Oh, boy, have I ever stepped into deep water with this one. But let me persevere.
I was thinking the concept I want to communicate would be fairly quick and straightforward to capture in writing, but then I made the mistake of deciding I should start with a quick statement of generally accepted meaning of “objective truth”. Ha! I should have known better.
Anyway, I googled “objective truth” and “definition”. Below are a few clips from different sites thereby located. In lieu of citations, the first phrase from each excerpt is a link to the site from which it came.
objective / subjective
Distinction between propositions or judgments about the way things are and those about how people think or feel about them. The truth of objective claims is presumed to be entirely independent of the merely personal concerns reflected in subjective expressions, even though is difficult to draw the distinction precisely. Thus, for example: “Spinach is green” is objective, while “I like spinach” is subjective. “Seventy-three percent of people in Houston don’t like spinach,” however, seems to be an objective claim about certain subjects.
The legitimacy of this distinction is open to serious question, since it is unclear whether (and how) any knowing subject can achieve genuine objectivity. Nevertheless, . . . objective truth is supposed to carry undeniable persuasive force. . . .
I’m going to come back to that offhand statement that “‘Spinach is green’ is objective” later. But first, a few more excerpts:
Objective reality is whatever remains true whether you believe in it or not.
which has a sort of common-sense ring to it. It begs the question of what is the relationship between reality and truth, but I’ll leave that alone for now.
The next is similar:
“the truth-value of a . . . claim depends (only) upon the object of inquiry, not the subject doing the inquiry”
The next contains the same core distinction, but slips in an additional claim about the nature of objective truth:
. . . we must first ask what “objective truth” really is. By definition, objective truth is absolute truth. The truth of an objective claim is defined to be entirely independent of subjective, or personal, influences. That is, if something is objectively true, then it is true for everyone. A subjective truth, on the other hand, is relative to the person who asserts it.
The additional claim to which I referred is that “objective truth is absolute truth”, and that furthermore this is true by definition. Though I suspect that many people, perhaps most, have that equation between absolute truth and objective truth as part of their concept of objective truth, I maintain that it is neither obvious on the face of it nor a necessary consequence of the agreed-upon core meaning of objective truth.
One more excerpt, and I’ll try to get to my original point:
. . . there are five basic philosophies of truth:
First: The coherence theory states that that which is true is the coherent system of ideas. If I understand that theory rightly, it means that the entire collection of our humanity’s ideas, at least those ideas that have not yet been abandoned, constitute truth.
Second: The pragmatic theory says that whatever is a “workable” or satisfactory solution of a problematic situation is true — that is, whatever makes sense to me and solves my immediate problem is my “truth” for that occasion. “Hey, whatever works!”
Third: The semantic theory states that “assertions about truth are in a meta-language and apply to statements of the base language” — that is, truth is such a metaphysical concept that it cannot even be intelligently expressed in real language.
Fourth: The performative theory states that truth occurs whenever I agree with a given statement — that is, whatever I agree with at a given moment in time is truth for me in that particular time and place.
And Finally: The correspondence theory states that that which corresponds to reality is true.
I wouldn’t necessarily trust these characterizations of the five approaches–I know that pragmatists might/would take/have taken exception to the above characterization of their position, for instance, and the “that is” addendum to the characterization of the semantic theory is completely inaccurate–but their accuracy is not essential to my point. What is important to what I want to say is to notice that all five concepts of truth involve relationships, often relationships between language (statements) and something else–reality, or a person’s belief system, or to other forms of language.
Now, if truth is a relationship between language (statements, propositions) or ideas (concepts) and something else (other language, other ideas, reality), the simple distinction between objective truth and subjective truth breaks down, it seems to me, because you can never remove the person, the cognizing subject, from that relationship. And yet, there’s something important in the distinction. Is truth then to be considered entirely relative? Not at all, I say. Rather, we need to substitute the idea of inter-subjective truth for the idea of objective truth.
For this to make sense, it might help if you take a look at my concept of reality first, noticing that I believe in a variety of kinds of reality.
The concept of inter-subjective truth depends crucially on taking human experience, and the experience of individuals, seriously as avenues to truth, or at least the raw data from which we refine truth.
Let me explain with a couple of examples.
