Is There A Given, Discoverable, Objective Reality?

[DesertBob]

Has anyone here read My Big Toe by Thomas Campbell? (Big Toe = Big Picture Theory of Everything). Campbell is a former scientist turned philosopher after spending arguably too much time navel-gazing in his inner world -- and possibly smoking too much pot.

 

This guy desperately needs an editor -- he's terribly verbose and inconcise. Nor do I agree with him. But his massive tome is an interesting exercise in thinking about the nature of consciousness and what happens if you take to an extreme the idea that matter doesn't really exist except as a perception of consciousness, and that everything is a giant supercomputer running a simulation within an infinite regression of increasingly large supercomputers. It's quite possible that this sort of musing inspired The Matrix.

 

To Campbell the purpose of consciousness is to reduce its entropy and evolve better adaptations to be more effective at same.

 

In that vein, how do we know that everything we perceive with our consciousness isn't just that -- a perception? How do we know that a given discoverable objective reality "out there" exists?

 

How do you prove empirically (not for just practical purposes but absolutely) that physicality isn't simply an illusion?

[Legion]

Oh man, I like epistemological musings. Let me think about this for a bit and return later.

 

I can say this though. If there is no objective world, then all of science is a farce, because the entire aim of science is to make the objective world comprehendible to our subjective selves.

[Guest Valk0010]

It seems to me that we have to have some sort of objective reality for our minds to interpret(perception). If the purpose and the existence of consciousness is designed for anything its that, to creative our subjective views of the objective.

[Overcame Faith]

 

In that vein, how do we know that everything we perceive with our consciousness isn't just that -- a perception? How do we know that a given discoverable objective reality "out there" exists?

 

How do you prove empirically (not for just practical purposes but absolutely) that physicality isn't simply an illusion?

 

We are ultimately dependent upon our own minds to interpret the world around us through our senses. We can call on instruments to help us understand our physical surroundings, but even they are dependent upon our minds to interpret through our senses. At a very important level, we must simply accept that we evolved in response to our environment and that therefore there is in fact an environment outside of ourselves.

[DesertBob]

Oh man, I like epistemological musings. Let me think about this for a bit and return later.

 

I can say this though. If there is no objective world, then all of science is a farce, because the entire aim of science is to make the objective world comprehendible to our subjective selves.

I don't know that all of science is a farce because even if consciousness is all there is, it still presents a universe (although virtual in the technical sense) that has a rule set that is discoverable and manipulatable (in a practical sense). Gravity is still "real" in the sense that if I were to jump off a 20 story building right now this would be my last post.

 

I am not suggesting that if we could prove that reality is 100% perception and 0% actual matter that the appropriate response would be to behave as if that were true. Because saying that reality is a simulation is not the same as saying it either springs from or can be influenced in any meaningful / reproducible / reliable way by our individual minds. Campbell isn't suggesting that we start suspending the (apparent) physical laws with Jedi mind tricks. His point is that this particular virtual reality is an individual experiment or lab for raising awareness and lowering the entropy of our consciousness and we have to work within that framework.

 

Of course he believes you can see or even participate in other realities via out of body experiences which he believes are as "real" as any other reality. And therein lies the slippery slope. Is it a good idea to accord dreams (waking or otherwise), guided imagery, and the like such significance? Jung would say our unconscious speaks to us in symbols, that this represents some "higher self" or "alter ego" and that we can even interact with characters in dreams using certain techniques. But he stops short of saying that altered states of consciousness come from other realities. He calls the characters that people our dreams "archetypes", and doesn't treat them as inhabitants of alternate universes.

 

I'm not sure I'm even comfortable with Jung, much less Campbell. But both of those guys flirt with ideas that have some connection or overlap with mental / emotional phenomena that drive the religious experience of many people -- at least people who are constitutionally more sensitive / open to them.

 

A scientist would ideally be curious about these phenomena because as Jung showed, they have many characteristics that are universal across different cultures and times, and they are at least somewhat amenable to scientific inquiry.

