https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VqIou9FxN3c
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. So today, I’d like to discuss perspective and objective reality, and what these concepts are doing and what they’re trying to do, and how we’re interacting with them. Because it’s very important that we understand not the meaning that we’re getting out of things necessarily, but maybe how we’re using the words. Again, we often use words in ways we’re not aware of, and that usage is usually more an accurate depiction of how we intend the word than what we say when we’re talking about that word and how we think other people are using it. And in this, I’m going to propose some definitions for things like objective reality, personal perspective, what perspective means, what commonality is, things like experience, materiality. So these are my ways of understanding and using these terms. And I hope you’ll adopt my perspective, because I think that using my perspective is obviously a better way to do it, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it. And I do try to be careful. But if you decide that this isn’t the way you think about it or isn’t the way you want to think about it, then feel free to throw it out. Or, better yet, try to use it and modify it for your own benefit. So when a lot of people are talking about objective reality, what I think they’re really discussing is objective material reality. And I think there’s a specific reason why they’re discussing objective reality, and even though they mean objective material reality, they often make appeals to it, right? They’ll often say, well, we can both agree that this rock is a rock. It’s like, well, we can both agree to use the name rock or the label rock to describe something, but even the way we would describe the rock is probably vastly different. And if we’re using different descriptions of the same name, are we talking about the same thing? We have lots of little problems with this, and a lot of the objective materialists tend to use the fact of the difference to say, yes, but generally speaking, most people, it’s like, yeah, but that’s not the point. The point is that while it’s democratic to say most people, it misses the point that not everybody. And if we all can’t agree on it, is it objective? I’m not making any claims here or trying not to. I’m just saying when you say objective, because they often say, well, everybody can agree, but everybody can’t agree. There’s almost nothing everybody can agree on, and in fact, there is nothing if you count psychotic people. People with psychotic breakdowns, who have psychotic breakdowns, walk around in a different world. It doesn’t work out very well for them sometimes. Sometimes it works out just fine for them, but they do act as if, and that’s what’s important, because if you’re not acting as if you’re living in the objective material world such as it may be, so you don’t act as if there’s a door where there’s a door, maybe you never go through the door. That might be a problem, but it might not be a problem. It really kind of depends. That’s the thing, though. If I act as though there’s a door there and there’s a door there and it works for me, but you can’t see the door or perceive the door or whatever and you never use it, you’re cut off from reality in some sense, maybe, but you can still do that. Nothing prevents you from acting as if, and that’s where the problems come in. If you act as if killing people is okay, usually we call you a serial killer, then you’ll kill people. Objective material reality is not going to save you from that. I mean, they’ll claim, well, with psychology and if we just knew enough information on the history of the person, we could objective material reality our way to a fix, but that never pans out. They’ve been saying that for hundreds of years by this point. It never works out. So it’s important to understand that we have different perspectives, because we can’t occupy the same space at the same time, and time and entropy are related. So when you do get to the same exact space as somebody else, your interpretation of perceptions is different anyway, even if entropy isn’t a factor. So we’re never perceiving the same things, and that’s not a problem, because there are broad agreements we can have about things, but most of the agreements aren’t about the things, they’re about the importance. Or often they’re about the patterns. And you may say, what does objective material reality have to do with patterns? Well, if I say rock, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about jewelry? Are you thinking about the things you can do with a rock that aren’t jewelry? Are you thinking about the things you can do with a rock that aren’t carried in your pocket to remind you of something? Are you thinking about the things about a rock that have to do with where to put it in your yard, that it will look pretty, or the things that have to do with what you can break with a rock, like a window? Because different people see rocks, and they could all see the same rock, and they could all come up with different uses for the rock. That’s kind of interesting. If you’re looking at the rock thinking, oh, that’s a pretty rock, I know what color scheme that rock would match in my house, like which room it would go in and look good. Well, your reality of the rock is very different from the reality of the rock from the kid who wants to throw