coberst

Objectivity is our security blanket

My second son, Mike, was a blanket boy. He spent a good part of his first 24 months with a thumb in his mouth and a blanket in his arms. If we left the house with Mike we checked and doubled check that we did not leave his ‘blanky’ behind. After 24 months the blanky was nothing more than a scrap of shredded cloth. He would not accept a substitute.

Absolute truth is our blanky. DickandJane become very anxious when their security blanket, i.e. absolute truth, is not in hand.

Objectivism is a fundamentalist philosophy. It believes that reality is something external to the brain and that the task of the brain is to gain knowledge about this external reality.

Right/wrong and true/false are considered to be objective criteria rather than subjective criteria. Objectivism posits perfect knowledge and assumes such knowledge is obtainable. I think that such views have been discredited.

The myth of objectivism says that: the world is made up of objects that have properties completely independent of those who perceive them; we understand our world through our consciously constructed concepts and categories; “we can say things that are objectively, absolutely true, and unconditionally true and false about it…we cannot rely upon subjective judgments…science can ultimately give a correct, definitive, and general account of reality”; words have fixed meaning that can describe reality correctly. To be objective is to be rational.

The myth of subjectivism informs us that our senses and intuition is our best guide. Feelings are the most important elements of our lives. Aesthetic sensibilities and moral practices are all totally subjective. “Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with more important reality of our feelings and intuitions. We gain this awareness through imagination rather than reason…Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives.”

The new paradigm of cognitive science rejects both objectivism and subjectivism. I believe in this new cognitive science, which theorizes that objectivity is a shared subjectivity.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. Objective truth is a misnomer; there is only shared truth/false and there is only shared good/bad.

Objectivity is shared subjectivity. We create reality in our brain. If you and I create the same reality then we have a shared subjectivity. We cannot know the thing-in-itself, as Kant informs us and is easily recognized if we focus upon it.

I would say that reality comes in two forms; the thing-in-itself is the reality that Kant informs us that we cannot know and then we have the reality that our brain creates. This reality we create is aided by the senses and is congruent with how our body interacts with the thing-in-itself. If the interaction between the thing-in-itself and the creature’s embodied mind is too far off--the creature quickly becomes toast.

Most people are objectivist in many ways; do you still comfort yourself with blanky?

Quotes from “Moral Imagination” Mark Johnson (coauthor of “Philosophy in the Flesh”)

Katczinsky

I can't say that the truth is always comforting. Usually it tends to be the opposite.

Objective truth isn't a security blanket but 'shared objectivity' (i.e. religion) is a security blanket. There incontrovertibly exists objective truths separate from our subjective experiences. The reason why I am convinced of this over solipsism is because I gain new information. If we both 'experience' an objective event, a stray cat walks by say, then we may both formulate differing accounts of why the cat was there, or who it belongs to, or whether or not the cat was 'cute', etc., though if we hold the shared 'objective' belief in our heads that we did not see a cat in the first place, it doesn't matter what reality we agree upon, the objective truth of the cat existing remains.

Reality isn't dependent upon the experiences of an observer but the experiences of the observer are dependent upon reality. The reason why a creature quickly becomes toast if it's subjective created reality strays too far away from reality isn't a result of a gap between two equal symbiotic parts, but because the creature's created reality is complete rubbish and holds no real consequence over anything resembling 'reality' or 'true truth'. I can believe that I can fly as much as I want, and we can all agree upon it, but that won't change the actual physical reality that I will die when I try to fly off a cliff. The physical reality is all there is. It is categorically impossible to speak of a relationship between material and immaterial realities.

If objectivity is shared subjectivity then, like in Orwell's world, two plus two equals five.

Unless I read you wrong...

__________________
Political Compass:

Economic Left/Right: -9.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.72

coberst

Kat...

“Most postmodern philosophers and other post-Kuhnian philosophers of science deny that cognitive science can have “truths” that could provide a basis for criticizing a particular philosophical view…they argue, cognitive science can neither function as the basis for a critique of existing philosophy nor provide the basis for an alternative philosophical theory.”

There are at least two versions of cognitive science: a first-generation that has assumed most of the fundamental tenets of traditional Anglo-American philosophy and a second generation that has called most of these same tenets into question on empirical grounds.

First generation cognitive science evolved in the 1950s and 60s centering their concern about symbol-manipulation, which accepted without question the disembodied nature of reason. The mind from this functionalist view was seen to resemble a computer program that could run on any appropriate hardware. “This was philosophy without flesh…This was a modern version of Cartesian view that reason is transcendental, universal, disembodied, and literal.”

The realist views of first generation cognitive science are based upon specific a priori commitments such as:

• Functionalism: The mind is disembodied, meaning that mind can be studied without concern about the brain and the rest of the body.
• Symbol Manipulation: Cognition operates upon symbols without regard to the meaning of those symbols.
• Representational theory of meaning: Mental representations are merely symbolic without inherent meaning
• Classical categories: Categories are consciously defined by that which is necessary and sufficient.
• Literal Meaning: All meaning is literal without imaginative or metaphorical content.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science)is committed
to what might be called ESR (Embodied Scientific Realism).

Disembodied scientific realism is committed to at least three scientific claims: 1) There is a world independent of our perception and comprehension of it, 2) We can have a stable knowledge of this independent world, and 3) That our manner and structure of thinking are unaffected by our bodies but is determined completely by the external world and that these external truths are absolute.

ESR accepts (1) and (2) while rejecting (3). “At the heart of embodied realism is our physical engagement with an environment in an ongoing series of interactions…Our embodied system of basic level concepts has evolved to “fit” the ways in which our bodies, over the course of evolution, have been coupled to our environment, partly for the sake of survival, partly for the sake of human flourishing beyond mere survival, and partly by chance…The basic level of conceptualization is the cornerstone of embodied realism.”