I don’t think we disagree. I just think even our most objective, scientific descriptions of reality are inherently framed by our human abilities to interact with that reality, and as such are subjective and incomplete. The fact that we see and hear and touch as opposed to some other sensory capabilities we can’t comprehend because we don’t have them determines what we believe reality consists of.
1 Like
Being incomplete, like the things we can’t yet see in the world, doesn’t mean that what we do see isn’t really there.
I would not use the word “determines.” I would use the word “informs” or even say it is “the foundation” of our understanding of reality. We can go beyond what we can see and hear (or the lack of other senses) by the use of our rational faculties. That discovery of psychologists that perception is not independent of our beliefs has multiple consequences. Yes our perceptions are not as objective as we presumed and the philosophy of empiricism is shown to be flawed. But it also means that our perception is not limited to our senses and by reason we have expanded our perception so much farther and deeper than ever dreamed of before.
Consider for example those who are blind or deaf (or both), lacking some of the senses we all have. Are their beliefs determined by the lack of these senses. Sure the communication of others about what these sense tell us has a lot to do with why they don’t, but isn’t that an example of how we can transcend the limits of our senses by the use of our rational capabilities?
P.S. Perhaps you can at least see why some of your word choices has caused so many to object to what you say.
Of course not. Which is why I clarified that I think our constructs of reality can be true and we can reach consensus on what it real.
1 Like
Sure. Language is limited by our subjective experiences with words. 
I guess my point is that if we had bodies like jellyfish and lived in water, we would have different concepts space and movement, of left and right, up and down, forward and backward. Our reality would be different. The fact that we have those spatial concepts is due to the particular way we are embodied and our life on land with gravity. This discussion started about time. The way we are embodied and the life we live on earth determines our capacity to conceptualize time. Our descriptions of time are informed by our experiences yes, but I don’t think we can get beyond them purely by rational will and imagine how time would be experienced by creatures fundamentally different than ourselves with different sensory capacites. Or how time is experienced by God. It’s beyond our conceptual reach in many ways.
Very much so, but we can still marvel and be thankful for his providential interventions into the lives of his children, whatever. And be obedient in remembering them and recounting them.
If they are not part of our ‘subjective experience’ it is not illegitimate to desire and objectively seek them!
1 Like
That works for me, but I’d say that is what objectivity looks like.
2 Likes
It is not a matter of “rational will” but of rational analysis and discovery. I am also not so satisfied by such traditional rhetoric about imaginary inscrutabilities. What we do not know about what we do not know is simply not known and is a poor excuse for imagining vast gulfs. The surprise of future knowledge within our current horizon is not only one of unguessed complexity but also a good portion of unexpected simplicity. Our understanding of time has already changed a great deal from our instinctive experience and I see little reason for these to mislead and more reason to think these actually can inform us of how time is experienced by God.
After all, I believe us to be in a parent-child relationship with God. It may take an eternity to understand all there is but I think we are made to understand everything.
We can also employ similar assumptions that we don’t recognize, but which predispose us to agree on “reality,” while another group with their own shared assumptions would see reality differently. Each groups’ subjective experience is different, but feels objective to the members of each group, because someone else, maybe someone who sees most other aspects of reality differently, “agrees” with them.
1 Like
This becomes a splendidly fascinating conversation among different groups when one group believes reality to be an illusion. Which goes back to my previous point about how the discussion about metaphysics begins with an agreement about an objective world. Which presupposes (I am still working on this) a world which begins in (or is determined by) the past.
If we don’t agree there is an objective world, there’s no point talking about it.
Einstein believed in a B theory. He had a well-framed model of space+time which he applied to the actual universe, with the whole of time present in his model. But, that does not in itself make it true. Probabilies seem to take place in one dimension in time, fowards not backwards, and Einstein in particular did not believe in quantum probabilities - he was unorthodox in this respect. Most physicists in practical life make use of a direction in time as built into their work. A thoroughgoing B theory would have to explain or explain away how the past can influence the future but not vice versa.
3 Likes
What I am talking about, and I think Christy is as well, is not whether objective reality exists. I think an objective reality is a given. The subjective part is our perception or conception of objective reality, which is all we can know of it.
