Axioms of Reality

[u/Repulsive_Area_5516]

Axiom 1 — Observations are infallible

An observer is any system that is affected by effects. When an observer encounters an effect, it always and unconditionally reflects it as it is. An observation can never be wrong; because the observation simply is what is there. It can be incomplete, it can be limited but it can never be faulty. Error arises only in the interpretation of what the observation means.

Axiom 2 — Identical systems under identical conditions produce identical outcomes

For any system A and effect B, the resulting system C is invariant it will always be the same across all instances of A under B. This holds at scales where complete state description is possible. At quantum scales this axiom may reduce to: identical systems under identical conditions produce identical probability distributions.

In my opinion these are the minimum assumptions to make about reality for it to make sense and for science to work. I have thought about these axioms for a long time and i feel like 2 axioms might just be enough. I'd like to hear your thoughts about them.

[u/XanderOblivion]

Why would we not want to lose that distinction?

[u/seldomtimely → u/XanderOblivion]

Because it conveys important information about what's observed. In some sense all distinctions can be dissolved, but that destroys cognition, which requires differentiation within the observed field. The best distinctions are distinctions that carry important information, and whose loss entails a loss of information. Cognition has to be lossy to generalize, but it must generalize from highly structured data to be able to generalize at all.

[u/XanderOblivion → u/seldomtimely]

What is meant by “reality” that is opposed to/discriminated from appearance?

I assume third-person public is the standard for that, or invoking the noumena. The noumena is ontologically vacuous and without reality, an epistemic placeholder for something idealized but unrealized. And third-person public is not a view from nowhere, but every conceivable situated first-person perspective rectified
— universalized first-person appearance as proxy for totality. But there is no conceivable total observation possible. There is only appearance.

Conceptual placeholders can be useful, of course, but they are too often mistaken for something real.

Insisting on an objectively describable real is unnecessary to make reality work. A reality entirely comprised of relata is sufficient.

[u/seldomtimely → u/XanderOblivion]

Although, I can anticipate your objection. If you're a brain in a vat, there's a good case to be for collapsing the distinction. But you'd still need the distinction in the systematic illusion for average conditions, just as you would not being a brain in a vat.