 

The problem is that at some point you cross a line where your data is coming from the inner subjective experiences of people as described to you after the fact. It can't be directly measured in a test tube. You can measure brainwaves of people in altered states of consciousness and ask them what happened. You can attempt remote viewing and the retrieval of data known to the researcher but not the subject, etc. This is how Campbell started out. But then he started investigating altered states of consciousness personally, and much of his book simply describes his personal explorations over many decades, the results of experiments conducted and data gathered by him personally, and he admits that it's unverifiable and urges you to do your own investigation. Which sounds suspiciously like evangelicals urging you to have a personal religious epiphany like the one they've had.

 

I get off the hook here because I seem utterly incapable of entering altered states of consciousness (or at least lucid ones, at any rate). I'm not sure it's a loss -- I'm just curious about life in general, including this, but can't investigate it personally. So to me it becomes somewhat irrelevant.

 

However, this is a forum full of areligious skeptics, so I'm curious if any of you have gone down this particular rabbit hole or had any useful thoughts about it. My purpose is completely neutral. I don't have a need to find out what's behind the curtain anymore; I'm not looking for a substitute for a religious experience I left without regret. I'm simply open and curious.

[DesertBob]

...we must simply accept that we evolved in response to our environment and that therefore there is in fact an environment outside of ourselves.

Agreed, for practical purposes. But is there a way to prove that the "environment outside of ourselves" is a given, objectively discoverable reality, not simply a shared illusion?

 

The thought experiment that I heard someplace is this: can you prove that your brain wasn't taken out of your head by aliens and hooked up to instruments that feed you an apparently real experience? Or expressed in Hollywood terms, can you prove that you're not plugged into the Matrix?

 

The import of this question is, religions are all based to some greater or lesser degree on the idea that there is a hidden reality behind the apparent reality, and that there's some value in knowing about this or even interacting with it in some way.

 

Most of us here are prone to dismiss this out of hand as primitive, magical thinking. But why are we as a species so prone to it? Is it because there is actually something to it, and the real primitive thinking of religion is to misinterpret it as God? If you separate it from people's yearnings and fears and hopes, and look at it objectively, is there still some value in it?

 

In the alternative, is there simply some evolutionary glitch in our mental machinery that makes us prone to an illusory sense that something more is going on than meets the eye? Why don't we trust our senses 110%? We clearly, as a species do not -- if we did, religion and political extremism / fanaticism and the like would not get much traction.

[florduh]

Brings back the days of a freshman dorm smelling of weed in the wee hours.

 

 

 

 

Animal House addressed this kind of philosophical cud chewing with this gem of dialog:

 

That means that...

 

 

 

our whole solar system...

 

 

 

could be, like...

 

 

 

one tiny atom in the fingernail

of some other giant being.

 

 

 

This is too much!

 

 

 

That means...

 

 

 

-one tiny atom in my fingernail could be--

-Could be one little...

 

 

 

tiny universe.

 

 

 

Could l buy some pot from you?

 

 

 

 

There are questions not worth asking.

[DesertBob]

There are questions not worth asking.

(smile)

 

Yes, 'tis so true. And thoughts not worth thinking ... or at least not worth over-thinking.

 

The question-within-a-question here, that is worth asking in my view, is probably reducible thusly:

 

The things under discussion in this thread are unknown and probably unknowable, given that smarter people than I have looked into it for millennia and have come to no real consensus and recent technological advances seem to make the problem more, rather than less, complex. Perhaps what it all boils down to is that we're too limited and it's pointless to ask questions that we aren't equipped to understand the answers to, even if we were given them.

 

Where's the balance here? That's the real question.

 

I sounds like just completely ignoring it or discounting it is the easy way out. On the other hand, excessive thought experiments can lead to long rambling dissertations, new religions, coming under the sway of some exotic bogus belief system, self-aggrandizement, self-delusion, and so forth. All of which are signs that we are out of our depth in even looking into such things.

 

This is humbling to contemplate. We'd like to think there is no ultimate limit to human creativity and intellect ... but maybe we've bumped our heads against it.

[florduh]

To me. such questions are akin to wondering if the color blue looks the same to you as it does to me. It's like wondering if the bank that owns the house you live in has its offices located in a glass or a brick building. IOW, irrelevant.

 

I know some people are drawn to such fruitless discussions of 'what if' but we live in this reality and are learning more about it every day. What other course of action makes sense? One may think that nothing is real, but that bus you've imagined in the intersection will still kill you if you walk in front of it. Besides, all the people involved in building that bus would disagree that you created it in your mind.

