How can we be sure this is reality?

[JDFlood]

Everyone should probably ponder this for a while. But I also have to agree with above. A little bit in private is good, but looks silly in public. In one line of standard reasoning we suspect our perception: after images and miss perceptions. But overall 99.9999% we are correctly perceiving. The other is we are in The Matrix or similar you suffer a strong lack of evidence, motive ( now you need to invoke a god). Prove is a very strong word and can not be used on stuff we cannot perceive (in this case the framework for deception) ;-). JD

[CleanShavenJesus]

It has to be, and we have to be experiencing the same one. Everything we do affects another person. This type of question, when faced with it, has everyone doing circles in their heads. Same reaction.

And if you like to propose that this isn't reality, then what is? And where are we now? A dream world? An alternate reality? None of the above?

How could it be a dream world? How do we know what dreams are? We experience dreams in reality, so dreams would be just as much part of our reality as reality. So we can scratch that off the list.

How could it be an alternate reality? We don't even know what reality is (for the sake of this argument). There's no way we can propose that this is a different one from the one that already doesn't exist.

What else is there?

[Psykhronic]

Fuck reality. I don't care if it's real or not.

[Something completely different]

I am soooo shure that it is reality that I spend and have spent countless hours of my life drunk and high.

[Angrboda]

I prefer a position of pure agnosticism on the question of the real. Is it real? What do I mean by real, here? (My hunch is that much naive realism is stuck at one level of metaphysical description which corresponds with a certain stage of scientific or philosophical theory. I'd say your typical naive realist today is stuck at the stage of Neils Bohr's atomic model, they believe that there are tiny little particulates called electrons and neutrons and protons — that at bottom, reality is an aggregate of small bits. But this is not reflective of our current understanding of scientific truth; there are no such underlying little bits according to quantum theory. And when science moves on from the metaphysical interpretations of quantum physics, which is populated by models of the essence of reality from 'many worlds' to the Copenhagen interpretation, people's notions of what the fundamental essence of what is real will change.)

Ultimately, the only thing we have is experience. Are we real brains in a physical world? Or ideas in the mind of a god? Or blips in the matrix? Ultimately, all these scenarios, and an infinite more, are consistent with our experience and with no way to differentiate them or prove one or the other. Does it make sense to term one of these views 'real' and the others not, when there is no way to distinguish which is which. I don't believe so. That's why I devalue the concept 'real' as mere metaphysical baggage. There is no way to tell what view is preferable to another, and they're all likely equally false, and what would the word 'real' actually refer to anyway? If by 'real' you simply mean "accepted scientific model of real," then not only are you investing in a temporary, transitional construct, you're attempting to cash out a set of metaphysical ideas in non-metaphysical terms, and I think unsuccessfully. Some centuries hence, physics may have moved on and become something wholly unrecognizable from today. Will that make our current understanding of what's 'real' an illusion? Will that set of metaphysics and mathematical models be any more "real"? What about after that? Real as a placeholder for something like, "the consistency which orders my experience" is fine; but real as an 'idea' of what the underlying stuff that gives rise to our experience is, is, imho, a useless concept. It's sheer metaphysical nonsense, and like Hume, I say, consign it to the flames.

And at bottom, there is, I think a very sound reason for this. Assuming the physicalist model of brain and mind for the moment (I am a physicalist). Our minds exist by virtue of properties of the brain, but while our brains give rise to our minds, our minds are not physical objects in the world. Our minds exist as some kind of construct, being maintained in a small bowl of jello like flesh. This "thing" called the mind is populated by things which don't exist "in the world" but nonetheless are "real" to our experience. Things like pain, and emotion, and memories, and hunger and sleepiness and fear. Our minds exist as a bath of "mind stuff" that in no way resembles anything in the supposed external world. It's possible to make isomorphisms of this or that feature of the external world (like light or sound) and translate them into mind stuff that the mind then operates on. But once it becomes mind stuff, this "information" is no longer anything like what it is meant to represent. Things like colors and the sound of a car horn don't exist "out there" — they only exist "in here". Much as we'd like, there is an incommensurable barrier separating "mind stuff" from "real stuff". Thus I reject the notion that our internal perceptions are 99.9999% accurate; our internal representations bear extremely little actual resemblance to the things they represent. The only reason we like to think they do is because our mind is embedded in gigantic feedback loops with the external such that our mental 'echoes' of the external bear fruit in terms of useful and self-consistent behaviors. This is all that the "accuracy" of perception means, that our behaviors and our corresponding perceptions don't go flying off the rails. It's an operational concept, not an informational one. Even if we were to say that our perceptions were 99.999% accurate, what exactly would we be measuring our perceptions against? There are no "probes" that can tell that our view of that cylinder in our mind is slightly elongated from the way it "should" appear. Where do you get that gauge of accuracy from? And how?