I’ll start with the external, physical reality in which we find ourselves. Let’s consider a rock. Most people experience rocks as hard, and would not quarrel with the idea that hardness is a property of rocks (to varying degrees, of course.) We can achieve pretty clear communication about rocks and hardness because we all experience them very similarly, at least as far as hardness is concerned. We might accept that “rocks are hard” is objectively true in the sense of being true for all subjects (though I could argue the contrary, I’ll try not to, in hopes of eventually finishing this post.) But this “objective” property of rocks has as its basis our experience of rocks and the fact that it is shared ––inter-subjective–– experience.
But now consider color, and the statement quoted above that “Spinach is green” is an objective truth, and that it is “objective” because it is true independently of the observer. What if the observer is color blind, and sees only black and white? What if the observer is blue-green color blind? What if the observer is a dog or a bee (which have quite different color vision from humans)? None of these observers will see the spinach as “green”. We can’t remove the subject–the observer–from the equation when considering color. Color isn’t just a property of the object–it also depends on characteristics of the observer and, if we’re considering color as we see it anyway, several other factors, such as the colors surrounding the spinach. I could go on–there’s a lot of really fascinating research into human color vision–but again I’ll restrain myself. The point is that “spinach is green” is a shade less “objective” than “granite is hard”, and that it is so because there is less inter-subjective universality in our experience of color than our experience of the hardness of granite.
OK, I’m gonna stop here, in the hope that I’ve at least communicated my meaning, whether or not persuasively. I want to build a discussion of abstract and spiritual truth on this basis, but will leave that for a later post, partly just in the interest of getting this blasted thing done and off my to-do list.
(This post is a follow-up to this.)
Very interesting. I’m probably guilty of practising a double standard when it comes to philosophy. I get impatient with philosophers when they problematize matters that seem quite straightforward, from a common sense point of view. But I often problematize subjects myself, when I think people are unduly complacent in their opinions!
I have always started from the common sense observation that there must be such a thing as objective truth. For example, God exists or s/he doesn’t. Events are predetermined or we have free will — etc. Of course, there may be some middle ground on some questions, but even then, if our knowledge was complete, presumably even the most baffling questions could be parsed accurately.
But of course our knowledge is neither complete nor objective. So objective truth exists, I presume; but we have limited access to it; therefore it doesn’t really exist for us.
I like your point about the inter-subjectivity of truth. I believe the best way to progress toward objective truth is via dialogue. We have to share our ideas with one another respectfully, and consider each other’s perspective sympathetically. It’s not always comfortable, submitting our ideas to the bar of critical scrutiny. But it’s the only way we human beings can progress beyond the boundaries of our chronic subjectivity.
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To split a hair I think worth splitting–and something I’ve been thinking of returning to anyway with regard to this post–there’s a distinction that can, and I think often should, be made between objective reality and objective truth. Objective reality is the “what is” regardless of what we may think. Physical reality is pretty much all objective reality in that sense, I think, though the brain raises some interesting questions about that. Some social reality may be objective, but we start getting into slippery territory there. And personal, individual reality poses some interesting questions in this regard. For instance, the most indisputable fact any individual knows is the brute fact of their own existence (though once you go beyond the mere fact to considering the nature of ourselves or our existence–nothing remains indisputable). So is this fact part of objective reality, or subjective reality? (I have a somewhat complex model of “reality” here that helped me sort out my thoughts when dealing with the ideas of post-modernist social constructivists. It also helps me sort things out when dealing with the ideas of logical positivists. This model is relevant to what I’m saying here, so you might want to take a look at it.)
The concept of truth seems usually to have some notion of relationship about it, as I said in my post. So the paradigm meaning of “objective truth” would involve a relationship between language, or concepts, and “objective reality”, and ideally that relationship would be that our ideas, or the propositions expressed by the language, about objective reality are correct. Because that’s the relationship we are after, it’s easy to conflate the ideas of objective reality and objective truth, but I think it’s often more helpful to keep the distinction in mind. That’s why I labeled the “objective reality” in my model–what’s true regardless of our ideas about it–as the tao, to evoke “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” Or by another translation: “Existence is beyond the power of words to define: terms may be used but are none of them absolute.”
I think it’s salutary for us to remember that no matter how good our “objective” understanding (or to revert to my preferred term our intersubjective understanding) of anything is, even of the physical world, our understanding is a model of the reality, not the full reality itself, and therefore there may be aspects of that reality not yet incorporated in our model–not yet understood–that may nonetheless someday become understood, or be significant even if we never do understand them. And while we should not be too ready to give up our current understanding, neither should we assume that our understanding is absolute–that we have fully attained objective truth about objective reality.
