a question

"Does Objective Reality Exist?"

Posed in an online community I'm a part of, but not a place where I can really handle this sort of debate. But the question is still taking over my brain and I know the only cure is to get my thoughts all worked out in words I can see and confirm. And I mean, a blog that makes a claim like mine needs to deal with what that means, right?

My initial reaction is "define 'objective.' Define 'reality.'
...
"define 'existence.'"

maybe once all that is cleared up we will really be able to find an answer.

My second thought is, "why is this question relevant?"

The closest thing I can come up with for a definition of something that is real, that exists (that doesn't rely on hoo-ha like the philosophical jargon of epistomology and ontology and, well, philosophical hoo-ha to cover up circular reasoning, essentially unprovable assumptions and general ignorance), is anything that is observable. If you can see it, or its effects on the things you can see, than its real. If you can't observe it, you can't ever know whether its real or not and it will never affect you anyway, since as soon as it begins affecting you or something else that affects you
it become observable and therefore real and not a part of the set of things we cannot observe.

But this kind of definition is inherently subjective, because reality expands every time we learn new ways of observing.

Basically, if there is some kind of objective reality, we will only know it once we have run out of things to learn. Which, unless Heisenberg is wrong, we can never do. Until someday maybe we learn that Heisenberg is wrong, when we learn a new method of observing and find a new set of observable things, and "reality" changes.
And let's assume, perhaps, that objective reality does exist, but we can't observe it. What does that mean?

I think the closest we can get is a definition of reality that accounts for as many subjective truths as possible. If you have a thing in motion, and you want to understand its "objectively real" motion, presumably you would need to know how it moves in terms of as many frames of reference as possible. Unless of course, special relativity is wrong and we do find a universal frame of reference. Really that's as close as my mind can get to an objective truth: a universal frame of reference. But of course, no such thing has been observed. Special relativity in its current form (which does still include that bit about inertial frames of reference) is the best we can get right now to accounting for our observations. It's as close as we are to "reality." If we observe something new, that clearly contradicts relativity, what we know of reality changes.

My other point with this is that, even if we can account for all possible frames of reference, if they are in fact all equally valid, that doesn't make them all equally useful. Being able to understand the "objective reality" of an object may actually be completely counterproductive. If I want to navigate around it, all I need is to compare it to my own frame of reference, and maybe a couple other nearby objects. That choice, of which frame of reference to use at any particular time, is inherently subjective. I believe that even if it were humanly possible to perceive an "objective reality," it wouldn't make any sense. We would become hopelessly lost and overwhelmed. And even a computer that was capable of storing the whole of that objective reality (what does that mean for the computer? Can something contained within reality contain the sum of that reality?) , in order to do something with it, it can't use all of that data simultaneously for every calculation. The process of understanding, of making sense, is a process of eliminating information that is not useful. Our brains discard a huge quantity of the information they receive all the time, and if they didn't we'd be paralyzed, incapable of identifying what to react to in our environment. Having an effect doesn't always mean having an important effect. So why should I be trying to learn an objective reality at all? Personally, all I ask for is a reality that is good enough to get me through the day, along with the ability to recognize when my working reality isn't "real enough" anymore and to expand that reality to something that is enough.

And another part of me, the part that has spent too much time with cross-cultural psychology and Ursula K. LeGuin says, that argument, and indeed the whole question, is twisted. It assumes logic: Either objective reality exists, or it doesn't. Either we can observe it or we can't. Logic is a human construction. A useful one so far, but no one told the universe it had to obey the rules of logic. Isn't that the point of Shroedinger's cat? That either-or statements don't apply at the quantum level? According to our best current approximation of reality, the universe at its most fundamental level does not follow logic. Existence and nonexistence, contradictory to the rules of logic, are simultaneous. Until you bring in subjectivity, observation. If subjectivity can have observable effects on the universe, does it make sense to exclude it from some kind of privileged definition of reality?

Godel also more or less proved that consistent systems of logic are insufficient to capture reality. Hell, they're insufficient to capture their own implications, never mind all the stuff that your starting assumptions are probably leaving out. So even if we find objective reality, we can never "prove" it to a Western logician; the only kind of person who'd pose such a silly question in the first place.

I am already all kinds of long-winded, and I haven't even touched on the definition of "objective."

