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Inherently Subjective Things

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Mahdi Dibaiee 2021-11-08 20:47:16 +00:00
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@ -56,6 +56,16 @@ We start with our individual perceptions as the most objective view and descript
Inherently Subjective Things Inherently Subjective Things
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With our definition of objectivity in place, now let's see: is there something that we cannot move towards objectivity about? Yes. That is our personal experiences.
See, if there is an attempt to give a more objective description of _my_ personal experience, there will need to be either an agreement among a group of beings about this description of my personal experience, or there should be an apparatus that we can agree on that measures my personal experience. However, my personal experience is personal exactly because it is completely dependent and originated from my perspective alone, and no one else's; and as soon as you try to move towards objectivity by trying to describe this experience in a way that moves away from my person-specific and species-specific standpoint, towards a more agreeable and general description that even non-human beings or apparatus can agree with, you lose the initial personal experience in the process, so you end up with a non-personal description of the experience which misses the point of the actual subjective experience I have.
So, you can come up with _some_ description of my experience, but you can't actually describe the subjective experience of being me as it really is. The walk towards objectivity requires you to drop the subjectivity of my experience, and hence, some inherently subjective things such as our personal experiences can't be objectified.
This is how Nagel puts it (I think this may be a bit hard to read without reading the whole paper):
> Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it. {% cite nagel1974like %}
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