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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Hey wjnc. That's actually part of the problem I have with it. When you say:

> ...for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.

That is a large part of why I take issue with the phrase: the idea that 'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible (afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this), so it's problematic to have it assumed as true, and to encode that assumption subtly into the language you're using (it's a phrase made up of common words, so unless you're familiar with it, you won't know it has a special meaning).

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You wrote "afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this". This is an example of a fragment of your constructed reality. It's something you choose to believe, because it coheres with your other beliefs. It is clearly not a true statement, because the supposed objective reality is constantly updated with new knowledge acquired across all domains of human thought. No single individual possesses the complete view of all the knowledge. In other words any subjective reality is constructed, and the objective reality is not known.

A "constructed reality" is not the same as a lie (or incomplete truth). A lie can stand alone in contradiction with facts and proofs, as your statement above does, by definition. A lie can be integrated into a coherent view of the world, a constructed reality, composed of truths and other lies.

> In other words any subjective reality is constructed, and the objective reality is not known.

Yes, agreed. The only issue I have here is about the contortion of language to support a particular philosophical viewpoint. If the phrase were 'the social construction of subjective reality', there would be no problem. Instead, this underhanded usage of 'reality' is an attempt to remove the distinction between objective and subjective reality. Not only does it do that functionally, but it was also promulgated by people who do not believe in the existence of an objective reality (comically, in part because of then-vogue linguistic theories and bad interpretations of quantum and relativity theories).

To a certain degree the list of people who don't believe in an objective reality includes Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In fact probing the rather complex and contradictory nature of objectivity has been part of almost every philosophical school of thought or tradition I've ever read about.

It's funny - I find myself violently opposed to epistemological relativism right up until the moment I hear someone else use the term "objective reality". ;-)

Thing is, I think our brains effectively run on epistemological relativism -- it describes the map the brain builds about the world outside -- but "objective reality" indirectly measured via action and reaction is what keeps it honest.

You might believe you're the leader of your country, and you are as long as everybody else also thinks you're the leader - and as soon as they stop believing it, it's no longer true. This is shared, constructed reality in action, and it's also "objectively true": if you imagined a disinterested observer looking at a human society through a set of powerful instruments, they could identify you as the leader. It still doesn't stop you coming down to earth with a bump if you believe you can fly, of course.

> but "objective reality" indirectly measured via action and reaction is what keeps it honest.

Which is great when you're talking about stuff you can poke and kick and study but people very quickly start creating new stuff like "beauty" and "justice" and all the other nouns that you can't kick or poke.

Even things you can kick or poke start to become rather tricksy if you're not careful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

It's not unreasonable to argue that the number of things that are amenable to uncontroversial objective study is rather small. We live in a world full of nouns and we aren't terrible clear on which ones are objective and which ones aren't.

I think we're on the same side of this.

Yeah, it's a tricky set of distinctions to master. When I stated doing meditation, I started to "get it", that is I became more aware of the way my mind manufactures reality on a continuous basis, and all we ever really do is interact with this internal simulacrum. But that doesn't mean the same thing as what solipsism means. It means you train and expand your awareness by understanding the limitations of that awareness, just like you exercise a muscle.

You can take this idea and use it as an excuse to retreat into passivity, or you can see it's power and use that to go out and make a difference in the world. It's your choice, your Karma, as they say. :)

Let's agree about the premise that a objective reality exists. Still, the problem persists - we do not know anything about this objective reality or more accurately said, we can not know whether our subjective perception of reality matches this objective reality. There is no way to find out as we are bound to our limited senses.

I'd recommend reading "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" by Nietzsche.

I commend to your attention Isaac Asimov's essay that I believe is called "The Relativity of Wrong". Even if nobody knows everything, not everyone is equally ignorant; even if no model of the world is perfect, some are a lot better than others, and we can tell which is which.

"Even if nobody knows everything, not everyone is equally ignorant;"

I certainly agree. One would hope, I sure do for one, that the cloud of subjective realities trends towards the objective as time approaches infinity, assuming such objective reality exists. The cloud may even ultimately converge on the objective reality when all the knowledge is eventually acquired and made universally known. Then human race can be said to have achieved enlightenment. It is certainly a race against time due to cosmic forces beyond our control. One of the issues this article raises is that humanity is now actively and successfully devising machines that serve no other purpose but to disperse the said cloud of subjective realities away from the objective one. By doing so it is willfully directing resources (time) towards postponing or preventing enlightenment.

Measurements of the usefulness and accuracy of models aren't evidence of their truth value, unfortunately.

"and we can tell which is which" - I doubt that. You think you can, but others will disagree on your truth. So how do we determine who is right? Yes, it's a philosophical discussion, but therefore no less relevant.

"Reality" is ambiguous, I agree. What we experience, even at a basic sensory level, isn't reality. Rather, it's a model that's based on limited perceptions. In an context based on natural selection, at scales from evolutionary through developmental to experiential.

And further, what we experience as reality depends on our model of reality. And then we act, which reinforces whatever reality we think exists.

'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible

I'm not so sure about that. I find Kant is pretty convincing; scientific realism is pretty vulnerable when faced with the fact that theories change. Science is best viewed with an instrumentalist perspective, that's where it is most solid.

We simply don't know if we're brains in vats, or creatures in a simulation. The real reality is unknowable.

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