Yoshie:
> 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).
While I tentatively agree with what you say, it was not what I was thinking of, which was the curious fact that we can't escape from mentation. I haven't read all of either Gould or Witt, but it's my impression that they are more concerned with problems of what we might call computation or intellection, than with the physical and logical inescapability of mind.
Ian Murray:
> "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"]
All this appears to assume that only human beings are or possess minds. But there can be non-human minds; in fact, mind could be an attribute or aspect of all beings, or of the world itself. So the moon may be more difficult to get rid of than is implied above.
-- Gordon