Consciousness: produces reality (General)

by dhw, Monday, May 14, 2018, 12:38 (2174 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Reality only exists in the eye of the observer. The universe requires consciousness. An 18 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0IKLv7KrE

DAVID’s comment: Reality must be observed to exist!

Really? There is a very telling remark in the commentary to the effect that some people think this is “only true of the quantum world but not the macro world. Pragmatically this is true….” Well who says pragmatism is false? My stock answer to this is to invite the researchers to step in front of a bus.

The headline given to this lecture is “Materialism is dead”. To me this is as blinkered and as arrogant as a title like “The God Delusion”. The fact that scientists conduct experiments with particles and cannot understand their behaviour apparently means that scientists who do understand and can even predict the behaviour of materials that are made up of particles (e.g. minerals, plants, stars, machines, the human body etc.) are suffering from some kind of delusion. In your days as a doctor, would you really have told your patients that they were only suffering because you were observing them, so they should get out of your sight and then their sufferings would disappear?

I’m not pretending for one moment that there aren’t mysteries we haven’t solved, or that the quantum world doesn’t exist. But I’m afraid I simply don’t believe that the reality of the stars and dinosaur fossils and the bus coming towards me is dependent on my observation of them. Sorry.