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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
The point I’m trying to drive at is that it’s foolish to say that any single image of the tree is the<\/em> image of the tree. There is an entire family (technically of infinite size) of images that could pass as a tree.<\/p>\n So what you perceive as a tree depends on you<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","category-philosophy","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}