Objective

From O'Reilly

Objective vs. Subjective

I firmly believe that there is an objective world outside my brain. Everything I experience is consistent with this idea. However, everything I experience is necessarily subjective -- it is all just inside my head. Thus, it is impossible to prove that I am not in fact a brain in a vat hooked up to some kind of crazy world simulator, as in the movie the Matrix.

So, objectivity is something that is contained within the larger sphere of subjectivity:

I know some people who actually purport to not believe in an objective world. I would argue against this on the grounds that belief in an objective world explains a huge amount of experience that otherwise has no good explanation other then extreme narcissism or paranoia or some combination of the two.

If you do happen to believe in an objective world, then you probably also believe that there are other people within it that also have subjective experiences:

And those people have some kind of notion of the objective world, which in turn may actually contain some notion of you having a subjective and objective experience, etc.

Now, of course I can't by definition have any direct access to your subjective world. Your entire subjective world is really just a construct that I imagine, along with everything else in my objective world -- that is what it means for it to be contained within the "My Objective" section of the diagram (which in turn is always safely contained within the "My Subjective" section, in that the only access we have to the objective is within the subjective).

This state of affairs leads naturally to my own personal theory of consciousness.

Finally, I'll point out that is very tempting to try to escape the subjective bubble, and pretend like we can provide a perfectly objective description of the universe. After all, I really do believe that there are very specific, relatively simple physical laws that give rise to everything in the universe. Doesn't this mean that I should just be represented as a tiny drop in this huge objective universe. I believe that this is actually the case. I am a tiny little clump in an infinite cellular automaton, which has been going on for an infinite amount of time, and will continue for an infinite amount of time after my death. I certainly don't notice any change in physics when other people die, even if they are prominent physicists.

However, I also know that I might be just plain wrong. I know lots of people who think they understand the laws of physics and I personally think they're just plain wrong (in some important respects). So, until everyone (who plays by a particular set of rules -- the scientific method) fully agrees on a fully consistent and complete description of the objective universe, and this remains the case for 100's of years and withstands all the most clever experimental tests, we have to remain extremely mindful of the priority of the subjective. Of course, even after all is figured out for sure, each new person born into the world must learn about all this stuff anew. And probably most will have an incomplete and partially incorrect understanding of it. And of course there will always be the flat earth folks, who deny everything. That's just the way it is.