this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Science Memes

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[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 208 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (19 children)

All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I'm just not aware of can't REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn't exist ~~or doesn't have meaning~~ (see comment below for clarification here)

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 62 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (10 children)

The data of reality is consistent. How that data is interpreted by the brain may not be. Like the color red might not look the same to you as it does to me despite it being the same wavelength for both of us. We'll never know since it's impossible to describe a color and we can't see the world with the other's brain.

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 32 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn't some variety of colorblind, I'd argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.

[–] erev@lemmy.world 16 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

the logic might be the same, the perception may not

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, that wasn't a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn't have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

But perception is for a large part embedded in memory, which differs individually. For me steel foundries smell amazing because I used to play on the beach near a steel foundry, to the point I need to put effort into understanding that it's actually kind of acrid. So am I still "having the same perception" as someone who doesn't have the lived experience?

This can happen at a society-wide level too. Liminal beige and seafoam green were not intended to create a feeling of disquiet, but of calm neutrality. Modern audiences perceive them as disquieting because they have been systematically used in our society to impose a sense of calm on un-calm situations, such as operating rooms or hallways in sketchy buildings.

I honestly don't know how much of the commonality of associations across cultures comes from instinct and how much comes from the fact that all children learn to live on the same planet with the same physical laws. I would bet that for 99.9% of children, their first experience with a strong sulphur smell is going to be from rotten eggs (or similar rotten goods) that others act disgusted by. So the fact that sulphur smells disgusting to the vast majority of adults is not evidence for instinct over memory. The same goes for green plants, red blood, blue skies, etc.

[–] quarkquasar@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn't mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.

If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn't, you wouldn't say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.

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[–] NKBTN@feddit.uk 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

At least it is in terms of a spectrum. Everybody finds orange text on a red background uncomfortable to read. So there are plenty of shared perception categories at least

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[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

colour theory works the same to everyone because it works entirely with how colours relate to each other

if you saw colours rotated on a colour wheel 180° - so that your green is my purple - we wouldn't know

the only difference would be in the hue (difference between green and purple), which isn't all that important. there are plenty of videos on youtube with artists drawing using random hues but with correct values (difference between black and white) and once they switch their work to colour it all just looks, good, a bit abstract for sure but still good

besides, colour theory picks colours that go together well based on their relative position on the colour wheel. teal works well with orange because they're complimentary, opposites on the spectrum. neutral colours are neutral because they're desaturated regardless of hue, neon colours are very saturated regardless of hue

maybe in objective reality we all like the same exact hue of colour, but in our brains we all call it a different word, we'll never know

[–] degen@midwest.social 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Kinda true but kinda not. Language alone can affect our perception. Some don't have a word for green or blue, and orange is indistinguishable from light brown given context.

Even when we are almost definitely seeing the same things, there's a lot that can differ.

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[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 weeks ago

Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn't clear

[–] i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 2 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

They did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.

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[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I'm just not aware of can't REALLY kill me.

It's not that reality isn't subjective it's that acting as if it is subjective isn't useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like "Jesus loves you and died for your sins" - not to great science.

There is a uniform and self-consistent reality

The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality

I'm really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it "is... uniform and self-consistent" does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether this represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn't necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as "objective reality." Nevermind that "reality" is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes - there is no way to determine that what you think you experience as "reality" is anything more than the qualia of a brain in a jar. This is Descartes 101.

Anyway, for anyone interested in this stuff, there's a great video from Sean Carrol about that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.

Edit to add: on somewhat of a tangent, there's a fascinating book regarding your brain and reality I really love called Free Will

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲

I don't subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don't support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999...% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

There are no interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so maybe you should look a little closer at what it actually does say? You can pick and choose the science you want to subscribe to of course, but it's been making verifiable predictions for a hundred years now. If you ignore it because it disagrees with your preconceptions... well, that's called religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing.

It doesn't tell us that at all. This is just bizarre metaphysics invented out of someone's ass one day and became popular among academics, despite it having no empirical basis for it and not even being logically consistent if you take it seriously for more than five seconds.

Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. You literally superimpose states in classical statistical mechanics as well. The only difference is quantum mechanics has an extra degree of freedom in the state description of the system that includes phases, and those phases evolve deterministically and influence the stochastic dynamics of the system. This gives a kind of "memory" effect whereby the same operator can have different behavior if the history is different, such as, a photon having 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted by a beam splitter, unless its immediate previous interaction was of a beam splitter as well, then it is 100%/0% because the state of the phases are different.

No, Sean Carroll is just wrong and he presents nothing to justify his position. The cat doesn't stop existing when you're not looking, nor is there is a multiverse, nor do things spread out as infinite-dimensional vectors in configuration space when you aren't looking. You just do not know its state because it is statistical as quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. Multiverse believers love to put their idea side-by-side another idea which is even more absurd in order to make it look more viable, but they never bother to defend their ideas on their own merit, without a comparison. Any time you ever encounter a multiverse believer, they will constantly bring up Copenhagen even if you never mention it.

