@fresco,
fresco wrote:
I never used the word "subjective". The argument is that the subjective-objective dichotomy is irrelevant. All we have is potentially transient degrees of consensus about which "science" coins the term "universal laws" where there appears to be unanimity. But those "laws" (even the constancy of the speed of light) are often limited in application and subject to revision. In short, they are functional summaries of human expectancies about what they call "data".
Species specific physiology suggests that humans are going to substantially agree about many of their interactions with their world. Therein lies the essence of "consistency".
The point that we can communicate at all is evidence that reality is consistent. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to comprehend anything that is said because the context of the words would be so subjective in your experience it would be like I was speaking a language you couldn't understand.
There is shared experience and the more shared the experience the more solid the conclusions become. This is why science stresses repeated experimentation and not to stop or ever be satisfied completely with a result. You seem to want to think that this proves science is faulty or something but no it's because we don't always have a definitive way to verify our findings. There is no resource cosmic log book to fact check our answers with, despite some trying to claim we do.
Reality isn't subjective, if it were we wouldn't be able to communicate AT ALL. Language itself is evidence that reality is not subjective. Therefore there is consistency in reality which hypothesis can be made, tested, experimented with.
It is irrelevant if reality were some sham or the creation of our own brains. None of that matters because we can interact on the basis of this "false" existence and find similarities between us. If there was not these similarities it would be like sharing a dream with another person where the rules of the dream were completely up to the dreamer. Where one person believes they can't fly at their own command and the other person can and it defies the belief of the other as to why that would be possible. We don't see this in reality because reality is consistent over all our collective experience with it.
This is how we develop laws, because reality is consistent and doesn't just randomly change. The speed of light examples are understood but you have to remember occasionally these tests are faulty like the recent one where a particle was thought to have traveled faster than light. No, the experiment was faulty.
The problem with quantum physics is that we are dealing with concepts that don't have a direct experience in reality. They seem counter intuitive and this is why people object to it. But people do this all the time. Just like the example of "solidity" is nothing more than the repulsive force. There is NOTHING else in reality other than this force. But it is so counter intuitive that people can't accept it.
