Physical things exist, and will continue to exist. Energy is not created or destroyed, only converted.
Abstract things may come and go. Thoughts and ideas, understandings, etc...
Math and language are constructs we created to better understand and describe the world around us, and when the last human dies, so may all our amassed understandings.
People were dying en-masse because you had doctors not washing their hands when moving from autopsies to giving birth.
No one was aware about the germs that are causing this. It still killed people.
This is true for most of the early medicine/illneses/hygiene, this was just an example I remember. Especially in regards to germs and bacteries, the humanity wasn't even close to getting it right.
The primordial Universe itself may have only been possible with an observer. No Big Bang, no primitive Earth, no organisms and evolution without the All-Seeing-Eye that has allowed our Universe to exist.
Haha, I wouldn't put my faith on this, but still fun and disturbing to think about...
Classical question. Heard it often. I mean, yes without someone being aware we can't prove the existence of it.
But I think this is a really human self centered world view.
The earth existed for millions of years even before we or any other animal was aware of it.
I mean we can prove that now later. Yes this prove now also only exists thanks to someone being aware. But it shows to the past to something that was there already even without it.
I don't think the Universe cares. It was before us, it will be after us. Yes we have no prove while we are gone, but the Universe doesn't care.
Ok, new question: can something exist if there is, was, and will be, nothing or no one that is/was/will be aware of its existence?
Note my definition of being aware here: if that something can be illuminated, photons are "aware" of it. If it can fall freely, gravitational fields are "aware" of it.
This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?
Next, ask yourself "do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?" What about Mickey Mouse?
Then you move on to questions like "does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?"
Yep, that's another great question. Personally, I like the idea that art is any form of human expression that exists for its own sake. Not in order to be instructive or useful or to make money but simply because the person creating it felt like it (obviously this is an ideal and real life motivations vary).
More pragmatically, one might ask what art is good for, but since you didn't, I'm not going to ramble here.
That said, there is the question I raised in my comment whether the work needs an audience, someone to behold it, in order to fully become art. I believe it does. If you paint a picture in the dark and hide it so nobody ever sees it, I struggle to accept it as art.
Old definition was defining Art as transforming nature for the purpose of a human.
usual definition is something human made that someone finds pretty.
Contemporary art definition is making something that makes people react / feel. Performance art went all the way to saying that what the artist felt made it art.
If you hide it on purpose, the hiding itself may be contemporary art (similar to Once upon a time in Shaolin bu Wu Tang Clan). A hidden piece by an unknown artist may be considered art according to the performance art demonstration.
So.. Choose your definition, similar as the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest (is sound a pressure wave or the brain processed signal?)
Edit: linguists will just say art is whatever sufficient people believe it means.
I think me and Ahmed gave the same answer, but with mine being indirect using an example, and Ahmed's answer being direct, so maybe people had a harder time understanding Ahmed's answer.
Animals are sometimes declared 'extinct' (no one is aware of any living examples) while they still exist (sometimes for decades).
Until 1967, noone was aware of the existence of gamma-ray bursts, the result of the biggest explosions in the universe. The bursts were only visible to specialized satellites.
Right now, people are suffering from diseases caused by unknown viruses.
Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren't observing them.
There's also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that's a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.
The results of the axiom are that things do exist when we are not observing them. Our observations don't back propagate to retroactively bring them into existence. We can't prove that however, though it's fundamental to a lot of science making sense (quantum mechanics being the oddball).
One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.
E.g. we couldn't do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can't prove the universe isn't a computer program, only rendering what a "conscious" entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.
How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn't affect the model's ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.
I think you might be confusing statistical with stochastic. Quantum mechanics makes incredibly precise predictions about the statistics of particle interactions. A stochastic model implies an experimental result could change depending on what day it is, when in fact quantum mechanical principles are relied upon every day for modern technology, and the screen you are reading this on is likely lit up because of the small but predictable chance an electron in an LED has to overcome an energy barrier it classically could not.
Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn't guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be "a function of the date" or something that is "conditional on the date". This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling date.today().day in Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to date.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between 0 and date.today().day).
Edit: I think what you're talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that "stochastic" too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.
No, that's exactly what I mean and exactly what I think you are missing: quantum mechanical experiments have been reproduced thousands of times, and even as measuring instruments became sensitive, the predictions have held true. The statistical nature of it doesn't make it any less predictable, and an experiment proving a different statistical value of an event than QM predicts would be world news.
The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable
Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn't mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.
Bacteria and viruses existed for billions of years before humans ever existed and the majority of the time since. Dinosaurs existed before we were aware of them. Lots of things have.
