A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE Part Two (Identity)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 09, 2018, 15:10 (2148 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: The question is whether things exist independently of our consciousness. Your quantum theory maintains that they do not. If the image doesn’t exist without my seeing it, then your God, you and the bus don’t exist either without my seeing them.

DAVID: Of course the photons exist, and are real. But it takes reception of them to interpret their carried information.

dhw: My reconciliation between materialism and dualism is that something immaterial can survive its material source, as we know from images surviving the materials that produce them. You replied: “Problem: there is no image until a consciousness sees it. It is all a potential image before that, photons which carry information.”

You said there was no image, so my analogy didn’t work. Do you or do you not believe that things exist independently of our observation of them? If the photons containing the image are real, then the image they contain is real, whether I observe it or not.

Of course things exist even if not observed. The photons carry the image as information, and it becomes an image only upon observation.