On Tue, 1 Mar 2016 04:08 am, Rustom Mody wrote: > And who is the last arbiter on that 'reality'?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is a genuine question, and not just an attempt to ask a rhetorical question to demonstrate your profundity. You should not assume that there is any such thing as "the last arbiter" of reality. There is no arbiter at all, let alone a final one. But what we have are various ways of managing and uncertainty and error. One of which is consensus. For instance, there are seven billion people on earth who think they are people, and one who thinks he may be a butterfly. Which is more likely to be correct? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi To quote Terry Pratchett: ‘The poet Hoha once dreamed he was a butterfly, and then he awoke and said, “Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming he is a man?”‘ said Lobsang, trying to join in. ‘Really?’ said Susan briskly. ‘And which was he?’ ‘What? Well…who knows?’ ‘How did he write his poems?’ said Susan. ‘With a brush, of course.’ ‘He didn’t flap around making information-rich patterns in the air or laying eggs on cabbage leaves?’ ‘No one ever mentioned it.’ ‘Then he was probably a man,’ said Susan. Because there are limitations on how we observe reality, there are limits to how objective we can be. We have an imperfect ability to observe the world around us (including our own mental states) and are prone to errors. But, over a wide range of conditions (although not *all* conditions) we can eliminate many classes of error by comparing notes with our fellows, so to speak. If I think I am a butterfly, and my wife thinks I'm a man, and my co-workers think I'm a man, and my neighbours think I'm a man, chances are good that it is me who is mistaken, not them. Consequently reality is a shared construct -- or rather, our understanding of reality is at least partly a shared construct. In principle, at least, *everything* is subject to disproof. But in practice some things are more certain than others. I wouldn't bet $100 on quarks still being considered the fundamental building block of matter in 200 years, but I would bet a million dollars on the sun still seeming to rise in the east every 24 hours. As Isaac Asimov put it: When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm It's not that reality itself is subject to change (except in the trivial sense that we can take actions that modify the state of the world: I can pick this cup up and move it over there, you can eat that apple) but that our understanding of reality is subject to change. Sometimes our understanding is full of uncertainty and doubt, sometimes it is subject to re-interpretation, and sometimes our understanding is almost certainly correct: it is difficult to imagine any credible or believable reinterpretation that would change the facts as we know them. A thousand years from now, the sun will still appear to be rising in the east. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list