Does Objective Reality Exist? If so, how?

Okay, I was debating in another thread and somebody accused me of not being grounded to reality. Instantly, the question arose: Whose reality? What reality? Obviously I would be grounded to my own reality. But my reality is different then the reality of every single other person, and all their realities are different from each others and mine. So that being the case, is there an objective reality at all? Is there even one single thing that everybody agrees on unanimously world wide? If there is not, then how can there exist an objective reality? I mean we don’t even all agree that we are humans as stupid as that sounds. Some people think we are animals, mammals, or alien lizards in the most extreme case (no I’m serious, people believe this). People see science as “objective” but what makes it objective? Science can be skewed. The latest climate gate scandal is proof of that. So what is so objective about science?

I have long promoted the belief that the universe is conscious and that therefore consciousness is universal. So that is the reason why a chair is still a chair when I am not observing it. But while I say it is a chair, there is undoubtedly someone else in the world who thinks it is not a chair for whatever reason. There is no doubt in my mind that we as people add form to the universe. After all, without someone around to say a chair is a chair, which is a piece of furniture that is composed of atoms that make wood molecules that bond together in a manner that is comfortable to sit on, it would just be a bunch of energy mixed in with a bunch more energy. That is the true nature of the universe and the only real objective reality isn’t it? I think that is maybe the one thing people can agree on. Not necessarily that it is energy, but it is something. So can we just say that even the most insane person agrees that stuff is stuff, and the universe is made up of stuff? I don’t know. You might even find someone to disagree with that…

check out berkeley and spinoza

-Imp

What you are doing is pointing out a reflexive quality of our language, that is often expressess what we are trying to deny… For example, reality comes from the word res, that means objective thing… You are saying reality exists in attempting to question it… It is like asking if things that are, are in fact…Isn’'t the answer to that question obvious…What we call reality is the objects and the space in time… We are all of these in life. We are objects and space in time…To ask, we must be, and we cannot prove objective reality exists any better than by proving we exist…From our perspective, when we die, all dies… But until that time, objecive reality is beyond doubt at least with our language, because it asserts as we deny…Nothing, as a word, shows this fact, for the reality is first asserted before denied…At least, if the prefix still modifies the word…

Hmmmm. I don’t know about that. After all, there is still the issue that the entire universe may be in your head and there are no other people. But setting that aside, even language is not always agreed upon. I doubt there is even one word in the English language that every single person would agree to the meaning of. Nor would even every single person agree that it is English. Perhaps someone from an African tribe might mistake it for German, for example. What I am saying is that subjective reality is sovereign over objective reality. Even when someone claims that X thing is objective, it is through their subjective reality that they find it to be objective. So it really is just an opinion. I think what most people claim to be objective reality, is really just a majority consensus on an issue.

But how does a majority vote make it objective at all? I for one am not too quick to jump on “the majority is usually right” bandwagon. Common belief has more then often been later proven incorrect. For instance, it was once commonly believed that the world was flat and there were sea monsters at the edge of the world. I think it is safe to say that is not the case now. Also it was once believed that the sun rotated around the earth. That has also been proven false. I personally think the most commonly believed things are usually the incorrect ones. People go through life believing whatever makes the most sense to them until something better comes along. Facts come and go. History is rewritten. Different schools of thought manipulate reality at various times. How do we really know that science is any more accurate then religion? Truth is that we don’t. This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but reality appears to be for all intents and purposes made up. We make it up as we go along. A child’s maturity is evidence of that. As we grow older we change, and so does our perception of what is real and what is not. Little children believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny but when they reach a certain age they stop believing that. Hardly anyone grows up continuing to believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny.

So what changes? Do Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny change? No our perceptions of them do. In this case, our perceptions of their very existence changes. But that is actually false. The Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny do still exist, they are just not real. The human mind is a universe in and of itself. It is this magnificent universe that forms what we conveniently call objective reality. If everybody on the entire planet perceived that the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause were real, then wouldn’t they be? What if we all thought we knew Santa Clause personally and he was a great guy. I know that sounds like an impossible scenario, but people believe more outlandish things then that. We could actually be reptilian apes. Some people say we are. More then one would think. I have a friend who is schizophrenic and he actually thinks the CIA put a microchip in his brain that they communicate to him with via radio frequencies. I have told him that he is just mentally ill, but he insists that I am just not aware of the conspiracy. I told him to X-Ray his head, and if there weren’t any microchip there then he would have to believe me. Though he did not take me up on that, I bet if he had he would have come up with an excuse why it did not show up on X-ray such as the X-ray technicians were in on it.

