And that would be a strong disagreement between us.

I work in science and technology, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how good my arguments are, the final arbiter of truth is reality. At the end of the day, our ability to understand the world is only as good as our understanding of what is, not what we would like to be or what we think is. If you make predictions or plans based on incorrect models of the world, you will get outcomes other than what you want.

In the famous movie “The Matrix”, one of the main characters named Morpheus asks “What is real?”, with the implication of the question in that moment being that The Matrix, a simulation where people spend their days while objectively speaking their physical bodies are in vats of nutrients as their brains have the simulation implanted into them through a prosthetic implanted in the back of their heads, was just as real as the physical world. In a subjective sense, perhaps it is. The interactions between people are certainly real. In the movie, Neo and Trinity fall in love in part during their time in the Matrix. Their love is highly subjective (Trinity certainly isn’t my type), but real to them. On the other hand, the existence of the subjective does not mean rejection of the objective. The objective reality (in the movie, at least) was that whatever the Matrix told the individuals brains, they were in vats of goo being used to power a supercomputer. The main theme of the movie was a rejection of inauthentic simulations to rejoin the more authentic world that while subjectively much less comfortable was nonetheless objective reality. The second and third movie I think didn’t communicate that theme as well, but the point of the architect near the end of the second movie was that Zeon itself was something of a simulation – Despite being in the objective world of atoms it was a false world created by the machines to give the humans who needed hope to not destroy their fictional world. Once again, however, the existence of subjective reality does not mean objective reality does not exist, only that the two both exist, and that our perceptions of subjective reality can cloud objective reality.

Consciousness is an example of something we know to be real subjectively but is very difficult to quantity objectively. We ‘know’ we’re conscious, but some objective data really puts it into question such as research showing that for some decisions we have the answers before we consciously decide on the answers. This shows that the two can exist and be somewhat distinct from each other. The fact that the two can exist and even be at odds does not negate the existence of one or the other, however.

Now you can make a convincing argument that what we perceive and understand what the world isn’t objective reality and instead a subjective shadow of reality seen through the lens of an organism which is evolutionarily developed in order to ensure survival and replication of the organisms containing specific DNA, but at the end of the day regardless of our ability to properly perceive it objective reality absolutely exists. There’s something outside of ourselves that must exist independently of us, because things can happen the same to a lot of different people who hold entirely different beliefs and still have essentially the same outcome.

One civilization that doesn’t strictly believe in objective reality is the Indian civilization. It’s an incredible civilization in terms of culture, but anyone who has ever tried to take over the country has been wildly successful. Of course British colonialism is one example, but in the 9th century muslims from the northwest came down and were absolutely dominating the indian subcontinent, and all the leaders did was build nicer temples so the gods would grant them victory.

Things in the objective physical world also happened before there was anyone to subjectively perceive anything. Assuming our theories are correct (which is always a risk – every era ever including ours has been fundamentally wrong about some understandings of the world. This is due to the objective nature of reality and how we are striving to understand what is, rather than what we think is), the universe was born, stars were formed, burned for billions of years, and exploded releasing the atoms that would someday become our solar system, our sun formed by accumulating hydrogen and building a gravity well that eventually accumulated material to form the planets including earth, the hadean period rocked the planet with red hot fire, and then after billions of years without any organism to percieve anything, the first life showed up on earth in the archean period. It would be quite a long time before complex life would show up, and that would include objective events such as the oxygen catastrophe and ensuing ice age that killed most life on earth whether the simple single-celled organisms subjectively thought it would happen or not.

Quantum mechanics makes people believe there is no objective reality because of elements such as wave-particle duality or quantum entanglement, or even quantum superposition. In my view, this argument is critically flawed because quantum mechanics in fact shows the objective nature of reality. We subjectively believed for 200 years that Newtonian physics is the language we can use to understand reality, but it turns out that on very small scales newtonian physics break down and there’s an entirely new conception of reality that is unintuitive to us at the macro scale. On very high scales of relative speed, we also saw newtonian physics break down at very large scales or for objects travelling very fast, and that’s where Einsteinian relativity came in. Once again, it shows that reality is objective rather than subjective because these rules apply to us independently of our perception or understanding of them. Our perception of time relative to other things may change due to relativity, but reality and the rules of the universe don’t care about our perception of them. Also important is that stuff like Heisenberg’s uncertainty theorem that suggest we can know a particle’s position or its speed but not both isn’t a subjective thing because it doesn’t require a human observer to be true – particles interact in predictably unpredictable ways with or without us, which is why quantum mechanics works when a scientist isn’t looking directly at a screen. At the quantum scale the nature of measurement is that you are interacting with something using forces or particles that are on similar scales to what you’re measuring, so of course you’re changing the value by measuring it, to measure it you need to interact with something smaller than most people can imagine.

