Subjectivism is the fact that we cannot know everything, or even know anything for sure. Because everyone's mind is different everyone experiences events differently. This page introduces relevent biological, personal, philosophical and quantum physics notes on subjectivism. This is epistemology 101 - the most ancient philosophers debated these problem thousands of years ago1, and today it is still prominent and as irresolvable a concept as ever.
- Extreme Philosophical Epistemology
- Perception
- Reality by consensus
- Quantum Physics
- The Conclusion: Subjectivism
| Extreme Philosophical Epistemology |
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It is possible that everything that you see, the entirety of what you consider "reality" is complete illusion. You could be completely insane, and suffering from grand delusions, where nothing that you see corresponds to reality. This is possible - part of reality disorders (e.g., paranoia) is that you do not know what is real or not2.
You could be in a straight jacket, hallucinating your life away. It all makes sense to you... such is the nature of illusion. Or perhaps, like the Matrix, your entire sensory system is being fooled, perhaps everything you see is part of a virtual reality world, from which you cannot possibly escape. You could have been hypnotized to think that something has happened which hasn't, or vica versa. You cannot tell that what you see is real. A powerful demon could be tricking you, giving you no chance to form the 'right' beliefs about the world.
| Perception |
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Biology
The fundamental neurones and chemistry that make up our brains is fundamental in our experience of the outside world. Our brain maps out billions of neurological pathways, the fundamental systems are formed by our biology and genes, the rest by our experiences... and in all processes of development, that lead to us thinking in the way we do, change and variation occurs that occurs in no-one else. Everyone is unique; the neural networks that make up your brain and form your thoughts are different to those that form other peoples' thoughts.
“Despite the fact that the structures of the brain which give rise to conceptual abilities and self-consciousness arise at the level of species, there is no uniformity between individuals. [...] In consequence it can be asserted with confidence that no two individuals will experience the external world in exactly the same way. Edelman (1992) draws this point out clearly when he claims that the collection of individual and subjective experiences, feelings and sensations associated with awareness are unique to each individual. These experiences, feelings and sensations are termed qualia and they will be subtly different between individuals because the same synaptic pathways which underpin neural structures are never repeated.”"Chaos and Intoxication: Complexity and adaptation in the structure of human nature"
Prof. Alan Dean (1997) p56
Prime example: Perception of colours
Genotype
We see colors via "rods" and "cones" in our eyes. The rods, color-vision, come in three types receptive to red, green and blue. Every person has RGB cones that are triggered by boundaries of slightly different wavelengths, so that everyone perceives the precise colors slightly differently, giving each one a slightly different band width, and intensity. An extreme and solid example is colour blindness: this informs us clearly that some people can have radically different perception of colors, except that in most cases the differences are much smaller.
Phenotype
In addition to that, a persons' upbringing and phenotype in general will also mean that they give slightly different prominence to different colors. There are also emotional equivalents to colour blindness, so that every person due to their mental states will have colours that they see more distinctly - a person born in the countryside develops naturally a more subtle and richer perception of countryside colours, but a person born in the city will distinguish between grays more readily, and to him countryside colors all look a bit more similar than they do to a person accustomed to them. Our life experiences and upbringing affects the clarity with which we see colours. As no two people have the same experiences, all people do view colours slightly differently for both genetic and historical reasons.
This highlights, most clearly, subjectivism between people means that even though we give the same names to things we experience, the actual experience of those things is not the same for all people.
All of our senses and perception are imperfect
All of senses are imperfect. Our sense of smell is fallible, we frequently see things wrongly, hear things that were not real, and all the time all of us distort everything we experience ever so slightly, because our very senses are imperfect. Based on our point of view, our neurones susceptibility to misfiring, our brains habits of assumption and error, we can logically deduce that any given experience may be untrue. Sometimes people experience things that blatantly are not true, but to the experiencer of any given moment, they themselves cannot tell that they have made an error unless someone else points it out or they realize through logical deduction.
The type of imperfection we are talking about here is the consistent, small-scale noise that creeps into all of our perception of everything. As our senses themselves are imperfect, our knowledge about the world is deduced as much as it is directly experienced. Our knowledge is based on what we have learned, and what we learn is ultimately and intimately tied to the problem of subjectivism: Due to the fallible nature of our brain and senses, we are never entirely sure that any given learned fact about the world is true.
Incomplete knowledge
The reality we experience is not the total picture, it is only a personal opinion on reality. We may have everything all wrong. Our bodily interfaces to the outside world are imperfect and our brain, with its intelligence, makes up quite a lot of what we think we see. Our brain is the greatest level of error in our perception of the theorized absolute reality. It forgets, invents, mutates and corrupts its own data. It can't help it, and without this instability it we may not have ever became intelligent in the first place.