it through a window and be destructive with it. That’s not a bad thing. I’m not saying there isn’t a rock. I’m just saying that the utility of labeling it a rock is a little misleading, because rock doesn’t mean the same thing to all the people that view the same rock. That sort of points to the problem with the objectivist view, with this objective material reality view. Objective reality, such as it is, isn’t a very utilitarian way of understanding the world, because different people have different purposes, and it’s the purposes that determine what we do with things. I have very recently gone out into the yard and found sufficiently large rocks to use them as hammers for very specific reasons. Those were hammer rocks, by the way. I dubbed them such, and therefore it must be true. And they did what they needed to do perfectly in ways the hammer couldn’t have done, by the way. So, very efficacious, very useful, very utilitarian. What’s the reality, what’s the material reality behind the rock if I use it as a hammer to bash something, that had a purpose, not to break something, not to bash it to break it, but to bash it to put it in its place, actually, in its proper place? Well, sort of hard to say. But, again, because entropy exists, because our interpretations of our experience exist, and then most of the things in the world are bigger than us. Most of the realities of the world are bigger than you are. They’re bigger than I am. They’re bigger than us. They’re bigger than three and four of us, in many cases. How big is nature? You might say, oh, well, I know exactly how big a tree is. It’s like, yeah, do you? What if that tree is around other trees? Trees communicate underneath the earth, you know, and through the air, in some cases. Hmm, how big is one tree? I don’t even know. Maybe if it’s by itself. I can’t really see the root system, though, and who knows what ties into that root. Where does this end? This categorization is arbitrary, and it’s useful. I’m not saying don’t categorize things. You kind of have to. But even when we categorize things and agree on the categories, again, our purposes are different. Our reasons for engaging are different. The labels are different. Not that the labels need to change. They probably find the way they are. Most of them are old, and they’re old because they work. But we need other people to understand the world. Because my perspective, looking down at something, is different from your perspective, looking up at the same thing. Things are not equally shaped. They’re not equivalent on all sides, at least most of them. And therefore, the experience from different perspectives is different. And it’s a bit like figuring out the elephant by feeling it. I feel part of the elephant. You feel a part of the elephant. We report on what we see. Just the communication is problematic. It might not be precise. But that distributed cognition, the ability to communicate something close to what we’re experiencing, and, by the way, what we care about, so that we can see if we’re caring about the same things, or attending to the same things, or thinking about the same things in the same way, all of that sense-making is really important, because that facilitates distributed cognition. And the distributed cognition, the outsourced cognition, is very important, because we need that, because the world is bigger than us. We are insufficient to understand the world. Most of the knowledge you have about the world was given to you. It may have been given to you incorrectly, by the way. Something you might want to check on. And this is where we get into trouble. When we outsource our sense-making to school authorities, or teachers, or textbooks, or scientists, or authorities in the government, or anything, we run the risk of having that information. And, look, I mean, that’s going to happen. Like, the world isn’t a perfect place. Shocker. Shock ending. Twist surprise. But we have to start somewhere, but we also have to be aware when we’re outsourcing. If you’re watching CNN, or any news organization, you’re outsourcing the new sense-making apparatus to them. Okay? And in some cases, if you prefer that over your observation, you can get in a lot of trouble. There have been incidents, more than one, where people on TV have said, mostly peaceful protests, while there is a large, large fire that could burn them up very easily in the shop behind them. Now, you can choose to believe these people when they make a ridiculous statement like peaceful protests, with a large building on fire behind them, if you wish. But, and I’m not saying that the protests weren’t mostly peaceful, but that’s kind of problematic if there’s a fire, and people are dying in some of these fires. How peaceful is it when people die? I don’t understand. So, if most of the protest is peaceful, and the protest breaks up, and then someone dies, is that okay? Because it was mostly peaceful? I don’t understand what that means. And this is why there’s no objective reality, because both things can be true. It’s just that one of the, quote, true things is being measured differently from how you might measure it yourself. And so they’re using that difference in observation, in usage of word, to convince you of a material objective reality that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. There isn’t a world where peaceful protest has a large fire in it at the same time. That’s not, because whatever your