theread.me/_posts/2021-10-29-inherent-subjectivity.md

layout	title	subtitle	date	permalink	categories	author	draft
post	On Inherent Subjectivity of Some Things	An Alternative Definition of Objectivity for Rigid Scientists	2021-10-30 12:57:46	alternative-objectivity-and-inherent-subjectivity/	philosophy	Mahdi	true

As a computer scientist and someone who loves mathematics and abstractions, I was obsessed with the idea of rationality, that is, an objective and absolute rationality.

I somehow stumbled upon Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationality: From AI to Zombies about 4 years ago, and it took me two years to go through it all but I was absolutely fascinated by this book. I knew how to be rational now, and I could prove it using mathematics, what else could I ask for!

The book basically looks at the world as a probabilistic system, and everything that happens can be assigned probabilities, and using mathematical theorems such as Bayes Theorem, we can predict outcomes of certain actions and then decide between them. There is a lot of focus on cognitive biases as well. I was particularly very interested about these biases, and so I set out to learn more about them, and that's how I found my current course: Cognitive Science at University College Dublin.

So I enter this course with this mindset: we can objectively analyse the world around us using probability and statistics (mathematics), but we are limited by our cognitive biases, so I want to learn about these cognitive biases: where do they come from, how can they be resisted to allow us to act more rationally and so on. These questions would mainly fall under the umbrella of psychology...

However... I found myself to be more and more interested in the philosophy side of this course than the psychology side, hell I even started to not like the psychology side anymore, but fall in love with the philosophy. This is where I found the opposite of what I had come for: an alternative definition of objectivity, and an inherent subjectivity of some things. This is mainly inspired by Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat {% cite nagel1974like %}.

What is Objectivity Anyway?

This is probably the main question here. What is objectivity? I don't think dictionary definitions are particularly authoritative when it comes to philosophy discussions, but I found this dictionary definition interesting to open the topic with:

the quality or character of being objective : lack of favoritism toward one side or another : freedom from bias. {% cite objectivity-merriam-webster %}

This definition itself has ambiguous phrases such as "freedom from bias", what does that mean? When can we say that we are free from bias? Let's look at how bias is defined in the same dictionary:

an inclination of temperament or outlook {% cite bias-merriam-webster %}

But... is it really possible to have no inclination at all in our temperament and outlook? Let's look at the definition of subjective, that will help us here:

relating to the way a person experiences things in his or her own mind {% cite subjective-merriam-webster %}

Is it possible for us to have a view of something without it being part of our experience? It seems not. All that we do, all our views and expressions and our interactions are part of our experience as a person, and it relates to us on an intimate level, which means that everything that we do as individuals is subjective. In that sense, it seems impossible for any individual to be objective, since they will always have some form of inclination about everything.

What does this leave us with then when we ask what is objectivity? A better definition of objectivity in my opinion is one given by Thomas Nagel:

It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. [...] [T]he process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. {% cite nagel1974like %}

In this sense, there is no black-and-white distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, but rather it is a spectrum, a line on which we can walk from subjectivity towards objectivity.

We start with our individual perceptions as the most objective view and description, we then move towards descriptions that allow us to agree with other (human) beings, and finally we move towards descriptions that can be verified and agreed upon by other apparatus, although it is important to understand that even the apparatus that we may use to describe things are not necessarily free from bias, since they are created by biased individuals and groups. By now you may notice that if a measuring device is made to be agreeable between a large group of people, it is already more objective than a device made by a single individual! However, absolute objectivity, which we may call "a view from nowhere" may not be attainable by us, because we will always be viewing things from our own perspectives, even if it is a large, collective perspective that we agree on, it is not a view from nowhere.

Inherently Subjective Things

References

{% bibliography --cited %}