 

 

I sounds like just completely ignoring it or discounting it is the easy way out. On the other hand, excessive thought experiments can lead to long rambling dissertations, new religions, coming under the sway of some exotic bogus belief system, self-aggrandizement, self-delusion, and so forth. All of which are signs that we are out of our depth in even looking into such things.

 

This is humbling to contemplate. We'd like to think there is no ultimate limit to human creativity and intellect ... but maybe we've bumped our heads against it.

There is discoverable and verifiable reality and the rest is, by necessity, merely guesswork.

[DesertBob]

To me, such questions are akin to wondering if the color blue looks the same to you as it does to me. It's like wondering if the bank that owns the house you live in has its offices located in a glass or a brick building. IOW, irrelevant.

On the other hand how blue appears to you or whether it's the same as it appears to me speaks almost not at all to the meaning of life, or to anything else so long as we can both point at something blue and agree it's blue; and assuming the construction materials used in my bank mattered to me, compared to the ultimate fabric of reality, it's readily obtainable information. These questions you state are irrelevant precisely because they're demonstrably inconsequential. On the other hand the true nature of things is, potentially, extremely consequential, and certainly much more interesting.

I know some people are drawn to such fruitless discussions of 'what if' but we live in this reality and are learning more about it every day. What other course of action makes sense?

In practical day to day terms, of course. However, who really considers life a proposition that they would have agreed to in advance, given all the facts? Some of us have rationalized it and shrugged our shoulders and moved on, but the seductive power of wanting to inquire into the nature of reality has to do with the fact that understanding it would at the very least explain a lot that is inexplicable. I'm not talking about the questions most of us here have settled to our own satisfaction, e.g., is Christianity a true or false belief system. I'm talking about, what do I do about the perceived injustice and pain in my life; why did s/he have to die before I said what I wanted to say but wasn't ready to; why have my hopes and dreams and aspirations have all gone to shit despite having done all the "right" things; questions like that, which are being asked by people all the time. These are the questions that Christianity and other -isms are purporting to sell the "answers" to. Deciding their answers are bogus in no way makes the questions go away. People don't like fighting blind. They want to know what the real deal is.

One may think that nothing is real, but that bus you've imagined in the intersection will still kill you if you walk in front of it. Besides, all the people involved in building that bus would disagree that you created it in your mind.

I think you are lumping some ideas together here that don't really go together. If I posit that the bus exists only in a lucid dream that I share with the occupants of the bus and everyone else in my world, if its substance and concreteness is an illusion, I am not automatically saying that it's not a very realistic illusion that doesn't obey certain rules which if violated could end the dream in so far as I'm concerned. Indeed, I'm only positing, not saying I'm sure, so I'm still admitting the possibility -- nay, the probability -- that I'm wrong, and I'm acting accordingly. It's true that people can and do make leaps of illogic about how to respond to the idea that matter is an idea rather than a substance; not everyone does and I certainly wouldn't. It's true that some people would like it all to be a dream to escape or to figure out ways to manipulate it selfishly; but many do not.

 

Campbell and others like him aren't suggesting that reality isn't real, and shouldn't inform our actions; just that it consists entirely of data -- digital bits or something analogous. In practice the distinction between whether matter is virtual or "real" isn't even meaningful unless it points toward a way to use our minds to explore beyond our reality to others and to see how they interrelate and how we might interact with that, and/or to discover greater purpose by locating your place in a larger reality. A real larger reality, not the fantasy reality of religion.

There is discoverable and verifiable reality and the rest is, by necessity, merely guesswork.

So you would agree that not all reality is discoverable and verifiable. Would you agree it's possible that some of it may be inherently undiscoverable, that is, it will never be discovered, no matter how much time, and intellectual and technical sophistication we apply to it? Or do you believe that rational inquiry, the scientific method, etc., will eventually push back the frontiers of knowledge at least beyond what we are currently even aware that we're not aware of?

 

Put another way, does man need a few more million years to evolve further in order to grasp what he currently is baffled by, or do you believe we have substantially everything we need to eventually penetrate the mysteries of creation and existence?

[florduh]

So you would agree that not all reality is discoverable and verifiable.