I think it’s important with respect to quantum mechanics to understand that there’s sort of 2 fields – one is based on strict measurement and analysis of experiments, and one is based almost exclusively on thought experiments and often fails to come up with any testable hypotheses. Personally, I consider the former to be actual quantum physics, and the latter to be quackery. Thought experiments have their place, but a problem with leaving the objective measurement and understanding of measurements is that you can justify many interpretations, most of which can be quite wrong. Everyone knows Democritus theorized about the existence of atoms, but few people follow that up by pointing out that for millennia people followed instead the concept of everything being made up of 4 elements of wind, fire, water, and earth. The correct answer was largely forgotten and the incorrect answer was largely accepted in part because people could only go by what looked better on paper or felt better instead of what was objectively true.

Some people think that reality is socially constructed. To me, this is an egocentric and arrogant view of the world, fitting for our egocentric and arrogant civilization, but not fit as a theory of reality. Give 1 person LSD and convince them they can fly, and they’ll jump out a window and die. Give 10 people the same and do the same, they’ll jump out a window and die. Give a million people the same and do the same (jeez you’re a dick, what did those million people ever do to you?) – reality exists independently of our perception of it, and the only thing that changes is our perception of reality.

On the topic of objective truth and social sciences, the social sciences in particular are in a crisis caused by failures to measure objective reality. Some problems are with famous researchers being accused of faking data to lead to certain results they want. Some problems are with techniques such as “p-hacking” where a statistically insignificant result is played with (for example by increasing the sample size of a borderline result but only for one that wouldn’t be significant) until it becomes statistically significant, because novel positive findings have greater prestige than negative findings. There is objectivity in measuring the subjective, after all. In failing to properly design their experiments, measure the outcomes, or analyze the data, they have stopped being a science and thus entire fields are in a crisis because nobody can be correct – not because reality is subjective, but because it is objective and failure to correctly work with that fact results in objectively negative outcomes for everyone as the results of research only serve to make the authors better off, not the scientific field.

This links up with the concept of postmodernism which simply put often tries to reject grand narratives and often questions the existence of objective truth. There is actually a benefit to this in subjective or human sciences, but at a cost – Postmodernism has created new artforms that are often intellectually stimulating or aesthetically pleasing and a complete departure from previous norms, but it has also put out an almost unlimited amount of gibberish and garbage, since the biggest benefit of questioning if we really have the right answers is that we might find another area of subjective emotional or aesthetic truth we hadn’t considered before. On the other hand, where postmodernism runs up against objective reality, it always loses – At the end of the day, reality doesn’t care how smart you are, it chooses what is correct, not you.

Some religious ideologies may consider reality subjective, such as the indian brahmins I mentioned earlier. While their worldview can often be quite compelling emotionally, only religions that manage to find a compromise between their subjective worldview and the objective reality of survival will grow because if a religion’s tenets lead individuals to objectively die then those religions will die out. Whatever the beliefs of the Minoans or the Harrapan civilization, neither of them have any adherents today because their civilizations were wiped out by objective reality’s harsh tenets – we don’t even know what they believed their ideologies were wiped out so completely.

I guess finally, we can say that due to the limitations of human perception perhaps there’s cognitive glitches that mean reality actually is subjective and it only appears objective because we collectively believe it’s objective. I suppose that’s a possibility, but I think at that point we’re having to make an awful lot of unfounded assumptions to fit the hypothesis to the data. It is much simpler and much more likely that objective reality existed before us, subjectivity exists on a small timeframe in the universal scale because there exists something to be subjective, and then for many times the current estimated length of the universe objective reality will outlive us because we have every piece of evidence that we’re not that special.