Dinosaurs have conscious awareness. They were "anyone". Some evidence suggests that consciousness is a fundamentally intra-cellular process that became inter-cellular, and that even the simplest organisms exploit some form of consciousness.
The atoms are there for sure, but we could argue, whether it is a thing/object without an animal being aware of it, since it's us that define things to be objects.
The universe doesn't care whether a pile of atoms behind Pluto happens to be chair-shaped. It's only when we look at it, that we declare it an object.
What qualify as observers though? Or, how far divorced from an event counts as unobserved?
If a tree falls in a forest and scares a rabbit which a dog barks at which I hear... is that chain of observation enough to grant existence to the tree?
Does existence only count if there is an observer to observe it? I don't understand this notion.
I think about this every time I drive long distances, passing through forest.
"That tree over there is just standing there, all hours of every day, winter and summer, just waiting. Then I drive by it for 2 seconds. Then it still stands there, waiting."
Similarly I think of rocks rotating in silence around planets, stars. Or orphan rocks around galaxies, in darkness, and also silence. They're just there, for millions of millennia. Without anyone's knowledge. But surely they exist.
I have a similar question: can things exist if they have no physical connection at all to their surroundings? The double slit experiment shows that light seem to be information (if we pretend waves are information) until its forced (by observing) to exist. This works with photons, electrons, neutrons, atoms and even particles. So what if i take a cup and put it in a "magic box" that disconnects it from every "observing" system? Does it vanish? Is it gas if i open that box again?
Technically they exist.
But do they exist for you if you don't even think of them? Theological/ philosophycal views might say no.
Tho you can still be affected by unkown therefore "non-existent" things.
Nowadays I call "tap to pay" magic. I know the very basic things to go in there - but I couldn't recreate it. Thos is kinda the same tone as your question.
Yes they do. Otherwise we would never discover anything. Unless one would mean that the people who have discovered everything that has ever been discovered were also the creators of those things. And that seems far-fetched.
Of course. I think there are many things that we haven't detected because we lack the instruments or even the concept they exist
Humans are constantly discovering life on Earth in places it was thought impossible, like deep underground or in very hot water around volcanic vents.
Certain cancers (HPV, EBV, HBV) have been discovered to be caused by viruses, not just randomly out of control cell replication.
IMO even astronomers suffer from short-sightedness. They tend to classify things in terms of our own little solar system when actually with billions of stars and trillions of planets there are likely very many astronomical objects and phenomenon that we have never observed or thought of.
I am half awake and my brain for some reason decided that you had written ‘political realism.’ I literally read it and was like ‘huh, makes sense,’ before moving on and then abruptly stopping when my actual processing finally caught up, like ‘wait, what?’
The more I sit here considering, the more it feels like political realism should really be a thing.
The duality behind being both aware of something that can exist without your knowledge while also not being aware of its existence. Depending on if it's conception has been conceived first. Then it would exist without any knowledge and would count. But if you know it can exist than its already a possibility.
Yes. You aren't the main character of reality.
Obviously they're not, because I am.
I'm not aware of anything that does.
Physical things exist, and will continue to exist. Energy is not created or destroyed, only converted.
Abstract things may come and go. Thoughts and ideas, understandings, etc...
Math and language are constructs we created to better understand and describe the world around us, and when the last human dies, so may all our amassed understandings.
No, things outside the player's field of view are unloaded to save memory, obviously.
If that’s the case, would things outside our field of view still have an effect on us? And to what extent?
In a good game they do, but those effects can be abstracted rather than simulated to save processing power.
People were dying en-masse because you had doctors not washing their hands when moving from autopsies to giving birth.
No one was aware about the germs that are causing this. It still killed people.
This is true for most of the early medicine/illneses/hygiene, this was just an example I remember. Especially in regards to germs and bacteries, the humanity wasn't even close to getting it right.
Perhaps I just confabulated all that, and your comment. Perhaps in the process, I manifested the history therein described.
The primordial Universe itself may have only been possible with an observer. No Big Bang, no primitive Earth, no organisms and evolution without the All-Seeing-Eye that has allowed our Universe to exist.
Haha, I wouldn't put my faith on this, but still fun and disturbing to think about...
The human body needs water to survive. Perhaps you are different.
Classical question. Heard it often. I mean, yes without someone being aware we can't prove the existence of it. But I think this is a really human self centered world view. The earth existed for millions of years even before we or any other animal was aware of it. I mean we can prove that now later. Yes this prove now also only exists thanks to someone being aware. But it shows to the past to something that was there already even without it.
I don't think the Universe cares. It was before us, it will be after us. Yes we have no prove while we are gone, but the Universe doesn't care.
