I don't know, but thanks for giving me a headache

If there is only experience, then am I writing this or are you imagining that I’m writing this? W/o the assumption that you’re there, then all meaningful discourse is futile.
Of course, you could always agree with Berkeley that God provides all of our experience. I find that at best farcical.

It's hard to know how we would know this. Our every experience is subjective, even the experience of other people describing THEIR subjective experience.

It seems reasonable to hypothesize there is, in fact, a reality independent of us. It's the confirmation of this that is difficult. Solipsim, and objective rationalism could both lead to one having the same inner experience.

I think, at some level, it's BOTH. We have an inner world of our own creation, and this experience, our consciousness, so to speak, can indeed diverge from the environment which provides us with our sensory input. In a nutshell, life can surprise us.

Whether or not this environment is something that exists outside of some collective consciousness that perceives it, is, to my knowledge, a long-standing open question. Take the issue of color, for example. Some things are red, some things are green. Unless you have red-green color blindness. So, which perspective is accurate, and which is distorted? Does the color lie in the retinas of the perceiver, or is it some innate property of the perceived object?

There are a couple issues in this thread I find interesting. But I'm going to confine this response to the issue of “objective reality.” By definition, this is the”reality of the universe independent of our perceptions.”This seems to me to be precisely what science is trying to discover..... rules, models predictions about the universe that we can all agree on independent of our individual prejudices and extremely limited perceptions. Science has done an amazing job coming up with ideas that seem counter-intuitive but explain soo much. Examples – the earth is like a ball – it revolves around the sun. Mass and energy are interchangeable (E=MC2). Time and velocity are related and depend on your reference point. These “laws” of physics are attempts to describe objective reality. Are they complete? Of course not – we discover new such constantly. Does this mean that “objective reality” does not exist? Of course not – but if you think you know what it is, you are probably ignorant or delusional.

probably arises in isolated puddles of muddied waters ,if you know what to precisely fish out?

Finally, an interesting question!

If there is an objective reality, we do not have access to it as we live entirely subjective lives. In some sense I chuckle when discussing the possibility we are all living in a simulation, because ostensibly we have no choice... we are entirely beholden to the construction produced by our mental faculty. We do not see the universe “as it is” we see what we are attenuated to perceive. Fortunately, we are pretty clever and through the use of tools and instruments, we have been able to expand the “scale” of this mental construct. All that being said, despite the uniqueness presented by our brains, there is a remarkable consistency from one moment to the next. There are agreements we can make amongst ourselves about what is “real” and how to coordinate our efforts in a productive way. If our internal interpretation of the universe was dissimilar to any great extreme, we would not be social creatures. I balk at those who try to convince me that time and reality are illusions... whatever “this” is is all I got, so to say it isn’t “real” is a statement with no point... you may as well argue for the existence of god. It’s like saying a chocolate cake is an illusion because it’s made of eggs, flower, sugar, chocolate, etc. Such efforts do not refute the existence of cake, the cake is still a cake. Time and space are real for everyone, even if they use extra steps to describe it.

The grass is greener until you get there.
I am a butterfly dreaming about being a man who isn't sure there's a difference. And no one makes it out alive, so for the sake of more fun while we are here: No.

Objective reality is axiomatic. It does not matter if it is true or not, It only underlies the entirety of our knowledge set. It is not provable. We however are forced to rely that it does in fact exist. If it does not exist, then it could not be an illusion. An illusion being a distortion of an actually. Even the definition of subjectivity depends on some independent state to have an impression of. Do books of Philosophy exist when no one is perusing them?

Is there a world independent of subjective experience? Isn't that like asking if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound even if no one hears it? Do bears "scat" in the woods?

I don't believe so! Even the most genius scientists will have more information added to his own discovery, long after he is dead! So the whole truth was not found, by one person! I think that I understand this question!

Yes BUT it's filtered through subjective brains. Thus both the physicists and the post-modernists are right. They just disagree on the meaning of the word "reality".

The question of objective reality seems, to me at least, to boil down to the following question: If a planet killing asteroid or comet were to obliterate the entire human species, would the universe we perceive today continue, unaffected by our catastrophe, or would the waveform of our collective consciousness collapse, and the universe that we understand fold in upon itself?

Yes. Unless you are all not real, just figments of my imagination. Which may be the case, but I am not of that opinion.

I certainly hope so. It doesn't do us any good to think otherwise.

I consider "reality" to be the set of all things that are real. So in that sense, I'd say it's objective. Our experiences with reality are subjective. I have a problem with people who say something is "real to me." It's either real or not.

I had a college professor once who was talking about a particular book and how much he loved it, and a particular character Hetty. I know that he was trying to explain the experience of losing oneself in a great book and creating a world so vivid in the mind that you can imagine yourself in that fictional world, interacting with the characters, and "bringing them to life" in a way. He asked us if Hetty was "real," and I didn't' think she was. He said Hetty is "real to me."

Hetty is real only in the sense that she is a fictional character concieved by and written by George Elliot. She does not exist in reality, she is only a conceptual construction. Some people include abstrations and constructions of the imagination in the term "reality," but I think I'm still stuck in the model that speaks to a more concrete existence.

We don't know enough to answer this question conclusively.

Where I study, the discussion centers on the "ultimate reality" of non-duality ("all is one" ) versus the "relative reality" of dualistic distinctions.

I'm not sure exactly how this scheme maps onto an idea of "objective" vs. "subjective"; I'd posit (very loosely) ultimate : objective :: relative : subjective.

Ultimate reality is what you're left with when you see through to the emptiness (i.e. lack of inherency) of all things. I think. I'm not yet fluently conversant in this system.

I just had a passibly profound insight on this! I had to come back to share. The fact that "you" exist at all, infers an objective reality. Our awareness "arose" out of the formation and evolution of our minds, from zygote to whatever it is you are now. In order for any of us to come in to being at all, we had to arise from circumstances beyond our perception, thus there is an objective reality. An Objective Reality, which we augment through the Subjective Lens of Experience.

I heartily encourage rational challenges to this argument!

I veer on the edge of - I am not sure that there is -

Good question. I do believe there is a high possibility, of an objective reality. I mean think of all the things humans have seen that are odd that don't always seem to see us. I mean how much time do we really spend "awake" in this reality? I mean I myself have, and noticed others meandering along lost... Somewhere? Inside their selves but where are they? Are parts of their consciousness scattered about? I mean anything is possibly when you have subatomic particles in existence anything can happen with them..

I don't think so I suppose soemthing like a slice of toast has an objective reality it exist as a think of itself and cannot be described as a poached egg - but not the human relationship to it which seems vast and incomprehensible so many variables.

How about C= 2πr ? That is pretty objective. Planck's constant or Avagadro's number. Or that water is H2O These are objective.

Strictly speaking, I believe so. But we, as different persons, can never fully be the judge of what is reality in the objective sense. The colour blue in one object is seen differently by everyone - because the shape of our eyes and the wiring of our brains will never be exactly the same.

HOWEVER, I think that we have machines and can build more complex machines that can judge reality objectively. E.g. a blue with the RGB value of 0,0,255 will always be a blue with RGB value of 0,0,255. And even my vision of 0,0,255 blue is different to another's vision of 0,0,255 blue, it is still objectively 0,0,255 blue.

I don't know too much about this but wouldn't objective reality be the same as a perfect world? If reality is the way things actually are, wouldn't objective reality be the way things should be?