To reiterate a comment I made yesterday, I used to have this viewpoint, that what we see and hear is objective, until I experimented with psychedelics, and my e

To reiterate a comment I made yesterday, I used to have this viewpoint, that what we see and hear is objective, until I experimented with psychedelics, and my entire concept of reality was shattered. Reality is objective, we can measure the spectrum of this audio clip, or the RGB values on the image of the dress. But the reality we experience is subjective, whether we hear laurel or yanny, whether the dress is blue or gold. What we see, what we hear, what we taste, it all gets subconsciously pre-processed before it reaches out conscious mind. To tie into another HN article from yesterday, an expensive bottle of wine does taste better to us, even if it's exactly the same wine inside. The objective reality is that it's the same wine, but our subjective reality, from what we see, from what we taste, is that the expensive bottle is a fine wine. Plato recognised this when he penned the Allegory of the Cave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave) I've started to apply this realisation to life in general. If someone has a different viewpoint, I try to understand why they think that way, what has caused them to have that belief. So often in this day and age, people have a set opinion and think that if you disagree you're a bad person, or being deliberately wrong or lying. As much as I hate to wade into the Trump debate and American politics, this has been one of the failures of the left in the USA. Instead of trying to understand why somebody might support Trump, instead of trying to view the world through a different lens, they just tried to demonise Trump supporters and convince everybody that if they voted for Trump they were bad people. The political Right do exactly the same thing. Instead of trying to understand the viewpoint of the left, they accuse them of being socialists and hating America.