But this being the case, how do we know that we are not all crazy and he is the only sane one? We don’t, and there is no way to prove it one way or another. So again, what is objective reality? I am not entirely sure that it exists at all.

“Just”? What else do you want of it?

If science is the study of objective reality, technology is the creation of things using our knowledge of it. So investigate the subjectiveness of shooting yourself in the foot; report back to the majority.

Thanks for the links. It’s good to know that someone else sees it more or less the way I do on the consciousness thing. But one thing I find odd about that theory is that it basically implies that until something is observed for the first time it has not any form. So then I guess the first person to look at a tree would be the person that made it into a tree? Or does God already set that it is a tree for you, in which case there is no subjective reality influence over objects at all. As far as I can tell there isn’t a middle ground there. Either God (the universe, whatever) shapes the objects of the universe before you see them or it doesn’t. Right?

Something other then mob rule. Do you think the majority always right? If science is the study of what the majority consensus says then what if the majority consensus is wrong? I fail to see what shooting myself in the foot has to do with this conversation. Witches and magicians all have the group majority consensus that magic is real. In the middle ages the average person believed magic was real also. So the clergy and covens and such all studied magic and then created “enchanted items” with it. So then when they created those items were they using science to create technology? What about alchemists? Were they scientists? How do you know that modern day science isn’t actually totally BS, and the witches and alchemists were actually correct?

Not saying that I believe the above, just challenging the viewpoint that science is objective.

and that’s plato’s question

-Imp

If you do not know that you are not crazy, you are crazy… I will say something… Idle speculation and fantasy is not philosophy…Consider the ability of your language to assert a positive condition…That is what the verb- To Be says, and what you must do to deny that positive existence…Is it is, or is it not…In any event it must be considered as is to have being denied… We cannot have nothing without something…We cannot have no thing…

Does objective reality exist? The real question is: do we have any means by which to determine the objectivity or lack thereof of reality?

If the answer to the second question is No, then the first question is meaningless.

Huh? What are the chances? I don’t believe there is any way in which we could calculate that. The law of averages does not apply since there are only two options, and so if you had to give chances (which are irrelevant to this idea) then those chances would be 50/50 since it either is one way or the other. If we define real as “existing independently from human thought”, does it matter if everyone is real or not. If they exist in my thought then they are real enough to me, so of course I would treat them as such. But the possibility would still exist that nothing was real.

So you are saying anytime two or more people experience the same thing that it is objective? That doesn’t seem very objective to me. I bet there is at least one other schizophrenic somewhere out there with a CIA implanted radio chip in their head (voices got to come from somewhere right?). So then if these two got together and experienced the CIA communicating to them through alleged microchip implants together would that make the experience objective?

Well when everyone at school wakes up with presents under the tree, then Santa Clause is obviously an objective experience. He is also omniscient and can make moral judgments about your actions remotely as we are all told. Does that make it an objective reality

This is off subject, but it sure seems odd that Santa is so good at spying on people and judging them. I wonder if Santa Clause counts as a police state…

So ideas can’t change?

Everything exists. I made a thread about this some time ago. You see, nonexistence is nonexistent so then there is no such thing as nonexistence and only existence is existent. This is a tautology. Even if something only exists as thought it still exists. Are you saying that there exists a such a thing which does not exist? That is an obvious contradiction.

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Why is that? I am saying we don’t know for certain if any one person is crazy or not. Objective reality is subjective. Everybody perceives reality differently without exception. Assuming that there is only one genuine reality, then only one person can be totally sane and all the rest must be crazy to some extent or another. Or it could be that we are all crazy, and no one is sane. I tend to lean more towards the former since even if one person’s reality happens to be the correct one, there is no practical way in which we would ever know that. If you want to get into states of being, being is the same thing as existence. As you said there cannot be nothing. I agree since nothing would be nonexistence which doesn’t exist. But then this creates a conundrum. When I say there is no tree in my backyard, I am saying no tree exists since is means exists. But trees do exist. Only not in my backyard. The lack of treeness in my backyard creates a negative state of being. But it is still a state of being none the less, and therefore exists. So we could get a group of people together to come observe my backyard together and determine trees have no being in my backyard. Which trees have no being in my backyard then? All trees have no being in my backyard. Are all trees nonexistent then? Of course not. Trees exist. So then no being must be a form of being. So then all trees have being in my backyard, albeit negative being. So another way to look at it using math, if we could count all the trees in the universe (lets say there are 100 quadrillion trees in the universe) and none of them are in my backyard then I have negative 100 quadrillion trees in my backyard. So although we cannot have no thing at all. We can have the lack of everything else. It just cannot be the total lack of everything.

