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Another Nail in the Coffin of Objectivity

VMAT4

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This may be of interest.
 

Oldasdrt

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Good article,
Physical experiments like the Wigner’s Friend test show that our understanding of objective reality breaks down whenever quantum mechanics gets involved, even when it is possible to run a test. On the other hand, a lot of science seems to imply that there is an objective reality about which the scientific method is pretty good at capturing information.

Pretty interesting how in entanglement, the second you view it,its gone,,,,
 

Tks

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Felt like reading a news article. Same old TLDR

New age people have a new substitute for their theistic tendencies (the quantum they now call it), while science's Method still throws a wrench in such Gaps Fallacies because in systems larger than the quantum level, all the objective information we have gathered holds up. While the majority of these reality exploding thinkers reside in the quantum with basically little knowledge, assign most stock to quantum ignorance in order to make all sorts of claims they feel safe in making because they know verifying such claims is non viable.

The article concludes nicely, but sadly brings no new developments to the table regarding the philosophical or scientific status of this post quantum phase of reality arguments.

Philosophy still untouched, scientific method still untouched, quantum knowledge still lacking.

Sam Harris may enjoy articles like this though.

EDIT: Mobile typo corrections.
 
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Oldasdrt

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If more people could deal with the fact that things look different from different points of view, there would be a lot less strife in the world.
Good luck with that happening :):):):)
 

pozz

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If more people could deal with the fact that things look different from different points of view
This is the objective necessity, not the other way around. Objectivity relies on multiple perspectives.
Philosophy still untouched, scientific method still untouched, quantum knowledge still lacking.
Agreed with your assessment of the article, but the fundamental philosphical problems of our time were established in the late 16th century, and we have not moved past them. Every scientific development since then has been a consequence of that philosophical work. We have complicated it, though, and amassed much more general and clarifying knowledge since then.
 

Cbdb2

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Good article,
Physical experiments like the Wigner’s Friend test show that our understanding of objective reality breaks down whenever quantum mechanics gets involved, even when it is possible to run a test. On the other hand, a lot of science seems to imply that there is an objective reality about which the scientific method is pretty good at capturing information. ,,,,

Yet: "Quantum physics is probably the most precise scientific discipline ever devised by humankind. It can predict certain properties with extreme accuracy, to 10 decimal places, which later experiments confirm exactly."
 
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Oldasdrt

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Niels quote,,,,
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.” “I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary.
 

Phorize

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Our entire world is contained in our consciousness in precisely this moment. Goodness knows what our brains are doing to it before we notice it. I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I finish writing this sentence, or for that matter when I’m going to finish it, until I do. Done.
 

Phorize

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Of course I erred above. There is no ‘I’ writing the sentence, just a stream of conscious with no one watching.
 

Phorize

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If an apple falls on your head did your brain do it? Thats the objective world. And someone actually figured out why. ;)

Obviously phenomena outside an individuals consciousness exist, but not as far as that individual is concerned in any given moment:)
 

Kal Rubinson

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Obviously phenomena outside an individuals consciousness exist, but not as far as that individual is concerned in any given moment:)
Obviously, phenomena outside an individual's consciousness exist and may, just possibly, have an impact on it. :)
 

tmtomh

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This may be of interest.

An almost identical article, on the same subject, was shared here in a thread not too long ago, with a nearly identical clickbait-y thread title and a nearly identical "click on this" OP with no context and no evidence of any thought expended by the OP.

It is difficult to do justice to the intellectual laziness behind this kind of impulse, or to the sheer number of logical flaws and leaps behind the notion that any of this applies to the objectivity-subjectivity debate within audio.

What popular interpretations of the "we do not experience any objective reality directly" idea always fail to take into account is the basic scientific principle of repeatability. To pick a random example, the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant and is known. The measurement has been taken and confirmed over and over and over and over again 1000s of times, over several centuries, by 100s or 1000s of humans, using a wide variety of instruments in a wide variety of experimental conditions.

In order for the speed of light to be a "subjective" perception of some unknown, inaccessible, and - most important for the "objectivity is not a thing" argument - constantly changing actual reality, then all of those experimenters in all those times and places must have had subjective experiences of the measurement of the speed of light that were bizarrely in sync with each other. When they consulted their measuring instruments and the result came up the same as it always does, perhaps their instruments were all actually displaying something different that different people would have read as a different number - but miraculously, everyone who looked at the results happened to see the same number. And miraculously, the "unreliable," "not really real," "subjective" result every experimenter got happened to be exactly the same as the result gotten by every other experimenter. What an amazing coincidence that the actual movement of light might not be a constant, and the readout of the measurement instrument might not actually have said what the experimenter thought it said, and the measurement instrument might not actually have looked anything like the experimenter's eyes told them it looked like, and on and on and on - and yet the "incorrect," "subjective" perceptions all lined up perfectly with each other.

That might all be true: there is nothing truly objective about any of our perceptions - but the difference between what we perceive and the actual reality is a meaningless difference because we all experience it the same way. It doesn't need to be "true" in an absolute sense in order to be real in that it structures our understanding of the world and our physical experience of the world. Photons that come into contact with us at one frequency look like a color; photons that come into contact with us at another frequency don't look like anything but give us sunburn. Some people are less susceptible to sunburn than others, and some people are partially or entirely colorblind - but we all know, understand, and experience the difference between visible light and ultraviolet light. Gamma radiation above a certain amount will kill all of us, regardless of how and when we perceive or don't perceive the radiation.

Similarly, in audio, you can play anyone some music over a stereo system and if the amplifier has tone controls you can turn the bass knob all the way down and then all the way up, and they will hear a clear difference. Even if they are deaf they will likely feel a difference between the bass all the way down and all the way up (assuming the speakers have sufficient bass response and the volume is loud enough in the room to produce the requisite vibrations). This is universal, and therefore it is objective in any meaningful sense of the term. Now, it could certainly be that if I could magically be transported into someone else's brain, I might be surprised that their actual perceptual experience of "yeah, the bass went way down and then it went way up" would not sound like it does to me in my brain.

But if we all agree that when you turn the bass knob up and down it changes the bass, and if we all agree that changed bass impacts the lower-frequency tones that you can feel as much as you hear, and we can use a common (or apparently common) language to trigger responses in our brains that we experience as understanding what others are saying, then it doesn't actually matter if our perceptions are identical. If what you hear as bass is something that I actually hear as treble, then that will have repercussions and we will not be able to proceed with life and activities as if we both hear the same thing. If we can proceed as if we both hear the same thing, then any difference in what we "actually" hear is meaningless and for all intents and purposes there is no difference.

To put it most simply, the fact that we are organisms with specific, limited sensory organs does not mean that your favorite high-distortion tube amp is secretely higher-fidelity than a more linear, lower-distortion, lower-noise amplifier. And it does not mean that Audioquest interconnects actually produce better sound even though they measure the same (or worse) as generic ones.
 
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Robin L

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Obviously, phenomena outside an individual's consciousness exist and may, just possibly, have an impact on it. :)
And that's why we have cats.
 

JSmith

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So, did the cat die?
Too tempting... resistance is futile;



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JSmith
 
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