That’s at bottom a very scientific attitude, but one that has a good fit with some sprititual attitudes as well. Which may be why I like it.
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hI! i would like to ask a question in defense of there being a true objective reality:
in regards to people’s own perception’s being differant from one another’s.. lets say perhaps one person IS colorblind, or perceives a lighter tone of blue than the next individual. cant we take that problem itself into concideration, and perhaps just say that person A doesnt have a true accurate perception because s/he is colorblind? But person B has a proper functioning vision and can see things for what they are? which in turn might bring the question: how can we prove who has the correct perception? well, the same way we decided that person A is colorblind pehaps? in that argument doesnt it assumes that there exists a non colorblindness, saying some people do have an accurate perception of something constant? and if that was true, would this mean this example is too far from the subject it is addressing?
in any case, i dont know if im talking mumbo jumbo here, definately not schooled! but in regards to perception of a possible true objective reality, im hoping that whatever amount of accurate perception is necessary in humans to move toward a better understanding of a possible real truth has been provided to humans as is. and that we may give ourselves what we need to percieve and grow along these possible lines of real truth. if that wasnt the case it would be pretty depressing, because it would suggest we are not enough in and of ourselves to feed our own minds, and would need to rely on outside help. who would that be? who speaks to us better than ourselves? i’d also like to think that similarly if divine revelation exists and could be concidered truth, it would most likely find its channel to humans thru humans. im probably not saying anything new here.
but i love the idea of examining reality for what it is in itself so that we can hope to never stray too far from it.
i like the lyrics of a greatful dead song: wake up to find out that we are the eyes of the world 🙂
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Welcome, Richard. Nicely thoughtful comment.
Human color vision is a good area in which to explore these ideas, because the mixture of the contribution of objective reality with the contribution of subjective elements is both clear and subtle. For example, consider the line between two colors–for example, the point where “green” shades over into “blue”. What we perceive as green or blue is a combination of regions along the electromagnetic spectrum, the sensitivites of the cones in our eyes (or rods, I can’t remember for sure which perceives color) to those wavelengths, and some central processing in the brain which can be influenced by language as well as by the light conditions and surrounding colors. I have no problem with talking about wavelengths of light in terms of objective reality OR objective truth, since we now have the technological capacity to measure those wavelenghths in a reliably intersubjective ( 🙂 ) way. But human color vision does not merely take light wavelengths into account and translate them directly into color perception in a 1-1 fashion. I am just a hair blue-green colorblind. I often perceive things as green or blue that others insist are the other way around. I may be a bit red-blue colorblind too–a couple of weeks ago I was teaching a class with some materials I had made, one of which I saw as blue; the students all insisted it was purple. I don’t know enough to say for sure, but I suspect it has to do with the range of sensitivities of the cones in my eyes vs. the range of sensitivities of the cones in other peoples’. The “objective” part of all this is the light wavelengths; how that’s translated into what we experience and call color is not, I don’t think, objective–rather, it’s intersubjective. I’m willing to call me the one that’s colorblind rather than everyone else becasue I’m in the minority; but if the bilolgy shifted, so that more people saw things my way (literally), it would be those other people who I would then call colorblind.
So in the case of color, I think we can identify an “objective” component, but there is also a “subjective” component, and an “inter-subjective” component, and we can sort all that out fairly clearly, though not so clearly that we can’t get hours and hours of enjoyable debate about it all. But for social phenomena, or for spiritual phenomena, we don’t have the check on our mental systems that is provided by the physical reality underlying color vision i.e., wavelenghts of light). For instance, consider the concept of “justice”. To me, there is no way we can identify an objective grounding for that concept that would be analogous to the objective grounding light wavelength provides for color vision. It’s essentially a human concept, based on our reality as a social species. But on the other hand–it’s not entirely arbitrary, either. It is emphatically not the case (I argue) that we can define justice any way we want to, any more than it is the case that we can discover a “one, true, objective” defninition or meaning for “justice”. What I’m interested in exploring is what we might find if we consider each person as precisely an instrument for “perceiving and growing along the lines of truth” (I’m not sure what “real truth” would be, in contrast to “not real truth”, or “unreal truth”, or even just plain “truth”), and took that seriously. Since (in my worldview) we are all products of the universe, having evolved and developed in response to whatever the underlying forces and realities are, we aren’t likely to be entirely divorced from those realities–any moe than we directly percieve them in a straightforward or simplistic way.