I hope I wrote that in a non confusing way…

Back up a moment - you said that what most people claim to be objective reality is just a majority consensus. That’s a tautology. What most people claim is the same as the majority consensus. I don’t see how you can argue that.

Taking as an assumption that there is an objective reality, we must realise we only have subjective access to it. However, if there is one objective reality, we will all see aspects of the same thing. If we agree on something objectively unreal, we will see different things altogether. The trick is how to separate that out from the language we use to communicate what we see - if ten people all claim to have seen an angel, they’ll most likely all assume that each other’s experiences were similar to their own.

Science is really the distillation of what we can say about the universe, and a very key part of it is its repeatability. If you take a measurement and I take a measurement and other significant variables have been controlled, the measurement will be the same. We align our subjective viewpoints sufficiently that when we describe what we see to others who have seen things from the same angle, we agree on the outcome.

We can use that agreement to build theories that make predictions about what will happen. It’s the success of these predictions, measured (ideally) impartially and (importantly) non-anecdotally that gives science the edge over witchcraft. Excepting some pernicious variants of witchcraft like homeopathy, of course. It’s important to discard anecdotal points because we can’t be sure that the subjective viewpoints were sufficiently controlled to know what we are describing.

You cannot separate yourself from what you listen to or look at. Your preconceptions and expectations are all built into what you think you are listening to or looking at.

There is nothing you can do to change your present attitude on reality because whatever you are now, your confusions, problems, conflicts, are all products of self-consciousness. Thought can never know anything as it is. It has to distort what is given according to its predilections. Any attempt on your part to change the given is born out of thought, and whatever thought does only perpetuates and strengthens itself and the knowledge it has, but does not make you free from them. Besides there is no reality beyond the knowledge you have of it.

I like how people use tautologies like some kind of a swear word in this forum. I don’t understand how if my position is a tautology that somehow makes it invalid. If it were a contradiction, then okay. But it is the opposite. Yes, I established A=A. Then I went on to say why A/=T, T being Truth. And you have to admit, the majority consensus is not always true. So A/=T. In my search for truth I embrace tautologies and avoid contradictions. Isn’t that what you are supposed to do?

The assumption you begin with is the very thing I am challenging. Perhaps there is no objective reality and what we think is objective reality is just where our subjective realities intersect and happen to agree. Maybe our common agreement is actually just part of our design. We might all measure the same thing and agree on a measurement, and then some advanced alien race might come and measure it with different equipment and inform us that we are way off. This can even be seen through genetics. One different gene pool has a tendency to behave and perceive things differently then the other. If there were an objective reality, assuming that everyone perceives reality at least slightly different, only one person throughout all of history could possibly have a truly objective view of reality. That is quite a counter-intuitive assumption. So barring that, there is no objective reality. At least not just one. I think that quantum mechanics should tip us off to that fact. You can perform the same quantum experiment over and over and control the experiment down to the subatomic level, but still get different results every time. I think the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle limits how objective anything can really be.

I consider myself a pluralist. If there was one objective reality, wouldn’t that make pluralism false? I think it goes without saying that there is more then one correct answer to a question. I think you could ask me any question to which there is only one seemingly obvious answer, and I could come up with a way to create a different answer that is also true. For instance 1+1=2. But it also = the difference between 3 and 1.

I didn’t claim it was invalid… Go and reread what was written. I pointed out that what most people claim to be objective reality is a majority consensus, whereupon you seemed to think I was advocating that objective reality was mob rule, or some such. In any case, I wasn’t attacking you, or using “tautology” in any way negatively, just explaining why what most people claim to be objective reality is a majority consensus.

I don’t think you proved that A/=T, only that A=T doesn’t follow from A=A. But I’d agree with your premise that A/=T, absolutely.

If we all measure the same thing, then there is an objective reality that we draw upon for our subjective experiences. And are the advanced aliens in your subjective reality, mine, both? Are they in theirs, and are we? Are they measuring the same thing as us?

It sounds flippant, but it’s the core of the question. You don’t need unmediated objective access to an objective reality in order for there to be an objective reality; we can all form our own subjective models of objective reality and be unable to do otherwise, but still agree on the existence of a common substance that we are imperfectly/subjectively/perspectivally judging. If we then take steps to ensure that our subjectivity is minimised, we can talk of degrees of objectivity.

Do you have anything to back up this claim? I don’t even know how perception is measured.

