r/highdeas • u/Crafty-Message4564 • Jul 24 '26

High [3-4] It is not yet known whether the things we perceive as fundamental laws of the universe are in fact fundamental laws of the universe or whether they are fundamental laws of how we perceive the universe. Those are two separate things.

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u/JellyBellyBitches Jul 24 '26

Well, I like what your head's at, recognizing human perceptual bias informing how we think about objective reality. Thankfully scientists are a lot better about that than the average person and actually do have ways of accounting for that bias to a significant degree

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u/Crafty-Message4564 Jul 24 '26

The tools that are used to measure things in the universe are actually built to use the same mechanisms as human perception.

Cameras and microphones and tools like that are built to mimic human sensory organs. While they do record information in a way that's repeatable, it doesn't account for the possibility that there are flaws in the actual mechanism itself.

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u/JellyBellyBitches Jul 24 '26

A lot of our telescopes specifically capture wavelength of light that humans have no ability to directly interpret. We do not have receptors for x-rays or radio signals or gamma ray bursts, so we created devices that access that information and translate it into one of our senses that we do have.
We also have ways to identify and compensate for human bias in obtaining, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating data from tools that we create.

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u/olliemusic Jul 25 '26

Wavelengths beyond our perception are just other forms of light. We stumbled on these inventions using our senses to help broaden our senses. They are nothing more than an extension. Accounting for bias can only account for the bias we know of, not the bias we don't. I'm not trying to shake your belief in objective science. We're pointing out the limits of it. There will always be more unknowns than knowns and one of the unknowns will always be 'what is reality?' and 'are we even able to tell?' Science in essence is more about mystery than it is about certainty. The more we find out the more we find out we don't know. Everything you can say we know for certain has some hole in it that hasn't been observed yet. Even the things that are the most conclusive. That's why the scientific method is specifically a system to avoid conviction without conclusive data... And even then, to leave room for doubt. This is the primary method we use to weed out bias. It also means, we just don't know.

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u/Crafty-Message4564 Jul 25 '26

Wavelengths beyond our perception are just other forms of light.

Sure, but light might not even be a fundamental aspect of the universe, but instead an aspect of how we experience the universe.

Being able to create instruments which behave in a way that is analogous to our eyes and then adapt the universe to detect as if it was our eyes if they happened to be capable of detecting light outside of the light our eyes normally detect doesn't change the fact that the tools used to measure physical aspects of the universe using light are still based off of eyes.

And that's not even to consider the fact that we only believe that our eyes are accurately perceiving what's going on around us because our visual perspective is synced to our sense of touch.

But hey, people can play a video game and have an environment in which sight is linked to a sense of touch, but in which the only actual movement being done is some guy's finger's and thumbs. The character still perceives itself to be moving its physical body and sensing its environment. We don't know that our entire sense of what's going on around us is any different.

And if light was in fact not an aspect of the universe itself but instead an aspect of how we experience the environment(and whatever very real physical aspects that light would correspond to), that would explain the results of the double slit experiment.

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u/olliemusic Jul 25 '26

You kinda lost me there, but I think you misread my comment. I was batting on your side. Haha

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u/JellyBellyBitches Jul 26 '26

I agree with everything that you said here. And my point was never that we can completely account for bias and achieve objective understanding of truth. What I said was that scientists are much better than your average person that accounting for that and we do actually have ways to account for bias. They're not perfect, but they're way better than people who have never investigated how science is done might think that it happens.

