Subjectivity versus Objectivity

Meno2 · October 12, 2017, 3:00pm

Equally briefly, where does the confirmation come from, and what is its status of difference from experiment? If it is different from experiment/experience, then what conclusions can be drawn from it, as far as the difference is concerned?

Alf · October 12, 2017, 6:02pm

Look at the syntax. A sentence requires a subject, not necessarily an object.

And with Schopenhauer I say that everything that is an object can be this only with reference to a subject.

Meno2 · October 12, 2017, 6:06pm

Rarely, but then the subject substantially consumes its object.

Alf · October 12, 2017, 7:05pm

Subjects have an advantage.

Arminius · October 12, 2017, 8:28pm

X says: “The Sun rises in the East”.
Y says: “The Earth rotates around its axis once every 24 hours (mean solar time), causing the change of day and night for an observer on the surface”.

Arminius · October 13, 2017, 7:48pm

Arminius:

Newton’s physics was “true” till Clausius’ second law (“entropy”) of thermodynamics, in any case till Planck’s constant, Planck’s quantum theory, and Einstein’s (actually Hilbert’s) relativity theory. The “truth” about dynamics and about time changed. Both “truths” are very typical for the Occidental culture. One of the both led to the knowledge that entropy and irreversibility make probabilities and statistics more relevant, more “true”; the other one of the both led to the knowledge that time is more organic than anorganic, more historical than physical, more chronic than mathematical.

So what changed was a pattern of the Occidental way of life, experience, the kind of epistemology, the interpretation of “truth”, also of “subjectivity” and “objectivity”. The cultural goal, aim, target, object came closer.

Oswald Spengler (translated):

Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass — the counterpart of constant force — has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ipso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the group of hypotheses constituting the " classical" mechanics of the Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the basis of the Infinitesimal Calculus founded by Leibniz is threatened (1). But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. “Correct” and “incorrect” are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those •physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the “classical” concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground — just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant.

(1) See M. Planck, Entstehung und bisherige Entwicklung der Quantentheorie (192.0), pp. 17-2.5.

If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr (2) signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the “classical” Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the great style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has taken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique — true child of its century — hides the collapse of the symbolism.

(2) Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the “actual existence” of atoms has now at last been proved — a singular throw-back to the materialism of the preceding generation.

Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics — not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntal-dynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic element of the Faustian world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in Nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics.

Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. Entropy, like Force and Will, is something which (to anyone for whom this form-world is accessible at all) is inwardly clear and meaningful, but is formulated differently by every different authority and never satisfactorily by any. Here again, the intellect breaks down where the world-feeling demands expression.

Nature-processes in general have been classified as irreversible and reversible, according as entropy is increased or not. In any process of the first kind, free energy is converted into bound energy, and if this dead energy is to be turned once more into living, this can only occur through the simultaneous binding of a further quantum of living energy in some second process; the best-known example is the combustion of coal — that is, the conversion of the living energy stored up in it into heat bound by the gas form of the carbon dioxide, if the latent energy of water is to be translated into steam-pressure and thereafter into motion. It follows that in the world as a whole entropy continually increases; that is, the dynamic system is manifestly approaching to some final state, whatever this may be. Examples of the irreversible processes are conduction of heat, diffusion, friction, emission of light and chemical reactions; of reversible, gravitation, electric oscillations, electromagnetic waves and sound-waves.

What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. The First Law had drawn the strict picture of a causal Nature-happening, but the Second Law by introducing irreversibility has for the first time brought into the mechanical-logical domain a tendency belonging to immediate life and thus in fundamental contradiction with the very essence of that domain.

If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly, that in theory all processes must be reversible — which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the law of the Conservation of Energy — but, secondly, that in actuality processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible. Not even under the artificial conditions of laboratory experiment can the simplest process be exactly reversed, that is, a state once passed cannot be re-established. Nothing is more significant of the present condition of systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of “elementary disorder” for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between intellectual postulate and actual experience. The “smallest particles” of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods.

Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the “classical” mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of Probability — instead of under that of the a piori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded — what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. The Nature “known” in this wise is the Nature that we know by way of living experience, that we live in ourselves. What theory asserts (and, being itself, must assert) — to wit, this ideal irreversibility that never happens in actuality — represents a relic of the old severe intellectual form, the great Baroque tradition that had contrapuntal music for twin sister. But the resort to statistics shows that the force that that tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted. Becoming and Become, Destiny and Causality, historical and natural-science elements are beginning to be confused. Formulas of life, growth, age, direction and death are crowding up.

That is what, from this point of view, irreversibility in world-processes has to mean. It is the expression, no longer of the physical t but of genuine historical, inwardly-experienced Time, which is identical with Destiny.

