Reality is not 'just an experience'. It's a constructive activity which synthesises elements of sensory data with the categories of the understanding to generate the phenomenal experience. — Wayfarer
All the experiments its theory is based on are done with "publicly accessible objects"; we rely on the measurements and results they show to derive the theory in the first place. — Janus
Kastrup (a different idealist thinker) simply argues that all we experience is real - it just isn't physical. So signs and fossils and DNA and an oncoming bus - are all important readings on a dashboard that hold real consequences. They are mind when observed from a different perspective. But this stuff is very elusive and cannot be demonstrated other than undermining materialist ontologies. — Tom Storm
They're not, though. That is the whole point of the 'observer problem'. That is why Einstein had to ask his friend Michael Besso, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' — Wayfarer
If physicists did not absolutely reliably discover the same readings, no physics would be possible. — Janus
You're just talking out of your comfortable assumed realism. Science suggests otherwise. Anyway - duty calls, I have a commercial assignment to start, so I'll bow out for now. Cheers. — Wayfarer
So, we can make up our stories about mind independently existent physical objects or ideas in the mind of God or collective unconscious or whatever, but they are all just stories we tell ourselves, some of us preferring one and others preferring others. For all intents and purposes we know there are publicly accessible objects, whatever their "ultimate constitutions" might be; and we don't even know if that idea is of ultimate constitution is coherent. — Janus
All I'm saying is that for the purposes of human experience and understanding there are publicly accessible objects — Janus
We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own. — Arthur Eddington
it is one of the things that has become apparent through 20th C science itself. — Wayfarer
The lack of ability to visualize these things does not seem to be holding us back.
But if reality were nothing like what we experience, no kind of observation would be telling us anything that we could justifiably base any theory on. For example the idea of evolution is based on the fossil record; and observation of plants and animals and their similarities and differences, and also on studying DNA profiles but according to his theory all that could tell us nothing about how species evolved, and indeed the very idea of species evolving and sharing traits and DNA would be groundless.How do you think he could address this problem? — Janus
The question is: is talking about the location of the Moon "in space" when no one is watching as silly talking about the smell of Mars when no one is around to sniff it.
The idea that we are stuck and need a conceptual transformation to move forward seems quite common in the field. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It's fairly speculative to think what Kant might think of our modern scientific world, ultimately. Especially given the diversity of opinions on Kant's thoughts on teleological judgment and how that sort of offers a way for reasonable individuals to still be, well... spiritual. Or whatever. — Moliere
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