andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2003-01-20 10:30 pm
andrewducker) wrote2003-01-20 10:30 pm
Building up (part 1)
This started off in conversation with nICk, where he asked me clarify what I meany by objective and subjective and I warbled on incomprehensively about how I felt about both words, leading him to (effectively) point out that I was making no sense, contradicting myself and generally failing to come across at all well. So I'm going to start off again and see if, rather than taking things from the discussion we were already having, which was confused enough as it was, I could start over from scratch. So, nICk, having written and rewritten my answers to that comment three times, you're getting this instead. Which hopefully makes up for it's lack of "replyness" in it's increased clarity.
If this one also doesn't work, I'm going to bloody well keep on trying until I actually have something that makes sense. I'm determined to eventually have something which holds together. As usual, all comments gratefully received on the following:
There is Objective Reality, which is what actually exists. It is made of nothing more than elementary particles interacting with each other, or possibly fluctuating intersecting energy fields, or maybe something in-between or entirely other. In any case, we do not (and can not) know anything directly of it. We interact with it and receive sense impressions of it and everything we know arrives from those interactions. (As a side note, we are part of it, so to say that "we interact with it" contains, in itself, categorisation and arbitrary division of reality into us and other.)
We use the sense impressions obtained through interactions with the universe to form an internal Subjective Reality, which exists solely in our heads, but is nevertheless where we actually spend all of our time. When you see a table, for instance, you do so because your eyes have interacted with light reflecting from a group of atoms, activating certains clusters of neurons in the brain in certain ways and producing an internal understanding of the fact that there is a table. At least that's one theory - the exact method by which our minds become aware of the occurrence of a table is irrelevant, what's important is that there is some kind of interaction between our internal mental mechanics and the external world, via a sense organ of some kind, and we interpret those sense inputs in a way that produces an understanding of some kind of situation.
So: Objective World--{interacts with}->Sense Organs--{producing signals to}->internal analysis system--{which interprets them to produce}->Subjective mental picture
Now, there are two problems with this. I'm not going to go into much detail here, but here's a brief overview:
1) The resolution and quality of the sense organs will not be infinite. Generally, it can be argued that they don't need to be, they just need to be 'good enough'. Of course "good enough" for whatever they were originally adapted for doesn't mean they're much good for (for instance) picking up radio waves, seeing the movement of the stars, smelling blood in the water from 5 miles away, hearing footsteps 100m away, and all those other things wed be able to do if we were Superman. This means that the sense organs will miss things. They will fail to pick up enough information, will pick up vague information and will not actually do their job terribly well.
2)That final analytical/interpretative step. This takes the pure information (which, let's remember, was inaccurate in the first place), make a few guesses to piece the information we have together and then interpret the resulting picture to decide what exactly was happening. Well, to be honest, it'll make a lot of guesses and the interpretation will make a lot of assumptions. Stephen Pinker goes into this in a fair amount of detail in How The Mind Works, pointing out some of the assumptions the mind makes when interpreting visual signals, based on the ways it can be fooled (using those cool pictures that can look like two things, optical illusions and magic eye pictures as examples).
People differ in how much resemblance they believe that their subjective reality bears objective reality, but the assumed amount varies from person to person. Most people seem to think that (for instance) seeing is believing, I believe that I can mostly trust my senses most of the time and some people think the whole thing is an illusion which can be shrugged off by meditation/fasting/drugs.
Assuming that the world is not a totally safe place, it seems reasonable (to me) to assume that those beings whose internal representations were somewhat close to objective reality would be better at surviving and reproducing (and would not walk off cliffs without realising they were there, wander blindly into tigers, etc.), thus it seems reasonable (to me) that our senses will bear relation to reality in such ways as would generally aid survival. At the same time, senses presumably cost energy to run, so it doesn't make sense to make senses much more acute than is actually necessary. I'd expect evolution to reach a compromised equibrium of senses that are pretty much good enough, most of the time.
Anyway, by the above definitions, any statement of mine is inherently subjective, everything is merely possible and nothing is absolutely true (at least, we can't be 100% convinced of its trueness). However we can possibly move from an Aristotalean ObjectiveSubjective pairing of opposites to a more modern continuum with each of them as the extreme poles. For example, our experiences provoke multiple kinds of internal effects. One of these types of effects produces the aforementioned internal representation of what we believe the outside world to be, another causes the emotions about those representations.
