Quote of the Day
Quantum mechanics presents a view of reality in which we inhabit many worlds at once. As the political scientist Alexander Wendt has put it in Quantum Mind and Social Science, we are “walking wave functions,” which “collapse” at decisive moments, when everyone is forced to accept the same reality, but in a way that reconfigures each person’s view of how the past was and the future will be. Niels Bohr introduced the word “incommensurability,” which Thomas Kuhn popularized, to characterize the kind of “coherence” involved here. For example, Galileo could imagine living in both a geocentric and a heliocentric world, until his telescopic observations convinced him of the latter. At that moment, he started living exclusively in the heliocentric world and proceeded so much in that way that he eventually faced a Papal Inquisition.
Steve Fuller
September 2, 2026
We don’t have different perspective, we inhabit different realities | Steve Fuller » IAI TV
A summary of the article:
We tend to think we live in a shared reality, with differences in how we experience the world attributed to differences in perspective. But according to philosopher and founder of social epistemology, Steve Fuller, this is a radical mistake. Breakthroughs in neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and AI show that we don’t have different perspectives on the same reality. We inhabit different realities altogether.
I’m not complete sold on this but I’m willing to say I find very little to disagree with him on this topic. And using this framework as a model for human behavior could be very useful. I’ll have to think on this some more.
One of the first thoughts that come to mind is how gun owners versus gun grabber’s view firearms.
Gun owners tend to think of them as defensive tools used to protect innocent lives and their property. Government confiscation of firearms is viewed as enabling enslavement and/or genocide.
Gun grabbers tend think of firearms as tools of criminals to commit violent crime. Government confiscation of firearms is viewed as reducing violent crime and even reducing the number of criminals. There is no downside to gun confiscation if the ignorant, stupid, deplorables would just turn their guns in without a fuss.
These two groups live in irreconcilable realities and live their lives immersed in them without significant discomfort or desire to challenge their beliefs.
> Gun grabbers tend think of firearms as tools of criminals to commit violent crime.
I think this is either wrong, or incomplete enough that it’s the same thing.
Gun grabbers seem to think that the gun–or maybe the presence of guns in society–causes people to behave violently.
Which is even a deeper level of nonsense.
Doesn’t change your central thesis though.
“Gun grabbers seem to think that the gun–or maybe the presence of guns in society–causes people to behave violently.”
Spend time around die hard Democrats and one of the common statements you will hear is: “if I had a gun I would shoot that SOB!”. Over silly or inconsequential bullshit. Most of these people stay away from guns because they fear that they would. The main problem is that they think everyone else is the same as them in that regard. Their self control is sadly lacking.
There is a reason why twice as many in prison identify as Democrats than all other political affiliations combined.
You are too kind to gun grabbers, at least the leaders. They are totalitarians who want to make resistance difficult. They may be catching on the lawful gun owners are unlikely to start a revolution, no matter the provocation, but still empowering criminals to ply their trade without resistance furthers their goal.
Exactly my thought.
The phrase to use is “what is it they want to do to us that requires disarming us first?”
And by the way, a related question is “what is it they want to us that requires packing the Supreme Court first?”
How is this perspective significantly different than the solipsistic view that there is only one reality, and you’re the only one in it? Everyone and everything else exists only in relation to you. Those “different worlds” do not exist for you and might as well not exist at all, for all they affect you.
This is a bit like the “Multiple Worlds” theory of quantum mechanics, and some people take an inappropriate comfort from the idea that there is a world where they exist where all the other choices were made. Why? Why take comfort in that? Those other multiple worlds are the Other Yous problem; you’re on the constantly sliding conveyor belt of This World. Go talk to some philosophers and have them convince you that you are already living in the Best Of All Possible Worlds… this is as good as it’s going to be for you; all notionally better realities were not possible for you.
Having thought these Deep And Profound Thoughts, what are you going to do differently?
Or… we do live in a single shared reality, which we each perceive differently with our limited and flawed senses and intellects, and only those who believe in the single shared reality act like Good Roommates. The “My Truth” and “Different Worlds” and “I’m The Only Real Person” people leave their laundry all over the place.
“we each perceive differently” we underappreciate how much differently.
F’rinstance: Michael Sartain recollects a conversation with an attractive female influencer at dinner. “You don’t notice average-looking men or men who are ‘below’ you. You literally do not see them.” She disagrees. He asks her the name of the man who served her main course. “What man?”
“He was a man. His name is Joshua. He’s black.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“You exchanged words when he served you.”
Perception, and its handmaid memory, are unreliable, in part because we subordinate so many tasks to them, and allow many of those tasks to get done half-@ssed and with no ledger for followup or due diligence. Each of us double-checks, or has logging in place to make double-checks possible, only what each of us deems important enough to justify the expense.
I think that explains “different realities, one for you and one for me” far better than quantum physics. Less ‘woo-woo’ or waveforms required.