Baroque physics was, root and branch, a strict systematic and remained so for as long as its structure was not racked by theories like these, as long as its field was absolutely free from anything that expressed accident and mere probability. But directly these theories come up, it becomes physiognomic. “The course of the world” is followed out. The idea of the end of the world appears, under the veil of formulas that are no longer in their essence formulas at all. Something Goethian has entered into physics — and if we understand the deeper significance of Goethe’s passionate polemic against Newton in the “Farbenlehre” we shall realize the full weight of what this means. For therein intuitive vision was arguing against reason, life against death, creative image against normative law. The critical form-world of Nature-knowledge came out of Nature-feeling, God-feeling, as the evoked contrary. Here, at the end of the Late period, it has reached the maximal distance and is turning to come home.

So, once more, the imaging-power that is the efficient in dynamics conjures up the old great symbol of Faustian man’s historical passion, Care — the out-look into the farthest far of past and future, the back-looking study of history, the foreseeing state, the confessions and introspections, the bells that sounded over all our country-sides and measured the passing of Life. The ethos of the word Time, as we alone feel it, as instrumental music alone and no statue- plastic can carry it, is directed upon an aim. This aim has been figured in every life-image that the West has conceived — as the Third Kingdom, as the New Age, as the task of mankind, as the issue of evolution. And it is figured, as the destined end-state of all Faustian “Nature” in Entropy.

Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-world rests, and in the description of natural processes it emerges distinct. It would not be too much, therefore, to say that entropy, as the intellectual form in which the infinite sum of nature-events is assembled as a historical and physiognomic unit, tacitly underlay all physical concept-formation from the outset, so that when it came out (as one day it was bound to come out) it was as a “discovery” of scientific induction claiming “support” from all the other theoretical elements of the system. The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it nears the goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the picture come to the front and the more insistently the organic necessity of Destiny asserts itself side by side with the inorganic necessity of Causality, and Direction makes itself felt along with capacity and intensity, the factors of pure extension. The course of this process is marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of like sort, which are only apparently demanded by experimental results and which in fact world-feeling and mythology imagined as long ago as the Gothic age.

Above all, this is manifested in the bizarre hypotheses of atomic disintegration which elucidate the phenomena of radioactivity, and according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered, in spite of all external influences, for millions of years and then suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest particles over space with velocities of thousands of kilometres per second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are struck by Destiny thus, the neighbours being entirely unaffected. Here too, then, is a picture of history and not “Nature,” and although statistical methods here also prove to be necessary, one might almost say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by chronological.

With ideas like these, the mythopoetic force of the Faustian soul is returning to its origins. It was at the outset of the Gothic, just at the time when the first mechanical clocks were being built, that the myth of the world’s end, Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, arose. It may be that, like all the reputedly old-German myths Ragnarok (whether in the Voluspa form or as the Christian Muspilli) was modelled more or less on Classical and particularly Christian-Apocalyptic motives. Nevertheless, it is the expression and symbol of the Faustian and of no other soul. The Olympian college is historyless, it knows no becoming, no epochal moments, no aim. But the passionate thrust into distance is Faustian. Force, Will, has an aim, and where there is an aim there is for the inquiring eye an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting expressed by means of the vanishing point, the Baroque park by its pint de vue, and analysis by the »th term of an infinite series — the conclusion, that is, of a willed directedness — assumes here the form of the concept. The Faust of the Second Part is dying, for he has reached his goal. What the myth of Götterdammerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies today — world’s end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.

James_S_Saint · October 13, 2017, 9:41pm

Although quite erudite, he expresses the very reason why science’s ontologies must be revisited and reborn.

The second law of thermodynamics is false. The universe is not winding down to a stop.

Arminius · October 15, 2017, 6:32pm

Yes. See also here.

Meno2 · October 15, 2017, 9:16pm

With time the differance disappears. The appearent difference, of course.

gib · October 16, 2017, 3:11am

I think you’re right that objectivity comes out of subjectivity–it is not opposite. It’s like a man color blind to red all of a sudden seeing red and thinking it must b something opposed to color. Subjectivity and objectivity possess opposing characteristics–namely, tendencies towards consensus vs tendencies away from consensus, thereby giving off the illusion of being real vs in the head–but if consciousness and mind are characterized by subjectivity and if objectivity requires consciousness and mind, then objectivity must be a form of subjectivity. Having different characteristics does not make two things opposite.

James_S_Saint · October 16, 2017, 3:33am

Is it objectively true that there is a reality?
Yes or no?

Meno2 · October 16, 2017, 3:55am

Sorry to interject, but was compelled, You are raising the question to the level of the paradoxical. I do not think it has gone that far. But I am unwilling to substantially interject, that would invalidate my excuse for it. It is proximal but distant enough to bring up the point.

