Comment on "Trippy" Reality

mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      the logic might be the same, the perception may not

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      • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.

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      • quarkquasar@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn’t mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.

        If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn’t, you wouldn’t say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.

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      • NKBTN@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        At least it is in terms of a spectrum. Everybody finds orange text on a red background uncomfortable to read. So there are plenty of shared perception categories at least

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      colour theory works the same to everyone because it works entirely with how colours relate to each other

      if you saw colours rotated on a colour wheel 180° - so that your green is my purple - we wouldn’t know

      the only difference would be in the hue (difference between green and purple), which isn’t all that important. there are plenty of videos on youtube with artists drawing using random hues but with correct values (difference between black and white) and once they switch their work to colour it all just looks, good, a bit abstract for sure but still good

      besides, colour theory picks colours that go together well based on their relative position on the colour wheel. teal works well with orange because they’re complimentary, opposites on the spectrum. neutral colours are neutral because they’re desaturated regardless of hue, neon colours are very saturated regardless of hue

      maybe in objective reality we all like the same exact hue of colour, but in our brains we all call it a different word, we’ll never know

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    • degen@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Kinda true but kinda not. Language alone can affect our perception. Some don’t have a word for green or blue, and orange is indistinguishable from light brown given context.

      Even when we are almost definitely seeing the same things, there’s a lot that can differ.

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      • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Your language doesn’t change your perception of color.

        The primary colors being Red, Yellow, Blue. Is made up. There’s no reason those should be the three primary colors.

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        Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan could be the primary colors if you were taught that.

        In that color wheel orange is an intermediate color. The intermediate color between green and yellow can be called chartreuse.

        Did you know chartreuse as a color or did you just know it as yellow-green?

        Do you not preceve the color chartreuse the same as someone that just knows that name?

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        You can perceve all the difference colors on this wheel without needing an official word.

        As you can see “Brown” is just a darker orange.

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    • tatterdemalion@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We literally have proof that people don’t see colors the same way: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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      • Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That was horseshit with multiple different pictures being used with different levels, confusing people to death about what others had reported seeing. It’s easy to white balance the blue back to white which with the yellow orange lighting reflections on the black, saturated up the yellow lighting to look more gold. Nobody with normal vision both looking at the same original picture claims the blue part is white.

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    • candyman337@piefed.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Everyone sees colors slightly differently, this is perfectly illustrated by the old blue black/white gold dress. Depending on how your brain has learned to perceive color determines what colors you see.

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      • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Your phone screen only uses three colors to represent all colors.

        If you printed out the photo of the dress the “illusion” wouldn’t work.

        The 3 colors used to make the blue dress in warm “gold” light is what allows your brain to interpret it as yellow.

        If anything it helps prove that people basically see in the same way. Just if your brain adjusts for the backlight tone. You either saw blue or yellow. No one was saying purple or orange.

        If you took mushrooms and saw purple you’d be hallucinating. Your brain is giving you false information.

        Seeing it as yellow isn’t false information but a different interpretation of the given material

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear

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  • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Okay. I'm going to fuck with your head. Don't click this unless you're sure.

    The color red is not even the same for you between each eye. Go look.

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    • Bysmuth@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Looks the same to me

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    • Wutchilli@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Looks the same to me, do you have some kind of source or paper to back up your claim?

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      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Nah, just folk who look closely are typically able to notice they perceive shades of colors slightly differently. Everyone I’ve tested it with has been able to do it.

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    • 5too@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Given that it’s the same brain interpreting information from two different eyeballs, I’d suspect this is down to minute differences either between them (such as adjusting for darkness while testing as Kratzkopf suggested), or in their relative position.

      It’s interesting, but I don’t think it really gets at the question of differing perceptions between people.

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  • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      that’s not really a good study for the issue in question since getting a control group of people who never formed associations between colours and ideas would be rather difficult

      even a day old baby would begin forming their first associations - yellow is warm because the sun is warm

      has the study included totally colour blind people? (like literally blind to colour, full monochromacy) and if so how were their results interpreted?

