[mercuryrising]

Originally Posted by alegro

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".

You've heard the Zen koan, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?"

Well, if there is no subject to define the object "cup" in the event of falling and breaking, then it is irrelevant to reality as you or I know it. Without the perceiver involved, the cup could have not fallen and broken or there was never a cup in the first place or there is and is not a cup falling simultaneously. We don't know.

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?

If you were to ask a dog or a machine if the cup fell, it could neither confirm or deny the event. That may sound like a smart allec answer. My point is that a cup only exists in a subjective universe. From a purely objective universe, you would have a bunch of atoms flying around running into each other. The universe only has some sort of meaning relative to a limited perception by a conscious being.

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.

They have to because you say so? You can't interact with people who perceive the world differently than you? How are we having this conversation then?

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.

Just as the world is not round for everyone (given the flat earth society), the world could not be flat for everyone. I used that as an example, not as a principle. What you are calling an objective universe is more a collectively subjective one. It's what you and I can agree is real. Given a different set of conditions, the conclusion changes.

Like this forum. You and I accept that this forum is real, giving us the ability to communicate through it. If we were in a different position in time/space, say 1880 in India, this forum no longer is real. To my 6 year old daughter, this forum is meaningless. It doesn't enter her subjective reality. It isn't real to her. The Webkinz website, however, is quite real to her.

You might check out the book Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. A lot of what we are talking about here goes back to insights I gleaned from that book.

But is the evidence not "objective"?

Does it have any meaning without a hypothesis formulated to it?