It would be more accurate to say I think if there are things that are not discoverable and not verifiable, then they are indistinguishable from nonexistent.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

While I enjoy such questions when building my debating skills, using philosophy, I prefer to wait until such questions can be addressed in order to address them in any serious manner. Since this question smells of selfdefeating arguement. As if it were designed for failure. How do you prove that there is? You can't, because if you find a way, it could always be just in your head, then 45 minutes later, or what seemed to you to be a lifetime, you leave the matrix.

 

While I agree that philosophical arguements are all too often, too quick to be dismissed when they should be addressed, when they can be addressed. Ones like these aren't addressable, as in order to address them, you need an objective reality and a means to objectively address them. So no matter how you try to look at such a question, you'll get just the answer the poser of the question wanted, no objective reality.

[skepticalme]

I tend to think that there is an objective reality in the same way that Pi has and objective value. It exist but we can never obtain or define it with a perfect numerical value outside of abstract concept, we can only describe it with increasing degrees of precision. No matter how many digits you calculate, there are stilll infinitely more to be found.

[DesertBob]

So you would agree that not all reality is discoverable and verifiable.

It would be more accurate to say I think if there are things that are not discoverable and not verifiable, then they are indistinguishable from nonexistent.

Certain things we now know -- such as how to split the atom -- were not discoverable or verifiable 200 years ago, yet if they had been considered nonexistent no one would have ever looked into them. I'm not sure you literally mean what you say. Perhaps it's better to say that there's not point debating issues for which we have no quantifiable data, which leaves open the possibility that such data will eventually become available.

[DesertBob]

While I enjoy such questions when building my debating skills, using philosophy, I prefer to wait until such questions can be addressed in order to address them in any serious manner.

Perhaps the root problem is that people have trouble leaving some things alone. Mankind seeks to understand the Meaning of Life and as Douglass Adams hilariously pointed out, perhaps the answer won't be to our liking or that we don't even know how to frame the question (he suggested that the answer was "39").

 

Given our insistence on knowing the unknowable, we create religions and quasi-religions and movements that attempt to explain the aspects of life that don't seem to make coherent sense or make us uneasy.

 

All of which isn't to say that we can't continue to seek out that which we might have overlooked, so long as we're careful not to invent ideas that seem to fit the problem. It has to do with being comfortable with ambiguity. Ambiguity or just plain knowledge vacuums needn't be so abhorrent to us. They are data, just like all other data, and must be accepted for what they are: indications that we don't and at least at present can't know all there is to know.

 

We need to quit investing ego in knowing all there is to know, to the point that we make stuff up because we can't sit with the idea of being ignorant about anything.

[DesertBob]

I tend to think that there is an objective reality in the same way that Pi has and objective value. It exist but we can never obtain or define it with a perfect numerical value outside of abstract concept, we can only describe it with increasing degrees of precision. No matter how many digits you calculate, there are stilll infinitely more to be found.

That's a pretty good analogy. Although the problem under discussion isn't that we need more precision, but potentially a paradigm shift. The analogy works with respect to describing a presumably physical universe but breaks down if that universe is apparent rather than material. For one thing, if the universe is virtual then when we bump up against edge cases and limits we may simply be glimpsing the edges of a simulation, the approximations and holes in its rulesets. This means something to me, since I'm a software developer by trade and while I do line-of-business applications and large databases, rather than simulations, I do understand in general terms the limits of a simulation.

 

If I were to create a virtual being within a simulation, and that being were sufficiently sophisticated to possess self-awareness, it would see the limits of the operating system and memory as the limits of its universe. It would see the moment the simulation was launched as the "big bang" or moment of creation of its world. It would see various approximations and shortcuts in the simulation as puzzling inconsistencies.

 

(And no, a matrix-like view of reality doesn't demand a Creator, any more than a materialistic universe does; that's where MY analogy breaks down).

[florduh]

Certain things we now know -- such as how to split the atom -- were not discoverable or verifiable 200 years ago,

NO, that's not what I'm talking about at all. No doubt there are still discoverable things we have yet to discover.

 

If there are things that are not ever discoverable, that are by their nature forever undetectable by us, here, now, in this reality, they are no more relevant to us than if they didn't exist at all in any sense. They are, in effect, simply imaginary - assuming we entertain the concept at all.

