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Old 05.17.2006, 01:42 PM   #49
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Quote:
Originally Posted by qprogeny79
at the risk of antagonizing everyone here yet again, wrong. as the most obvious counterexample to your point, consider the following: let us suppose that not only every human, but every sentient being were to suddenly disappear from the universe. now nothing would be left to perceive objective reality any longer, but the ONLY things that would cease to exist would be the sentient beings themselves, and the attendant mental and conscious states they possessed. our PERCEPTION of objects would no longer exist, but the objects themselves, being independent of anyone's perception of them, would persist. to say otherwise is to erroneously conflate epistemology and metaphysics, much as berkeley did when he asserted that there are only ideas and that the existence of x is dependent upon the perception of some consciousness y (with x's persistence through time without human perception attributable only to the constant perception of god).

Sorry, I'm on Berkeley's side.

Objective reality exists BY human definition. How can one validate the existence of objects/the universe by a means independent of human perception? It is, by nature of our being, the only way in which to process our environment. While I wouldn't be so arrogant as to assert that there is definitively no objective reality, neither would I assert that there is.

Observable patterns of behaviors and occurrences do not by default equate an absolute. The aforementioned are digested and processed by and in terms of human consciousness, so the claim that a reality independent of perception concretely exists is an impossible one to prove.
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