Through recent discussions, I’ve found myself wanting to clarify where my own sympathies lie.

I find myself strongly resonating with the view associated with Merleau-Ponty — the idea that we cannot be certain that an objective world exists as a fully completed structure, entirely independent of observation or engagement.

This is not a denial of the world’s existence. Rather, it is a refusal to take for granted the assumption that the world is given to us as a finished object, already complete before any encounter with it.

We are not beings who apprehend the world from a completely detached, external standpoint. We are embodied, acting, perceiving beings who are always already involved with it — through movement, observation, and interaction.

In that sense, objectivity seems less like something guaranteed prior to experience, and more like something that gradually stabilizes through engagement, sharing, and repetition.

This is not the claim that “everything is subjective.” It is simply the sense that we do not need to presuppose a purely observer-independent, unquestionably objective world in order to think meaningfully about reality at all.

  • pcalau12i@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I tend to side with Francois-Igor Pris who argues that you cannot meaningfully have a philosophy that both includes an objective world and also describes it as dependent upon observation/engagement without it running into an infinite regress.

    We can only ever know that our act of observation disturbs a system by comparing it to a more subtle form of observation which presumably does not or perturbs it very little. We know the Hawthorne effect is real because you can compare an experiment where a person is observed in a very obvious way where they are clearly aware of it to one where the observation is secretive, and interviewing them later you can confirm they were not aware of it.

    But if we are talking about reality being fundamentally dependent upon observation, then this dependence applies to all observations by definition, and thus there is no such thing as a non-subtle observation that you could compare it to. You could never actually empirically confirm that your act of observation is something that is active that physically alters the system. You would have no control to compare

    Indeed, there is kind of an infinite regress here that Pris explains in his book Контекстуальный квантовый реализм и другие интерпретации квантовой механики.

    1. If observation is taken to be an active process that alters the system, then the properties of the system are observer-dependent, in the sense that the observed facts depend on an interaction between observer and system. It therefore becomes necessary to explain how this interaction itself gives rise to the definite facts that are observed.
    2. But an interaction between two systems cannot, by itself, constitute an observed fact. Any interaction can only be identified as such from the standpoint of a third system relative to which the interaction has determinate features.
    3. This third system must itself observe or register the interaction, which again requires an interaction that alters the combined system.
    4. If this observation is also treated as an active, perturbing process, then it too requires a further system to account for how it produces definite facts.
    5. Repeating this reasoning leads to an infinite regress: every observation that is supposed to produce facts must itself be observed in order to become a fact.
    6. Therefore, any theory that treats observation as a physical interaction responsible for generating facts cannot, on its own terms, account for the existence of facts without either an arbitrary stopping point or an infinite regress.

    Observation at a fundamental level has to be treated as passive, and thus must always be treated as observer-independent or else it leads to a vicious logical circle. An objective world (one that contains “facts”) that is observer-dependent is just not logically consistent.

    This does seem a bit strange, because clearly what I observer is different from what you observe, so it seems like there is a kind of “observer-dependence.” But what the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist has argued as well as Pris is that we should distinguish between observer-dependence and contextuality.

    If I am sitting on a bench and see a moving train go by, and you are inside the train, we will both perceive the train to be traveling at different velocities. Velocity is sometimes described as “observer-dependence,” but this implies that velocity somehow depends upon the existence of conscious observers and is thus subjective, when this is wrong. Velocity is clearly an objective feature of the world and has no fundamental dependent upon conscious observers, as you can define velocity even relative to inanimate things like a rock that is sitting beside the track.

    The physical reality of velocity would be obvious if I stepped onto the tracks in the path of the train. You would not be harmed, as you are riding the train thus its velocity from your perspective is zero, but I would be harmed because the velocity of the train in my perspective is non-zero. No one would be surprised if I got harmed because “velocity is subjective” or “observer-dependent,” we all intuitively understand that velocity is a real, objective feature of the world.

    The main premise of “contextual realist” philosophy as Benoist and Pris call it is to remove the anthropomorphic character from this kind of difference in perspective, to stop calling it “observer-dependent” as if conscious observers play some sort of fundamental role here. It is more accurate to call it contextual. You and I perceive the train to travel at different velocities because we are perceiving it under different contexts.

    Contextual realism takes all physical properties of the world to be contextual in the sense that they only can be meaningfully assigned an ontology once you specify the context under which it is realized. The train’s velocity, between you and I, is realized in a different context, and so it really is ontologically different. Contextual realism extends this to all things. All of reality is context-dependent, but not observer-dependent. The conscious observer plays no fundamental role, and what they observe is always, on a fundamental level, passive and just identifies what is really there, but what is there depends upon the context under which the observation is made.