Comment by txrx0000

> But look closely. Redness, heat and that sense of self you have are inherent to your own perspective. These things are all real, but at the same time there is nothing objective about them. There is not even anything objective about the existence of a singular, indivisible “you”, as a wealth of neuroscientific evidence (such as split-brain patients) has shown. Subjectivity is, itself, subjective.

I am looking closely, and this is nonsense. You cannot use neuroscientific evidence to justify the non-existence of the ideal observer when the modern scientific method axiomatically depends on the existence of ideal observers. You can't refute the thing while accepting that very thing.

What exactly do you mean by "real" or "objective"? What is the basis of your definition? Isn't your definition of "objective" based on your own observation? And if your own observation has nothing to do with mine because you claim "nothing is objective", then why should I care about your definitions and reasoning at all? Why converse at all? Your definition of every word need not share anything in common with mine, so there's no point in talking, according to your epistemic framework.

The article is mostly bathwater, but I will try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. To steelman the tiny bit of valuable intuition:

The two of us are looking at an apple on the table. Even when we look at this same apple, we still do not have the same definition of "this specific apple" because I'm looking at the fruit from a slightly different angle. And even if we rotate the fruit so that we both see it from all angles, the sequence in which we saw the "frames" would be different. That said, our definitions would end up being extremely similar, just not one and the same. If all experience turns out to be this way - having no identical correspondence - then a unified model of physics, which is supposed to describe and predict the behavior of everything (as observed by oneself) would be equivalent to a complete description of (one's own) consciousness. Frontier physics is likely stuck right now due to unexamined assumptions about observation (i.e. the assumption that the definition of "observer" or "observation" must be universally identical).

But this cannot be taken to mean that one's own consciousness is necessarily not objectively real. It may be that there are simply many objectively real entities, with each of them having their own definition of "consciousness" based on themselves, and every definition is at least slightly different. This is not the same as "consciousness is a socially given status". It just means that the phenomena used to define the word "consciousness" is always at least slightly different from person to person. We already know this. This does not only apply to consciousness, but to all words, all communication.

If I do not accept that my own consciousness is ultimately real regardless of whether other people/animals/things/whatever agree (def "consciousness": the thing that goes away when I'm under dreamless anesthesia or dreamless sleep, which is also the thing that I gained sometime after being born but didn't have prior to that), then there is nothing for me to define "ultimately real" or "objective" with, and I'd be reasoning in circles or with empty symbols where "subjective" and "objective" accidentally mean the same thing or perhaps even nothing at all. And that's what this Economist article did.

There is an I am, a sense of self in the here and now which defines my very concept/understanding of "reality"/"existence"/"consciousness", and this one miracle is presented in my face all of the time. It is the starting point of all that I know, which precedes the very concepts of reason, language, or society as I know them, if I am to be honest about how I came to know these things in the first place. I can entertain the notion that my existence may have material grounding that is non-unitary (and this materialist stance may be the only practical stance with predictive power), but this does not give me the ability to deny the very axiom (that is, my own consciousness) that all of my knowledge (including the materialist model) is contingent on.