Objectivity is Our Shared Subjectivity

[coberst]

Objectivity is Our Shared Subjectivity

Fingerprint and now DNA analysis are what I would call the epitome of objective truth. I say this because these two human characteristics are defining evidence upon which we judge a person guilty and thereby subject to the death penalty.

Fingerprints are very subjective in that they can change substantially as result of very subjective circumstances. My fingerprint can change significantly today from what they were yesterday.

How is it possible that some things so subjective and unique as DNA and fingerprints can determine objectively whether a person is executed or set free?

Fingerprints and DNA objectivity is based upon the structural integrity of both. That is to say that because both human characteristics are structured for every normal human being in exactly the same manner we can identify one unique individual within billions of individuals. So it is with the case of human experience. Because all normal humans structure cognition in the same manner we can identify that which is objective in human thoughts.

Objectivity is our shared subjectivity.

My second son, Mike, was a blanket boy. He spent a good part of his first 24 months with a thumb in his mouth and a blanket in his arms. If we left the house with Mike we checked and double checked that we did not leave his ‘blanky’ behind. After 24 months the blanky was nothing more than a scrap of shredded cloth. He would not accept a substitute.

Absolute truth is our blanky. DickandJane become very anxious when their security blanket, i.e. absolute truth, is not in hand.

Objectivism is a fundamentalist philosophy. It believes that reality is something external to the brain and that the task of the brain is to gain knowledge about this external reality.

Right/wrong and true/false are considered to be objective criteria rather than subjective criteria. Objectivism posits perfect knowledge and assumes such knowledge is obtainable. I think that such views have been discredited.

The myth of objectivism says that: the world is made up of objects that have properties completely independent of those who perceive them; we understand our world through our consciously constructed concepts and categories; “we can say things that are objectively, absolutely true, and unconditionally true and false about it…we cannot rely upon subjective judgments…science can ultimately give a correct, definitive, and general account of reality”; words have fixed meaning that can describe reality correctly. To be objective is to be rational.

The myth of subjectivism informs us that our senses and intuition is our best guide. Feelings are the most important elements of our lives. Aesthetic sensibilities and moral practices are all totally subjective. “Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with more important reality of our feelings and intuitions. We gain this awareness through imagination rather than reason…Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives.”

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. Objective truth is a misnomer; there is only shared truth/false and there is only shared good/bad.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. We create reality in our brain. If you and I create the same reality then we have a shared subjectivity. We cannot know the thing-in-itself, as Kant informs us and is easily recognized if we focus upon it.

I would say that reality comes in two forms; the thing-in-itself is the reality that Kant informs us that we cannot know and then we have the reality that our brain creates. This reality we create is aided by the senses and is congruent with how our body interacts with the thing-in-itself. If the interaction between the thing-in-itself and the creature’s embodied mind is too far off--the creature quickly becomes toast.

Most people are objectivist in many ways; do you still comfort yourself with blanky?

Quotes from Moral Imagination Mark Johnson (coauthor of Philosophy in the Flesh)

[The Atheist]

Sounds suspiciously like someone who is seriously attracted to solipsism.

[Lote-Tree]

Philosophy is like a blind person discovering beauty of the stars...

[The Atheist]

More like a blind person describing the beauty of the stars from where I see it.

:D

[Lote-Tree]

That works too :-)

[coberst]

Myth--traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain practice, belief, or natural phenomenon


What all humans share is our cognitive structuring of our experiences and all of our thinking structures. Anything that we might claim to be objective is based upon our cognitive structuring, which acts upon anything that we might call reality.


We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

[paperleaves]

Myth--traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain practice, belief, or natural phenomenon


What all humans share is our cognitive structuring of our experiences and all of our thinking structures. Anything that we might claim to be objective is based upon our cognitive structuring, which acts upon anything that we might call reality.

“Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.”

