this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
939 points (95.5% liked)
Science Memes
19891 readers
662 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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)
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.
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.
the logic might be the same, the perception may not
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
i think the best example of this is music. most people have very good relative pitch perception, but mediocre absolute pitch perception. that shared relative pitch perception though will often be built based on ones own experiences and life. the shared perceptual relativity is both developed socially/culturally and innate based on how we process and abstract information, but that says nothing about our absolute perception of that information.
Its interesting. We can both look at a landscape and agree there's two mountains in the distance and a forest in front, and can agree on a thousand further details like if the mountains are barren or snow-topped. But only when it comes to colour can we doubt whether what the other person sees is what we see. To be fair, the artist Monet did that experiment on himself. Painted a scene with one eye open and the next day with the other. Details are pretty much the same, but the spectrum is pretty different
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.
But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn't clear
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.
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
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
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.
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 and mostly ignore 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
As a great scientist once said:
"There's no scientific consensus that life is important" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Are you still alive? How's that blood clot doing?
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
Welcome to materialism lol
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
Careful, you'll trigger the libs
It'd be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that's how computers "comprehend" reality.
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"
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.