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Do you believe in objective reality?

Do you believe in objective reality?


  • Total voters
    47

John Bilbo

Member
All you are saying here is that you can't parse any linguistic difference between a device that records "sounds" and a device that records raw audio signal. It is a word game. If you say that a sound is some sort of experience that happens in the head of a human, then we don't know how to make a machine that experiences sound.
I think the meaning of the first question is more philosophical, not a word game.

I think the meaning is more a kin to "do you believe there is more to the world than what you can personally perceive or are you the end all be all of the universe".
 

Wildebeest

Member
I think the meaning of the first question is more philosophical, not a word game.

I think the meaning is more a kin to "do you believe there is more to the world than what you can personally perceive or are you the end all be all of the universe".
Philosophy can be understood as a word game. Probably best understood as a word game. This is why someone more aware of philosophy might try to creep terms like Qualia or auditory experience into play.
 

Keihart

Member
I just choose to agree upon what is real. it's the practical thing to do.
Am i sure about it? not really, how could i be? Just as i am not sure what really death means or if my "counsiousness" is something more than a symptom to my brain working.
 

Keihart

Member
Philosophy can be understood as a word game. Probably best understood as a word game. This is why someone more aware of philosophy might try to creep terms like Qualia or auditory experience into play.
Qualia is a really usefull term tho
 

EruditeHobo

Member
If a tree falls in a forest with no one around does it make a sound?

Is there any good reason to think it doesn't?

Is it possible to observe the truth or do you have your truth conflicting with mine?

Gotta get definitions right for this topic... there is likely only one "truth" the way we mostly use the word, but everyone can experience it somewhat differently. That's not separate truths though. That's the flawed human brain, taking things in differently.

Is science just a futile attempt to observe something beyond our skills of observation?

What's futile about it?

Yes, science is a methodical process which attempts to explain natural phenomena, based on observation and reliable evidence which can be derived from and is supported by those observations.
 

EruditeHobo

Member
Am i sure about it? not really, how could i be? Just as i am not sure what really death means or if my "counsiousness" is something more than a symptom to my brain working.

Right. How can you be 100% sure about anything? That doesn't mean there's reason to believe all kinds of crazy shit, just because we recognize human observation, memory, and understanding can be flawed/limited.
 

Keihart

Member
Right. How can you be 100% sure about anything? That doesn't mean there's reason to believe all kinds of crazy shit, just because we recognize human observation, memory, and understanding can be flawed/limited.
I totally agree, it's just neither practical or logical to deny what "seems" like reality. We have to make assumptions to even have a discussion about what is real.
That being said, discussions about qualia, consiousness and perception of reality, i think are really interesting and things that are not merely stuck on the realm of phylosophy.
 

RAÏSanÏa

Member

Oh Master, who was I in my past incarnation?
Who is it that asks?

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After listening to music inspired by Ibn Arabi yesterday I watched a video on his ideas regarding super-galactic oneness from the sidebar.


Insightful.
Besides talking about Oneness and the multiform the bio in the video touched on Ibn Arabi's travels and brought to mind a prophetic line across two pages from the first chapter of The Book of the Law

Expect him not from the East, nor from the West
16.jpg
17.jpg

This is after watching the Watts video which already sparked the realization of a relationship of Oneness, death and reincarnation with the riddle in the second chapter:

death is the crown of all.
73. Ah! Ah! Death! Death! thou shalt long for death. Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee.
74. The length of thy longing shall be the strength of its glory. He that lives long & desires death much is ever the King among the Kings.
75. Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:
76. 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet?

42.jpg

Alan's spark lit with Arabi's old material a garden of ideas to organize metaphysical models for a possible solution which could be expounded.
A means to detail the Orphic formula on reincarnation which can be inferred from Poe's Berenice.
 
These aren't really examples of subjective reality. If a tree falls, it either makes a sound or it doesn't. Either would be factual and therefore objective. Now, if there were two people around when the tree fell, there may be some argument over whether the tree made a sound when it fell or if, in fact, it was the ground that made a sound. There maybe even an argument about whether the tree fell at all or if the ground pivoted and smacked the tree. What's up and what's down?

I'm not keen on subjective reality. You can have two people at varying distances from an event and only one person heard it. That a second person didn't hear it doesn't mean the event made no sound, and neither does it present subjective realities where the event both made a sound and didn't. It's one objective reality where one person was too far away to hear it.


And these word games should be distinguished from the physics concept of [local] realism which is central to the ERP thought experiment and Bell's Inequality and much of the interpretation confusion that has plagued Quantum Mechanics for the last century.

EDIT: I find the ERP problem and Bell's Inequality, which suggest that we must give up on at least one of (i) locality, (ii) realism, (iii) statistical independence (“free will”) to be a far more definite and interesting problem than what's being discussed here. Who fucking cares about a tree in the woods when we have actual experiment's telling us at a fundamental level, if the current QM interpretations are right, we have to give up the quality of locality!! Or if you're a superdeterminist, that you choose to give up statistical independence, which I find intriguing from an intellectual stand point, even though it 'breaks' science as we know it.
 
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