Quote:
Originally posted by Fljotsdale:
Yorick?
I wasn't being specially 'religious' either  . And I don't think I'm postmodernist! 
Reality is reality is reality. But reality (truth) CAN be validly different for everyone. Take another 'for instance' a very small one - a leaf is a leaf: but what colour is it? Green, yes. But the green you see is not the green I see, because the colour we perceive depends on the individual retinas in our eyes. But your green is true to you and mine to me. It CANNOT be Absolute! It HAS to be a subjective truth. And truth in many, many things in this existence is purely subjective.
OK. There has to be objective truth, too. If your wife is cheating on you, that is not subjective, it is objective. (What you do about it depends on subjective feelings!)
But ABSOLUTE TRUTH is something else again. The term (to me, anyway) implies the coming together of all things, objective and subjective, into one complete, unified WHOLE that cannot again be split into it's component parts. Let's go back to the leaf: if we could see it AS IT ACTUALLY IS, that would be the Absolute Truth about the colour of that leaf. Likewise, if we could know everthing about this universe, that would be the Absolute Truth about that, too.
But we can't even know the Absolute Truth about the colour of the leaf, can we?
If we could KNOW the ABSOLUTE TRUTH about EVERYTHING - why, then, we would either become the creator, or the universe would vanish, or existence would be pointless... 
I'm getting out of my depth here! 
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Well yes that is indeed a post modernist viewpoint
. Let's take the leaf. How we percieve light is indeed subjective, so we can never actually indisputably know what the leaf looks like. However whether we percieve it or not, the leaf is an entity that reflects light in a particualar way, consistent with other leafs of it's kind. This has an ultimate appearance/form/shape that whether we correctly percieve it or not, exists.
Take soundwaves. Our ears only hear between certain frequencies. Dogs hear higher (faster) frequencies than humans. There are also subsonic frequencies below what we can hear. We know they are there because we feel them or observe the effects on say a building. We can't purely rely on the applicable human sense to ascertain absolute or objective truth because there are limitations. This is one example of how something is beyond our comprehension. We will never know what the dog whistle sounds like.
Regarding colour, I'm of the opinion that we see colours the same, but I don't know if this can be proved. The way light and colour works though, as in all colours being white, and absense of colour being black, seems to me to indicate consistency of interpretation. As I said, I'm not sure if this can be proved though.
What I find interesting is that colours change under differing lights. Under yellow stage lighting for example, a yellow lead becomes white, and a white lead becomes yellow. Love it.
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I am the walrus!.... er, no hang on....
A fair dinkum laughing Hyena!