Quotes About Subjectivity

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying there are only facts," I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Thus, radical psychologists ask us: does not the reality of schizophrenia or art remain real to those in schizophrenic or artistic states, however senseless these states appear to the non-schizophrenic or non-artistic? Anthropologists even ask: do not the emic realities of other cultures remain existentially real to those living in those cultures, however bizarre they may seem to the Geriatric White Male hierarchy that defines official reality in our culture?

1. People who meet Mr. A when he has the Oral Submissive self predominant, will remember him as that sort of person. People who meet him when he has the Semantic/rational self predominant remember him as another sort of person. Etc.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.

Ultimately, what we find in any experience, sexual or otherwise, depends upon our own emotional energy field. We can see a small mountain above a deep valley, or a shallow valley with a tall mountain towering over it.

It seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

Even Aristotle, despite the abuse he has suffered in these pages, had enough common sense to point out, once, that I see always contains fallacy; we should say I have seen. Time always elapses between the impact of energy on the eye and the creation of an image (and associated name and ideas) in the brain, which explains why three eyewitnesses to a hit-and-run such as we postulate here may report, not just the blue Ford of the first speaker, but a blue VW or maybe even a green Toyota.

What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows – i.e., that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughing-stocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.

Evidently, if Lise had expected to meet Jesus and his 12 apostles and copulate with all of them in turn, that is what she would have remembered afterward.

Words do not equal in space-time the things or events they denote, yet people react to a choice between words as if making a choice between real things or events in the existential world.

It begins to seem that no one reality-tunnel is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

To the Idolator, events really are what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be mad or bad — delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar.

The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist.

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the "tickets" or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.