“It’s not, we know it’s not, and I bet that you yourself treat reality differently than you treat fiction, thus disproving your claim.”
How do we know it’s not? You might say that I know that the table in front of me is solid. I can see it, I can feel it, I can rest things on it and I can try but fail to walk through it. But nowadays, I think a physicist with the right tools would be able to show us that, in fact, it is almost completely empty space.
So, do I treat reality different from how I treat fiction? I think the post we are commenting on has finally convinced me that there is no reality, only belief, and therefore the question is untestable. I think that is the opposite of what the post author intended?
History does tend to suggest that anyone who thinks they know anything is probably wrong. Perhaps those here are less wrong, but they—we—are still wrong.
“And one of the beliefs they’ve confirmed is “reality is really real, it isn’t just a belief.” :-)”
Hah! Exactly! The experiments confirm a belief. A confirmed belief is, of course, still a belief. If your belief that reality is really real is confirmed, you now have a confirmed belief that reality is really real. That’s not the same thing as reality being really real, though, is it?
;-)
Why is it accepted that experiments with reality prove or disprove beliefs?
It seems to me that they merely confirm or alter beliefs. The answer given to the first koan and the explanation of the shoelaces seem to me to lead to that conclusion.
″...only reality gets to determine my experimental results.”
Does it? How does it do that? Isn’t it the case that all reality can “do” is passively be believed? Surely one has to observe results, and thus, one has belief about the results. When I jump off the cliff I might go splat, but if the cliff is high enough and involves passing through a large empty space during the fall, there are various historical physical theories that might be ‘proved’ at first, but later disproved as my speed increases.
I’m very confused. Please forgive my naivety.
Similarly:
“If we thought the colonization ship would just blink out of existence before it arrived, we wouldn’t bother sending it.”
What if it blinks out of our existence, but not out of the existence of the people on the ship?