Is there such a thing as objective reality?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The one thing that is very clear is that we ourselves experience everything subjectively; I can only see with my eyes, I can only hear with my ears, and (most importantly) I can only think with my mind. This is an extremely obvious truth (to the extent that it is actually self-evident), but it's one that can be surprisingly easy to forget. Assuming that there is an objective reality, we cannot ourselves experience it - or even observe it - objectively.

A source of considerable amusement to me is the fact that many of the scientific breakthroughs of the past hundred years tend to back this up; no one knows what an atom looks like, for instance (let's not even think about the composition of an atom). It's interesting that the language of popular science struggles to describe this accurately; atoms are often described as being building blocks of matter even though strictly speaking this is not exactly true.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Back in the 19th century Catholic priests in Italy had a special tactic to rout Idealists in public debates; they would pound the table in front of them and insist that the Idealist sitting next to them believed that the table did not exist. Worked like a charm and would presumably (ironically?) have been approved by all the various materialists (philosophical, scientific, whatever) out there. As far as was known at the time it was not even exactly dishonest (except in spirit. Such tactics are always dishonest in spirit). The trouble with similar tactics now,¹ is that scientific breakthroughs have destroyed the materialism on which it rested (material reality turns out not to exist in its own right: it is effectively some kind of abstraction). Or to put things a little differently, we now know that the universe is not structured according to manmade rules and so cannot be explained by logic.²

<sub>1. Although I'm sure that they would still work in a public debate!

2. Which turns out to be excellent news for science because, damn, doesn't that make things interesting?</sub>