objective reality
Jan. 11th, 2008 04:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eNormally I consider myself very lucky because I've always been able to fall asleep anytime and anywhere I want. On rare occasions, though, I'm unable to fall asleep due to thoughts that keep chasing themselves around and around in my head. This is one such time. I woke at about 4am to put the dogs out for a pee (I'm visiting my parents at the moment) and found that when I got back to bed I kept going over a conversation I had recently with my old girlfriend Julie. She maintained that there can be no such thing as an objective reality.
At first I thought she was talking about morality -- that cultures and morals are off limits and you can't say anything about another person's culture or morals. I've heard this a lot recently and think it is as disreputable and fruitless a line of thought as the cultural and moral chauvinism that it is a reaction to; it is fairly clear that cultures and morals can be good or bad. The most basic underpinning of morality is treat others how you'd have them you. In that respect most cultures and moralities leave an awful lot to be desired (including our own culture).
Anyway, it turned out that Julie was talking about more than cultural or moral relativism. She really meant that there is no objective reality. I thought she couldn't be saying what it sounded like. Julie has one of the sharpest minds I know (even though she does often fall prey to every nutty new-age belief that comes along). So I thought she must be arguing about the difficulty in coming to grips with the world because we have to see it through the filter of our senses and the distorting prism of our emotions.
Well, it turned out, no. She used the argument the other way around. She said that because of our sensory limits and our emotions coloring our perceptions there can be no objective reality. It took a while for me to get past the idea that she was miscommunicating her argument, but I realised in the end that she wasn't. She really believed that we create our own reality!
I've struck this kind of magical thinking recently in another friend (seems to be a lot of it going around). It is a case, once again, of people getting symbols mixed up with the things they represent.
We humans are amazing symbol manipulators. It is our greatest talent. Unfortunately, for many people, the symbols become so compelling they get them mixed up with the real things. But they are really only symbols. This is the beauty of the body of knowledge called science, and its wonderful sibling, engineering: they work to disentangle our perceptions and emotions from what we know of objective reality, and periodically recalibrate our symbols so that they can more usefully represent that reality.
Magical thinking, most superstitions, most religion, and much of what passes for philosophy -- all these things get the symbols and the reality mixed up. Often this has little effect and is relatively harmless, but when people get causality backwards (thinking that symbols can affect the things they represent), or people make moral decisions based on misreading symbols (the biblical mistranslation "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" caused great suffering), or people think they can make the world work a particular way by holding a distorted view of reality in their mind, then we bring upon ourselves many of the worst ills humanity has plagued itself with.
There really is an objective reality out there. Two people can measure the electrostatic tug between molecules of water at a certain pressure and temperature and it will always be the same. You can split light into a spectrum that is always the same. If you add hydrochloric acid to sodium hydroxide you will always get heat and salty water. Diamond will always have the same hardness and graphite will always be weak, slippery, and shiny black.
Our greatest successes as human beings have been in understanding the objective reality around us. Recently we are coming to understand more and more of the objective reality governing how our own minds work too. We need to grasp these things rather than hiding away behind broken views of the world, because we have now become so numerous and powerful as a species we no longer have the luxury of getting it wrong. Magical thinking, superstition, religion, screwy morality, and rapacious culture can end life on this little planet.
Some of my friends are fond of saying that it is all science's fault (while they are wearing their polyester blend t-shirt, typing on their computer, in temperature-controlled comfort); that it would have been fine if we had left it all alone and kept to magical thinking, superstition and religion. They point to nuclear power stations and the bombs they create, the subtle poisoning from pesticide, the ecological damage wrought by high tech farming and fishing. But I say that these are examples of how much we need science.
Nuclear energy is a great example of misuse of science for screwy morality, and has little to do with anything but greed, power (as in having power over other people), and stupidity. This is something that properly researched science should make impossible.
