or otherwise of mathematics are especially pertinent in this thread. And? Amongst my friends is a mathematician who doesn't believe in the reals, and finds the rationals highly suspicious we tend to avoid discussing mathematics with each other.

True, but it's not really what I'm talking about. What "exists" to me is the "fact" that your particular checkmate does follow from your particular rules. Ah, I see. I must have erred. I didn't realise that all great questions have their answers in Dr A's infallible proclamations That's the spirit! I'm not sure why it never occured to me before that to puzzle out the mysteries of Platonism, all I needed was a constructivist - it's all so obvious now

But surely that is exactly what we are discussing here? The question is "what is objective reality". I am reasonably convinced that intelligent aliens will be more aware of the existence of Pi than they are of potatoes. Pi certainly appears objective, and to many of us, it seems real. What is your problem with this? My apologies - I obviously don't pay enough attention to your posts...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Err, that would be you're really cutting to the heart of matter

The obvious answer to "what is objective reality?" is "stuff" - the stuff of everyday existence: potatoes and tigers as Dr A would put it. There is an instinctive knowledge of stuff that exists, and then separately the rules that this stuff seems to follow. This view is endemic from children through to scientists of many fields. As a theoretical physicist, I am convinced that this view is not quite right.Scientists for hundreds/thousands of years have been attempting to drill down to discover of what this stuff is made, and what rules it follows. Over the past 100 years, the shocking discovery has been that when we delve deep enough, there is no more stuff, there are only rules. We can look at the mechanics of a canon ball. We can note its mass, volume, position, velocity, etc, and together with the known rules it follows, we can predict its behaviour. But underneath it all is still the canon ball itself, the "stuff" of which it is made. But when we turn to fundemental phsyics, we discover something different: the electron is not a little ball whose behaviour we can model. It is described completely by the rules it follows. There is no room left for further underlying stuff. Indeed, the very nature of the electron (its fermi-dirac "statistics") tells us that there can be nothing more (there is an astronomical scale equivalent to this, in the no-hair theorems of black holes, but that's for another post.)The everyday objects we "see" and "touch" are just massive collections of rules, which interact with the rules of our own "physical" bodies, and the real world of stuff that we perceive really does only exist in our minds. If this does sound like too much bullshit, just start to relax your grip on everyday reality with somethign simple such as your knowledge of say solidity - solidity is simply caused by electromagnetic repulsion. Every solid object you know is essentially 99.999999% empty space, and the only reason objects do not simply slide through each other is the interaction of massless photons...So to me, there are only rules. Or mathematics as I would normally say. I'm not talking about normal Platonism, as this is very much a monist approach - the Platonic realm is our world. This is why Pi is as real to me as the laptop I am typing on. This is also why I regard constructed realities such as the Matrix or WoW as real - they are just another layer up in rules creating a perceived existence. And certain ways of viewing string theory, and also the Holographic Principle, suggest that even the rules that make up our existence are just a projection of deeper rules, so perhaps we are already in a natural Matrix of our own...

No - you have missed the point which I expressed to Dr A above. Son Goku hinted at this in his post. It is immaterial that an infinitude of axioms can be posited - the objective reality is what a given axiom leads to. Ther are no circles in the Universe that will give you an answer for Pi, only approximations. Yet I can share with an alien an exact idea of Pi. This is the point that Sraggler and I were making.

How can Pi possibly be subjective? I appreciate that you yourself may not want to count it as "objective reality", but subjective???

No, definitely not. If the aliens are sufficiently intelligent, then they, like us (mathematicians) will have realised that Pi is an integral part of mathematics, with a value determined completely independently of any scientific experiment. And it is this that we would share. And the objective nature of mathematics would thus be revealed. Well, if you define objective reality by what you define objective reality to be, excluding the one major counterexample raised by nwr and championed by myself, then I guess I can't raise that idea to defy your statement... for trivial reasons But I would stand by what I have said. I believe that mathematics does not obviously satisfy your statement, and therefore your statement is potentially shakey, as you present it.