Subjectivism

            The ongoing quest to reduce all my thoughts, opinions, and actions down to a single source has hit another milestone. Previously, I’ve written about my ego and its desire to have no needs, and it’s been almost a year since I described my aversion to compulsion (how the time flies). I’ve kept digging and have found a pattern of subjectivism below everything. Subjectivism is basically a belief that truth isn’t singular and depends on how you vied it. This view of truth covers everything; from if a song is good, the speed and direction of a moving object, the color of a shirt, or the mechanism by which air is necessary to combustion.

Songs, or any art for that matter, is a good example since everyone has different opinions and preferences on the subject. You might say this is because it is a complex subject that depends on highly variable tastes, but the way so many people state the quality of art as an inarguable fact makes me think that they believe their opinions are the objective truth (objective being the opposite of subjective, where there is one truth and all others are false). I believe that all thoughts on art are equally valid and have even gone so far as to say that the subjectivity is what makes it art. How a song makes you feel is something that is uniquely true to you, and even if you don’t agree with a single other person that can never make you wrong.

 

I don't care what anyone says, One Night In Bangkok is my best song ever

For speed and direction let’s say a car leaves St. Louis headed West at 75 mph. But what if you view it from a car doing 80 mph in the same direction? Now the car is moving East at 5 mph. What makes a velocity relative to the surface of the Earth truer than a velocity relative to anything else? It may have more utility, but it isn’t any truer. The Earth is rotating and moving through the solar system so it’s not like it’s a constant reference. Plus the solar system is moving through the galaxy and the galaxy is moving through the universe. Don’t even get me started on how the universe itself is expanding and how the constant speed of light throws a whole new twist on everything. Even without relativistic effect the speed and direction of any object is completely dependent on what you measure it against.

            Color requires me to get a little more abstract to describe how it is subjective, so stay with me. The simplest example is just when you have an uncertain color that will be described differently by different people. The same hue could be described as cyan, aqua, teal, turquoise, bluish green, or greenish blue depending on who you ask. With the aid of some color charts you could probably get most people to agree, but this is assuming everyone views it under the same conditions. Add in factors like differences in lighting, angle, and distance (or monitor settings) and even the same person can see the same color in completely different ways. The same hue can look different under incandescent, florescent, and sunlight, not to mention under just different kinds of sunlight. What makes any one color the true color? This hasn’t even involved the fact that I think different people could view the exact same shade differently due to purely mental differences, which is an idea that completely blows my mind. Stuff doesn’t really change from green to red very often (unless you shine only red light on it, in which case everything becomes a shade of red), but subjectivity isn’t about anything being true, it’s simply that more than one thing can be true.

 

Looks aqua to me

            The mechanism by which air is necessary for combustion is an oxygen and phlogiston reference. I’m a big fan of phlogiston as it’s one of those Baroque period scientific theories that is a really elegant and reasonable explanation of events, but when viewed with more modern scientific evidence is completely false. Until Robert Boyle came along, people believed that combustion was due to phlogiston, a sort of elemental fire, escaping from a substance. The surrounding air needed to be circulated so it wouldn’t become saturated with the phlogiston. We now believe that the process is actually oxygen reacting with the substance and the air must be changed to replenish the supply of oxygen. I would argue that the discovery of oxygen doesn’t make the theory of phlogiston any less true in its time. People then believe in it just as much as people believe in oxygen now. Belief in oxygen may have a lot more evidence, but I don’t think that makes it inherently different from the historical belief in phlogiston. It’s not that we could go back to a phlogiston theory, but maybe oxygen doesn’t work exactly how we think it does. You never know when another Boyle will come along and find some evidence that throws everything back to the drawing board.

