Len M said:
But what if the patterns are subject to “rules” that exist within the construct that is our reality?
You said it yourself, "exist within the construct." That makes it quite clear where the "existence" lies, that's what I'm saying about all forms of information. As soon as we see what nature is doing as being some kind of information processor, then immediately the information processor is our brains, not nature. We must see nature as a kind of "mini me", because that is all we understand-- that is the point of physics, to be able to see our thought processes in nature, thereby claiming some understanding. What other form of understanding is there?
By a construct I mean a reality that is not produced from the hardware of a dualistic brain, rather mind emerges from “something” that gives us empirical reality.
And that's the paradox of mind-- we want to imagine that our minds "emerge" from nature, but everything we think we understand about nature comes from our minds. Hence, the "emergence" scenario is one where a mind emerges from itself, like a tiger chasing its tail. It's hard to say what other options we have available, so we get as far as we can, but we should not be surprised when faced with certain difficulties if we choose to ignore the self-referential character of the situation.
Within that reality brains are the same stuff as external objects, everything is a dualist construct from “something”.
Exactly, everything is a construct, including what is purported to be responsible for the construct. Our minds are constructs that are trying to construct themselves. This is the situation, we don't need to imagine otherwise-- everything we can say about our minds, including the definition of what a mind is, and any attempt to understand a mind, ends up being the object of that understanding, not the subject of it. The subject of the understanding is not what we mean by a mind, not in physics anyway.
But within that “whole” surely we can then say that “rules” exist without thought.
That is just the thinking that I reject. To me, the words "rules" and "without thought" are having a little fight in that sentence. If there was any evidence that reality actually
obeyed rules, rather than just can be effectively analyzed using the construct of rules (a product of a human mind), then there might be some authority to that claim, but a "rule" is something we make up (it's an anthropomorphism), and how does reality "obey" things anyway? These anthropormorphisms are not just conveniences of language, they are the language. If we could really make the point that our minds were not involved using language that is not anthropomorphic, then maybe we could be making a consistent argument, but there's a reason we never seem able to do that. The goal of understanding is to see ourselves in what we are studying, so anthropomorphism is inescapable, and that's fine, but we should not claim in the same sentence that includes anthropomorphisms that we are not involved.
Imagine a scenario where by nature outside of the “whole” consists of random irreducible elements not “existing” in space or time. We cannot logically think of an exception to this scenario that involves a brain sitting in a corner taking in all of these elements from “something” and creating “rules” – the brain can only be part of a dualistic construct that emerges from this “something”.
Sure, but even so, those "rules" exist in that brain, all the same. This also explains why rules are pretty much made to be broken, in physics, and why the ontologies of physics theories vary radically from century to century with no evidence of any convergence on the horizon.
The molecules do not care about their differences, but those differences involve “rules” that are part of our reality and are used in the emergence of the hardware that is us. Those “rules” will be there whether we discern patterns or not.
The rules are the patterns we discern, I don't think reality has the least idea what a rule is, precisely because reality does not have a mind. Or, if we take the view that reality is itself some kind of great mind, then the point still holds that the rules are a product of the mind, not the other way around. Both the rules, and what we mean in physics by reality itself, are inescapably intertwined with the mind that notices them, constructs them, and evaluates them. One can invoke the phrase "mind independent reality", but one cannot say anything else about it, so physics immediately leaves that notion to philosophy, as that notion has no place in the concept of reality that physics uses.
I believe Bohr hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that physics is not about reality, it is about what we can say about reality. Many people interpret that as Bohr's claim that the wave function is epistemic rather than ontic, but I think he was saying something much deeper that goes way beyond quantum mechanics-- he was saying that physics is a mind trying to see itself in what is around it, and meeting with both substantial success as well as unavoidable limitations.
I just don’t think that you can easily use the dualism of our reality to imply that cognitive thought gives rise to that dualism (unless one considers that dualisms exists as such within mind independent reality).
I don't think you have any choice in the matter-- the dualism does arise from itself, just like the mind does. There isn't any dualism that is "inherent" in some mind independent reality, dualism is just what you get when a mind tries to draw a line and say "in here is
me, out there is
other." It's pure mental construct, fundamental to the very definition of mind but meaningless without that definition. The tiger is chasing its tail, and that is part of the point of dualism.
It is the construct (the “whole”) that comes first and the cognitive thoughts second – existence comes before knowledge.
That is certainly the common view, but I regard it as untenable when applied to what physics means by "knowledge" and "existence" because there are two flavors of existence. There is what "really exists," which we can say nothing about, but we want to say something about it, so we invent physics and knowledge, and then, only then, can we start to talk about what exists. But then the existence we are talking about is immediately resultant from the knowledge and comes after that knowledge, and is strongly conditioned by the kinds of knowledge we are capable of manipulating. This is not a bug, it's exactly how physics is supposed to work-- physics is supposed to give us a means to talk about existence, and everything we get from physics comes as a result of our minds. There is no physics without physicists, and more, there was never supposed to be. That latter is what I believe Bohr meant by "there is no quantum world" and "physics concerns what we can say about nature."
None of this implies that our senses and brain do not have an effect on what we perceive, but that effect takes place within the construct that is the “whole” and within that “whole” there are rules that manifest themselves in terms of mechanisms that are purposeful and independent of cognitive thoughts.
The problem is when you try to get past the words "the whole", which are suitably vague to be talking about some pre-physics idea (what can be more basic than everything, the "whole"?), and try to get into specifics like talking about "rules." At that point you have left the realm of what we cannot talk about and entered the realm of what we can talk about (rules), which is exactly where you cross over from mind-independent thinking to mind-dependent thinking, and that brings us into contact with useful notions of our minds like rules and information. And if you want to start talking about what our minds are, you have the exact same issue-- you can start with words that don't say anything, like "a mind is whatever it is that connects with our ability to think", but the instant you take the next step, and give that definition some teeth by attributing elements to the mind, you have crossed over into what a mind can say about itself, and the tail chase is on.
Within our reality, (our “whole”) there seems to be purposeful things going on according to “rules”.
Again look at the inescapable anthropomorphisms. "Seems to be"-- seems to whom? To a rock? All we can say is that the "rules" concept is a good one to have in our minds, a useful notion, what more can we say, what more is there any
need to say?
It is those “rules” that constitutes physics and we assign lots of interpretations to those “rules” (and thus I see physics as exploring the rules of our reality but not those of mind independent reality). But fundamentally, those “rules” are surely independent of the interpretations or of any cognitive process that fits the “rules” to our perception of things.
Why must the rules be independent of those interpretations? Consider the following "dense" student:
Professor: "gravity is a force that is inversely proportional to the distance to the center of the Earth."
Dense student: "Is that what it is
exactly?"
Professor: "No, it's just a useful idealization, we have to make idealizations to do physics."
Dense student: "So what is gravity exactly?"
Professor: "Physics doesn't tell us that."
Dense student: "I don't understand, isn't physics where we get the notion of gravity? Experiment, hypothesis, theory, that whole scientific method business? So why can't it tell us what gravity is exactly, if it is responsible for the word?"
Professor: "Physics can tell us exactly what our approximate models are."
Dense student: "So gravity is a collection of approximate models, that physics tells us exactly what each particular model is?"
Professor: "Yes."
Dense student: "So gravity is a construct of our minds?"
Professor: "Um, well, er..."
There are “rules” that mean if we throw a ball, that same ball will come down.
Take that above dialog, and replace "gravity" with "ball", or with "come down." It's the same issue. "Reality obeys rules" is a statement of our minds that is gibberish without our minds. The ball, that we say is going up and coming down, has no idea what we are talking about.