To get back to the metaphor with color vision–suppose we didn’t know anything about wavelengths of light, and further suppose that you and I are the only two people around, and you see something as green” while I see it as “blue”. What if, instead of arguing about who is “right”, or whether the object is objectively green or blue, we tried to learn something about either the object, or about light, or about human perception, from the fact that we saw things differently? Wouldn’t that be more productive? that’s what I think we have to gain from coming at exploration of truth from the perspective of inter-subjectivity rather than objectivity.
If any of that makes sense. I just got home, and am tired, so won’t vouch for my sensibleness or coherence just now. 🙂
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if objective truth exists we cannot perceive it as by observation we create subjective truth. our bias on a given topic impairs our ability to judge and interpret effectively. if we cannot perceive it, and can find no evidence to support it, why should we assume that objective truth MUST exist?
in reference to the first post where it is suggested that objective truth must exist and the example given of a deity being universally true, i feel that i should mention that as humans we often feel the need to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and can this thought or feeling not create a God-like character? does God have to physically exist to be truth to some people? is not truth subjective and therefore our ideas of gods and the supernatural not just answers to individualised questions?
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I have to agree with all of you, but addofio makes the best point out all… why should we get stuck up on what TRUTH is? Does it really matter that we define it, subjective, objective, or even inter-subjective (think thats what Addofio said)… what’s more important is for us to INTERACT and DEBATE about such topics because it is the only way we will grow as people… or even as a SPECIES
Why is it that humans have the capacity to do so much more than other animals? Is it true that we are a “special case” when we talk about evolution of species? From all these questions, would it be safe to say that a higher power generated all that we know, to be the way it is, to do the things it does, to live the way life is… is this the TRUTH for all of us?
I think TRUTH is an outlet for us to vent out all ideas, and eventually reach a wall, in which we cannot further explain why things are the way they are, and we wait for something/someone to explain to us that yes… that is in fact… TRUE… but this must be reached as a collective and its hard due to the realization that yea, we all have different OPINIONS on what is FACT and FICTION, either based in religion, environment, or even government
This is getting thick real quick so I’m gonna end it with this… It is important for use to have such debates/discussions because this is a proven way to define ourselves, our way of life, our laws and regulations, what is right compared to wrong, what is false and what is REAL, based on “inter-subjevtive truth” (really like that wording for some reason)
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Hi Addofio—I’m a little late in joining the conversation, but here goes. Truth does not come in different flavors. Objective or subjective. To be truth, it must be independent of interpretation. Even using the word “absolute” is a mistake or at least a redundency. A mind’s perception of truth will vary in accuracy or interpretation, but truth just sits there. Hit me back if you want to discuss further, as I have to go into my woods to see if that tree fell yet.
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Welcome to the conversation. It has it’s own deliberate pace 🙂
Here’s a comeback for you, formulated from my own experience and perception of the world.
There’s a difference between truth and reality. Reality is “what it is” regardless of what we think it is (mostly*). Truth is a statement about, or model of, or belief about, or perception of, reality. Statements about and models of reality are never complete, always partial. Statements and models are never independent of interpretation–anyone who believes that they can be has never studied human language or cognition in depth. Beliefs and perceptions can (I believe) be true for one person but not for another–that is, be a satisfactory model of reality for one person, but not work at all for someone else. Not ALL beliefs or perceptions have this property–there is such a thing as delusion or simply being wrong–but some kinds of beliefs or perceptions do, under some circumstances.
It occurs to me that perhaps what you are calling “truth” is what I am calling “reality” here, and that perhaps we don’t differ in our opinions all that much.
Let me know how that tree made out.
* My model of reality is actually many faceted–check out the “Reality” tab at the top if you’re interested in why I qualified this with “mostly”.
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I feel that truth and reality are synonyms. The choice of which word one uses is more a question of style rather than meaning. Imagine Jack Nicholson screaming “The REALITY!!?…… You can’t handle the Reality!”…. It’s just not as dramatic.
We definitely agree that different minds can have varying success in correctly interpreting truth or reality. So I guess it is no suprise, that we differ on a word’s definition. I feel we need a different word for what you are calling truth. I nominate “opinion.”
The tree, by the way, is fine. It hasn’t fallen but it did make a noise.
