Ramblings on Reality and Subjectivity

Life is inherently subjective. The very act of perception, of “experiencing,” is an inference - a mere interpretation or impression of some “reality” we purport to exist. We can never truly know this reality, as it cannot be grasped in its entirety. We only sneak glimpses of it through our senses. We see colors and form; we smell aromas; we hear noises; we feel pressure and pain. These sensations arise from the interaction between “reality” and our nervous system - they are not intrinsic qualities of reality itself. And from these sensations we create our worlds, our own “realities” of a sort. Perhaps these subjective “realities” are more important than the objective realm that always lies outside our reach, as these perceptions guide our behaviors: they are adaptive, enabling us to function in a place that we will never fully understand - in which we are all aliens, in a sense. We are never at home in the real world.

The closest we ever approximate the “objective” fundamentally relies on our concrete, subjective experiences. From our experiences we can extract commonalities, forming concepts and tokens we can use to refer to sensory objects and patterns. We can form abstract thought, epitomized in human language. But these abstractions themselves fall apart without their subjective constituents. Humans need vision or audition to learn language; they are the vehicles through which words are written and read or spoken and heard. Every concept needs a referent, which must have some perceptual origin, however direct or circuitous.

What is life devoid of experience and subjectivity? It is nothing; it is not life at all. It is death - or perhaps the “undead,” the philosophical zombies that act unconsciously. And while we can never prove consciousness (or unconsciousness) of other beings, let’s assume the reader is conscious. In truth, of course, the only fact one will ever know with complete certainty is their own consciousness. All else is an inference.