We forget things, think things have happened when they haven't, we make up and forgot things we've done... we're sure something is true but discover it isn't. Our brain is an imperfect organic machine, not a mystical repository of truth. Whenever we view, perceive, store or retrieve experiences we make errors.... lots of little errors and sometimes big ones. The results is that the total picture is just a mis-match of guesses and patchwork. We all hope that we get by. The reality is that no two people ever experience the same event or thing in the same way, because the complexities and depths of their errors and assumptions are different for every person, every event is experienced slightly differently. No-one has precisely the same point of view on any event. This is "reality by consensus" again - how do we know what the real events are?
Robin Le Poidevin is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds. He highlights this problem on his book on time and space quoted from below. What he mentions with reference to time equally applies to measurements of distance, and eventually, to the description of all events and realities.
“Although we could perform a test that would show some kinds of timepiece to be more accurate than others, it [is] impossible to tell whether an instrument was 100 per cent accurate since all one had to judge accuracy by was other instruments, whose accuracy could always be called into question”
"Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time"
Prof. Le Poidevin (2003)3
Everyone sees things differently because everyone has different information, and everyone's brains are wired different. The same fact presented to two people will be interpreted and stored in two different ways. It's almost as if there is no "real" world... just millions of versions of the world and we just haven't got the mental power as living beings to see what is real and what is not. Logic and consensus are the only ways of ascertaining what is real and what isn't, but we can only ever know to the extent that experience gives us only a fuzzy and inaccurate picture of reality, and consensus is merely a diplomatic compromise with only logic and reason to back it up. To rely, however, on logic and reason leads to problems where one person concludes that anothers' experience is false. For example a psychiatrist concludes that a patients' experience of government conspiracy is a false experience - even though it's an experience the person has been having consistently for ten years - at the end of the day it's only one persons' point of view versus another and logic is not self-affirming of the world, only self-contained.
| Reality by Consensus |
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We all experience things differently. The same event is experienced in a different way by everyone and everything that witnesses it. This is because everyone's brain is wired up slightly differently, on account of their genotype and phenotype, upbringing and expectations, as discussed above. Given that this is all incontrovertible, how is it then we can share our experiences, and live in a common world, rather than individual solipsistic universes?
The answer is that we arrive at a reality by consensus. We all taught to call the sun "yellow", no matter what actual shade we see the sun as. We all put "happiness" and "sadness" on the same scale, even though we all experience them to different extents, and we all describe the world in standard ways using our languages, basing our communications on shared understandings of what the words mean. This is because although we experience things different, we can still communicate ideas to each other.
Our communications provides one subjective experiencer with a means of understanding another; even though the invisible behind-the-scenes experiences are subtly different, each re-construes the others' communication according to their own understanding, therefore a consensus forms that both people understand from their own point of view.
Everything you see has been named and "fixed" in your consciousness by experience, and this experience could be completely different to everyone else's, but nevertheless you call it the same. No person can know if what they see is the same as what someone else sees. The names you give things are only "references", people reference the same things with the same names, but the things themselves appear differently to everyone.
| Quantum Physics |
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Quantum Physics is a vastly important area of physics for philosophers, most philosophers have (or should have!) a running interest in quantum physics, and I would guess that all the greatest scientists in this field have strayed long and hard into epistemology and the metaphysics of philosophy.
Heisenburgs Principle of Uncertainty
This is the fact in quantum physics (the study of miniscule particles) that if you observer/measure a particles precise position, you cannot know its speed, and vica versa. This phenomenon is a mathematical catch 22 - it is impossible to measure one thing without altering another. Also all observation slightly changes what is being observed. So even with the most expensive and accurate scientific equipment, measurement causes error and a lack of knowledge. At a very fundamental way, at the height of science, we know that we cannot ascertain absolute knowledge.
| The Conclusion: Subjectivism |
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The conclusion is subjectivism, that every single person experiences a different reality and that there is no way to reconcile the experiences of two different people. In short, all of our internal words are completely unverified. Everything we think we know is a guess, and every thought process is a theory in progress. No knowledge is absolute. To accept this doubt behind every theory and fact is the scientific way - evidence and logic must back up theories, but theories are never irrefutably proven, merely not-yet-disproven. "The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002) examines many of the conflicting world-views that result from subjective interpretation of our senses and intellect. The psychologist William James wrote that many interpretations of reality are arrived at because people find them nicer or better for themselves:
“The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed.”
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James (1902)4