While walking, I came up with an interesting argument for relativism, which is one of the philosophies I extend in my “Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas”: support I take two pictures of a tree, one with a very short exposure time, one with a very long one. Which is the truth? Well, both of them reflect the image of the same real-world tree, and yet one would certainly appear more “tree-like” than the other (ala Plato)… yet if the perspective is changed (extending the exposure time), the very concept of what a tree is can change.

Let’s take the analogy even further. What if we take a photo of a tree and digitally enhance it? (Nothing too complicated that would lose the image of the tree; let’s say we just normalize the image’s histogram). Is the enhanced photo still a tree? What would the distinction be between enhancing the photo in software and changing the capture parameters on the camera? What if the camera could perform normalization directly?

Even better, what if a photo was, say, underexposed, and was digitally corrected to more closely resemble the real-world scene that it was meant to capture? The enhancements are “fake”, but they more closely match reality than the unenhanced photo!

The point I’m trying to drive at is that it’s foolish to say that any single image of the tree is the image of the tree. There is an entire family (technically of infinite size) of images that could pass as a tree.

So what you perceive as a tree depends on you.