Tags / 14 quotes from 6 sources
#objectivity
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Ontologically subjective yet epistemically objective
Searle states, “Observer relativity implies ontological subjectivity but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity.” To translate this into English: the existence of things that exist only because we believe them to exist does not mean that these things…
Why the social sciences are possible
“We can have epistemically objective knowledge about money and elections even though the kinds of facts about which one has epistemically objective knowledge are themselves all ontologically subjective.” He points out that if epistemic objectivity did require ontological…
Nietzsche's perspectivism
Few associate Nietzsche with philosophy of mind per se, but his perspectivism is very similar to Kant’s idealism in that both hold that we cannot have knowledge of the objective world. Perspectivism even rejects the possibility of objective metaphysics outright. Like the…
The objective as a degree of the subjective
quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing. Conversely, the apparent objective character of things: could it…
Intelligence as an invention of each brain
What does the notion of consciousness-as-useful-hallucination imply for artificial intelligence? It requires a paradigm shift within artificial intelligence, from seeing intelligence and consciousness as being about perceiving objective truth with a “view from nowhere” in…
How can subjective observers know the world?
how can subjective observers know anything about the observer-independent world? And as we saw in Chapter 6, we cannot assume that we can know anything about the objective world.
Dissolving the divide between subjective and objective
But the divide between subjective and objective could also turn out to be an illusion of our own creation. This division goes to the core of our scientific worldview. If some form of physicalism is true, then the division between the inner subjective worlds will have to…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Two explanatory pathways
a) The path of objectivity without parentheses (= the way of the Transcendental Ontologies), and b) The path of objectivity in parentheses (= the way of the Constitutive Ontologies ).
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Observer-independent and observer-relative features
There are two distinctions that I want you to be clear about at the very beginning, because they are essential for the argument and because the failure to understand them has led to massive philosophical confusion. The first is the distinction between those features of a world…
Computation is in the eye of the beholder
When I add two plus two to get four, that computation is not observer relative. I am doing that regardless of what anybody thinks. But when I punch: ”2+2 =” on my pocket calculator and it prints out “4” it knows nothing of computation, arithmetic, or symbols, because it knows…
Epistemic versus ontological subjectivity
The fact that conscious states are ontologically subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a human or animal subject, does not imply that there cannot be a scientifically objective study of conscious states. “Objective” and “subjective” are systematically…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Knowing our paradigms widens the picture
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Life review and dissociation from the self
Somehow the acid had catalyzed a process that continued without further chemical action. Gradually this ongoing life-review began to bring about an increasing sense of dissociation from the self I had so blindly identified with. My life seemed to become ever more objective…
The Essence Of The Essence Of Constructivism
The essence of constructivism
In one famous article dating from 1988 (German edition 1998), Maturana states that the problem of reality is “the most important problem of our time”. I fully agree with him and I think that realism needs to be expressively refuted and the choice between realism and…