Many people here seem to share an implicit assumption: that there exists an objective reality independent of observation, and that this reality is fundamentally stable and absolute.
I’m not trying to deny that assumption. But I’d like to ask something more specific:
If reality is truly independent and absolute, how do we account for the fact that every access to it is mediated through a subject?
In other words, is what we call “objective reality” something that exists prior to all observation, or is it something that only becomes coherent through the intersection of perspectives?
Not asking for agreement—just curious how far this assumption can be pushed before it starts to shift.
If all we ever have is access through observation, what would it even mean for a reality to exist completely independent of any subject?
Yes, that’s what I mean. And the basis is in the math itself: We can make observations about mathematics, just like physical reality; but we can also interact with mathematics directly, and they’re the same every time for everyone all the time, not relying on subjective observation.
Yes, but
The “actual” mathematics (in as much as we can verify our models through scientific experimentation)
are “absolutely subjective” in that (for instance)
At large scale, relativity effects are so great as to make order and locations of events subordinate to an observers reference frame
And at small scale, (example again) Uncertainty Principle makes events “fuzzy” ie (somewhat) indeterminate.
Now in both those cases, yes we have the mathematics “down” so hypothetically we can acount what an individual observer may “see” but
Practically speaking, a total accounting of this would seemingly require a computer more complex than the universe itself.
I can see I wasn’t clear. I don’t mean mathematics is a way to interact with physical reality in a non-subjective way. I mean mathematics is unto itself an objective reality, independent of physical reality, which we can access nonsubjectively.