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Originally Posted by mercuryrising  How you or I experience the world is subjective reality. Objective reality on the other hand has little to no compatibility with the way we experience the world. |
To deal with the abstraction, let's take an example: I drop a cup, it falls down and breaks. I would consider the fact that the cup fell down and broke "objective reality".
The experience of this event will certainly be subjective; some people would say "Oh no, now the cup is broken and I have to clean everything up", others "Never mind, it was ugly, anyway", still others "It wasn't mine! Ha!".
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Originally Posted by mercuryrising If there were such a thing as objective reality it would be absolutely true in comparison to anyone's subjective version of it, which is a logical fallacy according to rationalism itself. |
We certainly have subjective interpretations of an event. The event itself, however, occurred in everybody's reality. In the example above, how can anybody deny that the cup fell down and broke?
The only way out would be that the cup didn't break for some people and those people could continue to fill it and drink from it. Other people could not. Maybe there are people for whom this latter version of reality is true. But they probably could not interact with me since I couldn't exist in their reality and they couldn't exist in mine. So everybody I can interact with - including people on this board - have to agree that the cup broke.
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Originally Posted by mercuryrising In answer to your first question, I would like to ask you a question. What if you took a trip around the world and discovered it was a saucer riding on the back of a giant turtle? Would you continue to believe the earth is round? |
I guess I would first deny the evidence. Then maybe my sanity. Then get very upset. Probably, in the end I would accept it.
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Originally Posted by mercuryrising If you knew for certain that this wasn't a trick and you were quite sober, you may re-evaluate your belief that the world is round in light of your experience. I'm guessing that this is how a person who believes the world is flat would react as well. |
How is that compatible with what you wrote above about "objective reality"? If the world is flat for everybody, it would constitute something that couldn't exist if "subjective reality" was true.
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Originally Posted by mercuryrising Regarding the second question, the 'weird science' discovered through the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics come from the stated assertions of each theory respectively. For example, in Newtonian physics, there is no such thing as a 'quark' and gravity is a force not a field as it is in Einstein's universe. The changes in assertions are based on new evidence, but the assertions are specific interpretations of that evidence. |
But is the evidence not "objective"?