Let’s Cool The Philosophical Hot Takes On The Laurel Versus Yanny Audio Illusion
Vox science reporter Brian Resnick tells us that the meaning of Laurel Versus Yanny is that “your reality is an interpretation”: “Perceptual tricks like this…reveal that our perceptions are not the absolute truth; that the physical phenomena of the universe are indifferent to whether our feeble sensory organs can perceive them correctly. We’re just guessing.”
Resnick later tries to walk this back a little, admitting, “This isn’t to say you can never trust reality. Often, we’re correct and we agree on it! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.” Well, that’s reassuring. But at Wired, Adam Rogers waxes poetic about “The Fundamental Nihilism of Yanny vs. Laurel,” because it “proves that we will all die alone.” Not so reassuring.
There is a world that exists—an uncountable number of differently flavored quarks bouncing up against each other. There is a world that we perceive—a hallucination generated by about a pound and a half of electrified meat encased by our skulls. Connecting the two, or conveying accurately our own personal hallucination to someone else, is the central problem of being human. Everyone’s brain makes a little world out of sensory input, and everyone’s world is just a little bit different.
To makes some sense out of this kind of brain-busting argument, we need to set aside Laurel and Yanny and talk about Manny and Ayn. By Manny, I mean Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century philosopher who honed this kind of argument to its highest level. I don’t think Rogers knows he is parroting Kant, but it is an argument that has been around so long, and is so influential, that it long ago filtered down to the level of “pop philosophy” and became a commonplace conundrum favored by those who like to muddy their waters to make them look deep.
Let’s Cool The Philosophical Hot Takes On The Laurel Versus Yanny Audio Illusion
