In the previous posts, I asked whether questions or observations can create reality, or whether they instead form an intersection where reality appears.
I now want to sharpen the issue.
Many discussions seem to assume that there is a fully formed, objective structure of reality “out there,” and observation merely reveals it.
But what if objectivity itself is not prior to observation, and instead emerges through repeated, shared intersections of perspectives?
In that case, observation would not be a causal force, nor a passive recording device, but a stabilizing process.
My question is simple but uncomfortable:
Can we meaningfully talk about a “purely objective structure” without already presupposing a standpoint from which it is identified as such?
I’m curious where others locate objectivity: before observation, after it, or nowhere at all.
If objectivity requires the removal of all standpoints, who or what is left to recognize it as “objective”?
That’s a very clear way of putting it, and I find your position quite persuasive. We may not be able to know whether the external world truly exists, but by assuming that our senses and memories are not fundamentally deceiving us, we can make meaningful predictions about the consequences of our actions, and only then does intentional action become possible. I agree with that.
What I find myself wondering, though, is where the validity of that assumption itself is stabilized.
If our judgments about whether predictions succeed or fail already take place within some framework of expectations, then it seems that we are not directly confirming the world “as it is,” but rather checking whether our interaction with the world is cohering well enough to support action.
In that sense, I’m less interested in the binary question of whether reality exists or not, and more interested in the conditions under which prediction, action, and revision form a stable loop.
From your perspective, where do you think that stability ultimately resides? In the world itself, in our cognitive capacities, or in the relation between the two?