I think youâre right that objectivity comes out of subjectivityâit is not opposite. Itâs 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 characteristicsânamely, tendencies towards consensus vs tendencies away from consensus, thereby giving off the illusion of being real vs in the headâbut 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.
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.
Thereâs also the possibility that itâs 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 canât permanently talk ourselves out of playing along with the objective. The soul must breathe.
I would think weâd have to say yes. The brain is hardwire to think so. If objectivity comes out of subjectivity, that doesnât make the objective false.
What does it mean that there is or that there is not a reality?
Thatâs the first question one has to ask.
In order to prove that the concept the word ârealityâ 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.
Thatâs what we mean when we say âwhat is true (i.e. what will happen) is independent from what one thinks is true (i.e. will happen)â.
For example, I expect that it will be warm in the next couple of days.
Thatâs not reality. Thatâs what I think is reality.
Even if I was 100% sure that thatâs whatâs going to happen, and even if I was more informed than everyone else on Earth, itâs 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 thatâs not the case.
Because if thatâs the case then what does the question âis it objectively true that there is a reality?â means?
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 oneâs experience which can differ from someone elseâs. If the existence of reality is objective, it means it exists for everybody whether they experience it that way or not.
You need to give me an example of a thing that is represented by the word ârealityâ and an example of a thing that is not represented by the word ârealityâ. 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 itâs all-exclusive, it means nothing. If itâs all-inclusive, it means anything.
In everyday life, we often say things such as âthis is realityâ and âthis is not realityâ. 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 ârealityâ 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?
A âthingâ? Thereâs only one âthingâ thatâs represent by the word âreality,â and thatâs reality. Perhaps you mean an example of a thing that is realâhow 'bout the Statue of Libertyâbut 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 donât have, constitutes the fabric of reality. â Thatâs a start. Thereâs 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 canât say âThat chair is an example of something real but this table is an example of something unreal.â
Iâm not sure I understand this. Youâre 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 ârealityâ carefullyâwatching what gets included and what gets excludedâthen the world of Star Wars is correctly recognized as belonging to the category of the unreal. But I donât think saying âreality is everything around youâ is all-inclusive in the way you mean. The world of Star Wars is not all around you. When I say âeverything around you,â Iâm already denoting a specific set of things and not others.
Through a lifetime of experiences and being in social groups. When youâre young, you might think of your favorite movie and think: that movieâs awesome! But then talking to others, you might find that some people agree with you but others donât. 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.
Yes, a particular thing. Something that I can experience.
For example, a tree.
If you want to help someone understand the concept that you are using the best way to do it is to give them a number of examples that are labelled either as âthis is an example of my conceptâ or as âthis is NOT an example of my conceptâ and then let them make connections on their own.
Thatâs also how we train computers to differentiate between different classes of images e.g. those with a face and those without a face.
This is basically a style of learning that is known as constructionism. The good thing about it is that people do things on their own, i.e. you teach them how to be independent, so that when they face an unfamiliar situation they donât freak out. The bad thing is that it requires a lot of experience and this means making a lot of mistakes.
If you cannot afford making mistakes then the alternative is instructionism which is about giving people instructions that they can follow independently from their experience. The good thing about this approach is that itâs easy to learn. All you have to do is understand language (i.e. what sort of action each one of the instructions refers to) and memorize the set of instructions on how to act that has been devised by someone else (usually someone who learned these things the hard way i.e. through laborious process of trial and error.) Thatâs what a theory is. Itâs just a set of instructions on how to make predictions independently from your experience. All you have to do is fill the formula with input parameters and do the calculations. This is deductive reasoning. No need to be experienced. You can be clueless and still make accurate predictions. This is why theories, and instructions in general, are often used as a way to hide oneâs inferiority. Anyways, the bad thing about instructionism is that it makes you brittle. The moment you leave your comfort zone, i.e. the part of reality the theory you are using is capable of predicting with sufficient degree of accuracy, you freak out. You crash in the most ungraceful way that is possible. Basically, if you simply follow other peopleâs instructions, you cannot adapt to new, previously unseen, situations. At best, you can go back to your instructor to give you new instructions.
All of this may seem irrelevant to you but it isnât really. If youâre an instructionist â and by you I donât mean specifically you â then it is not surprising that you place so much emphasis on language, words, definitions, etc. Because thatâs where you get all of your knowledge from. Experience never enters your picture.
The more examples you give someone, the more accurate their understanding will be.
Categories are inductively inferred.
