>Yoshie Furuhashi:
>> Surely, anyone who studies evolution must be able to imagine the
>> history of the world before the emergence of human beings and other
>> creatures capable of subjective investigations of objects; likewise,
>> anyone who studies astronomy, etc. must be able to imagine the
>> extinction of human beings and other creatures capable of subjective
>> investigations of objects: "In about two billion years Earth will
>> become uninhabitable as a gradually warming Sun produces a runaway
>> greenhouse effect. In five billion years the Sun will swell up and
>> die, burning the Earth to a crisp in the process. At about the same
>> time the Milky Way will collide with its twin the Andromeda galaxy,
>> now about two million light-years away and closing fast, spewing
>> stars, gas and planets across intergalactic space" (at
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/01/science/01END.html?pagewanted=all>).
>
>Yes, but in thinking about such a world, one is projecting
>one's mind into it. This doesn't mean such a world can't
>exist, but it does mean you can't think about it without
>pretending something that isn't so. If you are thinking about
>a world that once existed, you are doing so on the basis of
>receiving energy and information from it. You have become
>that physically significant entity, the observer/receiver.
>
>On the other hand, an imagined world like that described above
>is _entirely_ mental.
You mean that we investigate, using our human capacity, the world without human beings (before the emergence of human beings and after their extinction). The quality and quantity of knowledge available to us is first of all constrained by historically evolving objective limits of human labor, within which we may include historically evolving "subjective" limits (e.g., metaphorical stumbling blocks of the kinds that Stephen Jay Gould, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc. discuss). -- Yoshie
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