Benefit and belief

[Ben Finney]

rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> writes:

> These are classical platonist claims:  In short objective reality
> exists aside from the subjective perception of it.

Yes, that's the simplest explanation for the comparability of our
observations: there's one reality and we all inhabit it.

> Quantum physics would not exist if all physicists were as cock-sure of
> objective reality.

Not at all. It's because those physicists *are* sure that there is an
objective reality that they are able to form testable hypotheses about
it and come up with objective tests and make objectively-comparable
observations of objective reality to see which hypotheses are
objectively false.

As a result, quantum physics is responsible for astoundingly accurate
correspondence between its predictions of objective reality and what is
actually observed.

That's not grounds to be cock-sure of any particular explanation; the
whole enterprise of scientific inquiry is based on trying to demonstrate
that people's explanations are false. But it's certainly grounds to be
confident that reality exists and is the same for everyone.

People's subjective perception of reality can of course be wrong to
varying degrees; and that's what science is designed to discover. But it
is pointless to try to find out more about objective reality unless one
takes objective reality as an axiom.

> Heres a capsule history: [mathematicians disagree about reality and
> much progress results]

Yes, exactly. Much progress is made in testing prejudices and
assumptions and hypotheses about objective reality to see which ones are
objectively false, and not by abandoning objective reality for some “my
subjective perception is just as god as yours” miasma.

That's just wrong-headed: subjective perception is commonly an
inaccurate representation of what's real, and we delude ourselves if we
think that doesn't apply to us.

-- 
 \     “Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto |
  `\    standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of |
_o__)                                     incomplete ideas.” —Alan Kay |
Ben Finney