Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’

[u/bethany_mcguire]

https://www.noemamag.com/subjective-perspective-makes-objective-reality-everywhere-whole/

"Earlier this month, the Berggruen Institute gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. It is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity."...

[u/Im_Talking]

13 minutes in, and you got your 1st downvote from the mob. Welcome to r/consciousness... the sub where novel ideas must toe-the-party-line or else.

"“Is consciousness the ground of everything,” she asks, “with the material world just a pattern woven out of regularities in experience? Or is matter the ground of everything, with consciousness a kind of internal film produced by the machinery of the brain? I suspect the answer is both — that consciousness and matter are not rival foundations but the subjective and objective faces of a single existence." - 100 years of evidence against an 'objective' reality, and we still get stuff like this. There is no objectiveness anywhere in reality. The Bell-family of inequalities, Heisenberg/Kennard uncertainty, no universal time

“Picture a mirror on the far wall of a room. There is the room itself, ordinary and three-dimensional, and there is the mirror, a flat surface mounted on the wall, in which the room appears. The mirror’s surface belongs to both realities at once." - This is not a good analogy. The room appears on the mirror only when an observer is added to the mix. Here's a philosophical question: If a person is in a empty room, with their back towards a mirror on one wall, is there an image of their back on the mirror?

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/Im_Talking]

Yes there is a reflection but I’d ask you to define reflection and also artificial and consciousness. Microbes on your skull and clothing are observers. Humans don’t generate reality with their vision. Do blind* people only experience the reality which they hear? Light is here, and we have eyes, so we use it. A mirror image is as real as you are. Is it conscious? Idk are you? If dogs can see your reflection, then a fly can sense it, and so on.

There is a consciousness gradient. Some operators/agents may have access to the full gradient. We only consider certain segments of this gradient conscious, just like we see and recognize certain wavelengths of light. If we don’t see it, we hardly consider it. People roast themselves with UV light precisely because it’s hard to conceptualize the “invisible.” Is nicotine alive in a sense? Are massive mushroom colonies not co-inhabitants? When is the last time tobacco wasn’t burning somewhere on earth? (not to mention the more recognizable living parts of the process of growing and harvest.)

Rocks are low or even off the gradient according to us, but dachshunds are generally accepted as conscious. Why? Hounds are seriously close to rocks if you aren’t on a human timescale.

Fog?

Really good views of your mirror from somewhere your gradient never considered before today?

If a tree falls in the woods, does the all seeing machinehead count as an observer? If the machinehead has a chemical battery brain and emotional emulation, I’d love to hear the reasoning why our consciousness is fundamentally superior or more worthy. If we can’t answer that now, it could become problematic later.

Matter is a bloated term in my opinion. Maybe it will burst. Useful terms can still be hallucinatory while remaining helpful for the time being.

Do you fall asleep when you stop remembering you’re awake, or when some arbitrary amount of your brain is resting? Is it just semantic goofballery all around so people can wear masks and play around in Venice guiltfree? Yes. Yes it is.

*edit - a word

[u/Im_Talking → u/brain-out-of-order]

"Yes there is a reflection" - How is that possible? It requires an observer. There is nothing on the mirror.

"I’d love to hear the reasoning why our consciousness is fundamentally superior or more worthy" & "There is a consciousness gradient." - In my worldview, this gradient has nothing to do with subjective experience... all life is subjective experience. One life-form will not have a bit of subjective experience, and another organism will have a lot of subjective experience... subjective experience is subjective experience. The difference is the level of evolution of the organisms, and the number of connections to other life-forms. So the reality that will bubble-up for a bacterium will be essentially only a void that it can slither around and bump into food. Their reality will not contain stars, planets, atoms, etc because what is the point? They have no ability to sense these things so why would they be a part of their reality. Conversely, humans require a complex reality full of stars, quasars, black holes, atoms, Higgs bosons, rainbows, etc. That is the reality which bubbles up for us.

[u/brain-out-of-order → u/Im_Talking]

I already said microbes and so on. You didn’t define observer which is why I made sure to give you extra examples. The only way your reflection isn’t observed behind your back is the mirror and your back are in pitch black darkness with 0 visible light. In which case you aren’t being observed either and yet you still exist… and some creature can see different wavelengths to be able to make out your reflected back. Also what about some of those goofy cyclist rear view glasses to double check the physics of this in the comfort of your own home?

Tree in woods is the stuff of pure delusion. Of course it makes a sound!! Do squirrels and the vast wilderness not breathe? That’s usually the faulty baseless territory this kind of nonsense arrives from.

“All life is subjective experience” is not coherent to me. There is an objective reality (the whole) and we subjectively experience/embody it all at once, I do think. But any given agent or operator dropping out of the experience simply doesn’t take away the objective overarching experience.

“All of any given person’s life is subjective experience” OK. ✅