Gamer · October 16, 2017, 4:17am

There’s also the possibility that it’s like asking if you are an inhaler or an exhaler. Perhaps consciousness is a balancing act of the subjective and objective, and that even when we allow that subjectivity seems primary, we can only hold that thought for so long, we can’t permanently talk ourselves out of playing along with the objective. The soul must breathe.

gib · October 16, 2017, 1:59pm

I would think we’d have to say yes. The brain is hardwire to think so. If objectivity comes out of subjectivity, that doesn’t make the objective false.

phyllo · October 16, 2017, 2:22pm

Let the paradox sink in.

Magnus_Anderson · October 16, 2017, 4:36pm

What does it mean that there is or that there is not a reality?
That’s the first question one has to ask.

In order to prove that the concept the word “reality” refers to is a meaningful one, you have to give me an example of something that is reality and something that is not.
It must be a particular of some sort.
You can say that what is not reality is what we expect to happen and what is reality is what happens.
That’s what we mean when we say “what is true (i.e. what will happen) is independent from what one thinks is true (i.e. will happen)”.
For example, I expect that it will be warm in the next couple of days.
That’s not reality. That’s what I think is reality.
Even if I was 100% sure that that’s what’s going to happen, and even if I was more informed than everyone else on Earth, it’s still not reality but merely what I think is reality.
What happens during the next couple of days, whether it is warm or not, is what is reality.
Is that what you mean by reality?
I am pretty sure that’s not the case.
Because if that’s the case then what does the question “is it objectively true that there is a reality?” means?

gib · October 16, 2017, 6:40pm

To say there is a reality is a tautology. To say there is anything is to say that thing exists, but reality by definition exists. To say there is not a reality is meaningless.

Reality is everything around you. The world of Star Wars is not reality.

I mean that even when you verify that the weather is warm by looking outside, feeling the air, etc., that is a subjective experience all the same (it comes from the senses) though it might also count as an objective experience (i.e. seeing a clear blue sky with the sun shining means that objectively there is a clear blue sky with the sun shining).

It means the existence of reality is not a matter of opinion or that it depends on one’s experience which can differ from someone else’s. If the existence of reality is objective, it means it exists for everybody whether they experience it that way or not.

Magnus_Anderson · October 16, 2017, 7:37pm

You need to give me an example of a thing that is represented by the word “reality” and an example of a thing that is not represented by the word “reality”. If you cannot do this then your concept of reality is either too specific (i.e. all-exclusive) or too generic (i.e. all-inclusive.) If it’s all-exclusive, it means nothing. If it’s all-inclusive, it means anything.

In everyday life, we often say things such as “this is reality” and “this is not reality”. This implies that the category of reality, like every proper category, includes certain things and excludes others. What are the things it includes? They are assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. Everything else is not reality. This includes assumptions that do not have the potential to influence our behavior.

If the concept of reality is all-inclusive, which means, if the word “reality” refers to everything around us, then the world of Star Wars is also reality. The only reason we can say that the world of Star Wars is not reality is thanks to the fact that our concept of reality, in this particular use, is not all-inclusive i.e. it excludes certain things. These things are everything that is not an assumption that has the potential to influence our behavior.

How do you determine whether subjective experience counts as an objective experience?

gib · October 17, 2017, 2:44am

A “thing”? There’s only one “thing” that’s represent by the word “reality,” and that’s reality. Perhaps you mean an example of a thing that is real–how 'bout the Statue of Liberty–but that hardly tells you what reality itself is. Or maybe you mean an example of what I think reality is (like the way a religious person might say: reality to me is all matter and energy, and also a transcendental, spiritual realm in which we find God). In that case, let me start by saying: to me, reality is fundamentally experience. All experience which we have, and all experience which we don’t have, constitutes the fabric of reality. ← That’s a start. There’s much therein to unpack.

Fair enough, so long as we understand that in order for me to give an example of something unreal, it has to be imaginary. For example, I can’t say “That chair is an example of something real but this table is an example of something unreal.”

I’m not sure I understand this. You’re saying that everything that is real is an assumption? What do you mean by assumption? And what allows for an assumption to influence behavior, and what disallows it to influence behavior.

Sure, if we define “reality” carefully–watching what gets included and what gets excluded–then the world of Star Wars is correctly recognized as belonging to the category of the unreal. But I don’t think saying “reality is everything around you” is all-inclusive in the way you mean. The world of Star Wars is not all around you. When I say “everything around you,” I’m already denoting a specific set of things and not others.

Through a lifetime of experiences and being in social groups. When you’re young, you might think of your favorite movie and think: that movie’s awesome! But then talking to others, you might find that some people agree with you but others don’t. You eventually learn that the awesomeness of the movie is something that only you feel (and others who agree with you) and not a fact of reality. Yet there are other things which everyone seems to agree on: the time of day, that the Sun exists, that 2 + 2 = 4, and you learn to call these objective.

James_S_Saint · October 17, 2017, 3:18am

Reality ≡ all that which really affects.
[size=50]… snicker…[/size]