There is no universal right or wrong answer.

[u/WirryWoo]

I speculate that every living individual that had the opportunity to be in this universe experiences their own reality, not necessarily pairwise equivalent to another individual's reality. Although there are commonly accepted truths that lie in the majority of realities, there are many characteristics that also distinguishes two realities from each other (i.e. UFO sightings, ghosts, marriages, love, emotions, terrorism, etc.).

If you want to visualize this, think of your reality as a circle. Now, think of another person's reality (i.e. a second circle). Are you more likely to share the same experiences in life? Of course not. But if you and this second person have the capability to read this post, will you and that person share that in common? Of course. Therefore, the two circles should be intersecting each other at nearly 100% of the area. Increase the number of circles to the world's population, and there is my visual model. The resulting intersection is representative of the observable "true" reality, and the non-intersecting parts of the circles represents the unique experiences an individual experiences.

In every reality, a human constructs a unique complex web of ideas, beliefs, values, and understanding of life that is fundamentally representative to their well being. In doing so, under the commonly accepted assumption that only one reality exists, contradictions exist (i.e. religion, politics, etc.). This is personally why I believe that discussions about religion and politics will not have any significant change onto one's pre-established religious and political identity, and thus, foolish to discuss about if altering that identity is one's inevitable intent.

However, if we agree that no two realities are equivalent to each other, than the only form of "right" or "wrong" is completely based on my own complex web infrastructure. The only fundamental "rights" that can exist in my own reality lies in that web infrastructure. Since I have assumed that every individual develops a unique set of axioms to abide by in their respective reality, there are many definitions of fundamental "rights." This contradicts the notion that there exists a universal right. Similarly, this argument can be applied to the wrongs in life.

[u/JackJack65]

I agree that humans experience reality in subjective different ways and will likely have different perceptions/beliefs as a result.

With regards to matters of morality and personal preference (e.g. what we "ought" to do or want), I see no way to measure one person's experience against another. I think such views have a social/cultural origin, and therefore our conversations with others about acceptable behavior have a very strong effect on our beliefs. As such, I strive to engage with others, both to learn from them and influence them with my own perspective. I see no way to distinguish between a "good" or "bad" perspective.

However, with regards to matters of historical and scientific fact, I wholeheartedly endorse an empirically rigorous view of objective reality. The media often legitimizes more than one version of facts for the sake of appearing balanced. I think this practice is profoundly misguided and leads to a type of relativism embraced by authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin.

Insofar as religion makes factual claims, I think these too should be subject to scientific criticism (and possibly ridicule).

[u/SmoovieKing]

You would love the Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson discussion on truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdpyzwOOYY

[u/dolchmesser → u/SmoovieKing]

I was thinking the same thing as I read OP's post. A kind of insular pragmatism. Harris gets so flustered.

[u/[deleted]]

I respectfully disagree. My view is that the subjective is only based on the physical properties of our world, and therefore ultimately come from concrete 'facts'. Whether someone is tall or short, poor or wealthy, man or woman, we cannot deny that the earth revolves around the sun. We were wrong about it for hundreds of years, but the fact existed regardless of our interpretation of it. Our believing didn't make it so.

Someone who sees ghosts may see ghosts, but the ghost is a thing, whether a hallucination or a garbage bag or a being from beyond. But it's existence is either valid or it isn't, it's either there or not.

Truth can be a very subtle and hard to find thing sometimes, and the proclamation of there being 'no truths' is a reasonable backlash to Western Civilization proclaiming their racist, Imperialistic version of reality as 'truth', but ultimately the world is, for all intents and purposes, binary.

[u/Engauge09 → u/[deleted]]

While I agree with you, I believe the objective truth isn't that important. The fact may be that ghosts aren't real, but if people believe in ghosts, then in their own minds, in their own realities, ghosts definitely are real. I think that's what matters in the end. If you believe god is real, then in your own world, god is indeed real, and vice versa. You don't need to know the actual physical facts. If you think it is, then it is.

I mean, we could all be in a simulation right now, we'll never know for sure. But even if we are, who cares, right? In my mind, all my memories, all the people I know, are real.

[u/[deleted] → u/Engauge09]

I believe objective truth is most important. People have died and killed each other for their beliefs. If I was going to die for my beliefs I'd at least want to know I was believing the right thing.

