This meme hurts my brain
We’re memeing at levels never seen before.
This graph is missing “who cares, nothing matters”.
I have to say that I think if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. I think this riddle / philosophical conundrum is solved.
Why? Sound is air being disturbed. The air is still disturbed regardless of if anyone heard the effect.
yeah but human beings are so arrogant they want to believe that nothing exists without them perceiving it.
people like to make an argument out of it, but what they don’t acknowledge is the arrogance of the idea nothing exists outside your perception, which basically makes you into a god-like figure it your own reality.
and nobody likes to talk about how social media has warped so many people’s brains into this way of thinking, that previously they had no access to because they were boxed in but a reality that didn’t let them sit on their ass and think delusional thoughts hours a day. Used to be only weirdo philosophy people did that, now it’s what your average person does with their social media feed.
I definitely know people who struggle with object permanence
Is sound air being disturbed or a brain interpreting vibrations in the air?
It’s air being disturbed. Microphones have no brain. Deaf people can still feel bass vibrations caused by speakers disturbing the air. It’s a fully physical phenomenon that happens regardless of there being an observer.
Carve this in clay and put it in a cave. A thousand years after some societal collapse wipes out all digital data, this will be the only thing archaeologists will have from our time
Now playing Low - Plastic Cup
The author’s bias in this is rather… apparent lol
lol i thought so too at first. it’s clear there’s bell curves … the author says that higher IQ value leads to “reality is subjective and all is mental” worldview.
but then i thought, wait a moment, maybe the author is wise enough to recognize that higher IQ value is not always a good thing? maybe they actually don’t identify as being super-IQ? maybe they just want to live a chill live, and identify themselves somewhere in the middle of the curve? that would mean that the author does not actually think that all reality is just a thought construct …
For me the bias is not just in making idealist views look “higher IQ” but that they depict a person who just has the most basic self-evident views that are the most widespread and commonplace among people who don’t do philosophy at all (that there exists a material objective reality) as only possessing those views because they just got them from the television.
I think this is very common in philosophy, where people want to sound more interesting by positing very bizarre towers of metaphysics, which they claim are justified by some incredibly intellectual line of reasoning. They then paint normies as stupid for not believing that for not following their lengthy complex line of reasoning.
But quite often these lengthy complex lines of reasoning are just the author tricking themselves out of an obvious conclusion, by writing so much they obfuscate what is being talked about, so then it makes it look like their bizarre conclusions logically follow, when anyone who actually takes the time to parse that metaphysical tower will find it does not.
But they rely precisely on the fact that nobody will bother to parse it because it is too complicated, and then use the complexity as a sign of the “intellectualism” of the position.
I’ve always been a fan of defending the common man’s views by analyzing arguments against it, going over the tower of metaphysics and seeing if their conclusions really do follow and prove the common man wrong. I’ve never found any argument that necessitates they are wrong. Sometimes the arguments are strong enough such that you have to make some additional clarifications, but that only serves to better flesh out the position rather than to dismantle it, so there is nothing inherently “stupid” about the common position.
you missed the part where the meta physicians claim what they aren’t doing is metaphysics but science and logic, or something… and their inability to admit or understand that any logic of science is a metaphysical system…
history of philosophy is often a lot of finger pointing and posturing about ‘my philosophy isn’t metaphysics! it’s common sense!’
personally I’m more interested in the implications of idealism as a system in practice, but i’m a filthy pragmatist interested in the real world as it is, not as it ought to be.
You missed the part where metaphysicians claim that what they are doing isn’t metaphysics at all, but science and logic, or something along those lines.
No, I didn’t. I agree with that. I have literally written an entire book criticizing how people conflate the mathematical models of modern physics with philosophical interpretations of those models, and then pretend their metaphysics is not philosophy but something “proved by the empirical evidence.”
The book was motivated precisely by the question I raised in my previous comment: does the common man’s position really have to be abandoned?
Philosophers, including physicists who write philosophy, very commonly point to modern physics as establishing the need to abandon certain common worldviews and adopt a new metaphysics. But they often present this not as metaphysics, but as something directly established by empirical reality, such that questioning it is treated as equivalent to denying science.
One example is the dominant interpretation of special relativity, which claims that space and time are ontologically relative. We can experimentally verify that clocks drift from one another exactly as the mathematics predicts, such as when two airplanes fly in opposite directions and meet again. The conclusion is then presented as empirically proven: space and time themselves must be relative.
But John Bell pointed out in “How to Teach Special Relativity” that the same mathematics can be given a different philosophical interpretation while preserving the same empirical predictions.
You can instead assume that spacetime is absolute, while objects in motion undergo physical effects that cause moving clocks to slow and rulers in the direction of motion to contract. The measurements of rods and clocks would then be emergent properties produced by absolute space and time plus these physical effects. The mathematics remains the same, but its ontological interpretation changes.
If physicists object that such an absolute rest frame could never be experimentally identified, that does not prove it does not exist. It means only that its existence is empirically undetermined. At that point, the usual response is Occam’s razor: if we cannot directly detect such a frame, we should eliminate it from our ontology.
My point is not that this is wrong. It may be a perfectly reasonable philosophical choice. My point is that Occam’s razor is a philosophical argument.
You have not empirically proven that space and time are relative. You have shown that relativity follows from the mathematics given a particular interpretation of what the mathematics represents. Choosing that interpretation over another requires an additional philosophical argument. If there were motivation to make an argument in response (which is a whole other topic, but I argue one can mount a strong counterargument), then it would lead to a philosophical debate, and that debate could not be settled empirically.
