Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
That’s at least admitting that something exists, but it’s more complicated than what we currently understand of it!
My current standing is with “poetic naturalism”, in which we acknowledge that something exists and that we build, based on our subjective experience, models of knowledge. And that we must use epistemic tools (ex: the scientific method) to overcome our subjectivity.
Overcome subjectivity? No, no, no! The desire for objectivity makes us weak and easy to control. The rich use their control of the media to exploit that desire for their own gain. They’ve created a subjective reality, pretending to be objective, which upholds the evils of capitalism. You mustn’t try to overcome subjectivity.
Subjectivity is freedom. If everything is subjective, and we understand the rules of that subjectivity, then we have the power to reinterpret our condition according to our own sense of justice. We can make ourselves a new subjective unreality, based on fairness and justice. We can create a multiverse of unrealities, and travel between them as easily as believing.
Take gender, for example. Traditional western culture tells us (as children) that gender is objective, and the answers are to be found in the biology of the cell. Written into our genes is the objective truth of gender, if only we have the curiosity to find it. This desire for objectivity is poison. Those who have clung to it into adulthood have become bitter and hateful, and have sought to take away our right to medicine.
But I know that gender is subjective. It’s socially constructed, and we should choose to reconstruct it in the best way possible, that makes everyone happy. Let people have whatever gender they want. Choose to believe in new genders, choose to perceive new gender presentations. Choose freedom through subjectivity.
Truth is subjective.
Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
It’s subjective.
What about gravity? It doesn’t exist, we just collectively hallucinate that stuff falls
That’s just nihilism.
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
That’s at least admitting that something exists, but it’s more complicated than what we currently understand of it!
My current standing is with “poetic naturalism”, in which we acknowledge that something exists and that we build, based on our subjective experience, models of knowledge. And that we must use epistemic tools (ex: the scientific method) to overcome our subjectivity.
Overcome subjectivity? No, no, no! The desire for objectivity makes us weak and easy to control. The rich use their control of the media to exploit that desire for their own gain. They’ve created a subjective reality, pretending to be objective, which upholds the evils of capitalism. You mustn’t try to overcome subjectivity.
Subjectivity is freedom. If everything is subjective, and we understand the rules of that subjectivity, then we have the power to reinterpret our condition according to our own sense of justice. We can make ourselves a new subjective unreality, based on fairness and justice. We can create a multiverse of unrealities, and travel between them as easily as believing.
Take gender, for example. Traditional western culture tells us (as children) that gender is objective, and the answers are to be found in the biology of the cell. Written into our genes is the objective truth of gender, if only we have the curiosity to find it. This desire for objectivity is poison. Those who have clung to it into adulthood have become bitter and hateful, and have sought to take away our right to medicine.
But I know that gender is subjective. It’s socially constructed, and we should choose to reconstruct it in the best way possible, that makes everyone happy. Let people have whatever gender they want. Choose to believe in new genders, choose to perceive new gender presentations. Choose freedom through subjectivity.