Nerd Pride Radio

Is what we perceive reality or just a construct of our minds? Can our minds correctly interpret reality or is reality subjective?

There is reality, which is fact. But how we perceive and interpret reality is greatly influenced by a number of factors: our current state of mind, our upbringing and past experiences, even our genetics (for example, people on the autism spectrum). So there are aspects of "reality as perceived by each individual" that are subjective to each of those individuals. If everything is working correctly, then there should not be drastic differences between the perceived realities.

What he said.

I believe that there absolutely is an objective reality, although all sentient beings (that we know of) can only know their subjective experience of that reality. And I think the goal of science is to determine as much as possible what that objective reality is.

God damn right.

Unless you're going full on brain-in-a-jar, "I think therefore I am says nothing about you" - the fact that most of us have some commonality to our impressions of the world is evidence that while we can't see the elephant, we're looking at something that is more than subjective but filtered through our limited senses.

If we are going full "whoah" with this, then you run into the A_E Nihilistic Parodox (if I remember the name right). Absent some way of proving the simulation or navigating your way out of the cave, you're going to act as if reality is real no matter what.

I try to act like there are "real" standards of right and wrong that exist beyond my individual preferences or even the majority of a group of people I'm in, and those standards seem a lot more real to me than most of what I see and hear, but I'm often told it's the other way around. Groups of people often get facts about what you can see and hear or measure with scientific instruments badly wrong, too, so I am hesitant to put much stock in their mutual agreement about anything real.

Let me try it this way. A person visits your home for the first time. Despite having no direct information from you, that person will come to the spot you normally associate as a door and knock at the physical location you normally associate with knocking at your door. (Again assuming that person is a real, separate individual rather than a projection of your mind). Subjectively, that house means different things to you than to a stranger. You have memories associated with it that color your perceptions, for a start. There MAY be smells in your home that you don't even perceive anymore that a stranger would notice. What you don't find is people walking through your walls like the Christian missionary in Erik the Viking. You and I may literally see the wall as different shades of color, or notice different details about the walls texture, but we have broad agreement that there is a physical barrier there.

Truly objective morality is hard to prove, to the point where I feel that is unique in this discussion compared to whether the devices we are having this discussion over actually exist. We can show the outcomes of various moral attitudes as a kind of ad hoc yardstick to measure their truth - a society that says DON'T murder will outlive one that says ALWAYS murder - but we haven't found those rules etched into the Firmament in a way that can't be written off as the creation of people. The trick is, it's impossible to have a moral standard that you don't hold as absolute. If you don't treat it as real, you just have a preference that you can abandon at your convenience. In a sense, morality is an area (one of many?) where a person's subjective understanding will impact the objective results.

I don't really follow what is meant by subjective/objective in the thread above. Presumably we would think of "subjective" as somehow connected to "subjects" - creatures that can perceive or think about things? As opposed to objective which is ... people don't walk through walls, regardless of whether everyone agrees they can or should. How any of that is connected to or illuminating of "reality" is unclear to me. Reality is that creatures like us cannot walk through walls. Ok, but reality also tells me that it is wrong and bad to enslave creatures like us as chattel, and if one of those two rules had to suffer defeat in an ultimate contest of The Real (not sure why we'd need one - surely real things are as real as anything else), imo it's the non-wall-walking.

I have a bit of a problem with Phoebe equating the fact that we cannot walk through walls being on par with the moral belief that chattel slavery is wrong. It doesn't matter what time period you look at, it has always been a reality that people cannot walk through solid objects. That's as true for us today as it was for our caveman ancestors. However, slavery has been a part of many societies prior to the Renaissance, and beyond for some societies. And saying that all of those societies were evil because they practiced slavery if something I have an issue with, since that involves applying our modern-day morals to that society, and just one aspect of that society at that.

Reality may be that the overwhelming majority of the population agrees that chattel slavery is morally wrong. But like anything that deals with morals, it may vary a bit on a person-by-person basis based on each person's moral framework. Otherwise, there wouldn't be the problems that exist with human trafficking that is still occurring in modern times. Just because you want it to be fact, does not mean that it is a universal, undisputed, scientifically-verifiable fact.

It's absolutely universally wrong, for all time, in any time, yes. I don't buy this "right and wrong are whatever we happen to think they are" nonsense. When or how would that ever be not-wrong? Whether we want to excuse this or that person or large group of people for what they chose to do is a separate question, but slavery isn't any less wrong simply because some people sometimes don't get that it's wrong or don't care that it's wrong. We might be doing things today that are totally wrong, for all I know, and our ignorance or willful refusal to accept it won't make a bit of difference to that fact, which is as hard a fact as the wall.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this started as a question about the Simulation that is being hijacked into a discussion on absolute morality. Oh well.

Tahlvin, I would disagree that morality is different for individual people. Our interpretation of morality is different, but if something is wrong it is still wrong even if the person committing the act disagrees. We may have limited moral authority to meaningfully castigate them, but in our own judgments we should be consistent. The exemption that I use is often to suspend moral judgment while interpreting the actions of people in other cultures or time periods, and that's more to limit biased interpretation than as a pass on evil. You can't understand their actions if you have "it's because they reject God" on call.

Morality isn't different for different people? Then why is there a debate about abortion or gay marriage? What about fundamentalist Christians who think gays are violating God's laws? Or taken to extremes, they have a duty to kill gay people for violating God's laws? What about the Islamic fundamentalists who think they have a duty to Allah to kill non-Muslims, and will be rewarded in the afterlife? Sure, some of these are not the norm, and is considered by most of modern society to be a warped morality, thankfully. And yes, even if the gay-hating, Christian fundamentalist who kills a gay person thinks he is morally justified in doing so, he is subject to the law of the land that says murder is illegal (and probably subject to hate crime laws, as well). But that's a legal issue, not a moral issue. There have been plenty of instances, in history as well as today, where morality and legality don't line up well.

But I agree, this discussion of morality is not what this thread was intended to be. And I did not intend to head that direction, either, I was just responding to some of Phoebe's thoughts. My intention with some of this thread was the thought I've had for awhile, increased by my son's color blindness, about our perception of our surroundings. We are trained from children to recognize colors. This card is blue, that card is red, etc. But our visual system involves our eyes sending signals to the brain, and the brain interpreting those signals. What's to say that what two people are seeing and calling "blue" is really being interpreted by their brains as the exact same thing, or are their brains just trained to call them the same thing? In other words, if I hooked someone else's eyes up to my brain and looked at something that I would normally call "blue", would I still see "blue", or could I instead see "purple"? If I had brain damage and my brain had to rewire my visual functions and my knowledge of color, would it continue to interpret blue as "blue", or could I perceive it as a different color now? Our perception of the world is based on our brain interpreting the input from our senses, and a common language/terminology for those different inputs (colors, shapes, textures, etc.). But are we really "seeing" the same thing, or have we just been taught to label them the same thing?

"THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!"