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Yes please lets have a semantic debate in which no one defines their terms
Science routinely solves problems like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51
In some sense this is the very heart of science: taking disparate views of the world and drawing likely conclusions that are testable and reproducible.
Truth is subjective.
Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
It’s subjective.
What about gravity? It doesn’t exist, we just collectively hallucinate that stuff falls
That’s just nihilism.
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
That’s at least admitting that something exists, but it’s more complicated than what we currently understand of it!
My current standing is with “poetic naturalism”, in which we acknowledge that something exists and that we build, based on our subjective experience, models of knowledge. And that we must use epistemic tools (ex: the scientific method) to overcome our subjectivity.
Overcome subjectivity? No, no, no! The desire for objectivity makes us weak and easy to control. The rich use their control of the media to exploit that desire for their own gain. They’ve created a subjective reality, pretending to be objective, which upholds the evils of capitalism. You mustn’t try to overcome subjectivity.
Subjectivity is freedom. If everything is subjective, and we understand the rules of that subjectivity, then we have the power to reinterpret our condition according to our own sense of justice. We can make ourselves a new subjective unreality, based on fairness and justice. We can create a multiverse of unrealities, and travel between them as easily as believing.
Take gender, for example. Traditional western culture tells us (as children) that gender is objective, and the answers are to be found in the biology of the cell. Written into our genes is the objective truth of gender, if only we have the curiosity to find it. This desire for objectivity is poison. Those who have clung to it into adulthood have become bitter and hateful, and have sought to take away our right to medicine.
But I know that gender is subjective. It’s socially constructed, and we should choose to reconstruct it in the best way possible, that makes everyone happy. Let people have whatever gender they want. Choose to believe in new genders, choose to perceive new gender presentations. Choose freedom through subjectivity.
If really love to be able to subjectively stop eating and sleeping, waste of time… I’d be free from that.
There are many social constructs about which what you say is possible, but there is still some underlying world which will nit change.
Ignoring all of the world’s problems will not make them go away, you have to acknowledge them and face them. Although it’s okay to take breaks from the world to rest and recuperate! But don’t simply escape reality and let the bad people take it all…
I believe you’ve mistaken My intentions of how I plan to use this principle of antirealism. I had hoped to imply by My use of the words “fairness” and “justice” that I am not interested in creating a perfect unreality only for Myself. That would be selfish. I have no intention of leaving humanity to rot and wallow in the capitalist consensus reality. I seek to spread this power and freedom to all the working class people of the world. I am an advocate, a politician. I want to kill the capitalist mind prison by convincing every person in the world to abandon objectivity. Let us work together to build our unreal multiverse.
My first moment of unreality came when I was an unhappy “cis” “boy”, scrolling through Reddit. I saw a meme with a simple message: If you want to be a different gender, don’t rely on some external sign of the truth. Just do it. Make your own truth.
So I did. And starting from that one act of defiance against the gender binary, I have followed My joy to make My own truth, all the way beyond consensus reality. I am now happy. But I’m also angry. I’m angry because there are so many other trans kids in the world letting society tell them what objective reality is. There are people committing suicide because their subjective reality is unbearable. One of them was My sister. Another, My friend. I don’t believe in criminalising or stigmatising suicide. I believe in criminalising and stigmatising the practices that make good people want suicide. Nobody should feel like they need an escape from the universe they live in.
If you want to live in a different universe, you should already have the training required to imagine yourself into a different subjective universe. Suicide is a problem of people believing their circumstances are objective. I know the mental techniques required to reprogram My perceptions. I call those techniques magic, because they are changing My unreality through belief. I am angry that other people do not have the same techniques. I will teach those techniques to the people. And the first step is to embrace your subjectivity as a source of freedom and power.
The more subjectivity you can find, the more fulcrums you have on which to balance your mental levers. Those mental levers are your mastery of your own beliefs.
Give Me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to balance it, and I shall move the Earth.
Yeah, I appologise for missing the context and coming with such an adversarial tone… Being a person that can easily pass as typical (ND white guy), I didn’t think of the social aspect of the topic.
Natural science methods cannot be applied on social sciences in an ethical way… I don’t want to push for that.
I also don’t want to hear “Climate change is subjective and doesn’t apply to my subjectivity, because it was cold this winter.”
From a scientific point of view, all type of gender and sexualities exist in nature, and I’m sure it’s a mistake to assume humans are binary. https://youtu.be/Jxs2yHP6K2E
Some say we live in a post-truth world. I say we live in a post-realism world. It’s not that objective reality vanished once this massive scale in ideological separation happened, it’s just that people stopped giving a fuck once it happened. Objective truth didn’t vanish though, most people just live without letting it inconvinience them.
We live in a post-world world
Truth can be subjective, in one scenario: when it’s not the complete truth.
However an incomplete truth is via omission, thus making it a lie.
It’s rather curious how those people who claim truth is subjective never do it for gravity, jumping off a high building while claiming “gravity is false for me”. Because guess what, odds are they know it’s bullshit.
In Einstein’s general relativity, different observers can disagree about the order of timed events, so long as their individual stories don’t violate causality. This is broadly known as the Relativity of Simultaneity.
Sure, if you’re traveling near the speed of light. For everyone on Earth, no one has ever experienced this (beyond a micro level that doesn’t matter and no one is discussing).
wait i wanna discuss the micro level
what the fuck tell me more this is neat
Your head ages faster than your feet do! :D
By such a small amount that it would never, ever matter, but it’s still cool to know!
This small difference does actually become relevant when trying to explain gravity, though.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, objects in free-fall do not feel an acceleration. Instead, objects in an inertial frame travel along straight world lines through curved spacetime “down” toward the gravitational source. Light is “pulled” into large objects because that’s what a straight line looks like to a light beam.
I have a question, though: why is that I can’t feel gravity during a free-fall, but I can feel my own weight when standing on the Earth? Isn’t that kinda weird?
(I’m wrapping the rest in a spoiler tag out of mercy to mobile users.)
Tap for more paragraphs.
Wouldn’t everything I just said suggest that if I can feel the direction of gravity, it must be because I’m accelerating somehow? If I were blind and in free-fall, I wouldn’t be able to tell what direction “down” even is, and yet, the muscles in my legs tell me very explicitly that they are “lifting” me.
The answer, or a very useful answer, anyway, is that something is accelerating: the ground. The stationary ground accelerates up through curved spacetime to push me. That’s how I can tell.
But how does the ground accelerate without moving? Shouldn’t the Earth expand if it’s accelerating?
We’re definitely approaching the limit of the things I can explain at the moment, but the key is time dilation. The fact that your head ages faster than your feet is the reason why the Earth doesn’t expand. It accelerates without moving because time is also curved.
You can think of it this way: If you were to graph the position of objects through time, the Earth’s surface might curve toward the y-axis, the time axis, because it is accelerating. But, the y-axis also curves “away” from the Earth’s surface in the same way, such that they maintain their distance. And so, the Earth doesn’t appear to move.
Isn’t that cool?
It is why physics was my favorite science class. Thanks for taking the time to write all that out
No problem :D
I learned about the expanding earth bit like a week ago and I was very excited about it, haha.
truth isn’t subjective, but perspective changes how you see something.
Truth is entirely subjective because all observations are subjective.
truth=facts. facts are objective. it’s a fact that the USA is a country in north America. there is no disputing that.
the notion that the USA is a good place to live is not a fact, it’s a subjective opinion
What if someone doesn’t recognize it as a country? Or what if they believe that there’s no north america, that there’s only one american continent?