In the first place, I'd like to expand on your claim about objectivity. Objectivity states that all objects in the real world are equally observable by man. Is there anyone you can think of that can defy the laws of gravity or wishes to argue that the sky is not blue but says, rather, that the sky is a lovely bunch of coconuts? The properties of an object will remain unwavering regardless of how flawed our understanding may be in extenuating circumstances (i.e. if you have impaired vision and you are trying to make out the color of a green leaf, the leaf will still be green despite your disability).

Secondly, "reason" is the mental faculty naturally evident in human beings which allows man to identify the material internalized by the senses. Is perception not defined as the collection of information delegated to man by the senses? I do not agree with your claim that reason is seen independent of perception and bodily movement. In what ways would that ever be possible in reality?

The answer is none!
So, my question to you is--what exempts you from reality? What leads you to believe that this objectivity (unattached to subjectivity) could in any sense be shared subjectivity? The two concepts are unrelated! They cannot coexist when looking at reality.

Respectfully,
Kate

[coberst]

So, my question to you is--what exempts you from reality? What leads you to believe that this objectivity (unattached to subjectivity) could in any sense be shared subjectivity? The two concepts are unrelated! They cannot coexist when looking at reality.

Respectfully,
Kate

The problem is in the fact that in our Western culture the word "reality" has at least two very different definitions. Some define it as something out there and others define it as something in here (a human creation in the brain).

My new OP might begin to make this matter a bit clearer.

[caddy_caddy]

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. Objective truth is a misnomer; there is only shared truth/false and there is only shared good/bad.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. We create reality in our brain. If you and I create the same reality then we have a shared subjectivity. We cannot know the thing-in-itself, as Kant informs us and is easily recognized if we focus upon it

I think it's sth very dangerous . The media can brainwash the brains of millions creating reality but that doesn't mean it's the truth .

[coberst]

The answer is none!
So, my question to you is--what exempts you from reality? What leads you to believe that this objectivity (unattached to subjectivity) could in any sense be shared subjectivity? The two concepts are unrelated! They cannot coexist when looking at reality.

Respectfully,
Kate

Reify--to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing.

We reify many abstact concepts such as freedom, justice, god, soul, communism, capitalism, etc.

Abstract concepts are constructed from concrete concepts. This is often done unconsciously. Abstract concepts are regarded a subjective whereas concrete concepts are regarded as objective by DickandJane.

[coberst]

I think it's sth very dangerous . The media can brainwash the brains of millions creating reality but that doesn't mean it's the truth .



“We understand a statement as being true in a given situation if our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purpose,”

This statement of the meaning of truth comes from Women. Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff. It is one that makes most sense to me.

We would like for there to be absolute truth but this cannot be.

[caddy_caddy]

This theory means that there is no reality without the human beings .

And that leads to the question : was there no reality before the existence of the human being?

[caesar]

I subscribe to the view that reality exists independent of human perception. But in the way we perceive things, the objective is not absolutely independent of the subjective. In other words, inside one's mind, real is what one believes; and what one believes is real.

[dizzydoll]

Life is a perception not a reality. Simple as that. What is real to you is not real to everybody [or necessarily to another one]. Life, as in nature, carries on without us so 'that' is not our reality, it is life's reality. However every single human being lives their own reality, even if its a delusional one.. its theirs alone. Others might share our view of reality, to a degree, but it will never be exactly the same as ours... they have [and are allowed], their own perception of importance which makes it their own unique reality. This means it is impossible for our reality to be independent of our perception [thoughts, opinions].

[Sebas. Melmoth]

From a poststructuralist POV our cognizance is predicated upon a system of signs which to some degree we all 'buy into' in agreement on meaning.
Is this your 'shared' objectivity?
Do we have a 'shared consciousness' as social critic Émile Durkheim has posited?

Probably most of you believe in a narrative of evolution from amino acids in a 'promordial soup' to 21st Century humanity.
If you believe that narrative, then you think that everything is made up of subatomic particles, right?

