Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.
The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.
The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.
My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).
And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.
And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.
We, as a society, fully understand the concept of truthful and untruthful statements. We learn it as a child and get scalded when we lie. We depend on this understanding in law, courts, contracts, and commerce. We understand it when educators teach and when requesting services of others.
If you want to claim that communication cannot be truthful nor verifiable at any level, then society would fail to function because the literal point of communication is to share an information.
Now if you wanted to make a philosophical point about proving an intent to lie, or our perceptions of reality, rather than communication as a medium, then that’s a different topic (and one I discussed elsewhere in this thread). But for your exact argument presented, we already have millennia of past precedence to prove that communication is expected to have truthful statements.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621
https://www.gov.uk/contempt-of-court
https://www.uklegalguides.com/what-is-fraud/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-Truth_Pledge
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8n99727lvo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton
And they are literally hundreds of thousands of other examples I could share where communication is understood to have provable truthful states.
Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate a fact nor that lies doesn’t exist.
I don't know, there is pretty strong evidence in this discussion that we are unable to communicate. Your apparent opinion of I am saying continues to show to be incorrect over and over — and I'm sure that goes both ways.
In fact, it seems evident that, deep down, you already realize this as you have stopped even trying to add anything of your own to the discussion, outsourcing to the words of others. Poor form to not be able to speak to something yourself, but I can appreciate that your emotions are starting to run wild on realizing that the world isn't as simple as you originally imagined.
But, as before, I likely have the wrong opinion about what you are trying to say. There is no objective way to measure language. QED.
Let's face it, there is no technical reason for us to disagree. The universe is what it is and that is an incontrovertible fact. We can measure the state of universe scientifically. There is fundamentally nothing we can disagree about except our opinion of the language. And, indeed, it is apparent that we are failing to discuss the state of the universe because our opinion about what the words mean is ostensibly not shared.
But, I mean, that's what we've been talking about the whole time: that there is no objective way to measure language. If you are trying to repeat what I said from the start, what value do you believe is added? Simple acknowledgement?
I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality (maybe private individualized realities), but it results in a scenario where you have nothing in common with other people other than "I saw some thing" and therefore it becomes very difficult to discuss anything with them.
Different cultures?
I think different cultures can share the same reality, though filtered through different lenses.
If two people from different cultures watch the same movie, one finds it ok and the other offensive and disrespectful, that's a shared reality filtered through different cultural backgrounds. Even if either version of the movie is dubbed, censored, or altered in any way, there's still enough common or shared material that a discussion can be held.
If two people had completely different experiences and watched completely different, tailor-made movies, then there's very little for them to discuss or even disagree with. "I haven't watched your movie", "I haven't watched yours either", "Mine was better", "I guess... I wouldn't know, I thought mine was cool", etc. No shared reality.
My point, which admittedly my last message didn't make at all, is that "different shared realities" is not a new thing. The concept is what would have been referred to as "different cultures" throughout most of human history.
Different art, politics, passions, fears, identities, and myths is what cultural variety is about.
If you and I watch the same movies and listen to the same music and follow the same politics and share the same dreams and worries, I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are from different cultures.
What is being described as a "shared reality" in this thread feels more like globalism and less like something obviously positive or worth protecting.
I'm all for more cultural variety as an expression of individual differences.
JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.
Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.
To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.
The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.
I'm saying that not everything is opinion, that there does exist a category called 'fact'. And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
Do you have access to their head? How do you know that someone didn’t swap that head for someone else who had been shot?
Like I said, this is purely a philosophic argument. I’m not actually trying to suggest that there isn’t such thing as “facts”.
> And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
No, I’m making a psychological point that our perceptions are what we use to construct our reality, and that our perceptions are malleable. If they weren’t, then drugs would have no effect, psychosis wouldn’t be a thing, and people’s opinions wouldn’t differ about even the most straightforward things like god, globe vs flat earth, and so on and so forth.
> This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
I agree. As I said in the previous comment:
“To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.”
I'm not sure I understand.. we have objective realities in the world that are certainly not "opinions".
According this logic, gravity exists because opinions coincide?