----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>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
==============
"We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during on walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it. [Abraham Pais--"Einstein and the Quantum Theory" Reviews of Modern Physics 51, 1979]
"Anybody who's not bothered by Bell's theorem has to have rocks in his head." [an anonymous physicist in conversation with the physicist David Mermin, in --"Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks? Reality and Quantum Theory"]
"We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks." [David Mermin--"Can You Help Your Team Tonight By Watching on TV? More Experimental Metaphysics From Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen"]
Ian