For instance, let's say you went to an exhibition of sculpture. You would walk around them and look at the various statues, forming various mental states about them. You would form both internal representations of them and feelings about them. The feelings are entirely internal to you and not inherent in the items themselves. If, for instance, you find the sculpture amusing, the humour happens entirely in your mind - the statue itself contains no humour itself. It may be the sculpture was intended to make you laugh, but even then the most you could say is that the sculpture shaped it in such a way as to cause a reaction in you, not that it itself in some way contains humour. Similarly, if you found the sculpture depressing, the statue itself cannot be said to contain sadness, it's the reaction between you and the statue that causes the sadness internal to you.
Aesthetic judgements are similar - when most people say "This band is good" what they actually means is "I like this band" - their interpretation of the music the band produces causes a positive emotional reaction. In someone else, the interpretation produces a negative emotional reaction, causing them to say "This band sucks", almost certainly causing disagreement. If, rather than saying "This band is good" they more accurately described the way the band made them feel, there would be no disagreement. If I say "This music makes me feel happy" there can be no disagreement, because even if it doesn't make you happy, it's effect on me is not in question.
Thus, emotional/aesthetic judgements (which can, in some ways, be seen to be very similar, something I'm not about to go into here) can be seen to be entirely subjective, being based on emotional reactions that are entirely personal, whereas internal representations are, while certainly flawed and interpreted, likely to be closer to objective reality (at least on some level). So, emotional/aesthetic judgement is entirely subjective, reality is entirely objective and our internal models of reality are somewhere in between, representing reality imperfectly.
If this one also doesn't work, I'm going to bloody well keep on trying until I actually have something that makes sense. I'm determined to eventually have something which holds together. As usual, all comments gratefully received on the following:
There is Objective Reality, which is what actually exists. It is made of nothing more than elementary particles interacting with each other, or possibly fluctuating intersecting energy fields, or maybe something in-between or entirely other. In any case, we do not (and can not) know anything directly of it. We interact with it and receive sense impressions of it and everything we know arrives from those interactions. (As a side note, we are part of it, so to say that "we interact with it" contains, in itself, categorisation and arbitrary division of reality into us and other.)
We use the sense impressions obtained through interactions with the universe to form an internal Subjective Reality, which exists solely in our heads, but is nevertheless where we actually spend all of our time. When you see a table, for instance, you do so because your eyes have interacted with light reflecting from a group of atoms, activating certains clusters of neurons in the brain in certain ways and producing an internal understanding of the fact that there is a table. At least that's one theory - the exact method by which our minds become aware of the occurrence of a table is irrelevant, what's important is that there is some kind of interaction between our internal mental mechanics and the external world, via a sense organ of some kind, and we interpret those sense inputs in a way that produces an understanding of some kind of situation.
So: Objective World--{interacts with}->Sense Organs--{producing signals to}->internal analysis system--{which interprets them to produce}->Subjective mental picture
Now, there are two problems with this. I'm not going to go into much detail here, but here's a brief overview:
1) The resolution and quality of the sense organs will not be infinite. Generally, it can be argued that they don't need to be, they just need to be 'good enough'. Of course "good enough" for whatever they were originally adapted for doesn't mean they're much good for (for instance) picking up radio waves, seeing the movement of the stars, smelling blood in the water from 5 miles away, hearing footsteps 100m away, and all those other things wed be able to do if we were Superman. This means that the sense organs will miss things. They will fail to pick up enough information, will pick up vague information and will not actually do their job terribly well.
2)That final analytical/interpretative step. This takes the pure information (which, let's remember, was inaccurate in the first place), make a few guesses to piece the information we have together and then interpret the resulting picture to decide what exactly was happening. Well, to be honest, it'll make a lot of guesses and the interpretation will make a lot of assumptions. Stephen Pinker goes into this in a fair amount of detail in How The Mind Works, pointing out some of the assumptions the mind makes when interpreting visual signals, based on the ways it can be fooled (using those cool pictures that can look like two things, optical illusions and magic eye pictures as examples).
People differ in how much resemblance they believe that their subjective reality bears objective reality, but the assumed amount varies from person to person. Most people seem to think that (for instance) seeing is believing, I believe that I can mostly trust my senses most of the time and some people think the whole thing is an illusion which can be shrugged off by meditation/fasting/drugs.
Assuming that the world is not a totally safe place, it seems reasonable (to me) to assume that those beings whose internal representations were somewhat close to objective reality would be better at surviving and reproducing (and would not walk off cliffs without realising they were there, wander blindly into tigers, etc.), thus it seems reasonable (to me) that our senses will bear relation to reality in such ways as would generally aid survival. At the same time, senses presumably cost energy to run, so it doesn't make sense to make senses much more acute than is actually necessary. I'd expect evolution to reach a compromised equibrium of senses that are pretty much good enough, most of the time.
