On subjectivity
This is the part I find most puzzling.
Subjectivity is your private experience of the world: your sensations; your mental life and inner landscape; your experiences of sweet and bitter, blue and gold, soft and hard; your beliefs, plans, pains, hopes, fears, theories, imagined vacation trips and gardens and girlfriends and Ferraris, your sense of right and wrong, good and evil. This is your subjective world. It is just as real as the objective physical world.
I wonder what it could even mean to say that a person's subjective world is real. Calling it "real" seems like an attempt to pseudo-objectify it. And once you attempt to objectify it, you are on the path to declaring that it doesn't exist.
If Gelernter wants to value the subjective, then he should avoid talk of subjective states, since such state talk is but another attempt to pseudo-objectify the subjective. Yet Gelernter wants to insist on giving mental states an important place. I doubt that he has thought this through.
---Steve
No comments:
Post a Comment