Realism about the external world: an adversarial collaboration

Abstract

One of us is a realist and believes that reality fundamentally consists in an external physical world, governed by laws of physics. Observers are either emergent (physicalism) or exist in addition to physical reality. The other defends a version of idealism and believes that reality fundamentally consists in first-person states, unembedded into worlds, on which laws of nature act directly. Shared "physical worlds" are merely emergent. The disagreement ultimately centers on the overall coherence of a formal model, known as Algorithmic Idealism, and its ability to resolve observer paradoxes, such as the Boltzmann brain paradox. Our aim is to confront this issue in the form of an adversarial collaboration, where we avoid misunderstanding each other, so that readers can see the true source of the disagreement, and decide for themselves. Our work represents an attempt to establish a form of exchange that may help overcome the fragmentation of scholarly communities in philosophy, physics, and elsewhere. The collaboration was conducted using a discipline-neutral template for theoretical adversarial collaboration developed in a companion paper [1], which we hope will be useful in other theoretical disciplines.