Objective Reality, Smart Machines, and Dumb Deer Hunters

I think that I always believed in objective reality, but I didn't know what to call it, or that I should call it anything. To me it was just common sense. Some years ago I was arguing with a guy on the internet who accused me of being an objective realist, while proudly proclaiming that he was not. I never did find out what he called himself but, just before discontinuing our discussion, he asserted that the entire universe was composed of data, not substance. Later I discovered that Ayn Rand considered herself to be an objective realist, sort of. As near as I can tell, she spun off her own version of it, calling it Objectivism, with a capital "O".

I'm not sure what consensus reality is, but it sounds like when you doubt your own senses and ask one or more other people what they are perceiving, figuring that, if they see it too, it must be real. While confirmation from other people may increase the likelihood that what you see is real, it does not prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. We are still talking about perception here, and objective reality exists independent of perception. I don't think you can conclusively prove objective reality anyway, but you can prove it to the point that you are reasonably certain, which is good enough for most practical situations. If a large tree falls in the forest, and you are standing in its path, you can be reasonably certain that, if you don't get out of the way, it will smash you like a bug. You can do a mathematical analysis of the probabilities later, but first, get out of the fucking way!

Since right and wrong are human concepts, unless you want to bring God into it, it is certainly possible to be right by somebody's standards and simultaneously wrong by somebody else's. Bringing God into it doesn't help much because everything we know about God comes from other people. As a Deist, I'm not supposed to believe that God speaks directly to people in words but, as a logical person, I can only say that God has never spoken to me in words. I can neither confirm nor refute that God has ever spoken to anybody else because I have never been a witness to it and, even if I had been, all I would have had to go by was my perception.

If computers ever attain consciousness, I don't think it will be all at once, more like an evolutionary thing. As far as we know, that's how it happened with humans and other animals. It is unlikely that a deer in the forest knows or cares that Donald Trump was recently elected President of the United States, yet it is certainly aware of its surroundings. It is probably conscious at some level of its individual identity and its relationship to other deer. I'm pretty sure that I know more about deer than any deer does. The question is, what do those deer know about me ? The fact that they have all evaded me since opening day may be explained by random chance, but I cannot be absolutely certain of that.

I have one of those orange boxes on my screen, but it's down in the corner of the marginal stuff and doesn't interfere with my writing. I suppose the location might be different with different browsers.