Silly Druid

@Kujamih Madame Violet wakes up after several minutes. "I'm... OK... just let me... rest," she says with a weak voice. You leave her in her tent and go to the streets of Canterlot to search for dark-colored ponies. Intellect (d3), result: 1 / Pony Sense (d5), result: 4. Best result: 4. Success! Not far from the main square, you see a unicorn mare with a black coat and magenta mane. She looks like a typical citizen of Canterlot, walking through the street and levitating a large bag next to her. @Samurai Equine @Skylight Scintillate @abrony-mouse The earth pony farmer looks seriously scared by the sudden appearance of Samurai before him. "Have mercy..." is all he manages to say.

This sentence is false.

@Kujamih Madame Violet looks at you through her crystal ball, focused on reading your future from it. But then something strange happens. She looks surprised and slightly frightened. Her eyes start glowing, and she says with a strange, unnatural voice: "Beware of the black unicorn!" Then she falls on the floor, unconscious. @abrony-mouse @Skylight Scintillate @Samurai Equine Dr. Clue: Agility (d5), result: 5 / Flight (d5), result: 1. Best result: 5. Critical success! Skillfully hiding behind rocks, you manage to get very close to the pony and not get noticed. He appears to be a simple farmer, carrying large saddlebags. Samurai Equine: Agility (d5), result: 2 / Fire Magic (d5), result: 5. Best result: 5. Critical success! Whatever the purpose of your maneuver was, it succeeded tremendously.

I think you got your date wrong...

I don't think about it in terms of specific things gaining their meaning due to consciousness, although there are some people who do it, and ask questions like "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" or "Is the moon there when nobody looks?" How I see it is that the entire universe gains its meaning if consciousness is in it, and by entire universe I mean all the spacetime. Many of the comments you and @Brony Number 42 make here are "time-centric", speaking about things that existed before consciousness, or will exist after it. I don't see it like that, as I said time is just another dimension, so you can ask the same kind of questions about distant regions of space. By definition, the universe consists of things that interact with each other, so if at least one of these things exists, all of them exist. You can say universes without consciousness exist, but, as I noticed in an earlier blog entry, if they didn't exist, nobody would notice any difference. So this kind of existence is pretty pointless to me, that's why I don't consider it real. I can agree with that. While things like atoms are pretty well-defined, chairs are only vaguely defined, so the description of reality involving them is not 100% rigorous and accurate.

A friendly reminder to @Samurai Equine and @Reindeer Skylight. I need your posts before continuing.

If we define a set of properties that a chair should have, and we observe something that meets these properties, then we can say it's a chair. That's true, but it's not clear that it means Earth in the center of the universe. Time is just another dimension, not very different from the spatial dimensions. When thinking about the universe as a whole, we should think about it as the spacetime in its entirety. If it contains consciousness, then I consider it real. If not, it's just an abstract mathematical object. So it exists mathematically, but not physically. I agree with everything you said here, and I don't think it contradicts anything I said. This blog entry is about philosophy, not physics. The kind of "problems" we're talking about here don't exist in physics.

@Brony Number 42 Valid means that what we observe about reality meets the criteria we defined for our description of it. As for Earth being the center of the universe, it's not valid in the sense that there are no observational results that confirm it. I'm not saying nothing existed before consciousness, because every stage of evolution of the universe depends on the previous stage, so it's still what I call indirect interaction with consciousness. And I still think consciousness is important here, because if there is a set of objects that interact with each other, but there is no one to experience them, then it's not "real" to me. It's just a mathematical abstraction. I think a modified version of your definition is better than mine: Reality is a set of things, including consciousness, that interact with each other. But I can't agree with the statement that "something exists if it is a member of that set", because in case of complex objects like chairs it creates all sorts of problems described in the video, like the fact that the chair exists but the atoms that constitute it also exist, so we have a redundancy. I think my version with "valid descriptions" avoids these problems. @Sir Done A Lot If you name a plate a chair and use it consistently for all plates, then you just changed the language, and your description of reality is still valid. But you won't have a word for chair then, so maybe you should name it a plate...

