Comment on "Trippy" Reality

mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The data of reality is consistent. How that data is interpreted by the brain may not be. Like the color red might not look the same to you as it does to me. We’ll never know since it’s impossible to describe a color and we can’t see the world with the other’s brain.

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  • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn’t some variety of colorblind, I’d argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.

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    • erev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      the logic might be the same, the perception may not

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear

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• Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me.

  It’s not that reality isn’t subjective it’s that acting as if it isn’t subjective isn’t useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” - not to great science.

  There is a uniform and self-consistent reality

  The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality

  I’m really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it “is… uniform and self-consistent” does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether is represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn’t necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as “objective reality.”

  For anyone interested in this stuff, there’s a great video from Sean Carrol about quantum physics that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲

    I don’t subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don’t support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999…% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol

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    • Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      There are no interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so maybe you should look a little closer at what it actually does say? You can pick and choose the science you want to subscribe to of course, but it’s been making verifiable predictions for a hundred years now. If you ignore it because it disagrees with your preconceptions… well, that’s called religion. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.

    I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.

    Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.

    So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.

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    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t think I’d be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there’s no way for us to “escape” the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn’t be less true, it’s just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.

      It’s kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.

      Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It’s the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question “if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?”, and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what’s up). Though circularity doesn’t imply it is wrong or incorrect, it’s also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.

      And this isn’t an anti-science stance, I just think that there’s a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don’t think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn’t turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).

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• droans@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Are you still alive? How’s that blood clot doing?

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’d be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that’s how computers “comprehend” reality.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oh I’m not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say “reality isn’t what we perceive… Therefore reality is subjective”

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    • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      I agree with you. The “It” in my sentence isn’t clear so I’ll explain.

      “Reality” in the sentence “reality is a shared hallucination” (or similar) means "reality as it exists in their brain.

      People instead interpret “Reality” as "[Physical] reality is a shared halucination which is very different. I was pointing out a more real/visual example with digital cameras.

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