[DesertBob]

If there are things that are not ever discoverable, that are by their nature forever undetectable by us, here, now, in this reality, they are no more relevant to us than if they didn't exist at all in any sense. They are, in effect, simply imaginary - assuming we entertain the concept at all.

I guess the logical question that then follows is, how do you know they are "forever undetectable"? We may simply not have thought of a practical method. And if we've rejected it out of hand in the meantime, we may never look for one.

 

Of course you're free to reject it out of hand for yourself, particularly as an area you don't wish to focus on even for a second. But I would suggest not dismissing out of hand anyone who pursues it.

 

As a for instance, someone elsewhere posted an interesting paper advancing a hypothesis about how, precisely, anesthesia suspends consciousness -- a mechanism we apparently don't presently understand with certainty. They suggest something over my head involving quantum effects in hydrophobic areas of protein folding. Whatever. If they turn out to be right, and it turns out that consciousness emanates at least in part from outside the physical brain, and they figure out how to tap into that, it's possible that some advance like that could open up whole new worlds of study, possibly leading to being able to verify what currently appears permanently beyond our reach -- just as splitting atoms or carrying around tiny little phones in our pockets or visiting the moon once occupied the realm of fantasy and science fiction.

 

I do take your point, and in my day to day life, I mostly go with it. I just don't consider thinking about the nature of reality and developing hypotheses, however apparently untestable, is a complete and utter waste of time for mankind generally. The trick is not to go places where the supportable data presently doesn't take you, however tantalizing it may be.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

While I enjoy such questions when building my debating skills, using philosophy, I prefer to wait until such questions can be addressed in order to address them in any serious manner.

Perhaps the root problem is that people have trouble leaving some things alone. Mankind seeks to understand the Meaning of Life and as Douglass Adams hilariously pointed out, perhaps the answer won't be to our liking or that we don't even know how to frame the question (he suggested that the answer was "39").

I know we don't like to leave such questions alone, but until we can address them, they remain just philosophical inquiry. Though good analogy with the meaning of life question, I saw that posed on a scifi show once. They asked this machine what the meaning of life was. I'm not against us asking the question, but I think we should address it seriously when that becomes possible, for now, its just useless to try to address it seriously. It would be like Socrates trying to understand quantum physics, when the most people knew about the world of the very small, stopped at the knowledge of a hypothetical form of matter called "the atom".

 

Given our insistence on knowing the unknowable, we create religions and quasi-religions and movements that attempt to explain the aspects of life that don't seem to make coherent sense or make us uneasy.

 

All of which isn't to say that we can't continue to seek out that which we might have overlooked, so long as we're careful not to invent ideas that seem to fit the problem. It has to do with being comfortable with ambiguity. Ambiguity or just plain knowledge vacuums needn't be so abhorrent to us. They are data, just like all other data, and must be accepted for what they are: indications that we don't and at least at present can't know all there is to know.

 

We need to quit investing ego in knowing all there is to know, to the point that we make stuff up because we can't sit with the idea of being ignorant about anything.

I don't understand though, as no one has this religious attitude that we know all there is to know except the religious or religiouslike. We accept that we just don't know everything, and I think its necessary to accept that. That's why I said that we need to get more information in order to address questions such as the question of "is there a given, discoverable, objective reality?". Right now, such a question is way too heavy for us to answer absolutely, but from what we have, there seems to be. So until we can address the question more seriously, we should go with what we know, and discover more of what we don't. I'm not suggesting that we assume we have all the data.

[florduh]

how do you know they are "forever undetectable"?

Not detectable in our natural world by natural means to our natural minds by their very definition - supernatural. That would include a separate reality that creates our illusory reality.

 

 

Back to the original question:

How do you prove empirically (not for just practical purposes but absolutely) that physicality isn't simply an illusion?

If one wishes to postulate we live in an illusion, then the question of proving it is irrelevant. It is impossible to ponder an unknown reality when all we can experience is in the only known reality. If you wish to label our known reality as an illusion, so be it. It changes nothing.

[Ouroboros]

If one wishes to postulate we live in an illusion, then the question of proving it is irrelevant. It is impossible to ponder an unknown reality when all we can experience is in the only known reality. If you wish to label our known reality as an illusion, so be it. It changes nothing.

Very true.

 

If we live in an illusion of reality, and we don't know and can't know the real reality outside that illusion, then for all means and purposes, our illusion is our reality.