            Those are some examples of how I view subjectivity, but that doesn’t really explain the effects it has on me and my life. Since this is basically a continuation of my post about compulsion, I’ll explain how it ties in with that. Essentially, embracing subjectivism means that I view different opinions and viewpoints as equal. My beliefs are no more true than anyone else’s, and theirs no more so than mine. Compulsion is one person forcing their way of thinking on another, and that strikes me as wrong. Presenting evidence and working to bring someone to a different point of view is persuasion or informing, which is okay, but forcing a full conclusion is compulsion, which isn’t cool. An example of how I feel about this is pulling out into traffic. If I’m waiting to turn onto a street but pulling out would mean someone already driving along the road would need to slow down then I won’t do it. The other driver probably has a plan to drive along the road at a roughly constant speed, and by pulling in front of them I’m forcing a change in this plan (compelling them to slow down). Just because I desire to get to where I’m going a little bit faster doesn’t give me any right to interfere with someone else’s desire to reach their destination as soon as possible. The burden is on me to respect their desires because I am the one making the choice of when to pull out. I’m in control and can change my own plans without affecting theirs, but the other drive can’t really do the same. This whole situation is greatly complicated if someone is waiting to turn behind me, and usually results in me panicking. But then given a choice I’ll go for the one that least impacts other people.

            Subjectivism also makes me really skeptical. For me, all truth only exists when viewed from a certain perspective and who is to say what it would look like when seen differently. I can believe that the Titanic sunk because it hit an iceberg based on what some history book tells me, but how can I be certain that if I were to actually witness the event I wouldn’t see that it was actually sunk by a time traveling Russian submarine (11 year old me’s theory). The iceberg seems a lot more likely at the moment, but one good piece on evidence could easily shift the balance the other way. I already mentioned my doubts about oxygen. I believe in oxygen because the idea is useful and it can help me explain and predict the world. This doesn’t mean that I would ever say that it’s objectively true, and I’ll always maintain a belief that it could be false. This suspicion of falsehood is something I can and do apply to everything.

 

Is that some Soviet era submarine paint scraped off on the side there?

            After all that theories and opinions are still important to me. In fact they are the thing I find most important. I usually can’t care less about facts and figures, and when I do it’s only in relation to the conclusions that they support. I’m really bad at remembering a person’s eye color or birthday, but I’ll remember if they don’t like the Talking Heads or if they wanted to be a veterinarian growing up. I remember these things because they interest me. This is why I don’t like small talk but love debate. Small talk is usually just an exchange of facts: the weather sure what nice; I grew up in some town; this one time this happened; none of that matters to me. I care about opinions and the ideas that support them: I liked this movie because it made me think; my favorite kind of car is so and so because the styling is whatever, I prefer smooth over chunky peanut butter because it spreads better; this is what I want to talk about. Sure I don’t much care about which team people believe will win the big game, but it’s still better than a list of high scoring players or something. What I really like are ideas I don’t agree with since they present things from a new perspective. New information is always better than the same stuff you already know, and a discussion is vastly improved when it has more than one side. Different conclusions drawn from similar inputs is the core of subjectivity and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            A subjective attitude isn’t all positive though. Depending on how you look at it, it can make me either easygoing or uncaring. I’m not competitive because I believe there are more ways to measure success than by who scored the most points, and I don’t get real upset things don’t go my way since my plans aren’t the one best way for life to be. I consider these good things since they help reduce stress and conflict. Not so good is the fact that I often don’t take things as seriously as I probably should. I have a tendency to simply drop out of troubling situations or feelings with an “Eh, it doesn’t really matter”. Sure this helps me get over mistakes and stuff like that, but I don’t think that it is always the most mature way of dealing with problems. There is a lack of that extra amount of motivation need to solve some problems so they just end up unresolved. Having embraced subjectivism also means that I’m always just one short step full blown nihilism, ennui, or solipsism, which is scary. A love of utility seems to be all that holds these unproductive views at bay. Now that I think about it, desire for utility is another major factor in my personality, but this post is about subjectivism so let’s forget about it (for now).

            To wrap this up, I don’t think that truth is concrete but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. It may be dependent on a specific point of view and initial assumptions, but truth is still useful. Or maybe I’m wrong and objective truth is really a thing. Eh, it doesn’t really matter.