I can't understand why some of you are dismissing this as a some sort of a minor phenomenon, which is of no importance to us. Nothing affects our day to day life...even evolution, Big Bang, Black Holes, Higgs Boson....and yet these are considered as important ways of understanding our world and our life.
Evolution is why we have the senses we do, and why those senses have the limitations and capabilities that they do - understanding evolution is part of how we understand what those limitations and capacities are. Understanding the other elements are part of the way we shape the culture and technology with which we interact daily.
Similarly, understanding the fact that, what we regard as the external objective world, is just our internal experience and not actually 'real', is a very important realization.
And wrong. What we regard as the external objective world is probably the external objective world. What we know of it is a subjective experience, and we need to appreciate that difference, and so we construct techniques to try to reduce the subjectivity and establish what is objectively validated about our understanding.
Definitions are fine. But it is a fact that 'sound' is an experience and not an external fact. Similarly with vision, smell and taste.
No, it's not a fact. Sound is a thing in its own right; we have a subjective experience of it, but it's there even if we aren't.
We tend to imagine that even without our senses and neural connections the world will appear and sound the same, just that we will not be able to see or interact. This is not correct.
How is it not? The sound waves travel in exactly the same way through exactly the same medium from the source to a point in space - if we aren't there to intercept them they still exist. If our senses worked differently, or our brains were wired differently, our subjective understanding would be different, but the source phenomena would be the same.
In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine what the world would be like without our vision or hearing or taste or smell.
Talk to some blind or deaf people.
What we see and hear is not the objective reality.
It is. Our understanding of that reality is subjective, but that doesn't mean that the objective reality isn't there as the source material.
Our faculties are just our interface with the real world, which enable certain perceptions. This is not the reality.
Which is why it's important to have an effective method for trying to eliminate the subjectivity and leave as impartial and complete an understanding as possible.
The sense of 'touch' is a little more complicated. Without our sense of touch we may not be able to feel things around us, but we would still knock against them, I suppose. But even in this, without our body and sense of touch (suppose we were body less persons in some way), whether objects will retain their shape and form I am not sure. Viruses and electrons will see the world very differently.
I'm not sure that viruses or electrons have the sensory or processing capacity to have any sort of understanding of reality, to be honest.
Take Dark Matter as an example, such large mass of matter (five time more abundant than normal matter) is completely undetected by us, because it does not interact with normal matter. So, if we could see and feel Dark Matter how the world would look and feel it is impossible to say.
How would we have a subjective experience of something that doesn't interact - there is no way of sensing it.
Detection is important...and is the only way we can experience the world.
Understanding and experiencing are not the same thing - we can understand Dark Matter without being able to experience it, because we aren't limited to our subjective understanding.
This is not some small philosophical point, it is about what we are and whether we actually see and hear 'reality' or not. It is clear that we don't see the world 'as it is' (whatever that might mean).
I agree it's not a small point, but I'd disagree that it's at all interesting or up for debate. Our subjective understanding is a given; the objective nature of reality is reasonably well-established.
We have a certain interface through which we experience the world...like VR goggles. What the world 'really' is, we will never know.
I'd disagree - we might never experience it directly, but there's no theoretical reason why our understanding might be limited. You cite dark matter - we can't experience it, but we can hypothesise which means we can have an understanding of it without experiencing it.
Simply put, what we normally regard as the objective world is really a subjective experience.
No. We have a subjective experience of an objective reality, which we are increasingly supplementing with an academic and intellectual understanding.
O.