I am saying that the word ârealâ is a label that is attached to assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. This is a very modest understanding of the word ârealâ. When you cut out all of the pretenses, all of the references or pseudo-references to the world beyond our experience, thatâs what you get. Itâs just a plain and simple description of how the word ârealâ is used in everyday life.
You ask what do I mean by assumption.
An example would be any kind of prediction.
Whenever you say something will happen (which means you are predicting it will happen) you are assuming that that something will happen.
The purpose of predictions is to motivate us to take preventive measures.
Another example is the idea that humans evolved from monkeys.
This one isnât a prediction because it is not an assumption regarding some future point in time. But itâs still an assumption. And the purpose of such an assumption is to help us predict the future.
Say you think there will be WW3 within next 10 years.
What does that mean?
It means you are predicting (or expecting) WW3 within next 10 years.
What does that mean in turn?
It means that you might prepare for it.
On the other hand, if you donât think there will be WW3 within next 10 years, then what that means is that you wonât prepare for it.
I suppose that what you mean by âall experience we donât haveâ is that the concept of reality has no temporal restrictions. For example, the concept of reality does not refer exclusively to my experience up to this point in time. It refers to my experience at any point in time which includes my experience at future points in time (i.e. future experience.) Otherwise, if you mean something beyond this, then youâre stepping into the territory of non-sense, I am afraid.
Letâs stick to the definition that makes sense. Reality refers to experience of any kind. Isnât that all-inclusive? The world of Star Wars is also a form of experience.
But the world of Star Wars is all around me. In the form of movies, games, comics, novels, toys, etc. Are you saying that these things are not real?
The problem is resolved by realizing that the word ârealâ is attached to assumptions. In the case of Star Wars, the assumption that there is a physical world of Star Wars.
That is not what I exactly said. It is easier to be subjective than to be objective. So one may think that objects come out of subjects. But I am saying that the subject-object-relationship is less like the diachronic chicken-and-egg problem but more like the synchronic side-by-side-problem. If there âISâ something, then always according to a subject that refers to an object. Which of them was first is not decidable. The first one of our world was no subject, since: in order to know what a âsubjectâ is, a second one is needed; but a second one is not only the beginning of subjectivity, but also the beginning of objectivity. So the subject and the object began at the same time. But the subject can always be one step ahead when it comes to the identification with the said first one before the second one. Descartesâ âcogito ergo sumâ assumes that there is a one who thinks, that there is a conclusion and that there is being. If Descartes had been the said first one, then he would have known (in the way we do) nothing about thinking, conclsuion and being.
Epistemologically said, subjectivity and objectivity are oppositions. For example: the subject is the observing one, the object is the observed one. It is similar to the grammatic active/passive-opposition.
Iâm not actually using the concept ârealityâ all that differently from ordinary people. True, Iâm a subjectivist, which means that I see reality differently than you, but if you want examples, I wonât give you anything different from what an ordinary person would give: bananas, shoes, tin cans, ear lobes, quasars, people, rock bands⌠these are all examples of things that are real. Santa Clause, Darth Vader, the Fly Spaghetti Monster, Harry Potter, Teddy Ruxpin⌠these are all examples of things that are unreal.
Ok.
True, but I have no idea how many examples or of what kind to give you before you inductively infer realityâunless, of course, you already know the category Iâm trying to define, and youâre just seeing if I can make the connection with examples.
So an assumption is a prediction, or can lead to predictions. Sounds like youâre saying that everything we take to be real, we do so on the grounds of an assumption.
Thatâs not quite what I was saying, but it counts anyway. Itâs more centered around the âweâ in that phrase. By âweâ, I mean humans. Other animals also have experiences. I was saying that reality is constituted by all experience that exists, not just those of humans.
No, itâs not all-inclusive. Thanks to the human imagination, we are able to conjure up ideas and images of things we take to be unreal, and at the same time, take the ideas and images themselves to be real (as mental things). The flying rhinoceros in the pink tutu Iâm imagining is not real, but my mental image of it is. As I said earlier, I can give you a rough picture of what I take to be real and what I take to be unreal, but youâll have to allow me to bring up examples of the imaginary or the fabricated in order to show you whatâs in the âunrealâ bucket, which is to say I have to bring up examples of the imaginary or the fabricated in order to avoid being all-inclusive in my definition of reality. The imagination helps a lot hereâitâs a mental faculty that enables us to actually bring up such examples.