What inspired me to write this entry is this video. Before watching it I haven't realized there is so much controversy over a seemingly simple statement that objects like chairs exist. So let me explain what I think about all this. First, we need to define what "exist" means. What I mean here is physical existence, as opposed to mathematical existence, which is a different thing. My definition is as follows: If something exists physically, it means it's a part of a valid description of reality. But what's reality? According to Philip K. Dick, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." I think it's a pretty good definition, because it captures an important aspect of it: consciousness (there's more about it in my earlier blog entries). Without consciousness there is no reality. Here's my version of the definition: Reality is everything that can directly or indirectly interact with consciousness. Which means consciousness is also a part of reality, because it can interact with itself or with another consciousness. But wait, aren't there fictional concepts that can affect our consciousness, like these colorful ponies from MLP? Not exactly. They don't exist, so they can't affect us in any way. What can affect us are the depictions of these fictional concepts, which are existing physical objects. For example an episode of MLP that we watch on our screen is something that exists, while the MLP ponies themselves are not. Which leaves us with another question, what is "a valid description of reality"? Well, there are many ways we can describe reality. The most basic way (but not very useful in practice), is to take into account the most fundamental elements of it. According to our current knowledge, these are the elementary particles, like quarks, electrons and photons. But we can also think about larger structures built from these fundamental elements, like nucleons, atoms, molecules and so on. When we're not far away from the fundamental level, things (for example specific kinds of molecules) are pretty well defined. But when we move to larger structures like chairs, we need to use fuzzy logic, because there are objects that are "kind of like a chair, but not quite". This way we avoid problems described in the video, like the necessity of defining a boundary line between "chair" and "non-chair", which would mean it's possible to take away one atom from a "chair" to make it a "non-chair". When using fuzzy logic, these problems don't exist, because everything can have a degree of "chairness", and taking away one atom just changes it by a very small amount. So what we do is to create a more or less vague conditions of what constitutes as a specific kind of object, like a chair, and check if the reality meets these conditions or not (or meets them to some degree). If we observe that it meets them, then we can say that there's a chair. We can also create more "exotic" kinds of objects like "trogs" and "incars" mentioned in the video, the only difference is that they are less useful in practice than the ones we use, like chairs. So the conclusion is, I think chairs exist, as one of many ways to describe reality.

Across the Obelisk. I beat it at the basic difficulty though, I haven't tried the madness levels yet.

@Kujamih Madame Violet looks shocked. "Fate of Equestria? A moment ago you were flirting with me, and now this?" She looks into her crystal ball again, but only for a short moment this time. "You're telling the truth. I will help as much as I can, but I can only see the future of the pony in front of me. Do you want me to perform the divination for you?" @abrony-mouse @Reindeer Skylight @Samurai Equine "I wish you the best of luck in your investigation, good ponies!" The beggar says to the group as they leave towards the cliffs. You arrive at the city limits, beyond them there is a single mountain trail leading to the valley below. Dr. Clue: Intellect (d5), result: 3 / Investigation (d6), result: 3. Best result: 3. Partial success. From the distance you can see a pony walking on the trail in your direction. It's too far to identify any details about that pony.

a30783e4-638c-4017-a088-7af770f4127a 63d50f9a-610b-441c-95c4-883f42078afd f3701dc5-a580-403c-a005-ec86df6f114e 845f01f2-bdb8-4f01-ac66-21bc92db2549 6ccb43d2-ef17-4010-b144-ea50b06dcf2b dddd8e2a-ffc7-4bfe-9623-582de35d2ddd 5e34091d-6ddc-407e-a5c5-16bacab45748 5b82b618-a2e4-439d-9db1-e0a1fe56f859 c796ed63-dedc-439c-8371-85029cc44fc1 4c230f4f-b637-48d7-9f39-c4d0f9ab80e1 38a6f1d8-5feb-4e79-b655-9396c0061b15 c2ec68e9-14da-4764-b960-a4a0349e4a06 fda517be-a5b2-4eeb-8fcf-3a108d12d09a 020ec9eb-a6fa-4a26-99d5-03cba32e9fba 0105370e-eb0c-43a1-bd13-abd0fd81e796 c7741200-5a8d-439c-92af-f59ba28fc43b

@Kujamih Madame Violet looks into her crystal ball for a long moment, then she turns to you with a smile on her face. "Are you sure about that? What would your marefriend think about it?" (You can still try to charm her, but it will be harder because she apparently knows about your relationship with Duster Lawn.) @abrony-mouse @Reindeer Skylight @Samurai Equine "I believe she went that way," the beggar points in a direction that goes away from the city center, towards the cliffs below.