Carroll responds to a variant of Copenhagen that believes in a "spreading out" axiom that things diverge into a multiverse of every possibility represented by a vector in configuration space when you aren't looking, but then suddenly "collapses" back down into a definite configuration in state space when you look. He then attacks the "collapse" as silly, and therefore we should believe things spread out as a multiverse forever. But nowhere does he ever give any convincing justification for the "spreading out" axiom to begin with. That axiom is not grounded in any empirical evidence or in the mathematics at all, and so multiverse believers can only make their position look coherent by putting it beside another silly belief which also presupposes that axiom, and thus they make it appear reasonable that they never justify it.

Just look at the awful slide 24:35. Someone can make this same argument in a perfectly classical universe. If we could not track the definite states of particles because they behaved randomly, but in a classical sense which did not violate Bell inequalities, we would also only be able to track the states of systems as vectors evolved by matrices. Someone could also come along and claim that particles do not have real states when you are not looking at them because they are not there in the mathematics, and that they are being the "reasonable" one for believing that the universe just evolves as a big deterministic vector.

We would all look at them as if they are silly. Yet, somehow, this is stated unironically among multiverse believers as if it is somehow made less silly by quantum mechanics, when absolutely nothing in the theory makes this a less silly position.

[–] observes_depths@aussie.zone 16 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Exactly. This post actually reinforces why I don't want to alter my reality. That little window of interpretation is absolutely remarkable, it's all we have to anchor us to the outside world and I will never give that up. Not that I'm dead against occasional hallucinogenics, but our perception is an amazing thing and I feel bad for people who don't appreciate it.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

IMO the term "hallucinogenic" undersells what psychedelics do in some ways. There is an interpretative layer of abstraction that naturally builds up between you and what you are perceiving. This is useful because it lets you make assumptions about objects that you know are not necessary to pay attention to, and not be overwhelmed by the experience of being actively aware of all their details, but it also prevents us from considering and experiencing what is behind that layer of preconception.

Obviously there's also a lot of other things our brains do that is interpretive or corrective, but it's really remarkable to be able to see the world without that one in particular, which is one of the more striking effects of those drugs, and it happens on doses lower than the ones that produce especially vivid hallucinations.

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

there is some evidence in our pre-history that we used to experience the world without the layer of abstraction

cave paintings at one point became... different. at first they represented reality - various animals - in absolutely amazing detail, down to depicting which muscles tensed as an animal ran, then they stopped. just around the same time as we began depicting ourselves in more detail. when we noticed ourselves it seems like first layers of abstract interpretation of reality began forming

here's a cool video on the subject (the title is rather click-baity but it is a good video, trust)

[–] greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Brother, have you never been depressed? That shit can do as much to me as mushrooms sometimes. Or shit if I get a really good runners high, feels very similar to a low dose of mushrooms.

[–] AoxoMoxoA@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Brother, I don't ever want to know what a low dose of mushrooms feels like...or 2cB or DMT or LSD or 4aco DMT or

Oh, well it's not very different from how you normally feel. Our perception of reality changes all the time to a greater or lesser degree. Like when you're depressed, you don't see things as they actually are but through the warped reality of depression. Food won't taste good anymore, or you can't see the beauty of nature, or you can't remember what being happy feels like.

I'd argue that we almost never experience reality as it is. Things are filtered through our feelings and judgement and assumptions without our conscious input. The reason psychedelics can be useful for people with PTSD or depression is because it forces a shift in our perception.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 16 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn't imply any kind of meaning. I can't even think of a theoretical way to determine if we're here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we're just here.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the "meaning" to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I'm blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can't smell), etc.

I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of "purpose" or "reason" is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the "purpose" of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like "I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet". Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn't need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since "purpose" aka "reason for being" is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.

Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be "to be entertaining".

So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn't one.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

I don't think I'd be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there's no way for us to "escape" the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn't be less true, it's just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.

It's kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.

Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It's the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question "if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?", and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what's up). Though circularity doesn't imply it is wrong or incorrect, it's also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.

And this isn't an anti-science stance, I just think that there's a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don't think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn't turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 weeks ago

As a great scientist once said:

"There's no scientific consensus that life is important" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth

[–] droans@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are you still alive? How's that blood clot doing?

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50 on whether I die or not. Shit wait gotta stop observing it in my mind's eye

[–] happydoors@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree with you but in defense of the image in front of us, they still show atoms in the rest of the photo. I take that as the representation of “reality” and the commentary as being more about perception and not some alternate reality.

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[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It'd be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that's how computers "comprehend" reality.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh I'm not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say "reality isn't what we perceive...... Therefore reality is subjective"

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 2 weeks ago

I agree with you. The "It" in my sentence isn't clear so I'll explain.

"Reality" in the sentence "reality is a shared hallucination" (or similar) means "reality as it exists in their brain.

People instead interpret "Reality" as "[Physical] reality is a shared halucination which is very different. I was pointing out a more real/visual example with digital cameras.

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