Subjective versus Objective Reality: The Cage Match
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Senior Professor of Hypokeimenonology expounds briefly on the topic of the validity of subjective experience and the phenomenology of worldviews for new students.
If any of you crayon-eating know-it-alls puts your hand up and mentions Plato’s Cave, I will cheerfully incinerate the lot of you and drop what remains into Tartarus with your pustulent feculent slime-drenched window-licking ancestors, even if that means we have to harvest a fresh batch of students from the sunlit worlds and start this program over from scratch. Who would like to test me?
Anyone?
Excellent.
The word “epistemology” has been giving freshman philosophy students nightmares for many thousands of years. Someone says, “This is a fact.” Another replies, “How do you know it is true?” And the answer is an application of epistemology, either functional or flawed.
“I heard it on the Internet, voiced in a video by someone who sounded confident, and it gave me a teeny drip of dopamine by sounding like something that would fit with my current worldview, so I embraced it.”
“I was told it was true by people who will bully me relentlessly if I don’t parrot it, and who wants to put up with that? Also they’re good guys, and we all take care of one another.”
“You have your experts and I have my experts. I listen to my experts.”
“It came out of the same King James edition of the Bible that Jesus Himself carried around when he was a little boy.”
“I saw it with my very own eyes in a grade-school textbook printed in the 1960s.”
“Everybody knows it.”
And so on.
When 80% of the world seems to think these statements are sufficient validations of any “fact” they care to spout, it’s no wonder that the idea that “reality is subjective” starts to look attractive. “How else can so many different groups of people so fervently believe things that are so directly at odds with what other groups believe? We are all obviously living in different realities!”
… but this is just an acknowledgment that they know their own worldview is a bit shaky. It’s showing belly in a subtly worded entreaty to please not dismantle their obviously flawed worldview for them, because then their in-group will kick them out and they’ll be exposed to the existential risk of trying to navigate a terribly unfriendly world with no support.
Some people could do with being reminded that worldviews are cultural artifacts, typically shared among kinfolk and extended tribes, and incorporate only such facts as are literally death to ignore, with everything else reduced to social pressures.
Worldviews are not realities, because if they were, reality would have to be capable of being plural. If you don’t already know this, you will by graduation, if you survive all of your tests.
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“I know it’s true because I saw it with my own eyes.” This is only slightly firmer ground. In order for this to be worthy of a little trust, the person making this statement would have to understand the true capabilities and limitations of a jelly-filled eyeball and the tiny number of whatever light-reactive opsins you were issued with your eyeballs, and their ability to perform under the light levels at the time of the experience, and the general reliability of retinas and the connections from the back of an eye to a brain, and then the complex issues that can affect the processing of optical signals and interpretation of such into relevant data concerning one’s environment.
You’re on firmer ground if you can say, “The fifty of us saw it with our own eyes,” because then you’re averaging out a number of the reliability problems of eyeballs and brains and are down to the issues concerning the tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum eyes can detect and other ambient conditions where the observation is taking place.
“The fifty of us saw it dozens of times with our own eyeballs over the course of several months of random unscheduled visits” is even better. Trustworthiness of any fact increases with repeated measurement by multiple observers under varying conditions.
Even so, such a fact does not exist independent of its sources and validations. “This phenomenon was observed by these individuals using this sort of equipment at these times under these conditions” is the fact. Any conclusion you might draw from a fact or a stack of measurements is an inference, or maybe even a deduction, but not itself a fact as such.
Inferences and deductions are subject to being revised or discarded based on new measurements or disqualification of old measurements.
This is the only methodology of epistemology that has held up to thousands of years of rigorous testing, and those who are truly interested in accumulating and preserving knowledge will be happy to discard it the instant something better comes along.
Some libraries of knowledge are based more on intricate interconnected and mutually supporting structures of inference and deduction than others, typically due to the rarity of direct observations. These fields of study tend to be more in flux than their students might hope now and then, but that does not invalidate the entire field. It just comes with a recommendation to not hold onto anything too tightly.
You in the back, stop rolling your eyes. I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t need to be reminded of the basics every few hundred years or so, just in case something important got changed and maybe they didn’t notice. “Repeated measurements, multiple observers” includes this lecture.
Roll them again and you can pick them up at the end of the day from the cleaning staff when they empty the wastebaskets.
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Anyway, welcome to the twenty-first century and the bottomless fountain of quantum nonsense.
Quantum Mechanics isn’t nonsense. It has a little ways to go, but it’s not nonsense. The quantum nonsense is what’s coming out of everyone’s mouth who thinks that, thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics that they can’t fully grasp, they now have a sweet physicsy-sounding way to beg people to please not dismantle their obviously flawed worldview, because then their in-group will kick them out and they’ll be exposed to the existential risk of trying to navigate a terribly unfriendly world with no support.
