Subjective vs Objective
A matter of perspective
We are creatures with a variety of senses that give us information about our situation. We can smell and taste and feel and hear and see. Single celled creatures probably can smell and taste. I surmise that all creatures who can move around can feel and hear and see.
Dennett proposed the idea of a 'Cartesian theatre' that integrated all that information and presented it as if on a screen to a mind. The mind would interpret the screen and then tell the body what to do. This idea is most vivid with vision - my visual field is easy to map as a screen.
Dennett pointed out that we could cut out the middlemen here and drop the idea of a screen and a mind. The body just responds to the information directly. To me that is an amazing and wonderful concept. We are meat through and through.
Kant taught that we never experience reality directly - our experience is always an interpretation of the sense data. We never experience the "thing in itself'. I wonder if this is true. Perhaps what we experience is a perspective view of the thing in itself. That is, we are directly perceiving the thing but the perception doesn't give us all possible information about the thing.
Our perception involves way more than just receiving information - we automatically make the information meaningful (ie interpret) as a part of being aware of it. Our interpretation is influenced by the lessons we've already learned from experience. Each of us has a unique set of lessons taught by experience - that is, each of us has a subjective perspective.
The objective perspective is the commonality among the subjective perspectives. It assumes that it's possible to find that sort of commonality but that is trickier than it seems. Humans subdivide into cultural groups at all sorts of different scales. We have religions and nations and sport fans and men and women. My view is that the role of science is to discover the commonalities that we all must share. But religions make the same claim of universality.
Subjectivity is often diminished to "just an opinion'. Objectivity is valued because it's what is TRUE - not just a matter of opinion. The fly in the ointment is that the only way we can discover objective truths is via subjectivity.
Lately we've seen a phenomenon called intellectual silos. Silos like that are not new. I'd say every nation and religion is an example of silos. Each silo evolves its own concept of objective reality. This is because what is objective is the commonality among subjective experiences.
This poses a problem. An objective truth is seen as universal - it applies to everyone no matter what their subjective opinions. The problem arises when different silos come to different objective truths. It is very hard for the various silos to talk about their competing versions of objective reality.
I've tried. It can happen. I recommend it. My friend Ray and I had a great conversation for many years. He was into intelligent design and opposed to natural selection as an explanation for life on earth. Ray was a very smart and well informed man. Our friendly disagreement lead to a pretty encyclopedic discussion over the years that informed us both. Also, the more we talked together the more we liked each other.
I'd have thought that SL would be a great place for reaching across belief boundaries. It's no easier here than in RL. I did a brief survey or MAGA groups and I'd probably need to make a new alt to even be able to join. My Twilight pants would brand me right away as a LibTard ?
But most of the groups I saw had only one member.
One way of evaluating silos is to check how they treat outsiders. Some silos are welcoming. The Statue of Liberty was set up to represent a beacon welcoming outsiders. That sort of silo prospered and grew.
Now America is in the grip of a different silo - one that says that immigrants are leeches that suck "America" dry.
What is objective there? You decide.
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.