Thatâs not the âworldâ of Star Wars (except in a metaphorical way). Youâre trying to have it both ways. Youâre trying to say that the world of Star Wars is all around us (in the form of movies, toys, games, etc.) and at the same time canât be all around us because that would make reality all-inclusive (I mean, if Star Wars counts as real, what doesnât?).
Yes, if you really thought there is a physical world of Star Wars, youâd be making an assumption.
The point that I am trying to make is that the word ârealâ refers to a category of assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior.
For example, when someone assumes that there is a physical world of Star Wars somewhere out there what they are doing is they are attaching the label ârealâ to the assumption that there is a physical world of Star Wars somewhere out there and assigning it a potential to influence their behavior. It does not matter what caused them to decide to categorize such an assumption as ârealâ. The fact that they did is all that matters.
What youâre doing here, it appears to me, is youâre trying to take the word ârealâ out of its context. You are trying to make it independent from human judgment. Which it is not. The word ârealâ is a label that is attached by humans to certain things (namely, assumptions) based on some set of rules. It is a word that refers to assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. And it is people who decide what assumptions have the potential to influence their behavior and what assumptions donât. And they do so based on some set of rules. A lot of people do it by employing inductive reasoning. They look at the evidence they have, and then, based on it, they assign probability values to assumptions. But there are also people who do it based on their desires. An example would be a person who assumes he will become rich within next couple of years, not because his past experience suggests it, but merely because he wants it to happen. Every assumption has some sort of origin and based on that origin it can be categorized as either evidence-dependent or evidence-independent. The two terms translate to objective and subjective. Thatâs what objectivity and subjectivity really mean. They are epistemological concepts. They are not ontological concepts. In the same way that reductionism and atomism are epistemological (see Bertrand Russellâs logical atomism) rather than ontological (see Democritus and other varieties of physical atomism.)
I really think that there is a physical body behinid your Internet persona. Thatâs an assumption too.
Whatever hasnât been experienced can only be assumed.
Reality is a reference to the category of assumptions that has the potential to affect oneâs behavior. Thatâs what it is. Very simple. When you say âthis is realityâ what you are saying is âthis assumption has the potential to influence my behaviorâ. Similarly, when you say âthis is NOT realityâ what you are saying is âthis assumption has no potential to influence my behaviorâ. Thatâs all these words mean.
You are making a mistake in thinking that âwhat existsâ is separate from âwhat one thinks existsâ. It is not. You cannot say that something exists without it begin something that you think exists. Itâs very difficult for people to accept that their opinions are merely their personal opinions and not an exact or an inexact reflection of some never-changing state of affairs. People donât like fallibility. They cannot consider the possibility that what they are doing might turn out to be a mistake. They prefer to think that will keep doing what they are doing for all eternity.
Being corrupt and greedy makes you a subjectivist? Maybe it makes you biased, but being subjectivist just means you believe reality is based on subjective experience. If one becomes greedy and corrupt because theyâre tempted by money, that just means they canât resist temptation that well. Has nothing to do with how they see the world or what they believe.
I donât follow. What do you mean by âthe first one of our worldâ and âa second one is neededâ? You mean in order for there to be a subject/object distinction, you need at least two beings? One to be the object being observed, and the second to be the observer?
I think this is true in order to experience an object, but not for something just to be an object. The first thing to exist (if weâre reverting to the diachronic chicken-and-egg issue) is an object (thatâs what a âthingâ is). Insofar as it experiences, it is also a subject. As an object, it has the potential to be observed, but it doesnât have to be observed just to be an object. To be a subject, it just has to experience (which implies the experiencing of something, and that something could be said to be a second object).
Yes, thatâs more or less how we define these terms, but that doesnât mean an object canât be a subject at the same time. Nor does it mean something that is objective canât also be subjective.
Itâs like the relationship between a client and a server. In the context of that relationship, there is the client and then there is the server. They are thought to be different and opposite. But the client could also be a server to someone else, and the server could also be a client to someone else.
I also think the object/subject relationship is subtley different from the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. â Letâs not get confused here.
According to my understanding, scientists have to be objectivists; but when they become corrupt and greedy, so that they depend on their money givers, then they are no objectivists, but subjectivists; because they only say what their money givers want them to say. The methods are the other reason why scientists can and mostly do become subjectivists.
The words âsubjectâ and âobjectâ are linguistic (grammatic) and philosophic (epistemic) concepts.
The object/subject relationship is different from the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and different from the relationship between a subjectivist and an objectivist.