2.9 KiB
| 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.
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 %}
References
{% bibliography --cited %}