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“I feel we need a different word for what you are calling truth. I nominate ‘opinion’.”
I think the distinction between what is real and what we believe about what is real is an important distinction, however it is made. I think people are all too inclined to mistake their own perception of reality, their own beliefs about reality, for reality itself. An error made both by postmodernists, who think (or claim to think) that believing something makes it true and by people who think there is one absolute reality and truth and they happen to know exactly what that is.
I know that defining truth as something like a good match between a model, statement, or belief and reality isn’t fully satisfactory. It definitely seems to miss something. But I haven’t been able to find one that works better, so I’ll stick with it. “Opinion” definitely captures the variability and subjectivity of our beliefs–but seems to imply that they are more arbitrary than I believe they need be. That is, some definitely are–and we’ll call those opinions, no problem. But I think we can approach closer to truth (in the sense of accurate correspondence to reality) than that, at times anyway, so your proposed use of “opinion” also leave out something important. It’s precisely a balance between purely arbitrary opinion and claims that absolute reality is known or knowable (and hence there can be “objective truth”) that I think “intersubjective truth” provides.
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“I think people are all too inclined to mistake their own perception of reality for reality itself”
How true! I’m not Zen Buddhist, but I think they have a similar idea of “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the moon.”
Let me propose a hypothetical and see what you think.
Every creature that has sensory perception is suddenly gone. Doesn’t matter how, they are simply not present anywhere. Thermometers still respond to temperature, rain still falls and the planets still orbit the sun. But there isn’t a single life form present to bear witness. Does truth still exist?
P.S. I went to the book portion and I noticed that you haven’t read Life of Pi. Very good discusssion of truth and reality in that little book. The author went to Saint Mike’s in VT, as did my daughter. So she gave me a copy, and I loved it.
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“. . . . Does truth still exist?”
A number of possible responses occurred to me, not all of which I can remember. Here are some:
1. The questions no longer makes sense in the proposed situation. What would it mean for truth to exist, or not to exist?
2. No (given my definition of truth.) You can’t have a correspondence between two things if one of the things doesn’t exist.
3. If God exists, then yes; if God does not exist, then no.
4. What difference would it make? And to what?
5. There are no sentient creatures, but there are thermometers? How the heck did that happen?
Take your pick. Probably the ones I’ve forgotten were the best ones.
I started Life of Pi once (as a mathy sort of person, I felt obligated), but couldn’t get into it. I don’t really remember why. Maybe I was just disappointed to find it had nothing to do with math, even metaphorically.
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What happens to the “objective” world when you enter the state of deep dreamless and formless sleep in which is quite literally no-thing?
And you do that every night in bed, and quite readily. Indeed such formless rest is absolutely essential for your sanity.
Sleep is the every mans Samadhi.
Such a state is your True Identity before you “fall” into indentification with the fear saturated meat-body when you “wake-up” every morning.
Where is the “objective” world?
Is there an “objective” world apart from the process of conception and perception that you are involved in?
Neuro-scientists tell us that what we see “out there” is a construction of our brain and nervous system which is projected to seem to be “out there”.
In other words we never ever see an independently existing “objective” world—we only ever see our own brain and nervous system patterned projections.
What does the world really look like then?
To claim that there is an objectively existing world apart from the process of conception and perception that we all engaged in is a terryfying illusion and also a
profoundly” reductionist view of what we are as human beings.
Flying rocks rule OK!
It makes what is supposedly “out there” senior to what we are as irreducibly subjective beings.
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Sue: You say “It makes what is supposedly “out there” senior to what we are as irreducibly subjective beings.” I would offer the following in response.
First, I don’t think we are irreducibly subjective. Subjective, yes–but not irreducibly so. Mysteriously, we do interact with and communicate with what’s “out there”, both in terms of the physical and in terms of other human beings. Second, while I would never put forward my perceptions, or even humanity’s collective perceptions as “what is”, neither do I reject it as all illusion. I do rather suspect that when I perceive a rock, something like a rock as I perceive it is actually there. I do not imagine that I have grokked (I seem to have been channeling “Stranger In A Strange Land” lately) the total reality of the rock–but nonetheless, I doubt that my perceptions are entirely wrong, either.
