Quotes About Subjectivity

I'm not a huge fan of other people's logic.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

Humility is the power to admit that you may be wrong. Admitting to false beliefs is not weakness, it is the first step on the path to truth. And make no mistake, there is no such thing as individual truth, only individual perception. Perception is subjective, but truth isn't.

Ontology is more like a playground than a science.

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process

What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long. I find parts that overlap with mine and light them up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink, the flicker of his mouth a purple rust.

The book's always better than the movie.

Je est un autre.

Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they always say the same thing: 'This looks much better on.' on what? On fire?

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average personal values, all of which must be quantitively different or trade would be impossible.

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.

Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.

I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you're using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which 'real' reality can be seen; we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

An elementary example: I can give a physicist, or a chemist, a book of poems. After study, the scientist can report back that the book weighs x kilograms, measures y centimeters in thickness, has been printed with ink having a certain chemical formula and bound with glue having another chemical formula etc. But scientific study cannot answer the question, Are these good poems? (Science in fact cannot answer any questions with is or are in them, but not all scientists realize that yet.)

Back in the Vietnam War days, I attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations and the police's crowd-count never agreed with the organizers' count. My own observations never gave me clear reason to believe anybody's estimate. I don't know how people judge the size of large crowds, or how they can use techniques they sincerely believe have "objectivity." Even in looking at spilled marbles, I think people estimate very subjectively.

If we never describe anything as it is but only as it appears to our minds, we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all: