Objective Reality and Subjective Experience
Two very separate worlds
TL;DR: There are two worlds: the objective and subjective. The objective includes mutually comprehensible reality and abstractions like math, science, language, logic, and ethics. The subjective includes conceptions of the good and our personal passions, like art, beauty, and love. These are two separate realms that some ethical theories inappropriately conflate. The objective is publicly observable, articulable, and determined. The subjective is personal, unconscious, and the source of meaning. The objective has no authority over the subjective, since you cannot get an ought from an is. And the subjective has no authority over the objective since the subjective is not mutually comprehensible, and therefore, not justifiable to free parties.
Aristotle sent philosophical thought forward hundreds of years. But, unfortunately, uncritical dependency on his writings also kept humanity from progressing for hundreds of years.
Credulous thinkers were led astray by Aristotle’s logic, physics, and biology, but also his ethics. And many ethicists and ethical theories have continued on this wrong path, making the field appear more treacherous than it is.
Aristotle’s ethics inquired into what constituted the good life rather than creating universally acceptable moral principles. And Aristotle’s conception of the good life was, of course, philosophical contemplation, validating generations of professional philosophers while the rest of us rolled our eyes.
What is right and what is good aren’t just two separate questions but belong in two separate worlds of thought. The right is objective, analytical, intelligible, publicly observable, and determined by reason. This is the world of language, physics, and math, our shared tools, and mutual understanding.
The good, meanwhile, is personal, inarticulable, and often incomprehensible—even to ourselves. The good exists within our subjective realm, sharing the world with passion, art, sensations, and love. And it is what creates meaning in our lives.
Some argue that every decision in our lives can be subject to an objective choice. Decisions are not personal—they are other wrong or right, as determined by the correct moral framework. However, this is a misguided conflation of the two worlds. Some questions will have the right answers, whereas some questions can only have one right answerer.
There are questions that have objective answers. If you want to become a world-class violist, a pick-up artist, or a Trekkie, then you must practice the violin daily, flirt with tons of girls, or watch every episode of Star Trek.1
But why be a violist? Why be a pick-up artist? Why be a Trekkie? These are questions only for the subjective self, not for objective reality.2
The objective world creates the tools to pursue our goals, yet it can only be in service to satisfy our subjective being.3
The Objective World
The objective constitutes our material reality and metaphysical abstractions. Everything in this realm, including math, science, and logic, is explainable and mutually comprehensible. 2 + 2 = 4 means the same thing to everyone who can understand it.
This is the world of “is.”
All beings with the capacity for abstract thought and sensation of the world can understand the objective world. The objective is universal, making it our only means of communicating with strangers and will be our means of communicating with AI and aliens.
Importantly for this newsletter, law and morality exist within the objective world. A code of conduct must be articulable and reasonably justifiable to regulate social interactions. If it is not, it lacks the authority to restrict freedom.
Yet once we get into the subjective space, mutual comprehension begins to break down.
The Subjective World
The subjective self goes beyond reason, beyond understanding, and beyond our objective material universe. And because it is not subject to the material, it creates our personally autonomous meaning. This is the world of “ought.”
But the subjective self isn’t solipsistic. On the contrary, our closest relationships derive from a mutual understanding of the subjective selves of others. We relate to strangers through objective morals and laws, yet we relate to friends through shared experiences and perspectives.
Whether through a mutual love of a certain movie or having experienced a similar life-changing event, we develop bonds with those who comprehend at least part of our unique subjective selves and whose selves we somewhat comprehend. This is why the deepest friendships are between those with similar perspectives, values, and interests, which include the well-being of one another.
The subjective universe exists outside objective ethics, which is why so many supposedly ethical thought experiments lack a true moral answer (like the trolley problem).
The only philosophy suited explicitly for the subjective world is existentialism, and even there, it passes off its duty to provide answers to the individual. We aren’t robots meant to pursue a pre-designed objective. We are free, conscious beings that are responsible for creating our own meaning.
Our subjective self is the sum of our constitutive parts multiplied by the sum of our experiences. Every feature of ourselves shapes how we view the world, and how we view the world reshapes ourselves, which reshapes our view of the world, and so on and so on.
Our subjective self is like a Ship of Theseus, maintaining a persistent self despite constant change.
Listening to music or reading tax forms is a fundamentally different experience when we are 5, when we are 19, and when we are 60. The produced sensation can be dramatically different despite the same stimulus affecting the same object.
Even if we could obtain this god-like knowledge and understand every aspect of ourselves in relation to the world, it wouldn’t mean anything unless we chose to make it mean something.