Third, I don’t know about “senior”, but I do believe that what’s “out there” preceded my existence, and will still be here in some form when I no longer am. So I suppose that is some kind of response to your first question as well–I would say the outside world (note I do not say “objective”–I suspect you’re mushing notions of “truth” and “reality”, which I see as related but distinct, and I’m not sure what “objective” reality would be)–as I was saying, I suspect the outside world trundles along quite nicely without me when I am deeply asleep, pretty much as it does when I am wide awake. I guess I would instead ask the question, what happens to “me” when I am deeply and dreamlessly asleep–do “I” still exist? Not a question that concerns me much, but it’s more of a question to me than what happens to outside-me reality.
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Yo Addofio!—Do “you” still exist when unconcious? Hmmm. That’s an interesting question. What do you mean by “exist”? For that matter, what do you mean by “I”? I’m gonna take a swing at this one.
First, I’d like to start with the premise that the sense of individuality (“I” ) belongs exclusively to living forms. Rocks don’t have a sense of “I”. Brains and immune systems do. My brain and immune system are both very concerned with “me vs. other.” Why do I bring up the immune system? Because it is a non-concious system that appears to think. I believe that the brain is a multi-concious system that does think.
Which brings us to “thinking”. Being a bear of very little brain, I hesitate to go forward but here goes…..Thinking is the constructs of the brain when it is given information. We think when we dream. We think when we do algebra. Unless the brain has been damaged by trauma or turned way down by chemicals, we’re always “concious”. Who usually plays the lead in your dreams? And even if you aren’t the leading lady, you are still the primary audience. Well, what about “dreamless sleep”? I’m not an expert, but I believe that PET scans show that brain activity never stops. It just shifts from area to area depending on the function that is needed. I do know that brains are voracious consumers of oxygen and glucose at all times. Your brain’s oxygen and glucose needs don’t go away when you sleep so it must be “thinking”.
So I don’t think “I” go anywhere when I’m asleep.
As an aside, my wife has frequent seizures. 30 to 60 minutes prior to the grand mal, she is on some sort of autopilot where she appears to be “functioning” but in reality she is in something resembling an alcoholic blackout. She has no memory of her actions or thoughts and some times knows that she had a seizure only because she “wakes up” in an odd place in the house.
Lastly, I’ve noticed a lot of your peeps are interested in color perception. Have you ever heard of Benham wheels?
They are discs that have black and white patterns and when spun, create the illusion of color. Color is seen where it clearly does not exist.
ttfn
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Heffadog, sorry it took me so long to respond to this. I haven’t been very active on my own blog lately–I’m finding it less demanding to just make comments elsewhere. Ed blogs in particular for some reason. I go on sabbatical, and spend hours reading and writing about education, in ways entirely unrelated to my sabbatical project. Go figure.
I’m not sure I have anything to add to this topic that I haven’t already said. But I’ll take a whack.
Rocks may not have a sense of “I”–but do they nonetheless have some sort of identity? If not–how can we legitimately speak of “this rock”? Or take a drop of water sliding slowly down a window pane–is there a “something” that is that drop of water? And if so, what happens to the drop when it reaches the bottom and merges into the bool of water sitting on the window sill? Such questions have interested me for years, and I think that thinking about them in terms of interactive, if not inter-subjective, truth is the only way to make progress on them. Assuming progress can be made, or that we want to make progress.
So your “I” is simply any form of brain activity? I suspect I could slippery-slope you on that one. What if the activity is only in the brain stem, and between the brain stem and the machines they have you hooked you up to, that’s enough to sustain life in the body. No brain activity in the rest of your brain. Are “you” still there?
Benham wheels–I think I had heard of them, but didn’t think of them when writing about color vision here. A nice proof, if you will, that we don’t perceive the world directly in some simple and veridical fashion, but rather take various kinds of sensory input and process it in various ways to form mental models of the world. some of the processing being conscious and much more of it automatic, as the gift of evolution.
My first reaction to your wife’s situation was I wanted to give her a hug. But getting past that to implications for questions of consciousness: do you think that she is truly not conscious during the pre-seizure time, or only that the seizure wipes out the memory of that time retroactively? And what does your wife think about such questions, assuming she finds them worth thinking about (not everyone does)?
Ha! how about that. Not much to say, just more questions.
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Your scenario of the water drop reminded me of a chapter in a book entitled “Tuesdays with Morrie”. It’s a book I use in my ELA class.(Yes, I finally scored some decent books!) In it, Morrie tells a story about some ocean waves that see their imminent demise. One wave is distraught because it will cease to exist when it crashes into the shore. The other wave says “Don’t worry. You’re not a wave; you’re the ocean and you will always exist.” If you haven’t read the book, it’s worth your time.