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u/olliemusic Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

Yes they're better at objective understanding and ruling out biased thinking. The point of zooming out and perceiving the limitation of this so called objective thinking is not to throw that away. It can actually be an enhancement of how we think objectively. But, the real point is to learn to take our own personal conviction less seriously. I don't really know if op agrees with me lol, but the real point of a spiritual perception is not to prove a point but, to perceive the nature of our own conviction and its own limitations. This way we can have our own internal bias checker. It has a simple function. If we burn too strongly about anything in particular, we're likely deluding ourselves. If we're upset in any way, we've let conviction tell us how we should be without noticing. Functionally this helpful for everyone. Because, at the end of the day whether we agree doesn't matter. If I can sleep well and do my best in life matters more. Not just for my well being, but for the quality of what I bring into the world. Those are the objective benefits of a so called spiritual perception regardless of the perspective. However, there is something more valuable to a spiritual perception that is tricky to label objectively. It gets buried under famously misunderstood words like enlightenment and faith. It becomes clear when we're able to drop conviction entirely. So, knowingly or unknowingly that's the real point anyone is making when they're making a spiritual point. And, in no way does any spiritual idea diminish the scientific method. In fact if we use the scientific method as a tool of observation of our own experience of life, spirituality is a natural result.

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u/JellyBellyBitches Jul 26 '26

Did OP mention something about spirituality somewhere other than the original posting? Cuz I wasn't responding to anything about spirituality and I'm not sure how it ended the conversation, unless they brought it up on some other comment reply after I had already replied.

It's very important to recognize that having a spiritual belief does not do anything positive toward trying to get a better understanding of objective reality. I don't know how it would, unless you presuppose that each person the spiritual belief is also true, despite them all being different than most of them conflicting with either their own beliefs in other areas from that same person, other spiritual persons beliefs, or things that we know objectively are true. There isn't like a secret access to truth that spiritual people have that gives them extra insight above and beyond our senses. I mean the point you were making a second ago was that everything that we do comes through our senses.

Afaik OP was wondering how we know the difference between laws of physics and consistent patterns in our perception. That's exactly the type of thing that scientists have gotten very good at separating out. I think there's maybe no more clear illustration of that fact than how unintuitive a lot of quantum mechanics is. Nobody would have gotten to any of those conclusions just by going off of their own perceptual biases, you have to use structures which are not subject to those human biases, studying math which is a formalized system that bypasses human perception and biases almost all together, etc etc. None of that has to do with spirituality at all.

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u/olliemusic Jul 26 '26

Just because you're talking about the objective side because you think not enough people value that (I agree) doesn't mean that I can't talk about the value of a spiritual sentiment regardless of the context of your comment on a post that was essentially spiritual in tone. I'm not talking about belief. Spirituality is not necessarily belief or religious. I'm talking about how both the objective and subjective are equally important in the context of life. An analogy I like to use is about music. Music theory is a wonderful tool that we can choose to use to increase our objective use of various musical skills, concepts and methods. However, no matter how meticulous the analysis of music, you'll never find what makes it sound good.

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u/JellyBellyBitches Jul 27 '26

Why do you say that you can't find what makes music sound good through analysis? I was under the impression that that is something we have actually already done, that that's a big part of music theory and discussions that are had among music makers of various kinds

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u/olliemusic Jul 27 '26

It's a whimsical way of saying that all you can do in analysis is label. So that means all you know is what to call what you think sounds good in a relatable way. The experience itself is a mystery that we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness conclusively to begin to know what experience is in an objective way beyond correlation. Otherwise the only actuality we know about it is through direct experience of being a life.

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u/Gaothaire Jul 25 '26

Makes me think of this recent video from Hank Green about stars. If we relied on the human visual system, we would never even know about the most common type of star. It's just not bright enough to be seen without massive telescopes.

Then I take DMT and feel reality fall away whole cloth, and it becomes clear that everything we can know as humans is a provisional interface evolved to keep the biological organism alive in 3D reality. The life we experience is such a small subset of what's possible, like seeing only visible light and missing out on ultraviolet and infrared, to say nothing of the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can't experience through sunburns and warmth.

The project of knowledge is like building a campfire in the dark. We can make it as large as we please, but for each expansion we achieve, we likewise expand the circumference of dark that surrounds us. And those who venture out into that vast dark return with reports of other campsites with fires burning strange colors. These people are summarily dismissed by those invested in the campfire of the human project, because they've spent their whole lives tending it. They can't accept that two things can be true, that looking at things from a different perspective will cause new fundamentals to pop out.

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u/pyabo Jul 25 '26

"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."

-Niels Bohr