It's very difficult for people to come to an agreement
regarding just how subjective reality is. One person will say something
that misleads another person into believing that the first person thinks
that he can walk through a wall if he thinks he can, to which the first
person responds in a number of ways, none of which will likely resolve
the core misunderstanding.. (repeat chorus indefinitely.)
Why is it so easy not to agree on the fundamental nature of reality?
I can think of a few reasons..
A person may or may not realize that the things he holds
to be self-evident, absolute truths actually rely on a number of beliefs
that rely on other beliefs that rely on other beliefs, all the way down
to raw perception and unprovable axioms.. The only thing that you
can be ABSOLUTELY sure even EXISTS is yourself. You can't be wrong
in believing you exist because if you don't exist then neither does said
belief. But everything else involves some kind of assumption, such
as the assumption that the universe isn't just an aspect of your unconscious
mind that presents itself to you by means that you know of as your five
senses. Unfortunately saying anything to the effect of this realization
of uncertainty will cause some less enlightened individual to label you
a solipsist (i.e. one who believes that nothing in the universe exists
but himself) and then to try to disprove you by examples of things that
exist outside of your mind according to his own beliefs, not realizing
that it's more of an agnostic position than solipsistic, or that the idea
only makes sense to the person pondering it.
The exact relationship between our perceptions of reality
and reality itself is uncertain.
And since not everyone understands this, a person may
have a very shaky definition of 'objective reality'--and even someone who
has realized it operates for all practical purposes under the paradigm
that things as we perceive them exist the same irrespectively of our perception
of them.
And there is a problem with this. In a sense, 'objective
reality' cannot possibly mean what it implies. (sort of like 'infinity',
but that's another matter..) The problem is that 'things' as such
always boil down to ideas. Everything we know of or can imagine is
but an idea that makes sense only within the context of our cognitive structure.
Presumeably the 'objective universe' doesn't exist as a set of ideas, so
there really is no direct relationship between any given thing you consider
to be objectively there, or objectively true (more on that later), and
what really exists outside your consciousness if anything. Everything
is interrelated; the UNIverse exists as just that: a singularity.
Objectification into various objects and laws and such is arbitrary and
subjective.
Objectivity is ultimately an idea representing the set
of all ideas you're not necessarily aware of. (Yet obviously if you're
not aware of it then it's not an idea. And if you try to think of an example
of particular thing existing outside your consciousness, it's automatically
an idea and hence subjective on a certain level) When we think of an objective
universe existing independently of our perception, we can only think of
it in terms of our own consciousness and we project some kind of imagined
thing or things, ultimately an idea or ideas, into that imagined state
of being--while at the same time we assume that it doesn't exist as a state
of ideas.
We extrapolate based on our experience that we
may in the future become aware, by perception, of things we're not currently
aware of .. and because our perception of a thing is supposedly incidental
within our conceptual framework of how things work and because things that
we perceive seem to cohere internally afterward (which suggests a definite
correspondance between our incidental perceptions of things and an outside
information source, but by no means an equal nature), we naturally think
of these things as originating externally to our consciousness from an
entire realm of objects existing just as we think of them but only with
many many more things.. calling that particular projection objective reality..
while it's also possible in the context of debate for a person to have
a more bleak view of 'objective reality' because he *thinks of* thinking
of such projections more than the next person and therefore restricts
more of that projection to the category of subjective ideas while lending
the objective to the unknown on a more fundamental level.
Obviously it's a lot easier for people to have these
discrepencies than it is for them to understand them as such and that's
why the argument is always such a mess..
One avenue that may branch to or from the objective/subjective
circle-jerk is the matter of 'truth'.. what is truth, and exactly how absolute
is it? I think this deserves a page of
its own..
Richard A. Nichols III