An individual more brave than I responds by saying that if there is no objective reality, then either solipsism (my mind is creating reality) or collective solipsism (our agreement on what is real is creating reality) must be true, and then objects to both, basically on gut "I don't like them" kinds of grounds. Well, actually by stating the contradictory thesis that many more possibilities than solipsism and collective solipsism exist, and then concluding with "Let's go with Objective Reality. It's the simplest explanation that violates the fewest laws of the universe as we know them."

Which sounds a whole lot like collective solipsism to me. We may not be "creating" reality in a positive sense (other than by our actions and their observable effects on the world) but we are still defining it in terms of what we already know, which is necessarily subjective and changing all the time. In what sense is that an objective reality?

And just to be a total ass, the very concept of "reality" is one we made up. Its definition, like all the definitions of the key words in this question, is subjective, and also depends on the definitions of the other words in the question in a beautiful chain of circular reasoning that I cannot seem to pin down. Isn't reifying the concept of reality, of existence and objectivity, a subjective process? Are we not, in effect, "creating" reality with our minds?

Which is not only an asshole argument but sticky as well since the concept of "reification" depends on the existence of a distinction between subjective and objective.

Am I saying there is no distinction? I don't know. Much as I resist the concept of some kind of ultimate objective reality, I also resist the idea that the subjective and objective cannot be distinguished. There have to be observations. Those observations may be inescapably filtered through a subjective lens, but you still need more than the observer alone for anything to happen. Perhaps it is this interaction between observer and observed that produces a reality that is partly personal and partly shared. Perhaps subjective and objective, rather than being opposed, either-or, logic-style, are just two anchors on a continuum. On one end is your own personal frame of reference that nothing else in the universe shares, and on the other end is all possible frames of reference. Which we can never actually attain, only approach asymptotically until we (basically subjectively) decide that we are close enough and can settle back into the reality we've found, until some new observation comes along to expand it.

speculations on gender

I don't believe in essentializing biology, I promise. Biology is far from destiny. Pick any "biologically" defined group you like -- sex, race, cranial bumps, somatotype, etc -- and even when there are statistically significant differences between groups, if the groups are broad enough (if, say, close to everyone in the world is one of two sexes, or one of four or five races, instead of talking about small groups of people unusually high or low on a particular trait), there is almost always more variation within the groups than between them. Which means that differences at a group level are nearly useless when you are working at an individual level.

But this does not mean that I am not acutely aware of the fact that "I" cannot be separated from my biology. Every thought I have is both a cause and effect of changes in my body and would not have happened without that body.
"I" do not exist without biology, therefore "I" am affected by biology. And while there's only so much I can know about the details of another person's body, I know I share more biological similarities with other women than with other men. And sometimes that is important.

It seems to me that too often a rush to deny difference comes from the belief that difference is bad. That the nominal default category represents the most desirable state, and to acknowledge deviation from that default is to imply an intrinsic inferiority. Being "color-blind" is a privilege of the white, and it does not really mean treating everyone as if race did not exist, it means treating everyone as if they were white, because whiteness is the cultural default. (Try looking for English novels or newspaper articles not explicitly marketed to people of color where the white people are identified by race as often as the non-white. For a "mass," white-by-default audience, race is only an identifying feature if it is not the default), Noticing someone's non-whiteness is only an insult if non-whiteness is undesirable, so claiming "color-blindness" is a way of saying that being not-white is undesirable, which is a racist attitude if I ever heard one.

Likewise, maleness is the cultural default gender--everyone is male unless otherwise specified. Claiming that to ignore difference from maleness is a way to combat sexism means that the only way to erase female inferiority is to erase femaleness--because femaleness is, by definition, inferior. But you cannot begin to build a society that offers justice to women until you recognize the existence of women and the importance of womanhood as a social category.

I don't buy a goddamn word of it. I am not a man, and I am not the same as a man, and I want to be acknowledged as a woman. But being a woman means one thing and one thing only: I am a person who identifies as a woman. It does not tell anyone anything about my worth or skills as a person.

A New One

I am a fickle blogger. But sometimes I want a place to write certain things without the awkwardness of people I know personally reading them. So here we are. I have lots of thoughts and very few conclusions. And I am back on blogger, to explore them with the interweb.