I don’t have a good answer on my wife’s state of conciousness when she is pre-siezure. It’s still “Beth”; but she’s kind of like one of those pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I don’t usually discuss conciousness with her because she believes in God and spirits and souls and all that stuff. If it gives her comfort, who am I to contradict her? She knows I’m a joyful athiest and promises to put a good word in for me if I’m wrong. Besides, it would give her great satisfaction to prove me wrong one last time.
And now….A final (I swear) beating of this moribund horse of a question.
A rock always has existence until it is disassembled. Much like the wave in Morrie’s story. It only has “identity” when a brain assigns one to it.
A young boy skips a rock across a pond. A clam burrows under the rock for protection. An otter uses this rock to smash open the clam. One rock; yet three different identities were given to this object. Identity seems to depend on the beholder. Agreement on “identity” tends to be a function of how closely the observers are “related”. Existence is independent of the beholder.
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No way you get to quit now–not until you define “identity” for me, in a way that makes sense of the above. It appers to have something to do with consciousness. But why should my consciousness be what gives identity to a rock? What, exactly, is my consciousness adding to the rock’s mere existence that bestows identity on it? And do I have a different identity when interacting with a clam vs. an otter? Even if I seem to myself to have the same identity? (I suppose I could look in the dictionary, but not only am I lazy, that might preclude interesting digressions.)
Some time ago I ran across one of those internet quiz jobbies that asks questions and then presumes to tell you about yourself based on your answers. I don’t remember much about the specifics of this one, but I do remember it had a scenario asking something like the following:
This scenario, and your wife’s pre-seizure situation, I think have more in common with our ordinary lives than we might think. How much of any given day do we actually recall after a period of time has elapsed? Not much. I mean, pick a random day from 1965 or so, and see if you can remember anything at all that happened that day. I sure can’t–I can barely remember a few details of special occasions. So were “we” there in the first place? Even though we don’t remember it later? I sure think so–but it raises questions.
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Yo Addofio!—-I think math is the best language for “identity.” The rock is the end point of a ray. The half line is sensory data and the infinity indicated by the pointed end of a ray is the interpretation of the data. The rock reflects infinite rays of data and cares not a whit about any intersections of interpretation. “Identity” is an artifact. The rock has no identity until one is given to it. According to Genesis, God’s second task after creation was to assign names(identities) to his creations. He said the “word” and there was light. He made a value judgement. It was good and he differentiated it from night. I obviously don’t believe this is how it happened but I think it shows the remarkable insight that the early church fathers had on human conciousness. We are God because we are the namers. And since we don’t have all day to verify and reverify our naming process, our brains developed a short hand style. This is your “inter-subjective” reality.
As for the magic pill question……..I have taken this pill on more than one occasion. I don’t remember many details, but I know I had a good time. I’m too old for this kind of fun now. The Grateful Dead came to my area last week and I didn’t make the 20 minute drive to get there. I stayed at home and listened to a simulcast on Sirius radio. As a younger fool, I would skip a final exam to go to a show. (Many a grandparent “expired” to excuse my absences.) Under the right circumstances, I would take the pill again but it would simply be an amusing distraction not a revelatory pathway.
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I’m still not sure I follow your “identity” explanation. Seems to me you have to have a “something” in order for a name to apply or to stick, and the “something” is an identity. So to me, the endpoint of the ray in your metaphor, the rock, defines/is the identity. The other stuff is perceptions and interpretations, not identity. Though I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much which terms get used, as long as we know what we mean–I mean one end of the ray, you mean the other.
The one thing that seems to me somehow necessary for “identity” is some level of duration–but given how rapidly we change, that raises some interesting questions too, about the relationship between stability and change. I keep thinking that someday I may write up a post on that, but so far, laziness and getting ready for my trip have prevailed.
Sounds to me like your “pill” had some memory residue, implied by your phrase “reveletory pathway”. Though that raises some interesting questions too, about memory and consciousness. Can something be reveletory if it’s not consciously remembered?
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[…] themes are apparent in the top-ten draws: religion/philosophy, and travel. The number two post is “Objective” vs. “inter-subjective” truth. Another frequently-visited post is Objective basis for morality??. I have a sneaking suspicion […]
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[…] This is a follow-up to this previous post. […]
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