David McFadzean wrote:
> At 04:24 PM 04/11/96 MST, Jason McVean wrote:
> >David McFadzean wrote:
> >Isn't subjective reality a different, possibly partially
> >overlapping set of objective reality?
> Not if you include all subjective realities in objective reality. The
> latter is
> supposed to be all-encompassing. Everything that is, including my and your
> subjective experience, is part of objective reality.
Yikes! I guess if you define objective reality that way then I
agree. And I can see that that is a plausible definition of
objective reality as follows: Our subjective experiences are
caused by the movement of electrons in our brains and our brains
and their electrons are part of objective reality so our
subjective experiences are part of objective reality. Is this
what you're getting at?
> >If objective reality always gives off photons in the same way,
> >and always has the same magnetic field, and always exhibits the
> >same time dependent behaviour, no matter what the observer is, is
> >there really any point in distinguishing between objective
> >reality and the properties it has?
> Yes, because properties are subjective. They are the parts of
> objective reality that are of interest to humans. Do you agree
> that there is a point in distinguishing objective reality from
> subjective reality even though we can only experience the latter?
But I can never experience your subjective reality. What we *can*
share is objective reality. I may say that the colour is blue-green
while you insist that it is green-blue but we can sit down
and use a spectrograph to determine how many photons of each
wavelength range the object is reflecting/emitting. We may still
argue about whether it seems more green or more blue but at least
we can agree about the more objective properties.
> >What about something like the relative heights of Danny Devito
> >and Kevin Costner? For something such as this where everyone who
> >is qualified to judge (i.e., everyone who has seen both of them
> >side by side) would give the same judgement, is it still a
> >subjective matter?
> It is if any of "Danny Devito", "Kevin Costner", "height" and "qualified"
> are subjective matters. Are these names, words and labels absolute?
All of those terms can be defined very precisely. Yes, I agree
that it is probably not possible to fully satisfy someone who is
trying to think of all possible objections, right down to the
definitions of all the words and the words used to explain the
words etc. But that person also probably doesn't really believe
hir objections because s/he would have been selected against long
ago :-)
Jason
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Dept. of Physics and Astronomy University of Calgary
jmcvean@acs.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jmcvean
"I am as close to you as the veins in your neck when I say to you, in
my whispering lisp, I, too, began as a boy." Mark Richard - Fishboy
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