A Non-Mental Reality Must Exist.

You can't define "information" without implicitly including cognition.In the conventional model, percepts are objective observables that actively imprint themselves on, and thereby shape and determine, the passive mind and its internal processes. But a more general (and therefore more scientific, less tautological) description of percepts portrays them also as having a subjective perceptual aspect. Suppose you're wearing blue-tinted glasses. At first, you think that the world you see through them is blue. Then it occurs to you that this need not be true; maybe it's the glasses. Given this possibility, you realize that you really have no business thinking that the world is blue at all; indeed, due to Occam's razor, you must assume that the world is chromatically neutral (i.e., not blue) until proven otherwise! Finally, managing to remove your glasses, you see that you were right; the world is not blue. This, you conclude, proves that you can't assume that what is true on your end of perception (the blue tint of your lenses) is really true of reality.Fresh from this victory of reason, you turn to the controversial hypothesis that mind is the essence of reality...that reality is not only material, but mental in character. An obvious argument for this hypothesis is that since reality is known to us strictly in the form of ideas and sensations - these, after all, are all that can be directly "known" - reality must be ideic. But then it naturally occurs to you that the predicate "mental" is like the predicate "blue"; it may be something that exists solely on your end of the process of perception. And so it does, you reflect, for the predicate "mental" indeed refers to the mind! Therefore, by Occam's razor, it must be assumed that reality is not mental until proven otherwise.However, there is a difference between these two situations. You can remove a pair of blue sunglasses. But you cannot remove your mind, at least when you're using it to consider reality. This means that it can never be proven that the world isn't mental. And if this can never be proven, then you can't make an assumption either way. Indeed, the distinction itself is meaningless; there is no reason to even consider a distinction between that which is mental and that which is not, since nature has conspired to ensure that such a distinction will never, ever be perceived. But without this distinction, the term "mental" can no longer be restrictively defined. "Mental" might as well mean "real" and vice versa. And for all practical purposes, so it does.A theory T of physical reality exists as a neural and conceptual pattern in your brain (and/or mind); it's related by isomorphism to its universe U (physical reality). T<--(isomorphism)-->U. T consists of abstract ideas; U consists of supposedly concrete objects like photons (perhaps not the best examples of "concrete objects"). But the above argument shows that we have to drop the abstract-concrete distinction (which is just a different way of expressing the mental-real distinction). Sure, we can use these terms to distinguish the domain and range of the perceptual isomorphism, but that's as far as it goes. For all practical purposes, what is mental is real, and vice versa. The T-U isomorphism seamlessly carries one predicate into the other. Assume that a photon has no abstract existence. Then since ideas are abstract, it corresponds to no idea. But you know the world through ideas. So for you, a non-abstract photon has no existence. But you're discussing photons that exist. So the photon you're talking about is abstract (as well as concrete).If we form a theory of some aspect of reality, it may or may not be correct. But even if not, we can be sure that the correct theory will conform to our mental structures, since otherwise we won't be able to create a conceptual isomorphism with it (and that's what a theory is). A "syntax" is to be interpreted as any set of structural and functional constraints applied to any system. A syntax takes the form of general information and is implemented by generalized cognition. This, of course, is what philosophers call "solipsism", but without the assumption of personal control. In a word, it's impossible to prove that the universe doesn't exist entirely inside our minds, and that all that "objective reality" out there isn't just some kind of subjective internal simulation. While it's true that control of the simulation seems to be distributed among many people and influences, this merely amounts to a kind of "distributed solipsism" after all...an intersect of solipsistic viewpoints in one and the same meta-solipsistic universe. In other words, the solipsistic abstract/concrete "Self" of the universe distributes over all of its contents, and our own "selves" are just mini-solipsistic aspects of it.So the objective and solipsistic models are as indistinguishable as U and T, abstract and concrete, and we have to drop the distinction. And in this case, (objective) isomorphism equals (abstract, subjective) identity; when we talk about T and U, we're really talking about different aspects or characterizations of the same thing. So the perceived universe and the perceiver are one, and the universe is "self-perceptual". This is where reality theory meets the philosophy of mind. But that's fine, because as should by now be obvious, they need each other.In conclusion, physical reality has a general abstract existence. This is what happens when you embed physical reality in a space of abstractions in order to theorize about it; real objects necessarily conform to more or less exact configurations of an abstract distributed syntax. Since there's no way out of this requirement, it's pointless to theorize about it without admitting it from the outset. A theory that doesn't is nothing but an oxymoron; it contains an implied logical inconsistency from jump street and invalidates itself. Sources(1) http://web.archive.org...;