Or, is it a question of whether or not the subatomic particles really exist, or whether they are merely a construction of mind? And if so, what is mind?
Right?

And then there are others who believe another narrative of origins related to a Divinity.
In this narrative there is a Deity who is itself holy, and before whom no unclean thing can be: it is the Deity who is the ultimate 'reality', and who distinguishes clean from unclean.

[coberst]

From a poststructuralist POV our cognizance is predicated upon a system of signs which to some degree we all 'buy into' in agreement on meaning.
Is this your 'shared' objectivity?
Do we have a 'shared consciousness' as social critic Émile Durkheim has posited?

Probably most of you believe in a narrative of evolution from amino acids in a 'promordial soup' to 21st Century humanity.
If you believe that narrative, then you think that everything is made up of subatomic particles, right?

Or, is it a question of whether or not the subatomic particles really exist, or whether they are merely a construction of mind? And if so, what is mind?
Right?

And then there are others who believe another narrative of origins related to a Divinity.
In this narrative there is a Deity who is itself holy, and before whom no unclean thing can be: it is the Deity who is the ultimate 'reality', and who distinguishes clean from unclean.


Most people feel very uncomfortable to think that there is not any absolute truth to which they can adhere and thus they find an ideology to hang onto. However, even though it is uncomforting we would be better off learning what the human sciences have discovered about reality and accepting it in a critical fashion.

We must develop a confidence in reason because it is our only hope.

[Sebas. Melmoth]

That's all very well, provided you cannot conceive of anything greater than the human mind--which in a way makes the human mind your deity.

The ontological argument says that the very fact that we can conceive of something greater than the human mind argues in favour of the existence of deity.

The human sciences are merely the constructs of the human mind--critiques of empirical phenomena in the sign-systems we use.

But if you allow that the human mind is finite (as indeed it is), then consideration of the infinite suggests deity.

Then, the next question might be, 'Okay. If there is such a thing as deity, how could we know it?'

The theological discourse suggests two ways of divine revelation: (1) natural, and (2) special.

Natural revelation refers to the intuition of divinity which humanity has perceived in nature--i.e., the world, the universe, the cosmos.

Special revelation refers to the narratives of divine revelation via logos--i.e., the word, the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

[Vautrin]

1st Theory
Subjectivity is the objective of understanding everything from the one’s point of view. Objectivity is the collective understanding of the subject learned through subjectivity. Therefore, what I see and what you see may not be identical; however, what we agree on - the middle ground – is objectivity. Objectivity exists, but it can never be exact in the truest sense of the word.

2nd theory.
The idea of subjectivity and objectivity exist, but they themselves do not. This means that reality(absolute objectivity) must exist outside of this duality of human understanding since these two concepts are creations of material beings (humans).

3rd Theory
Language limits human thought. True objectivity may be attainable, however, the limitations and flaws of human language create the illusion that it is not.

4th Theory
Every opinion or point of view is objective because they are all reached the same way, are independent of each other and therefore just as real as everything else. Think of a forest. Each tree is like a subjective point of view and the entire forest is objectivity itself in that it encapsulates everything.

[Sebas. Melmoth]

What I see and what you see can never be identical because we each occupy different points of space-time--even were we side by side.

We can agree to meet each other half-way: this is the meaning of civility, and we may call it 'objectivity'.

There are forces in the cosmos and in the world exterior to our minds.
The fact that our human critiques via mathematics, physics, chemistry, calculus, etc., suffice us to accomplish certain feats only means that human knowledge has aligned itself with these cosmic and global forces--not that human intelligence has any special insight into these forces, merely that through observation trial-and-error we have discovered how to align our understanding to the movement of these forces.

The question still remains, 'what is behind these forces?' or 'what was the first force?'. The reductio-answer can only be a deity outside space-time and every conceivable dimension.

[softigo]

Objectivity is our shared subjectivity, I've never though of it like that before.