Ok, new question: can something exist if there is, was, and will be, nothing or no one that is/was/will be aware of its existence?
Note my definition of being aware here: if that something can be illuminated, photons are "aware" of it. If it can fall freely, gravitational fields are "aware" of it.
By definition, we don't know
Girl, go read some Enlightenment philosophy, why're you askin us 😭😭😭
Write your definition for "things" and that'll answer your question for you.
This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?
Next, ask yourself "do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?" What about Mickey Mouse?
Then you move on to questions like "does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?"
And finally, the psychiatric ward. 😜
Please define "art" :)
Yep, that's another great question. Personally, I like the idea that art is any form of human expression that exists for its own sake. Not in order to be instructive or useful or to make money but simply because the person creating it felt like it (obviously this is an ideal and real life motivations vary).
More pragmatically, one might ask what art is good for, but since you didn't, I'm not going to ramble here.
That said, there is the question I raised in my comment whether the work needs an audience, someone to behold it, in order to fully become art. I believe it does. If you paint a picture in the dark and hide it so nobody ever sees it, I struggle to accept it as art.
What's your take on these questions?
For me it's just a dictionary trick.
Old definition was defining Art as transforming nature for the purpose of a human.
usual definition is something human made that someone finds pretty.
Contemporary art definition is making something that makes people react / feel. Performance art went all the way to saying that what the artist felt made it art.
If you hide it on purpose, the hiding itself may be contemporary art (similar to Once upon a time in Shaolin bu Wu Tang Clan). A hidden piece by an unknown artist may be considered art according to the performance art demonstration.
So.. Choose your definition, similar as the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest (is sound a pressure wave or the brain processed signal?)
Edit: linguists will just say art is whatever sufficient people believe it means.
Obviously, yes. But now the question is, can you be aware of things that don't exist?
As fiction exists but describes things that may not exist, I think the answer is also yes.
Maybe we’re not aware of a non-existent thing itself, but of an idea or perception in our minds.
How does this differ from having an idea or perception in our minds about existing things?
purely imaginary things exist only in the mind.
But are we aware of existing things in themselves, apart from the idea and perception in our minds?
Actually this is the right answer, and doesn't deserve the downvotes.
I think me and Ahmed gave the same answer, but with mine being indirect using an example, and Ahmed's answer being direct, so maybe people had a harder time understanding Ahmed's answer.
No. There is always at least one observer.
Animals are sometimes declared 'extinct' (no one is aware of any living examples) while they still exist (sometimes for decades).
Until 1967, noone was aware of the existence of gamma-ray bursts, the result of the biggest explosions in the universe. The bursts were only visible to specialized satellites.
Right now, people are suffering from diseases caused by unknown viruses.
Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren't observing them.
There's also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that's a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.
The results of the axiom are that things do exist when we are not observing them. Our observations don't back propagate to retroactively bring them into existence. We can't prove that however, though it's fundamental to a lot of science making sense (quantum mechanics being the oddball).
Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.
One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.
E.g. we couldn't do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can't prove the universe isn't a computer program, only rendering what a "conscious" entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.
How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn't affect the model's ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.
I think you might be confusing statistical with stochastic. Quantum mechanics makes incredibly precise predictions about the statistics of particle interactions. A stochastic model implies an experimental result could change depending on what day it is, when in fact quantum mechanical principles are relied upon every day for modern technology, and the screen you are reading this on is likely lit up because of the small but predictable chance an electron in an LED has to overcome an energy barrier it classically could not.
Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn't guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be "a function of the date" or something that is "conditional on the date". This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling
date.today().dayin Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from0todate.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between0anddate.today().day).Edit: I think what you're talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that "stochastic" too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.
No, that's exactly what I mean and exactly what I think you are missing: quantum mechanical experiments have been reproduced thousands of times, and even as measuring instruments became sensitive, the predictions have held true. The statistical nature of it doesn't make it any less predictable, and an experiment proving a different statistical value of an event than QM predicts would be world news.
Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn't mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.
Of course.
Unless we're in a simulation, and only things you and other characters perceive are rendered.
Yes, they necessarily do.
Yeah we find new bugs and animals and plants all the time. We find new planets. Stuff doesn't pop onto existence once we find it.
Well I exist, despite it seeming that no one else in the world is aware of my existence.
You're ruining it.
Bacteria and viruses existed for billions of years before humans ever existed and the majority of the time since. Dinosaurs existed before we were aware of them. Lots of things have.
This isn't a very well thought out Shower Thought
That's what you think, but as soon as I leave this comment thread and become unaware of it, I'm sorry to say, but you will stop existing. Tough luck.
