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Old 01-25-2004, 10:11 PM   #21 (permalink)
filtherton
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Location: In the land of ice and snow.
Quote:
Originally posted by Tophat665
[B
Sure the world exists for your nocturnal friends; they create it every afternoon. Willbjammin has it right: The act of perception is indistinguishable from the act of creation. I merely deny that there is such a thing as an objective reality. All is subjective. Even physics enshrines this in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,which, to put it as broadly as possible while maintaining the gist states that the simple act of observation has an effect on the observed. (Of course, it also has an effect on the observer, but he either hadn't fully appreciated wht he had come up with, or he felt it was too obvious or, more likely, too mathematically challenging even for one of the great mathematical geniuses of all time, to state that.)

Now, it may seem I am leaving myself open to a charge of soplipsism. I am not. I said at the beginning that each of you also creates the world. And here's where a Catholic up bringing is handy. If Three can be one, well then why not 3 billion (or whatever the global population is these days.) Coextant yet distinct worlds, and each of us lives primarily in the one we create, but is influenced by all of them.

The more one talks about it the more trivial it becomes. There is an empowering shift of perception to be had here if one is prepared to grasp it. [/B]
I guess where i disagree is in my belief i an objective reality. You can't have perception without something to perceive. I can ask you what time it is and odds are you'll tell me a time within 15 minutes of what my watch says(if you take time zones into account). Now, if there wasn't some sort of objective reality we couldn't have that sort of exchange. You could come back at me by saying that our different realities share certain common characteristics. We all set our watches the same in this reality. That's fine. You could just say, "well, you never know" and it would have the same resonance with me. You have the ultimate argument though, because it amounts to the idea that nothing is real. How do you prove to someone who is convinced nothing is real that something is real? "We could all just be part of some massive computer program designed to use our bioelectrical power to power its army of robots"

Last edited by filtherton; 01-25-2004 at 10:14 PM..
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