3 ms·
The photons from the screen are real. Everything else is conjecture. If I look back at photos I've taken, I can conjecture that they appear to be an accurate r
by Merrill 6y ago
The photons from the screen are real.
Everything else is conjecture. If I look back at photos I've taken, I can conjecture that they appear to be an accurate record of what I was seeing when I took them, and that no one has surreptitiously hacked my phone and altered them. If I look at a photo of a grandson posted by my daughter, I can reasonably conjecture that it is also a faithful facsimile of his appearance at that time and place. If I look at a video of a third person posted by my niece, there is zero assurance that it represents reality.
So the default position has to be that the colored dots are for entertainment only, and not to be taken seriously, unless there is some valid reason to believe otherwise.
- chrisdirkis 6y agoIt's pretty easy to extend this further. The photons that bounce into your eyes when you look at a tree are real, but who's to say they got to your eyes by being emitted from a big ball of fusion, through the 8 minute trip to Earth, and off that tree into your eyes? If someone put a sufficiently detailed screen there, we wouldn't know. Similarly, how do you know you're not a brain in a jar? etc. GP's point, that there's a hierarchy to truth/reality, is probably more useful. All we have are observations, and we can use those observations to draw conclusions about the state of the world. We must always be aware that it's always a map, though -- we can never know the territory.