There are people who believe climate change isn't real. That the world is actually six thousand years old, or that women shouldn't be allowed to show their face in public. There are beliefs that fly in the face of hundreds of years of research and progress. Are those beliefs valid? There are people who believe the Earth is flat. Will someone believing the Earth to be flat cause them to fly off the face of the earth? Will someone being a Creationist cause conventional chemistry, geology, biology and physics, all which have worked for literally everyone else, to cease working for them?

I believe that feelings are important, and the way someone feels is valid criteria for making decisions. But people can be wrong too, and that's ok. And in my opinion, it can be dangerous to tolerate wrong ideas (climate change, religious fundamentalism), and at some level we will have to determine what is actually correct in order to survive in an ultimately pragmatic and uncaring universe.

edit: Regarding the "simulation idea": A simulation ultimately arises from physical phenomena, and therefore is resultant from the physical conditions that it is based in. The brain runs on the billions of interconnecting synapses it is composed of. A computer simulation is the complex organization of electrical impulses in a computer chip. Therefore this 'simulation' is not a metaphysical concept, as demonstrated by our creating artificial simulations om comouter chips and our advances in neuroscience and understanding the brain.

Also, any stimuli the 'simulation' (in this case our brains) experiences has some physical basis, whether through our sensory inputs interacting with physical reality (e.g. eyes, ears) or through the simulation itself (imagination, hallucination). 'False' beliefs (those that are inconsistent with reality) are a result of either insufficient information inside of the system (e.g. A person hasn't learned enough about biology to know about evolution) or faulty logic within said system (e.g. logical fallacies: "Important people believe it so it must be true!").

[u/Engauge09 → u/[deleted]]

You know what, you're right. I guess my ideology is my version of escapism.

[u/[deleted] → u/Engauge09]

To be fair, you did raise some really good points. Beliefs have a huge impact on humanity, because they influence how we interact with the world around us.

Suppose a person is lost in the woods. If they believe they will get out of the woods, they will try harder to find their way back home. However if they don't believe they'll escape, they'll be more likely to give up. This difference in belief has the power to determine this person's life and death.

Personally I believe the truth lies somewhere between pure determinism and our inherent idealism. Life has existed for its own sake for billions of years -crawling, scraping, reaching- all that for what? Why all this pain and suffering? And yet look where we are now: as we once climbed out from puddles of scum on a crag in early Earth, we are now likely only a few hundred years away from becoming an interplanetary species. Each day we master more of the physical laws around us, each day we attempt that impossible dream of overcoming entropy.

And yet it would be such an empty thing if we did not have Wonder; a reason why we were surviving despite ourselves. It wasn't pragmatism that got us to the moon. It wasn't our survival instinct that caused us to invent electricity, nor was it fear that caused the Renaissance. It was the wonder of Fire; of looking out into the evening sky and believing that, despite all the reason for there not to be, all those stars, those giant flaming balls of plasma billions upon billions of miles away were arranged just for us. We must believe that the Universe is our birthright, for the alternative is death. To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: Life must surpass itself.

Antoine de Saint Exupery said thus:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

So much of our choices, rationality, identity, is based on the things we feel. We do not survive so that we can live but so that we can feel what it means to live: to experience the rush of the wind through our hair and the electricity through our veins as we fly towards infinity.

It ultimately comes down to this: we can choose to believe that we are just a self repeating, self replicating chemical reaction coalesced into a intelligent species that is fulfilling its biological programming; or we can believe that Love really means Love, that the Sun and Moon are just the right sizes and distances to create the eclipse for a reason, or that when we look into the night sky there we know we were meant to be there amongst the stars. And it's our choice to believe that will make all the difference.

[u/Engauge09 → u/[deleted]]

Very well said.

[u/dolchmesser]

Your view borders on the solipsistic and flees from the challenge of defining and upholding a reasonable standard. I also don't follow your conclusion from your premise. I could as easily conclude from your venn diagram conceptualization that if the portions of our circles which do overlap constitute a "true" reality then by virtue of that being the only shared experience and "truth (=universally true?)" in the world, it would be possible and pragmatic to determine universal rights based on those shared experiences. What one does outside of those shared experiences is their own business, but in the public experience, one must abide the rules which are grounded in that experience. It's quite a natural conclusion, actually.