Stuff like that is quite silly.
Facts about reality can be independently verified. Do the experiment, get the same result.
Reality doesn’t care about us. It is what it is, and our opinion is irrelevant.
All that blather about “waveforms” and such is just stupid. We have different viewpoints, sure, and we have different opinions, but that doesn’t magically make *reality itself* any different.
We’re just wrong about some things. All of us. All that varies is which things. Reality DOES NOT CARE.
Awesome!
Please do the experiments and get back to us with the one true religion, if any.
The fact that our nature limits us to our perceptions, and therefore prohibits us from obtaining truth, and limits us only to successive approximation of truth through oversimplified modeling and testing… does not change what truth *is*, as a concept.
We have no direct access to truth, and it can be argued that we cannot prove it’s “existence”, but what we *can* prove, is the each and every one of us has *postulated* it. I’m here presenting symbols as words, concepts you already have. In speech, I can but vibrate the air, everything else is done by the listener, using what he already has. The very notion that this process can present to you something you do not alreayd have, requires as postulates that you presume my existance as something which is not *you*, and of a common shared reality through which we are presumed to communicate.
“Please do the experiments and get back to us with the one true religion”
People’s opinion includes unproven religions (which is all of them).
That’s a subset of the point I was making. “Reality” does not vary, no matter our opinions or beliefs.
Reality can be verified. HAS been verified, rather extensively – gravity, friction, chemical processes, etc.
Religion largely has to do with things we CAN’T measure directly. They are free to believe all kinds of stupid crap, like “reality is different for different people”, and I am free to point out that, in every single way we can directly measure, NO, it doesn’t.
And, in terms of what is actually measurable, *I am factually correct*, and *they are factually wrong*.
If you want to talk about “different realities” being just “stuff we believe”, then you’re not talking about “different realities” at all, you’re just redefining words to make yourself sound deep or something.
My point, very poorly expressed, was that there are lots of things that we don’t know. And probably some we can never know.
This is true even in the physical sciences. For example, is a photon a particle or a wave?
In general science does not determine the truth. It can usually determine if something is false. If we are honest with ourselves, when new data is examined and compared with existing data and beliefs a collapse of the false beliefs can occur and the plausible (if any) beliefs remain standing.
That collapse is of particular interest to me.
People’s ignorance is of far less interest to me than what and why they believe things which are not true and but yet are stubbornly held to.
“My point, very poorly expressed, was that there are lots of things that we don’t know”
After centuries of extensive measurement, we have never found a single example of any part of measurable reality that varies per person.
Whether we understand everything or not does not change that fact. It is not required.
The idea of “the collapse” you are talking about is indeed interesting and worth investigation and discussion, but the idea that *reality itself* varies is, at this point, completely absurd. It is gross redefinition of language for the purpose of deception.
“The idea of ‘the collapse’ you are talking about” is a psychological or emotional event, and it’s confined to the mind of the person experiencing it. Granted, it presents dangerous ramifications to those not experiencing it, when many people experience it roughly the same way at roughly the same time.
For example, Galileo could imagine living in both a geocentric and a heliocentric world, until his telescopic observations convinced him of the latter. At that moment, he started living exclusively in the heliocentric world and proceeded so much in that way that he eventually faced a Papal Inquisition.
I actually have a logical problem with this statement.
Galileo could imagine both, but only one was — and is — true; his perceptions and imaginings do not change reality. The telescopic observations that showed him the heliocentric model is correct didn’t make the geocentric reality disappear; that reality never existed. Galileo lived in the heliocentric solar system, but just hadn’t proved it yet.
Unknown quantities represent possibilities, but they don’t create alternate realities.
It’s like the old riddle:
Q: Before Mt. Everest was discovered, what was the tallest mountain on Earth?
A: Mt. Everest.
Heh… or as Mark Twain put it:
“How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg?”
Calling a tail a leg, does not make it a leg.
Truth is a thing.
I’ve met gun control parasites, and I don’t agree that they think that guns help criminals. For the most part they correctly believe that guns deter crime. However, they are, without exception, cowardly, effeminate worms who want to imagine that they are “bad boys” by making things better for criminals.
This is entirely a dominance game for them. The way to combat them is by destroying their “bad boy” fantasies, by getting in their faces and belittling them, until they feel like they are an inch high.
I see this differently.
It is the *definition* of truth, and it’s only objective measure, that it cannot contradict itself.
Truth is just another name for reality. There can be only one.
To entertain different and contradiction realities, is to entertain self-contradictory truth, which is an attack on the very *idea* of truth itself, whcih is an attack on the very idea of reality itself.
There can be no clearer rejection of the god of truth… of a creator.
This is the basis of “transhumanism” and “humanism”. The rejection of truth is the end of reason and of sanity itself. It is Nihilism.
It is evil.
A political “scientist” using physics-y terms. Adorable.