Low tech farming and fishing were ruining the world already; science can give us ways to support ourselves without ruining the fragile web that keeps the biosphere alive. There are plenty of examples of ancient people influencing the weather and utterly destroying ecosystems -- it is what humans do everywhere they go. Science gives us a chance to see what we are doing before it is too late.
Wonder if I can get back to sleep now...?
At first I thought she was talking about morality -- that cultures and morals are off limits and you can't say anything about another person's culture or morals. I've heard this a lot recently and think it is as disreputable and fruitless a line of thought as the cultural and moral chauvinism that it is a reaction to; it is fairly clear that cultures and morals can be good or bad. The most basic underpinning of morality is treat others how you'd have them you. In that respect most cultures and moralities leave an awful lot to be desired (including our own culture).
Anyway, it turned out that Julie was talking about more than cultural or moral relativism. She really meant that there is no objective reality. I thought she couldn't be saying what it sounded like. Julie has one of the sharpest minds I know (even though she does often fall prey to every nutty new-age belief that comes along). So I thought she must be arguing about the difficulty in coming to grips with the world because we have to see it through the filter of our senses and the distorting prism of our emotions.
Well, it turned out, no. She used the argument the other way around. She said that because of our sensory limits and our emotions coloring our perceptions there can be no objective reality. It took a while for me to get past the idea that she was miscommunicating her argument, but I realised in the end that she wasn't. She really believed that we create our own reality!
I've struck this kind of magical thinking recently in another friend (seems to be a lot of it going around). It is a case, once again, of people getting symbols mixed up with the things they represent.
We humans are amazing symbol manipulators. It is our greatest talent. Unfortunately, for many people, the symbols become so compelling they get them mixed up with the real things. But they are really only symbols. This is the beauty of the body of knowledge called science, and its wonderful sibling, engineering: they work to disentangle our perceptions and emotions from what we know of objective reality, and periodically recalibrate our symbols so that they can more usefully represent that reality.
Magical thinking, most superstitions, most religion, and much of what passes for philosophy -- all these things get the symbols and the reality mixed up. Often this has little effect and is relatively harmless, but when people get causality backwards (thinking that symbols can affect the things they represent), or people make moral decisions based on misreading symbols (the biblical mistranslation "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" caused great suffering), or people think they can make the world work a particular way by holding a distorted view of reality in their mind, then we bring upon ourselves many of the worst ills humanity has plagued itself with.
There really is an objective reality out there. Two people can measure the electrostatic tug between molecules of water at a certain pressure and temperature and it will always be the same. You can split light into a spectrum that is always the same. If you add hydrochloric acid to sodium hydroxide you will always get heat and salty water. Diamond will always have the same hardness and graphite will always be weak, slippery, and shiny black.
Our greatest successes as human beings have been in understanding the objective reality around us. Recently we are coming to understand more and more of the objective reality governing how our own minds work too. We need to grasp these things rather than hiding away behind broken views of the world, because we have now become so numerous and powerful as a species we no longer have the luxury of getting it wrong. Magical thinking, superstition, religion, screwy morality, and rapacious culture can end life on this little planet.
Some of my friends are fond of saying that it is all science's fault (while they are wearing their polyester blend t-shirt, typing on their computer, in temperature-controlled comfort); that it would have been fine if we had left it all alone and kept to magical thinking, superstition and religion. They point to nuclear power stations and the bombs they create, the subtle poisoning from pesticide, the ecological damage wrought by high tech farming and fishing. But I say that these are examples of how much we need science.
Nuclear energy is a great example of misuse of science for screwy morality, and has little to do with anything but greed, power (as in having power over other people), and stupidity. This is something that properly researched science should make impossible.
Low tech farming and fishing were ruining the world already; science can give us ways to support ourselves without ruining the fragile web that keeps the biosphere alive. There are plenty of examples of ancient people influencing the weather and utterly destroying ecosystems -- it is what humans do everywhere they go. Science gives us a chance to see what we are doing before it is too late.
Wonder if I can get back to sleep now...?