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Reality is here defined as "truth."

An example is, if someone killed someone else, then the truth is that person 2 is dead. Here, no one need to know that that person is dead in order for them to be dead. For example, if someone dies on the other side of the earth (it is not reported, and you do not know the person) then they are still dead, regardless of if you know it.

Also, reality does not need anything to exist, because if you blew up the universe the reality would be that there is no universe. Lastly, even if you time traveled, then the event still happened in the original timeline. Nothing can be done to change that. Is my thinking correct or flawed?

Mark Andrews
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Socrates hehe
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  • This is what is called objective reality, see IEP, Objectivity for a discussion. – Conifold Sep 29 '21 at 20:31
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    But objective reality without a subject? – Chris Degnen Sep 29 '21 at 20:41
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    I think this might be seen as a reductio of your equating Reality and Truth. It seems totally reasonable that without any speakers to form sentences, nothing in the world might turn out to be true, and yet nonetheless stuff might exist. – Sofie Selnes Sep 29 '21 at 21:13
  • This view is called metaphysical objectivism, and it implies that who who answers knows the noumenon (http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/p2.htm#phen). Also, your view on truth is superficial: truth is subjective. Jesus (ergo, Einstein) could be alive for many, or an aliens might not perceive the difference between living and non-living. – RodolfoAP Sep 30 '21 at 05:27
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    There are votes to close this question. However, I am inclined to let it stand because the comments it has attracted are informative. – Geoffrey Thomas Sep 30 '21 at 10:12
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    Maybe is useful to make a distinction between fact: the reality "out there" (someone killed a man in a far country), a statement asserting a fact: a linguistic entity, which is true or false according to the "existence" of the fact asserted, and the "propositional attitude of a person: the belief that I have/have not about the truth of an assertion. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Sep 30 '21 at 10:12
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    The fact is independent from my belief/knowledge and it is not per se connected to linguistic expressions... but of course it has little sense to speak of "someone killed a man in a far country" if there is no killed, no killer, no country, no universe at all. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Sep 30 '21 at 10:14
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    Who could ever know? The anthropic principle can be used to say other variations of fundamental physical laws must have happened as part of the complexity that allowed our universe to happen randomly. Thus even though we cannot access those other possible states of physics where no subjectivities are, giving them a place in 'our story', which is to say, in our parochial way, giving them meaning. – CriglCragl Sep 30 '21 at 23:24
  • It occurs to me, pansychism holds that consciousness is pervasive or imminent, so the universe 'hears itself'. Nothing at all, would be changeless, & impossible to interact with, and in a sense already everywhere, between the things - so in a 'wu wei' sense you could say it is an essential precondition to things. In a universe with the uncertainty principle, minimum knowledge is maximum uncertainty, least constraint, & so perhaps required for a minimum entropy fluctuation - see Conformal Cyclic Cosmology – CriglCragl Sep 30 '21 at 23:36
  • Reality may not exist without a conscious observer, or a consciousness, or a being who would perceive reality. However, reality may exist beyond the realm of perception. It may be like the wind. We cannot see the wind, but we feel it, therefore we know it exists. Reality perhaps is like this. Beyond our perception of it, reality may exist. – Iter Ator Oct 01 '21 at 10:34
  • "If a man says something when he's alone in a forest, is he still wrong?" – Scott Rowe Oct 28 '22 at 21:02

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I am inclined to believe that if all humans died overnight, the Universe would still be here in the morning, so if you consider the Universe to be real then reality can exist without anyone.

Whether reality/truth can exist without anything is a different matter, as I do not know how you would be able to differentiate, even in principle, between a true nothing and a false nothing, and even a statement such as 'there is nothing' would not exist if there was nothing.

Your final assertion, that an event happened when it happened, seems trivially true (recognising, of course, that the time coordinate used to label the position of an event is observer-dependent).

What I have said is my view, which I take to reflect common sense. Other people may have other views- for example, some take the view that reality exists only in the mind, so they might disagree with my assessment.

Marco Ocram
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"if someone dies on the other side of the earth (it is not reported, and you do not know the person)"

or, if a stone exists in space but no-one has ever seen it . . .

So it depends how you define existence. Personally, I would say the stone exists in the set of undiscovered things. Thus relating it to my point of perception and cognition.

Without relation to a cogito everything is "universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness", (to borrow a phrase from Camus).

