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Objective Reality Doesn't Exist

#2
upload_2019-11-16_10-46-16.jpeg
 
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#6
48thStreetCustom said:
Does that mean scientists will stop saying that the laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe?
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No, it means that just like before, you can propose better laws and a way to test them. Or, if the uniformity of scientific laws is too much of a burden, there are ways of studying reality that don't require it, such as general philosophy, and poetry.
 
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#9
I figured that out when I was in my 20s. I didn't have the math for it or anything, but my study of Buddhism lead me to understand that everything we experience in reality is relative. We experience reality through our senses, which differ slightly from person to person, and that is then filtered through our consciousness, which is an amalgam of memories and experiences, which is also singular. None of us experience reality the same, therefore you can't prove conclusively anything about an objective, singular reality.
On a scientific level, we can only describe or analyze reality through the lens of what we know, which will always be imperfect, so we can never truly nail down what is objective reality as we can only study it from our subjective point of view.
In the process of thinking about writing a hard Sci Fi novel, the idea of something so simple as time gets thrown out the window. We count time based on Earth's position relative to our sun. Which is far from a universal measurement. The idea of a light year then loses all meaning.
 
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#14
"Objective reality doesn't exist" is a sensational headline, but also a huge stretch. We know that reality is objective in the sense that you can contrive experiments with predictable outcomes, such as riding a bike on a busy street while blindfolded, or constructing an atomic clock.

At the same time, attempts to formally state objective reality (or related terms) as principles that can be tested in physics experiments have led to paradoxical results.

At one time it was convenient to compartmentalize our beliefs, saying that we have "macroscopic" experience, and quantum mechanics belongs to a separate "microscopic" world. But folks have demonstrated some of these paradoxical results at a macroscopic scale that convinces us that there are not two separate worlds.

And to make it even more puzzling, when the paradoxes are observed in extremely painstaking experiments, they behave exactly as predicted by theory. So even giving up on objective reality doesn't seem to let us off the hook from being able to formulate and test precise theories of nature!

I'm skeptical that anybody understands this stuff via any philosophical or theological route, especially because what we purport to understand is still evolving. We know that at some level, quantum mechanics is false. So it's premature to take comfort in ancient or contemporary scholars claiming to have a philosophical grasp of it. ;)
 
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#16
fdeck said:
No, it means that just like before, you can propose better laws and a way to test them. Or, if the uniformity of scientific laws is too much of a burden, there are ways of studying reality that don't require it, such as general philosophy, and poetry.
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That's what Stephen Hawking did when he proposed that the laws of physics don't apply in a black hole and the scientific community when ape ****.
 
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