I'm trying to find the transition, but am losing steam, so I'll just stick this in here. Our perceptions, in some sense, are like the old parable of the man pointing at the moon. One person will look up and see that he is pointing at the moon. Another will look at his finger and wonder what this curious gesture is supposed to mean. Perception is like a finger pointing at the moon (perhaps an invisible moon). We can't actually see the moon it's pointing at (in our mind stuff), but because it's pointing, and we've grown adept at interpreting its pointing, we fill in the blanks as to what it's pointing at (the external world). But it's worth bearing in mind that, at the end of the day, it really is "just a finger" displaying a curious gesture. If we ignore what we assume it is pointing at for the moment, we realize that all we have is the gesture, and our assumptions that this or that gesture is "pointing at the moon" or "pointing at a tree" or "perceiving the color red" — but ultimately all you have is the finger, crooked a certain way, and a bunch of beliefs about what it means when the finger assumes this or that pose. You never see the moon, or the tree, or actual "red". Only the finger pointing.

[Brian37]

Everyone should probably ponder this for a while. But I also have to agree with above. A little bit in private is good, but looks silly in public. In one line of standard reasoning we suspect our perception: after images and miss perceptions. But overall 99.9999% we are correctly perceiving. The other is we are in The Matrix or similar you suffer a strong lack of evidence, motive ( now you need to invoke a god). Prove is a very strong word and can not be used on stuff we cannot perceive (in this case the framework for deception) ;-). JD

No actually, our perceptions are notoriously flawed. But that is a product of evolution, and due to psychology. That is separate than the issue of being real beings.

Religion and ideology are results of our species pattern seeking, but it does not mean the patterns we seek are true. Often we us a false perception as a placebo IE superstition or god belief. It can have a real affect of creating safety in numbers if the false meme is spread. The Egyptians falsely believed the sun was a god. That miss perception made them successful for 3,000 years.

Chimps seem to smile, but what they are really doing is bearing their teeth in a show of defense "come near me and I will bite you". I am of course talking about wild ones, not the trained ones we see in the movies.

We also miss perceive distances and or sounds and memories about trauma can also be false. Eyewitnesses in criminal trials may truly believe what they are testifying to, but scientists can and do often refute their flawed perceptions.

Perceptions are notoriously flawed not mostly accurate. It is not all accurate or all inaccurate , simply messy and inconsistent at times. Flawed does not mean wrong all the time, just not perfect.

[Angrboda]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb-gT6vDrmU

[Confused Ape]

Religion and ideology are results of our species pattern seeking, but it does not mean the patterns we seek are true. Often we us a false perception as a placebo IE superstition or god belief. It can have a real affect of creating safety in numbers if the false meme is spread. The Egyptians falsely believed the sun was a god. That miss perception made them successful for 3,000 years.

The above indicates that 'reality' can be a majority opinion. Then there's personal reality. A theist who has a subjective experience of feeling a deity's presence will have a different mental construct of reality to atheists who regard themselves as survival machines for genes.

And when science moves on from the metaphysical interpretations of quantum physics, which is populated by models of the essence of reality from 'many worlds' to the Copenhagen interpretation, people's notions of what the fundamental essence of what is real will change.

I think that reading about the different ideas of what might be reality can be a very good exercise, though. Nobody knows which idea is 'true reality' yet so I've decided not to get too attached to a particular world view.

[Angrboda]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKEOSHCgK38

[Confused Ape]

I love Ramachandran's lectures. This one is particularly interesting where the topic's concerned.