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      • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        If they’re fully color blind, how could they be shown colors? That would be a bad control group.

        Instead, when doing fMRI stuff, they usually create a “baseline” by showing their subjects random stuff to see how the brain fires up. For example, they could show greyscale images of grass, sun, blood, etc., then see how it differs from seeing contextless colors (ie: a uniform green screen)

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• Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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      • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        There certainly are pseudoscientific interpretations of it like that, which many laypeople subscribe to.

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  • pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

    It doesn’t tell us that at all. This is just bizarre metaphysics invented out of someone’s ass one day and became popular among academics, despite it having no empirical basis for it and not even being logically consistent if you take it seriously for more than five seconds.

    Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. You literally superimpose states in classical statistical mechanics as well. The only difference is quantum mechanics has an extra degree of freedom in the state description of the system that includes phases, and those phases evolve deterministically and influence the stochastic dynamics of the system. This gives a kind of “memory” effect whereby the same operator can have different behavior if the history is different, such as, a photon having 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted by a beam splitter, unless its immediate previous interaction was of a beam splitter as well, then it is 100%/0% because the state of the phases are different.

    No, Sean Carroll is just wrong and he presents nothing to justify his position. The cat doesn’t stop existing when you’re not looking, nor is there is a multiverse, nor do things spread out as infinite-dimensional vectors in configuration space when you aren’t looking. You just do not know its state because it is statistical as quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. Multiverse believers love to put their idea side-by-side another idea which is even more absurd in order to make it look more viable, but they never bother to defend their ideas on their own merit, without a comparison. Any time you ever encounter a multiverse believer, they will constantly bring up Copenhagen even if you never mention it.

    Carroll responds to a variant of Copenhagen that believes in a “spreading out” axiom that things diverge into a multiverse of every possibility represented by a vector in configuration space when you aren’t looking, but then suddenly “collapses” back down into a definite configuration in state space when you look. He then attacks the “collapse” as silly, and therefore we should believe things spread out as a multiverse forever. But nowhere does he ever give any convincing justification for the “spreading out” axiom to begin with. That axiom is not grounded in any empirical evidence or in the mathematics at all, and so multiverse believers can only make their position look coherent by putting it beside another silly belief which also presupposes that axiom, and thus they make it appear reasonable that they never justify it.

    Just look at the awful slide 24:35. Someone can make this same argument in a perfectly classical universe. If we could not track the definite states of particles because they behaved randomly, but in a classical sense which did not violate Bell inequalities, we would also only be able to track the states of systems as vectors evolved by matrices. Someone could also come along and claim that particles do not have real states when you are not looking at them because they are not there in the mathematics, and that they are being the “reasonable” one for believing that the universe just evolves as a big deterministic vector.

    We would all look at them as if they are silly. Yet, somehow, this is stated unironically among multiverse believers as if it is somehow made less silly by quantum mechanics, when absolutely nothing in the theory makes this a less silly position.

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• daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As a great scientist once said:

  “There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth

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• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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• Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There is a uniform and self-consistent reality

  Quantum says otherwise, doesn’t mean hallucinations are reflective of really at all, but reality is a lot more bizarre than classical scientists could ever imagine.

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  • pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No. There is an obsession many people have, from laymen to academics alike, with quantum woo and trying desperately to extrapolate bizarre metaphysics from the linear algebra, but nothing in the mathematics of the theory necessitates their crackpot ideas.

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  • jjj@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I believe you’re speaking about General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics refers to “quantum” aka discrete, non-smooth things like the energy levels of electrons.

    General Relativity indicates that the temporal ordering of events may appear different to different observers, although there is a way to objectively switch between perspectives it describes.

    In all cases, the theories point to a uniform, self consistant reality, as that is in fact their very purpose. If they didn’t work as expected, your GPS wouldn’t be a thing.

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    • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No i was speaking about quantum mechanics thank you

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      • jjj@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Quantum says otherwise

        It doesn’t.

        I meant that GR better fits the vague description you gave.

