On related threads I brought up subjective vs objective reality. I feel there is ample evidence that if objective reality exists, we are incapable of discerning it.
Take a incident that has 6 witnesses. Ask the 6 independently what happens and you usually will get 6 different stories many times in contradiction with each other. After the incident is discussed among each other usually 1 story emerges from the 6, or perhaps there is 5 in agreement and 1 who insists on a different and contradictory story.
From the above example, if we assume a pure objective reality, what can be said about a human’s ability to perceive it if there are multiple versions contradicting each other?
And how does the one story come together from 6? How does that one story actually replace what they believed they observed at first in their mind? Does this show how human minds can be so easily influenced?
I would also like to include the need for humans to be accepted and not ostracized as a strong motivation to conform to popular opinion in creating the single story.
If objective reality exists, there’s one way to acquire knowledge about it – or really, become gradually less wrong in one’s knowledge about it --, and that’s the scientific method: forming reasonable hypotheses (i.e. those accounting for a maximum of data while making a minimum of assumptions) and subjecting them to empirical scrutiny. So, while we can never know – or never know and know that we know – how objective reality actually is, we can know how it is not. Gradually, we inch closer and closer to truth – we used to believe the world was flat, now we know it’s not; we used to believe the world was spherical, now we know it’s not; but it’s flat to a (surprisingly good) approximation, and spherical to an even better one – so whatever its ‘real shape’ may be, by now, we know it so well – we have such a good approximation – that the error is so small as to be negligible.
If the six people in the example in the OP combine their knowledge in the right way (which they usually won’t), then there’s a good chance that they will in the end converge on a story closer to ‘what really happened’ than either of their individual stories likely was. That’s really what investigators do (well, ought to do) when interviewing witnesses separately: mark what has little variance over the individual stories as likely, while discarding unreliable pieces of narration. Find the most likely story consistent with a maximum of the witnesses’ narratives. See if it holds up (i.e. test it against other pieces of evidence).
Every particular datum is fallible and questionable, but in relating a great number of data with each other, a picture emerges that at least with some quantifiable likelihood matches ‘objective reality’.
Are you talking about the difference between reality and our faulty and/or incomplete perception of reality? I take it this hypothetical incident with 6 independent witnesses is without any evidence at all except the eyewitness testimony, because that is practically the only scenario where your example makes any sense. In real life, such situations are extremely rare.
If there were no objective reality, or if there were but humans were completely incapable of perceiving it, why would the 6 stories have anything in common at all?
Your example doesn’t prove that we are incapable of discerning objective reality; all it proves is that some of us, at least, are incapable of perfectly discerning, and/or remembering and describing, objective reality.
There is no question about objective reality, if you mean a world that exists independently of your individual consciousness. It’s out there. The testimony of our senses establishes that fact, and leaves no room for reasonable doubt. Our knowledge of that world will always be imperfect and incomplete, but it doesn’t follow that we can have absolutely no confidence in that knowledge. Human testimony will never be perfect, but it doesn’t follow that it is never reliable at all, and I would be very surprised if the testimony of your six witnesses would be so wildly different that there was no significant overlap among them.
There’s no reason to think that their perception of the reality at the time of the incident was faulty. Merely that memory is faulty (which has been proven over and over again).
But hypotheticals (like a “The Matrix” situation) answer this question with a resounding “no.”
There has to be some limit to the malleability of the human mind, as you put it. Otherwise we can’t rationally claim to know anything at all. Claiming that the human mind is so highly malleable that we can know nothing with any real certainty means that you are claiming a high degree of certainty about the malleability of the human mind, which you claimed was impossible in the first place, and the snake devours its own tail.
I don’t see how faulty memory helps the human situation, though it could explain objective reality. We still can’t trust human’s ability to accurately relay information about a event. And again does not account for the perceived malleability of the human mind to accept a different then remembered view very easily and almost automatically to be accepted and not ostracized.
Ideas like the Matrix have been around a very long time, going back at least to Plato’s allegory of the cave, and come up often in philosophy, many of the worlds greatest thinkers would not give it a resounding no, some may even give it a resounding yes.
There are two explanations for the situation in the OP. Objective reality is shaky, or human perception is shaky. To test this hypothesis, all you need to do is to record it independently. If people are not suddenly confronted with an event, but get to study it (independently) at their leisure, their stories will agree without discussion.
If you say that the camera gets only one of the many versions of reality, all you need to do is record the event with as many cameras as you wish. If they all agree, reality looks secure.
They are malleable enough to usually come up with a single view from different conflicting views. That seems pretty darn malleable. So I ask also what are the limits to people abandoning what they observed and accepting someone else’s view?
Also what does it say about the will of the person willing to abandon what they perceived. Does the strong willed person’s view win?
As for the influence there’s such thing as “winner’s history”, or in this case ‘winner’s reality’ so to speak.
OR
We are all in our own individual kinda “Truman Show”. Nothing is real… objective reality, six witnesses, SD/Dopers, nor are you here physically. This is just an exercise. Soon(when you are done ‘here’) you’ll be plugged into a different exercise.
Can you use a objective test to discover if there is subjective reality? For if there is any subjective reality and all your camera records is objective reality what good is it for this purpose?
(Bolding mine) I agree with rachellelogram that much, if not all, of the discrepancy is in the memory, not the perception.
Thus, people aren’t so much willing to abandon what they perceived, but what they remember having perceived, suggesting that what they don’t completely trust is, not their perception, but their memory.
Notice that you’re talking about people willing to abandon what they perceived (past tense), not what they perceive (present tense).
Accepted axiomatically that objective reality exists. All* we* have however are our impressions of that reality filtered and modified by our senses and our tools and by group consensus.
Half Man Half Wit’s explanation of the scientific method reducing the degree to which our perceptions of that objective reality are off base, by making predictions and testing them, is right on, but so is his second half: deciding on what model of reality is least wrong is also a social process.
I can believe that a tree that falls in a forest causes vibrations of molecules that would be perceived as sound if an ear was there to hear it. But without the experience or the report of one I cannot know it, and if I was in a forest with multiple others and I heard something loudly but no one else did, even I might doubt that my perception was correct and not a hallucination.
Really? Take a look at this link. Without reading any other responses to this post, I’d like for six people to answer the following questions (and try to avoid the temptation to nitpick; answer honestly):
How many animals are visible in the short animated gif?
What kind of animals are they?
What happens in the short animated gif?
My suspicion is as follows. Please don’t read it until you’ve answered the questions.
[spoiler]1) Everyone will agree.
2) There will be slight disagreement on the bird’s identification–some will say bird, some will identify the species (budgie? parakeet?), but everyone will mention some sort of bird. This may or may not happen with the turtle.
3) Descriptions will vary as to what happens, but everyone will mention the turtle’s fall.
If there’s no objective reality, it’s hard to account for the similarities among answers.[/spoiler]
What exactly do you mean by subjective reality? You seem to have admitted that there is an objective reality. No one disputes that our perceptions of this objective reality match it perfectly, so if you define subjective reality as our perception of objective reality (which will not match anyone else’s.) no one would deny that both exist.