Anyway, by the above definitions, any statement of mine is inherently subjective, everything is merely possible and nothing is absolutely true (at least, we can't be 100% convinced of its trueness). However we can possibly move from an Aristotalean ObjectiveSubjective pairing of opposites to a more modern continuum with each of them as the extreme poles. For example, our experiences provoke multiple kinds of internal effects. One of these types of effects produces the aforementioned internal representation of what we believe the outside world to be, another causes the emotions about those representations.
For instance, let's say you went to an exhibition of sculpture. You would walk around them and look at the various statues, forming various mental states about them. You would form both internal representations of them and feelings about them. The feelings are entirely internal to you and not inherent in the items themselves. If, for instance, you find the sculpture amusing, the humour happens entirely in your mind - the statue itself contains no humour itself. It may be the sculpture was intended to make you laugh, but even then the most you could say is that the sculpture shaped it in such a way as to cause a reaction in you, not that it itself in some way contains humour. Similarly, if you found the sculpture depressing, the statue itself cannot be said to contain sadness, it's the reaction between you and the statue that causes the sadness internal to you.
Aesthetic judgements are similar - when most people say "This band is good" what they actually means is "I like this band" - their interpretation of the music the band produces causes a positive emotional reaction. In someone else, the interpretation produces a negative emotional reaction, causing them to say "This band sucks", almost certainly causing disagreement. If, rather than saying "This band is good" they more accurately described the way the band made them feel, there would be no disagreement. If I say "This music makes me feel happy" there can be no disagreement, because even if it doesn't make you happy, it's effect on me is not in question.
Thus, emotional/aesthetic judgements (which can, in some ways, be seen to be very similar, something I'm not about to go into here) can be seen to be entirely subjective, being based on emotional reactions that are entirely personal, whereas internal representations are, while certainly flawed and interpreted, likely to be closer to objective reality (at least on some level). So, emotional/aesthetic judgement is entirely subjective, reality is entirely objective and our internal models of reality are somewhere in between, representing reality imperfectly.
no subject
That doesn't follow. If everything you perceive is a product of your perceptions... then all you can really say is that you have perceptions. You cannot say that there is any kind of reality out there. You can just say you have perceptions.
And if you can't say there's any kind of objective reality, then how can you say you have perceptions? 'Perception' loses all meaning in that environment... there's nothing to compare it to.
('Cogito ergo sum' says that you have thoughts. But doesn't mention perceptions, and doesn't mention reality at all).
As you say, 'there is something'. But that something could merely be your mind ticking over. Dreams, in a sense. Hey, there's a good example - when you dream, your mind is observing yourself. Yup? There is no objective reality here. Yet you perceive.
"I meant model in the sense of physical representation"
Ok... then how can one divide our perception of an object (assuming it exists :) ) from all our experiences of objects like it, for example?
Let's say you and I are discussing our kitchen table. We could talk about how it is brown (though parts will be glossy, parts will be yellow). An artist might describe it in terms of form. A carpenter might discuss it in terms of function. An antique expert might compare it to other furniture.
And when I'm talking about the table, I know it's a table. I know what it does, and due to my experiences, I know it'll be heavy and solid. Turn it upside down and give it to a child, and it's a plaything. Put an urn and flowers on it and it becomes a shrine.
All my experiences with objects affect my perceptions. All my cultural indoctrination. All my conversations with others.
So what form, in your opinion, does this physcal representation take? What dimensions (length, breadth, color, weight?) does it include? And what does it not include?
no subject
That doesn't follow. If everything you perceive is a product of your perceptions... then all you can really say is that you have perceptions. You cannot say that there is any kind of reality out there. You can just say you have perceptions.
And the perceptions exist, yes? Which means there is something (even if it's just perceptions, or whatever it is that is perceiving) that exists.
how can one divide our perception of an object from all our experiences of objects like it, for example?
Which is an interesting question - I've heard discussion of whether someone who had never seen a cow before (or anything like one) would know how to look at a cow enough to actually see what we see when we see a cow.
However, you're right, I'm still being unclear.
When you say that "A carpenter might discuss it in terms of function." what function means is "how a person would use it." And how something is used is not intrinsic to the object, it's a function of how the object interacts with someone. It's dependent on intent and the person. The weight of an object doesn't change depending on who is weighing it, the use can change depending on who is using it. In the same way, the aesthetics of an object depends on how it affects you internally, it's about the reaction of a person to the object, not about the object itself. If two people can listen to the same piece of music and it had 2 different effects on them, would you agree that the actual form of the music (the soundwaves) were the same in both cases and that the effects were not in the music, but in the person experiencing them?