There is no such thing as absolute proof. This doesn't mean we need to abandon the idea of objective reality, because
the idea of objective reality doesn't need to be proved to be useful.
The brain/mind is a feed-forward machine. Its only purpose is
to predict future input based on past input.
The idea of 'objective reality' doesn't need to be 'proven' absolutely to be useful in this task. I can't prove objective reality, but the idea that I live in an objective reality has cleanly predicted every single subjective observation I have ever made. Thats why I stick with it. It is USEFUL.
My idea of objective reality does not include genuine psychic phenomena, astral projection, paranormal events, etc because they are
unnecessary and unelegant.
One
could try to construct a world model including these phenomena as genuine, but it will invariably be full of subtle but persistent self-contradictions and ambiguities, and will be excessively complicated. Why bother?
The hard scientific view of reality predicts EVERYTHING with startling elegance and from a remarkably small set of first principles. Its predictions include all paranormal observations (easily explained as subjective artifacts of an over-eager pattern matcher in the human brain - especially because all these effects disappear when we control for individual perceptive biases).
If I ever see anything that contradicts my current world model I'll gladly revise it.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by StevePavlina You can never be sure what effect your thoughts are having on reality |
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