You've made a reductio of this train of philosophical thought because you have come up with statements that are entirely in contradiction with what you started your philosophical investigation on in the first place
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
I can make objective claims about reality such as "this chair exists". No, an alien would not perceive a chair there. There is no existing chair there, but only undifferentiated matter, the chair is just interpretation in your mind.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
In fact saying that there is undifferentiated matter is also incorrect because it relies on our idea of matter and this perceptual idea of something being undifferentiated. There is then no true statement you can make about the universe, it's all interpretation
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
The "undifferentiated matter" is just the collection of atoms in the universe without trying to classify them into objects. The classification into objects is done in the mind (and the way the atoms clump together in our universe makes this job very easy, thankfully)
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
It's not atoms, because you can differentiate atoms out from the rest of the matter. Atoms are as in-your-mind as chairs are. Atomness is still x-ness for some x which is always interpretation and always in the mind.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
And you can't swap atoms with something else because that will still be x-ness whose existence is established by our experimental procedures upon the world. We can also never be certain when we hit bottom. Chairs to atoms is a continuum, physics isn't a separate magesterium.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
I am leaving open the possibility that there is a level below what I am calling the lowest level of physics, whether that is atoms or QFT or whatever. The point is, the entire universe seems to behave in accordance with the rules of that level. If there is a lower level, that 1/2
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
lower level just results in the behavior of the QFT/GR/whatever level. It can't *contradict* the QFT level (cf. The Relativity of Wrong). And since everything above the QFT level is explainable in terms of QFT, everything is "screened off" from lower levels.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
Yes, so this "bottom level" where reality exclusively sits is necessarily unknowable, so you cannot say anything about reality. You only have these subjective higher-level interpretations like atomic theory
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I never claimed that reality exclusively sits at this "lowest level". Reality is what it is, dependent of the level you look at it on. Nevertheless, higher levels supervene on lower levels.
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