I have obviously come to this discussion rather late, but I will throw in my two cents as a way of introducing myself to the group:
Firstly, the question at hand assumes (if I am not mistaken) that there can *be* such a thing as Objective Reality. Okay. I accept that as a premise for the discussion.
Secondly, there seems to me to be another layer to this. Measurability is more than positivistic. Positivism is often referred to as restricting oneself to using only the physical senses; to discard spiritualism, new age stuff, etc.
But a core precept of science, this measurability as you point out, is taking it out of the realm of human perception and into the realm *consensus*.
Measurability after all, presupposes that a physical thing, an effect, a phenomenon, can be sought out/reproduced at will and will measure the same every time. The premise of an Objective Reality is also a premise of Consensus Reality. The supposition that if an Objective Reality exist it *must* and *will* behave the same way for everyone, everytime. I may see or hear something, even measure it or record it, but if everyone else can't find it, or do it, or come up with the same measurement - my measurement is discarded as invalid.
Many spiritual traditions subscribe to the precept that truths should not be revealed to a student until they ask the teacher directly about the subject. In this way, the student is never confronted with a concept they are not psychologically ready for.
Science, interestingly, seems to operate in a similar way. You cannot build a device to detect gravity (let alone measure it) until the day it occurs to you that such a thing might exist. You then must contemplate the incidental evidences around you to hypothesize *how* it might work, then try creating something to measure it. The student must think of the subject, and ask the question before the wisdom is revealed. The "teacher" (the material universe in this analogy) volunteers nothing.
My point is, that if we do insist that our ability to measure a thing is the defining parametre of whether that thing exists, we must remember we have only measured that which it has occurred to us to measure. If something is undetectable and unmeasurable by any device.. like... I don't know.. ghosts, for example.. is that because they don't exist, or that we have never framed the question sufficiently well to have made the correct device to measure them?
Likewise, *must* an Object Reality be a Consensus Reality? We operate on the assumption that an Object Reality would operate that way because that has been our experience... but has it been? If you throw away every incident of observed, measured experience that could not be reproduced, then you accept as real only that which can be reproduced on demand - you engineer your own definition ... it is a self-fulfilling definition.
Well, these are my musings on the subject. I do not subscribe to the concept of Object Reality, so it is largely an intellectual exercise to me. Have you read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot?
Very cool.
:)
AT
posted 1 year ago. ( reply )