I think there is disagreement about how “close to reality” our perception of reality can be — what all lies between what we think of as reality, and ultimate reality itself. But there is some distance. Within that (metaphorical) space is where our subjectivity becomes involved.
To restate this understanding, as some have and continue to do, in ways like: “There are no objective facts,” is a misconstrual of the view and often used as a straw man. It’s part of what I found so frustrating about Doug Groothuis’s book Truth Decay and his (mis)charactarization of Postmodernism.
To your point about the existance of an objective world or reality, there might be some people who say it doesn’t exist; I don’t know them. There are others, I think, who say that we are so subjectively distanced from actually knowing ultimate reality, that the idea of ultimate reality is irrelevant (Perhaps Rorty), that there is no point in acting as if it does exist.
I find the first view (that there is no objective reality at all) is silly, but how could I possibly “prove” my position? The latter view, that ultimate reality is absolutely unknowable and is therefore irrelevant feels extreme to me, but I think does make sense.
None of these positions, though, as far as I can imagine, would be helpful to an apologist, who must rely on a provable, agreed-on ultimate reality. There are things that I think can be agreed on, as @mitchellmckain has pointed out, but things like the existence of God, for example, cannot be worked out from within our subjective perception of reality, because it varies from person to person, culture to culture, history to history.
[I think that’s everything I was trying to get in there.]
3 Likes
- The B Theory of Time in science is very “Postmodern”; it goes like this:
- All perspectives are valid, but some are more valid than others. Although there is no Absolute perspective, yours is still wrong."
2 Likes
Is this a commonly accepted interpretation?
It’d be a great confirmation for something I had a hunch about about with a counterexample to the cosmological argument I learned as an undergrad: the possibility of having an infinite number of past events, not formed through sequential addition, but existing as a brute fact to which present events are added.
I think that it’s generally taken for granted without too much philosophising. (I’m a physicist, by the way). There is some time asymmetry in the behaviour of elementary particles, but I don’t think this affects the causality issue. Causality is built into some quite widely used mathematics called the Kramers-Kronig relations (see Wikipedia for more). We are getting quite technical here, unfortunately.
2 Likes
Generally taken for granted as in an unspoken assumption?? I was really impressed by how clearly you stated the determinative question with B theory. I’ve only picked up bits and pieces on this subject over the years, but your statement stood out for me.
“The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit
Can lure it back to rewrite half a line,
nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
3 Likes
Thanks for the explanation, Kendall. That and Christy’s post helps me understand and accept post-modernism a lot better. The analogy that it brings to mind in science is our understanding of how the universe works. Ancient people saw the cosmos as being the usual 3 tiered structure, because that is how they saw the world. Moving forward, others continued to learn the earth was a sphere, and visualized the geocentric model, and made it work, later, the heliocentric model came to be accepted, and Newton’s ideas on gravity made it work. Now, we see Newton’s physics superceded by relativity which comes closer to describing the reality of how the universe is structured, but which even then we know is lacking.
1 Like
That’s a great analogy. It also raises a neat question about where science is headed. Does a block universe which has its beginning in an eternal present fit the observational (or experiential) data better than a world which is determined by the past?
Maybe Indian philosophy had or has it right all around:
Vedanta declares that our real nature is divine: pure, perfect, eternally free. We do not have to become Brahman, we are Brahman. Our true Self, the Atman, is one with Brahman.
But if our real nature is divine, why then are we so appallingly unaware of it?
The answer to this question lies in the concept of maya, or ignorance. Maya is the veil that covers our real nature and the real nature of the world around us. Maya is fundamentally inscrutable: we don’t know why it exists and we don’t know when it began. What we do know is that, like any form of ignorance, maya ceases to exist at the dawn of knowledge, the knowledge of our own divine nature.
This was exactly my original sticking point about causality. If the past/present/future distinction is illusory (as some B theorists claim), then if (what we consider) past events can affect future events, then this means future events need to be able to affect past events. Otherwise there is a distinction between past/present/future because the “arrow of causality” would only go one way and thus seem to imply A theory.
1 Like