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• mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Welcome to materialism lol

  www.marxists.org/reference/archive/…/09.htm

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  • king_comrade@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Careful, you’ll trigger the libs

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    • mere@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      the constant snide remarks at liberals are the same as the constant snide remarks at millennials, it’s a circlejerk that accomplishes nothing but make yourself feel superior

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• droans@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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• happydoors@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I agree with you but in defense of the image in front of us, they still show atoms in the rest of the photo. I take that as the representation of “reality” and the commentary as being more about perception and not some alternate reality.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes that’s true, and I did think about this, but really this just makes the image even dumber, because we can see atoms nowadays too, and even if we couldn’t, all our knowledge of them would still come from what this comic implies is our hallucination 🤔 kinda crazy to say that if you just zoom in on a hallucination it suddenly becomes real

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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• mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  One thing I took away from learning more about philosophy was to be unsure of pretty much anything except my own existence.

  The idea that there is an objective mind independent reality is a nice idea and neatly fits my worldview but there are compelling arguments for this not to be the case.

  I’d only ask what makes you so certain of this “uniform and self-consistent reality” because if you’re relying on your senses to gather information for this fact I regret to inform you that humans senses are awfully unreliable.

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I also have read quite a bit of philosophy! So this should be fun to discuss.

    First, I agree that 100% certainty is virtually impossible. However, there comes a point when we say we’re “certain”, depending on the severity of the outcome and the probability of it.

    For instance, if I offered for you to play a game where we spin a big spinner, and 99.9999999999999% of the wheel is red, which means you pay me ten thousand dollars, and the rest of it means I pay you ten thousand dollars…you’d probably not say “I might win ten thousand dollars!” You’d probably say “this forces me to give you ten thousand dollars”. And if I said “whaaaat, no, we can’t be certain of that!”, you’d probably think I was being nonsensical.

    So let’s acknowledge that while Descartes’ arguments for solipsism are indeed basically undefeated on a first order logic basis, we really should be evaluating the claim on a probabilistic or statistical basis instead, since the argument is fundamentally about our degree of sureness in something.

    You’re correct that ultimately my senses alone are my only exposure to the world. However, there are some interesting things I can notice. If I lock 1000 people in a room with an undetectable poison gas, then they all will die - even though none of them had any sensory awareness of the gas! If it was just one person in the room, maybe we could argue that reality isn’t consistent, but the fact that all 1000 people due suggests that the gas affects everyone the same consistent way. Similarly, a blood clot in my leg can kill me even if I’m not aware of it.

    Acknowledging now that things can certainly affect things regardless of their sensory awareness of each other, the only way to preserve our radical doubt of our senses is to suspect that perhaps the 1000 people in my room are actually not really people, but instead something me and my senses have imagined. If we suppose (against all other evidence, mind you, and purely on the basis of being able to achieve an impossible100% certainty to the contrary), that my senses really do deceive me at every turn, then we have other situations that will puzzle us:

    For example, I’m studying math as a 7 year old and coke across a fancy integral equation, which I absolutely cannot make sense of, and I don’t even know what the symbols mean. Later in life, in my 20s, I have learned enough math to understand the equation, and remarkably, I see that it made sense all along. The equation was always right, even before I had the mental capacity to understand it. How could this be, if my perception of the world was not mapping to some consistent reality? These are things that we must come up with strange explanations for, like claiming that my consciousness actually fully understands all workings and states of the universe, and I’m only playing a game with myself where I pretend to forget about it, or something like that.

    And if we were to make such a fantastical interpretation for the world as that, what would be our evidence for that interpretation as opposed to the “default” one that the world is self consistent and maps consistently to the our sensory interpretation? Our evidence could only be “we can’t prove with 100% certainty that this isn’t the case”! But if that’s a good reason to believe things, I could just as well say that we can’t prove with 100% certainty that my default interpretation isn’t the case either, and now our claims (and any claim) are on equal footing - since nothing can be 100% certain. All that this really does is show to us that this justification is completely useless, as it makes all claims equally viable and negates itself.

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