You’re confusing the reality with our view of it. Not a single person has to have an objective view of reality for there to be an objective reality; I personally don’t believe that there is an objective view of reality. There is an objective reality that is subjectively viewed and described in various ways.

There are thousands of people who can see the Statue of Liberty at the moment; not one of them sees the same thing, that doesn’t mean there is no Statue, or that there are thousands of them (or we should talk of the Statues of Liberty!) All of the people will agree that the statue is in one place in the communal space we share, that it’s roughly so big, that it’s solid… quite a coincidence for thousands of individual subjective realities, what causes that to happen?

Quantum physics gives reliable and repeatable predictions every time. That’s why it’s a science, and a remarkably powerful and accurate one. The Uncertainty principle only limits which predictions you can possibly make.

Does Objective Reality Exist? If so, how?
When you use some outside agency as the basis, the foundation of reality.

I have a quick question for you thinkers that hold to this kind of view, and I hope I am not derailing the topic too much here…

I used to think exactly the same – there are just far too many individual perceptions to posit (as “fact”) any one description of an objective observation/experience. However, upon contemplating this, and discussing with a friend of mine, we managed to stumble across an example in which I can separate subjective interpretations from objective recognition.

Here’s the example – Suppose you bring 5 people into a small, cubic room (maybe 10x10ft.). These people are of varied age and physical condition; let’s even suppose one of them is blind. Say you give them a few minutes to become acquainted with the room, objects inside, what have you. For the sake of simplicity, let’s use this layout:

0==0 = couch
= chair
@ = lamp
, = door (entrance)

-0==0]
[__,_@]

After getting a ‘sense’ of the place, you have them leave – completely out of site and beyond hearing range. You bring them back once, one at a time, and ask what has changed (you’ve done nothing at this point).

You make them leave once more. While they are away, you re-arrange the objects inside the room and remove one:

[–@—]
[__,_

You bring them all back one at a time, without letting any of the observers have contact with those who haven’t observed yet, and ask what has changed.

Would you not expect that every observer - regardless of age & physical condition - would notice a change? Even further, would you not expect that each observer would notice the couch and lamp were moved, and couch removed? I would, even the blind observer could determine that on his own.

Is that not your objective reality – as far as we “know” it anyway?

Now suppose that two of the observers say the couch looks faded after the re-arrangement because the door is blocking the light from the lamp.

That is your subjective reality; no?

All subjects would likely perceive the same change in object reality, while only a couple would notice certain changes because of subjective preferences/tendencies. In other words the changes in object reality would seem definite, while changes in certain characteristics of the entities comprising the object reality may be subjective.

Well, that agrees with my theory that there is an underlying objective reality. But then it presupposes an underlying objective reality - you objectively do things to the room that people agree on. A diehard subjectivist would say that you alter your room, and other people find their rooms altered But no, I would agree with what you say.

What I was arguing is that how each person experiences the room depends on their subjective view of the objective situation. Take someone who was raised completely away from modern society as one of your five, a caveman miraculously reanimated. He’ll have no idea what the lamp is, what bits of it are movable, whether it’s functional or cultural; is that seat some weird plant? And so on. He’ll observe the material arrangement of the room, but won’t see a lamp, a chair or a couch. He might see a religious statue, a weird plant and a soft altar. His mental model of the same objective reality will be different from that of the others, a chair is not a priori.

And in the same way, we are all fitting things into our mental models and making assumptions, all the time, because it’s useful to do so. Because we’d be overloaded with sense data if we didn’t, and because we couldn’t predict what would happen if we didn’t have the guidelines we learn from experience and live by - water flows, porcelain keeps its shape but breaks if you drop it, drinks are best served in cups, and so on. Our mental models are intensely subjective views of (objective) reality, in fact they are what make us subjective, and only insofar as they are useful and others agree with them do we have common ground to talk about objective reality.

Reality is such that we all take for granted in our days to day lives that there is a real world that exists independently of what we think about it. We recognize that we have access to that world by means of our senses. We use words to talk about what we understand to be real objects in the world. Our statements are true or false depending on whether or not they correspond to real objects in the world. Causation is a real relation between objects and events. Even an extreme skeptic or subjectivist will have to admit that such is the case. One who does not is either a liar or out of touch with reality.

You don’t have to be too extreme to hold that causation is an a priori inference of our minds.

I’m not sure what you mean by “real objects”, it seems to change between the first and second sentences of your quote. If they are portions of reality that we define and agree to be units, OK. If they are individual things-in-themselves then I disagree. And I’m not, as far as I know, a liar (Cretan paradoxes aside), nor out of touch with reality. Quite the opposite, I’d argue.