Girl, go read some Enlightenment philosophy, why’re you askin us 😭😭😭
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.
Yes. You aren’t the main character of reality.
Obviously they’re not, because I am.
I’m not aware of anything that does.
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.
By definition, we don’t know
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.
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.
Your question is a lot like this thought experiment:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Whatever your answer is to the above text can be applied to your question.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
did neptune exist before somebody looked at it?
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.
Ye no one was aware I existed until my mom went
somethings different
Yes, they necessarily do.
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.
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.
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.
