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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

> What is fact and what is fiction depends on person's senses and beliefs.

You probably didn't mean that: the difference between fact and fiction doesn't depend on anyone's senses and beliefs, but on what the world is as a whole.

What we think is fact or fiction will depend on our senses and beliefs.

Basically, even a genuine belief in in unicorns and pixie dust don't make those a fact. It's fiction, the believer just doesn't know it.

As for religion and secularity… well, either there is a God, or there isn't. If there is, secularity won't make it go away. If there isn't, religion won't make it true.

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There is no objetive reality, only subjetive. The "real world" is what your senses and knowledge tells you. You claim there is a "true reality" outside your mind, and I claim that for all it is worth, are the same and indistinguishable. If there's something we can't observe, does it really exists?

The important is to accept we are wrong when evidence arises, and change our mental model.

The objective reality is really just made of jello. We humans are blind to this reality. Except Bill Cosby, he gets it.

> There is no objetive reality, only subjetive. The "real world" is what your senses and knowledge tells you.

I was never sure how to deal with this postmodernist crap. When someone deliberately confuses the map and the territory, what can I say?

Let us just observe that sometimes, I believe something, and then, I see something else happen. That tend to give me a sense that something is going on outside of my mind. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

This generalizes to the entire humanity, by the way. Most people believed in a Young Earth, then we discovered fossils. Most people used to think the Earth was the centre of the universe, then Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, proved otherwise.

> The important is to accept we are wrong when evidence arises, and change our mental model.

That I must agree with. On the other hand, I'm not sure how this can help those who believe in magical thinking.

> I was never sure how to deal with this postmodernist crap. When someone deliberately confuses the map and the territory, what can I say?

Hit them with a rock. Objective reality hurts.

I suppose if you remember creating yourself, and exactly how and why you did that before you had experienced any of your subjective reality (so presumably there was none), then your view is both worthy and consistent.

Serious questions for you mcosta: If you don't believe in objective reality then what do you think made you? Where did the rules (i.e. chemistry, DNA, neural layout) of your mind come from that allow you to function and have subjective experiences?

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