This is the broader point I am making: the same mathematics can be compatible with multiple ontological interpretations. Empirical evidence can constrain those interpretations, but it does not necessarily determine them uniquely.
So, if you are an extremely conservative skeptic who refuses to abandon the common man’s worldview unless doing so is strictly necessary, you can always ask whether the new worldview actually follows necessarily from the mathematics and empirical evidence.
Often, it doesn’t. The physical evidence motivates the metaphysical debate, but it does not wholly determine its outcome.
Really. Can none of these people check Greco-Roman philosophy debates about this very question.
no, because that’s gay.
and big strong straight men never read history, they think their deep original profound thoughts that stand for all time by themselves, in their bedroom, after masturbating.
reality is the opinion of the Republic of Estonia 🇪🇪🇪🇪🇪🇪🫡
Chat, what coordinate system am I witnessing in this meme?
coordinate systems aren’t real. silly.
you should use your IM-AG-IN-A-TION! WOOOO! YAY!
“You see, i already put myself as the chad and you as the virgin.”
Nothing like ADHD existentialism
I wish reality was subjective, because then I could imagine it isn’t what it is right now and it wouldn’t be.
Reality is ultimately subjective but has a very heavy input bias from your material conditions.
In other words, you aren’t imagining your reality as being better than you are because you are insufficiently ignorant/delusional/disassociated.
Oh but it is.
One’s reality is entirely constructed from their interpretations.
The problem is that it’s a difficult state to remain in due to the ensnarement which comes from sharing reality with others. There’s a reason why ‘enlightened’ folk live on mountain tops.
Gravity applies no matter how far away you are.
Reality might be completely constructed from interpretation if there were no outside forces in play. But if your atoms are interacting with other atoms, you’re beholden to their rules.
yes, but you can’t convince people of that if they deny gravity is real.
the issue we have these days is gravity deniers get together and egg each other on in their delusions and create ever more elaborate theories to defend their denial of reality.
hell, many lemmy instances are created specifically for that purpose… because their theories often put that at odds with the general public.
“gravity doesn’t exist, we’re pulled down because the earth sucks”
You are referring to some overarching reality, with a capital R, which is unknowable in its entirety. Contrast that to one’s own reality, which is both more and less real than the ‘outside world’. There are physical and social forces acting upon us all the time, but how we feel about them, when we even notice them, is what creates our internal reality. Which is vastly more important to our quality of life.
The rules can be bent.
It feels like you’re using the word reality as a duplicate of the phrase personal experience. In that case I would agree. You can absolutely choose how you feel about the things you perceive.
But no amount of choosing how you feel gets you to fly. And no amount of thinking you can fly will ever prove you to be right when you try and fail.
Though you can certainly feel like it’s worth trying again if you’re so choose.
Sorry, looking over my usage today I just realized I didn’t really address your statement at all, except to hand-wave it away. That seems to be happening more as I get older, sort of lose the thread and meander off to continue insisting on points nobody is really refuting. Probably just dementia or something.
But, yes, I certainly agree. There are some hard facts about the world that impress themselves upon us. Like there’s no amount of mentalizing that’s going to change physics. Hell, most spiritual traditions are largely about understanding and effectively coping with the things we can’t change.
I have read some interesting proposals by legit philosophers that argue the entire world is in fact created by the mind. Post doctorates and well learned spiritualists are often as equally skilled in logical arguments as they are in sophistry so many of their points can be hard to refute. Not necessarily convincing, but certainly compelling in a way that makes you reconsider the nature of reality.
Still, if someone is convinced they can fly, they might better try taking off from the ground first.
It’s a deliberate use of the word. Because people’s personal experience is their reality. Even among scientists, objective truth isn’t necessarily agreed upon, so aside from specific cases, it’s hard to use it as a guide post towards navigating life. Like you said, there are certainly hard facts in the world which impact us, but how we perceive and interpret these phenomena, how we grapple with theory of mind, creates our reality.
If that sounds a little too woo-woo then how about a more practical and fun example.
Your nose takes up 10 to 15% of your vision.
The capital R reality is that photons are bouncing off of your nose and entering your eye. Your eyes are seeing your nose. And yet, unless pointed out most of the time you don’t even notice that your vision is nose-less when, in fact, a nose is constantly in your field of vision.
Your mind has edited out the existence of your nose.
That’s not woo, that’s neurobiology. But so is the conscious construction of your reality. If you think about getting into a fight, your heart races, despite there being no real threat.
Now if a baseball suddenly hit you on the nose, you would be quite aware of capital R reality making it’s presence known upon you. But how you perceive why that happened and what it means determines the rest of your reality.
is there a written version of it? i really don’t like getting news/explanations of things through videos
It’s not news. And arguably this is the type of thing where you benefit from seeing the actual person talking because they have personal experience of what they are talking about. It’s more than just conveying words.
What a great video so far. I’m on break so I could only catch half of it but I am excited to see the rest when I get home.
Reminds me of the Buddhist practice of negating every label one has for themselves. What’s left? The ineffable.
Glad you like it! He’s from a related system (advaita/tantra) so if you know anything of Buddhism, he would sound familiar. He just has stripped away pretty much all of the cultural trappings and focuses purely on the core nondual philosophy and practice.
Also he’s what’s called a “householder”, tantra being primarily a “householder” tradition. Meaning, no sitting alone on mountaintops, it’s realization while engaged with the world.
Unfortunately it’s only just subjective enough for us to all constantly miscommunate
Trust not what the machine elves say, trust what the machine elves do
If they don’t make my cookies they can eff off.
elf off*
I’m 44 and this is deep
real shit
The bell curves curves have curves
I am aroused
Ask not for whom the bell curves curve, the bell curves curve for thee
