Hacker News Reader

Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

View on HN

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.

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. :)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com