Dinosaurs have conscious awareness. They were "anyone". Some evidence suggests that consciousness is a fundamentally intra-cellular process that became inter-cellular, and that even the simplest organisms exploit some form of consciousness.
Yes, my one man black metal project exists and no one knows about it. 🥺
One man black metal? Must be fuckin excellent!
I can't believe it's you! Your one-man black metal project changed my life!
That's solipsism
Why do you think it’s solipsism? Can you explain your reasoning?
I mean, they don't have to think it's related to Solipsism, by definition Solipsism id an answer to your question
Why are all your responses in bold, you mad lad?
Your question is a lot like this thought experiment:
Whatever your answer is to the above text can be applied to your question.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
The actual one or at any time since Catholicism?
The atoms are there for sure, but we could argue, whether it is a thing/object without an animal being aware of it, since it's us that define things to be objects.
The universe doesn't care whether a pile of atoms behind Pluto happens to be chair-shaped. It's only when we look at it, that we declare it an object.
Yes. Because people are not the only observers.
What qualify as observers though? Or, how far divorced from an event counts as unobserved?
If a tree falls in a forest and scares a rabbit which a dog barks at which I hear... is that chain of observation enough to grant existence to the tree?
Does existence only count if there is an observer to observe it? I don't understand this notion.
I think about this every time I drive long distances, passing through forest.
"That tree over there is just standing there, all hours of every day, winter and summer, just waiting. Then I drive by it for 2 seconds. Then it still stands there, waiting."
Similarly I think of rocks rotating in silence around planets, stars. Or orphan rocks around galaxies, in darkness, and also silence. They're just there, for millions of millennia. Without anyone's knowledge. But surely they exist.
I have a similar question: can things exist if they have no physical connection at all to their surroundings? The double slit experiment shows that light seem to be information (if we pretend waves are information) until its forced (by observing) to exist. This works with photons, electrons, neutrons, atoms and even particles. So what if i take a cup and put it in a "magic box" that disconnects it from every "observing" system? Does it vanish? Is it gas if i open that box again?
Technically they exist.
But do they exist for you if you don't even think of them? Theological/ philosophycal views might say no.
Tho you can still be affected by unkown therefore "non-existent" things.
Nowadays I call "tap to pay" magic. I know the very basic things to go in there - but I couldn't recreate it. Thos is kinda the same tone as your question.
Have a read through this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it%2C_does_it_make_a_sound%3F
I know this example, but I want to see what people think from their own point of view. Like,Do things exist independently of our awareness of them?
Yes they do. Otherwise we would never discover anything. Unless one would mean that the people who have discovered everything that has ever been discovered were also the creators of those things. And that seems far-fetched.
BUT IF YOU READ IT YOU WILL FIND OUT THAT PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED OVER THIS ISSUE. SO THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE ANSWER.
Of course. I think there are many things that we haven't detected because we lack the instruments or even the concept they exist
Humans are constantly discovering life on Earth in places it was thought impossible, like deep underground or in very hot water around volcanic vents.
Certain cancers (HPV, EBV, HBV) have been discovered to be caused by viruses, not just randomly out of control cell replication.
IMO even astronomers suffer from short-sightedness. They tend to classify things in terms of our own little solar system when actually with billions of stars and trillions of planets there are likely very many astronomical objects and phenomenon that we have never observed or thought of.
Yep. There are many billions of people around the world who don't know you exist yet you do. Although how sure are you that you exist?
Well at least one person is aware they exist, so anyone does not qualify
How do you know a rock isn't aware of its existence?
This isn't really an answer to your question, but I think it's more in the spirit of it than some of the actual answers you're getting;
Does something exist just because you observed it?
Depends on your position on philosophical realism.
I am half awake and my brain for some reason decided that you had written ‘political realism.’ I literally read it and was like ‘huh, makes sense,’ before moving on and then abruptly stopping when my actual processing finally caught up, like ‘wait, what?’
The more I sit here considering, the more it feels like political realism should really be a thing.
Looks like it actually is a thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(international_relations)
I was thinking more about the ‘reality’ which politicians present to people than states interacting with one another, but this is interesting too.
At one point no one knew how gravity worked and yet the earth still orbited the sun
Things can and do.
So, can something exist that is in no way quantium entangled with anything that comprises your experience of existence?
If you subscribe to the multiworld principle, basically anything potentially viable can and will.
Can something exist if you are not aware of it?
Most of reality. Human experience is quite limited.
The duality behind being both aware of something that can exist without your knowledge while also not being aware of its existence. Depending on if it's conception has been conceived first. Then it would exist without any knowledge and would count. But if you know it can exist than its already a possibility.