Say someone has a love for the anime “My Hero Academia.” He’s seen every episode, analyzed every manga chapter, participates in fan forums, stays up to date on the latest news, and goes to anime conventions dressed as Deku.
Now say our alien simulation overlords were to beam a message down explaining how our weeaboo came to be. The simulation lords showed that specific genes were responsible for the fanboy’s introversion, creativity, social awkwardness, and attraction to quirky heroes, forming his inherent interest in shounen animes.
The overlords also show that the weeaboo’s earlier experiences with similar animes and his participation in an anime-appreciating friend group made him predisposed to liking “My Hero Academia.” They show him all the complex interactions between his innate personality and external experiences to explain the foreseeable causation between his arbitrary set of circumstances and his love for a goofy show.
They prove that his fandom isn’t an indescribable passion that he freely chose to shape his identity, but the inevitable consequence of a material universe.
“Cool,” replies the fanboy, as he continues listening to the My Hero Academia soundtrack during his workout. The explanation was interesting, but it doesn’t take away from anything, he still loves the show despite his inevitability for doing so. Subjective meaning lies outside the objective material—they are two separate worlds.
Some may try to understand their unconscious thoughts and emotions, possibly with the goal of changing them. This is the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis, where the patient speaks his mind freely, hoping the spotlight of his analytical self can shed some light on his subconscious. Comprehending the subjective self objectively can be helpful for patients whose unconscious functions as a handicap in their lives.
However, the objective is still only a tool for the subjective. To the extent we are at peace with our fundamental subjective perceptions, nothing in science demands that we change them. You still cannot get an ought from an is.
Modern science can help us get to where our free selves want us to be. It’s the objective that’s the means, and the subjective that determines the ends.
Two Separate Worlds
We’re so intuitively familiar with the objective that we often confuse it with reality entirely. We forget that our perceptions of the world aren’t as mutually comprehensible as we think.
Think back, have you ever had a deep passion for something, that, after showing it to a friend, was shocked that your friend didn’t immediately share that same passion? “How does he not get it like I do?”
Some of our perceptions can never be truly conveyed to another, the way that math, science, and logic can.
Substack writers can never understand musicians, who can never understand mathematicians who can never understand actors, and so on. If they genuinely could understand one another, they wouldn’t be substack writers, or musicians, or mathematicians.
However, because of their limited subjective realm, they remain in their professions and gravitate toward others in their group. That’s fine, but personal preferences are in a separate world from objective reality, including concepts of right and wrong.
We too often assume that what is true for us must be true objectively. If I have a view of what is right to do in a certain situation, then everyone must share that view. Some might feel that their morality becomes less significant if others have a different perspective—in the same way they may feel like they have “bad” taste in music if others don’t share that taste.
If someone’s ethical theory isn’t a universal law, then it’s nothing more than their opinion. Yet some people can’t understand others’ perspectives and will probably never. Some personal values exist only in the subjective world and are neither fully articulable nor mutually justifiable.
The subjective self should also remain separate from the world of the objective.
Our “lived experience” or conceptions of the good cannot serve as justifiable restrictions on others’ liberty, which is what law and morality are. The subjective may be deep and our source of ultimate meaning—but free people would never agree to be restricted by what they cannot even understand.
Utilitarianism especially is at fault for conflating these two worlds, with the objective allowed to dominate the subjective and welfare calculus creating “true” universal meaning. It focuses excessively on publicly observable phenomena as the basis of its morality and disregards who morality is for anyways: individuals. We aren’t just vessels to consume utility through, but free beings who happen to be guided by utility.
Many moral claims that utilitarians argue to be objective (long-termism, EA, etc.) are only subjective inclinations in the same realm as religious commands and personal tastes. While the subjective is a source of personal meaning, it is not a justification to restrict freedom, since free people would not agree to have their freedom contingent on an external calculus. It’s for this, and many more reasons, that utility cannot be the basis of morality.
I’ll have much more to say about these two realms of reality. This article is only meant to introduce the existing boundaries between the shared and the personal world that thinkers too often disregard, to the misfortune of their ethical theories. So subscribe for more!
The objective “hypothetical imperative.”
They are for the subjective self so long as no objective moral laws are being violated.
This post is heavily inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. To summarize the book argues that the interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the brain (representing, extremely roughly, the objective and the subjective described in this article) have played a major role in shaping human culture. Modernity, meanwhile, has emphasized the left at the expense of the right, creating meaninglessness. We should therefore return to appreciating the context and interconnectedness that only the right hemisphere can create for us.