EvC Forum: Reality is not based upon our perception.

Guido, I had to kook up some ofthe terms and ideas that were floating around here in your post!
You initially proposed that:

quote:
In this post I would like to propose the idea that reality is absolute, that no matter how our consciousness percieves it, it is as it is.

e-book writes:

Social constructivists believe that reality is constructed through human activity. Members of a society together invent the properties of the world (Kukla, 2000). For the social constructivist, reality cannot be discovered: it does not exist prior to its social invention.

So are these the type of philosophical arguments that would declare that if a tree fell in the forest and nobody were around to hear it, it would make no noise?

I suppose that the argument could be advanced on the theory that if no eardrum is around to capture the sound, no record of the sound exists. Noise registration requires an ear, right?

Similarly, if there were no humans to describe the universe and the physical world around us, it still seems logical that the universe would carry on without us. Right? Then I got to reading about the cat in the box.

mtnmath.com writes:

Here's Schrdinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.

This is like saying that the refrigerator light may stay on when we shut the door! Either it does or it does not. Just because we are not observing something does not mean that the event is not happening.

Guido: If God exists, then He is the observer that allows verification of creation. (IMB, anyway)

On a sidenote, IF God created and/or foreknew us before we humans imagined Him (and all other belief paradigms) then we are a product of His imagination which is reality. Jesus is the ultimate observer. Were He not alive, nothing would exist!

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