Chris Degnen
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  • And yet, the stone could have an effect on the orbit of some body known to us. Like Neptune perturbed Uranus long before someone discovered it. It's far from being clear cut between what has effect on us and what we are cognizant of. – armand Sep 30 '21 at 00:50
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You asking about mind-dependent and mind-independent reality. There are different aspect of the human mind and the reality-dependence will be based of what we are talking about. For the example of a tree falling down in the woods and no one hears it, is there a sound? No. sounds are mind-dependent as they involve the conscious experience of a stimulus. Though there might bot be an sounds there would be sounds waves bc they not not dependant on consciousness awareness for their reality. They are "in" or logically dependent on nature, not our awareness. Now what about completely mind-independent reality? There is no such thing that we as humans can conceive of without automatically running into a logical contradiction. if u think, imagine, doubt, will, or by any other mental activity get a thing, it is somehow related to the mind. it is ether mental or an object that mental faculty. So when u try to think of the world when everyone is dead, what would that actually be like? would it be atoms floating through space? from what perspective? everyone is dead. what idea of an atom? the atom is a construct of mental concepts? or would the world have color like how it seems to us in our consiousness? We are dead, there is bo consiouns experience like ours. So yes you are flawed in your thinking.

Vishnu Vardhan-Reddy Burla
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It's an interesting question for geologists and astronomers who are trained in observing the traces left by events that happened billions of years ago, long before anyone or anything could witness any of it.

For example, there are plenty of craters on the moon that, as far as we can tell, have been created by meteorite impacts dated way before anyone was ever there to look at them happen (including animals). We can extrapolate this by observing impacts happening in our life time.

It seems kind of strange to claim that the crater wasn't there until someone looked at it. That would mean the meteorite impact didn't happen until we look, and retroactively appears in the geologic records billions of years ago as soon as we raise our eyes to the moon ?

It seems much more reasonable to consider the moon and the meteorite were there billions of years ago without any witnesses, and the impact did in fact happen, leaving the traces we analyse eons after.

Wittgenstein proposed "The world is all that is the case", as in "It is the case that i am typing on my keyboard". At some point, it was the case that a meteorite created the crater. Now it is the case that there remains a crater. All of this was part of the world at some point, whether someone saw it happen or not.

armand
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  • -1: Wittgenstein was a logical idealist and not an empiricist. – Mozibur Ullah Sep 30 '21 at 09:17
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    @moziburullah: your comment is absolutely irrelevant. It is clear that the author of the Tractatus or On Certainty believed that there was a reality and the conformity of propositions with this reality made them true or false. If he didn't believe so the whole Tractatus makes absolutely no sense. "The world is all that is the case", I.e. there is an ensemble of facts that are the case, wether we think they are or not or are cognizant of them or not. – armand Sep 30 '21 at 10:16
  • It isn't as the first part of your answer explaims wgat empiricism is and you're suggesting implicitly that Wittgenstein was an empiricist. – Mozibur Ullah Sep 30 '21 at 10:50
  • @moziburullah: The first part of my answer is about realism. I strongly suggest he was a realist yes. This has nothing to do with empiricism. Any argument about why I'm wrong, maybe? Or why the answer is wrong as a whole? Because from here it sure looks petty as hell... – armand Sep 30 '21 at 23:19
  • realism and empiricism are the same. – Mozibur Ullah Oct 01 '21 at 09:18
  • @moziburullah no. Empiricism is about epistemology, how we know things. The idea that we acquire knowledge primarily by our senses. Realism is about ontology, what things are. The idea that things exist independently of minds. This question is about ontology, or "does the moon disappear when nobody looks at it". "The world is all that is the case" makes no sense outside of the axiom that there are indeed things that are the case. Please educate yourself. – armand Oct 01 '21 at 09:46
  • No, epistemology is about how we acquire knowledge and this canbe asked of epmiricism, idealism and other philosophical questions. Ontology is about how things are - in a sense it is complementary to epistomology. Wittgenstein was a fan of Schopenhauer. This helps explain the quote above from Wittgenstein. Far from educating myself, I'm the one who is educating you! – Mozibur Ullah Oct 01 '21 at 11:01
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    @MoziburUllah So according to you moral realists are also moral empiricists since it's the same thing ? (for whatever that would mean...) And sure, "how we know things" and "how we acquire knowledge" are very different things, obviously... Grasping at straws, much ? do you realize how little sense you're making ? – armand Oct 01 '21 at 11:29
  • Words change meaning in context. For example set theory and card set. Here set have different by linked meamings. Whilst there is an SEP entry for moral realism there isn't one for moral empiricism - it's a poor relation. – Mozibur Ullah Oct 01 '21 at 11:54