Oct 17, 2026 12:31 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 17, 2026 04:37 AM by Magical Realist.)
Why is tangibility almost always more convincing than visibility? Why do people, when confronted with the proposal that objective existence may not be real, typically reply with something about kicking a rock or punching a wall? Or why career skeptics consistently demand a dead bigfoot or a crashed ufo as acceptable evidence for their existence.
It's because we seem to trust what we can feel with our hands and feet more than what we can see with our eyes. I believe this is because there is little interpretive wiggle room left for what is happening when you touch something whereas when you see something there it's always a semantic question of WHAT we are seeing which can lead to misperceptions caused by wishful thinking or mere ignorance.
This is why the standard phenomenal "proof" for the existence of objective reality really comes down to its solidity, its resistance to our acting upon it, and the seeming lack of any other interpretation other than that it is at least as absolutely there and present to itself as our own bodies. As if a rock retains its touch and feel and resistance to force even without being touched or felt or resisting any force. As if the conscious quale of tangibility inheres in non-conscious objects themselves instead of just jn our own bodies.
It's because we seem to trust what we can feel with our hands and feet more than what we can see with our eyes. I believe this is because there is little interpretive wiggle room left for what is happening when you touch something whereas when you see something there it's always a semantic question of WHAT we are seeing which can lead to misperceptions caused by wishful thinking or mere ignorance.
This is why the standard phenomenal "proof" for the existence of objective reality really comes down to its solidity, its resistance to our acting upon it, and the seeming lack of any other interpretation other than that it is at least as absolutely there and present to itself as our own bodies. As if a rock retains its touch and feel and resistance to force even without being touched or felt or resisting any force. As if the conscious quale of tangibility inheres in non-conscious objects themselves instead of just jn our own bodies.