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You said something about denying that things exist. You said that "objective reality" is a myth, and you said it as though people who believe in objective reality are simpletons. If there is no objective reality, one person can say, "There is a car in my garage." and someone else can say, "There is a dragon in your garage." and both will be equally correct (because there is no objective way to determine otherwise). But, because objective reality does seem to be an accurate model for our universe, other observers can look in the garage, and see that, yes, there is a car (or dragon, as the case may be) in the garage. You can take a picture of the car (or dragon) in the garage, you can measure it, you can hop in (on) and take it for a drive (flight), you can touch it, etc. While your perception and your recollection may have gaps, we have scientific tools to remove the ambiguity of faulty perception and memory. With enough measurements, recordings, and photographic evidence of something, we can know it pretty darned objectively. My point is that it's simply unproductive to deny that there is an objective reality. The world behaves as though there is objective reality. My house has never turned into a turtle, and my dog seems to be a dog every day no matter how much she might want to be a cat. I may not remember all the details of each of these things, but that doesn't mean they aren't what they are. The "patchwork of things" that my brain puts together about the world can be made to match the patchwork of things that other brains put together by using tools to measure and record those things, even while understanding that no one will ever have a complete grasp of the entirety of reality (it's pretty big, and even one single pebble, is too much for a single human to grasp in its entirety, when you start thinking in terms of atoms and particles and such). Basically, I think you've decided that "objective reality" means humans can be all-knowing and perfectly observant...but that's not what anyone else means when they use the term. |
I still don't have a clear idea on how one can reject objective reality, or reject what is real.
There have been some simularities between all my confrontations over the years: the people don't make very much sense; they demand respect for their "opinion;" and, they attribute arrogance to believing in an objective reality.
Somewhere, they learned the wrong thing. And I think I've deduced part of the problem: they take the subjectivity of some definitions as a sort of proof that an objective reality doesn't exist, and at an intuitive level, they don't accept reductionism.
Definitions being a form of reductionism. That is to say, at a very fundamental level, they take issue with you saying "this orange weighs .3kg ." They won't confront you for saying that, but if they happen to like the movie Joe Dirt, and you say "Joe Dirt is a bad movie," watch out. You are now offending their reality and it is now very personal.
And just to further clarify, when I say "the subjectivity of some definitions," I mean the various degrees of allowed interpretation of ideas. There are different degrees of subjectivity to different ideas: people have an amount of leeway to define some things for themselves, such as love, as it is not very well understood anyway. However, some ideas are very close to a real, concrete, one-to-one, definition of reality.
Yet these people have it in their head that they can make up whatever they want with anything, even though they don't normally execute this power to make up whatever they want. But they do get caught up on their right to make up whatever they want, which boils down to rejecting objective reality. I think there's some kind of empowerment high and self-consolation that "opinions" hold merit by merely existing, even for concepts that aren't lenient with subjectivity.
This submission is pretty much dead but I hope you read this comment since I had this Aha! while reading your comment. This is a rough sketch of something I'm going to expand upon, but hopefully I explained it well enough for now.