Monday, October 28, 2024

Objectively Subjective

Pain is pain, and all pain is mental.  These are examples of logical truths about pain.  Without a mind, their could be no pain, since it is an experience of anguish within the mind.  Even physical pain, and physical pleasure or any other bodily sensation for the same reason, requires mental experience as well as a body, without which there would be only an inanimate lump of material tissue with nothing engaging in perception and no suffering to be perceived.  Since mental experience is subjective, this makes pain and other experiences objectively subjective.

Pain of the exact same objective intensity could be experienced by various people as if it is to differing extents.  Does this mean there are no objective truths about pain?  No!  That pain is subjectively perceived by an individual is one truth.  Pain could not have existed in any form if its presence contradicted logical axioms (it does not), rendering it metaphysically impossible, for logical axioms are not arbitrary presuppositions or just potentially true on an unverifiable level, but they are true in themselves because their falsity still requires their veracity.  No truth is subjective, but there are truths about subjectivity, and thus about things like pain that can only exist within experience.

One such foundational truth about subjectivity is that all experience is subjective.  There is no such thing as people avoiding the inherently subjective nature of experience because they look to groups instead of a sole person's experience [1], as if their own mind is not the only one they can know unless they were to not be under human limitations.  Gazing at trees during a forest walk is a subjective act whether or not the trees are objectively there beyond one's mind--the sensory perceptions objectively exist within one's mind either way.  Emotions and dreaming, while typically more passive, involve subjective experience: that is, they occur strictly within minds.

A person can allow themselves by passivity or by the active embrace of assumptions to stray from only believing in that which is objectively true and demonstrable, for something could be true without being knowable.  To do the opposite would mean they start with the epistemologically self-evident intrinsic truths of reason, as well as the objective self-evidence of their own conscious existence, and discover other logically necessary truths.  Ideological deviation from the objectively self-necessary truths of logic entails turning towards subjective persuasion or preference as a basis of belief, but this does not mean that anyone, by virtue of being conscious, makes assumptions based upon their subjective experiences.  Nothing can be true that contradicts logic, though it is possible for people to believe in anything they would subjectively like to, no matter how impossible or unverifiable it is.

However, all logical truths about subjectivity are objective, true by logical necessity independent of recognition or belief or emotional appeal.  Objective reality is knowable wherever there are logically necessary truths that are not locked beyond human epistemological limitations (for instance, while it could only be true or false that my memory of an event is accurate, I have no way to prove that the memory is correct).  All thoughts are still experienced subjectively by minds, and there are by necessity objective necessary truths about subjectivity.  Experience in its totality is objectively subjective and nothing about logical necessities or the real nature of one's immediate thoughts, such as one's worldview or intentions, is beyond one's ability to know them.


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