definition of peaceful protest is, is broken. It’s wrong. It’s not helpful to you to believe that things are peaceful when there’s violence going on. It’s not helpful when there’s fires happening, when you could die or be seriously injured. I don’t care how peaceful the protest is. I need to know not to be there. And this is what’s important. This objective material reality concept is maladaptive. It doesn’t help us to understand the world we live in. It doesn’t help us to distribute our cognition. It’s usually an appeal to authority. When people are pulling out the objective reality thing, and they almost always mean objective material reality, what they’re really telling you is, I have access to the truth. When people are using things like, all we need to do is get in happy conversations with people, or better conversations with people, and then everybody will find a way to agree. They’re appealing to objective material reality, because they think that once you see what they see, you’ll agree with them. They’re not being nice. They’re not saying, oh well, look, we’re both going to change our minds slightly and come to the truth. No, they believe they already have the truth, and they just need to find a way to convince you of it. And if they think they have the truth, what they think they have is the objective material reality. And that’s not conducive to distributed cognition, because nobody has the truth. Nobody knows what’s going on. We can only know that together in community, sense making, with similar goals in mind. If your goal is to prove to me that objective material reality exists, and my goal is to find reality, we’re not pointed in the same direction. We’re not aimed at the same thing. We’re not after the same goal. There’s no way to reconcile that, because we have a difference, an ethical difference, a difference of attention. You can’t reconcile a difference of attention with conversation necessarily. That’s not usually how that works. You’re not going to make me care about objective material reality. It’s not going to happen. I don’t think it exists. Not in the form you think it exists anyway. And we need that distributed cognition. We need proper communication. Even if it’s imprecise. We need that. But it’s hard to agree on these things, because we have different senses. We don’t even know what cilantro tastes like. There’s 12% of the population that thinks it tastes like soap. I don’t think it tastes like soap. I think it tastes delicious. But 12% of the population thinks it tastes like soap. There’s a lot of things like this. Even our sense of smell and taste is so different from person to person that these objective material things don’t have the same experience. So really, when we’re talking about these things, it’s a personal perspective. It’s a subjective interpretation. And yeah, there are some commonalities. And when we have common aims, we’re more likely to find commonalities. And that’s important. It’s more important to talk to somebody with a common aim about something common than it is to talk to somebody who knows everything about that common thing. Because what they know may not be in alignment with your aim. It may not matter at all to you. And if they’re trying to convince you that it should, all they want to do is tell you you should pay attention to what they pay attention to. And look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Maybe you should. I don’t know. But you should be aware of the manipulation. You should be aware of people trying to tell you things like, oh, conversation. We’ll just fix the world. Right? We all have different senses. We all have a different subjective experience. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean we’re alone in the world and lost. Right? What we usually do is make up stories. And these stories give us and others common handles to grasp onto. They help us to circumambulate things. Right? So that in a story, you don’t only in a good story, you don’t only tell what it is you’re talking about. You also tell why you care about it. Why you’re attending to it. Why it’s important to you. What’s important. And all the things you noticed that might be important but you’re not sure about. A good story does this. It helps to circumambulate the topic so that you have some sense that you can impart to others in your poor communication style because we all suck at communicating what it is you’re on about. And that’s the importance of stories is to help us get around these personal perspectives. Right? To disavow us the idea of an objective perspective and get us into the idea of a personal relationship. And then once we see the personal relationship that the other person has in story, we can grab onto that. We don’t need objective material reality. We don’t need it. What we need is to pay attention to the same important things. Those highest things that are above us that help us to cooperate in distributed cognition together to understand the world. To make the invariant patterns intelligible to us and to others. My communication style might not work for everyone so maybe your communication style can work for other people to communicate the same thing. That’s the best I can do. That’s the best you can do. That’s the best we all can do. But if we’re all doing our best, everything will get better. The only way to make the world better is to make yourself better. That’s enough. Thank you for your time and attention.