It’s true that some phenomena that we think of as existing in discrete states can exist in a superposition of those states until the measurement from a specific inertial frame resolves it for that frame. It’s true that two observers in different inertial frames experience differences in measurements of objective phenomena just because the observers themselves are experiencing differing accelerating forces at the time of measurement. But no sets of supposedly conflicting measurements splits reality into separate realities. Reality just looks different from those different viewpoints because the Pauli Exclusion Principle and various conservation laws must be upheld within—but not necessarily across—inertial frames. This means that causality, which is an illusion of viewing reality through inertial frames in linear time, looks different from different inertial frames.
The underlying objective reality being measured is a complicated thing, but it is not a separate object for every observer. Multiple conflicting threads of causality—separated only for the duration of time that the differences are causally relevant, and only with respect to the regions over which the differences in measurement are causally relevant—is merely a feature of our universally shared reality.
Despite many features of daily existence having been documented as chaotic—and I mean this in the strict mathematical sense of being extremely sensitive to initial conditions and likely to diverge massively with a lengthy passage of time—first, not many of us approach any measurable amount of relativistic acceleration in our lifetimes, guaranteeing that even measurements of minor quantum events differing from person to person are immeasurably unlikely, and second, the ordinary, mundane, physical mechanisms of resonance are likely to heal over any causal differences between any nanoscopically different inertial frames before any measurable divergences have a chance to manifest.
I’m saying we’re stuck with one another, that the solipsist “one reality per person” hypothesis is both oddly humanocentric and also bullshit, and anyone holding out for separate realities is probably just looking to legitimize trying to exclude somebody they don’t like from their worldview. Or trying to minimize the ethical impact of murder because the victim is undoubtedly alive and happy somewhere else in their own little reality. Or trying to minimize the moral impact of any crime by claiming it happened only in one tiny sliver of reality instead of everywhere.
There’s only one everywhere, and, wherever you are, you’re soaking in it. Sorry to disappoint.
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If I decide to relent and allow some flexibility in the term reality—which I will not do, because discussions like this require accuracy above social convention—I would admit that some people conflate the term with their personal experience of reality overlaid on top of their culturally mandated worldview—which literally causes them to discard direct observations (and reliable deductions and inferences based on those observations) in order to avoid upsetting themselves. In order to preserve faith in—in the sense of adherence to as if it were a contract—their worldview.
I do admit that everyone has their own worldview—unless through many years of disciplined thinking, they have managed to discard their own altogether, leaving space to (at least temporarily) entertain the worldviews of others at whim for the sake of understanding the phenomenon better, as well as simply to be healed from a ubiquitous illness that demands that one discount the reports of one’s own senses and abilities of deduction and inference in order to “fit in.” And if their worldview is all they know and are allowed to know of reality, it must seem like reality to them. And in order to not be ostracized, they must treat it as reality—or at least treat it as such when anyone is watching.
This in no way legitimizes any “multiple realities” theory of the cosmos. But I guess sometimes you may have to pretend in order to not get beaten or stabbed or shot or whatever. Not all people handle challenges to their core beliefs or understanding of the universe well.
All of that said, it is at least scientifically feasible that any two entities with different histories of accelerating forces can have different memories of how certain events unfolded where both sets of memories are based on valid and verifiable measurements of a single underlying reality. But if neither witness has been accelerated to speeds where one must calculate Lorentzian length contractions or time dilations (or experienced equivalent strong gravitational fields), it’s much more likely that one or the other or both of the observers just weren’t paying sufficient attention and are trying to reconstruct what must have happened from imaginings compatible with their relevant worldviews.
I will assume that no one present is willing to try to argue that anyone’s imaginings in any way constitutes a valid reality. For the sake of my own sanity and to curb my own violent urges.
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I understand that all you’ve gotten from me in this session is a stack of unsupported assertions. But you can check my assertions against the math and see that they should count as valid inferences.
If every inertial frame is an independent causality, each would have to multiply the entire universe every time a waveform “collapsed” differently in different inertial frames. But phenomena in different inertial frames can clearly still interact with one another as long as those interactions do not involve violations of various conservation laws or the Pauli Exclusion Principle. If there is some duplication, it does not have to be much, or for very long.
There are some who proffer conjectures that the duplicated fragments of causality, which the math says should be much more common among the chaos of gravity wells and whirling, swirling stars and planets and debris, could account at least partially for the mass of galactic “dark matter” halos. This seems like a possibility, and I guess one could say it’s a possibility with weight, but I’ll leave the math and modeling to the cosmologists. My concentration here is on the level of individual sapient creatures that live in large clusters.
The first of you to raise a hand at this point will be solely assigned the task of performing the mathematical proofs (or disproofs) of the claims I have made over the last fifteen minutes, which I will then compare to my own for the purposes of grading and—at least I entertain the possibility—potentially correcting my own work.
Are there any questions?
Excellent.
Since none of you have volunteered, I will be assigning the task of performing the mathematical proofs (or disproofs) of the claims I have made over the last fifteen minutes to all of you, each of which will be graded individually in my office in the order in which you show up with your work in your hand. Both the best and the most ridiculous will be selected for presentation at our next class a week from now. You should expect to be entertained and/or mortified, as appropriate.