Subjective reality
I noticed some of the texts I wrote here or the views I share with some people often revolve around the idea that everything is subjective, without actually elaborating. I'll try here to explain what I believe in. (I'm pretty sure there's a philosophical name for this way of thinking, but I don't really care.)
Of course, the views I hold I haven't thought of alone: most of my beliefs (like many of us) come from many places, wether I can remember where or not. I'm not exposing anything new here, rather simply writing some thoughts on e-paper and hoping it'll make sense in the end. This document will therefore not have a real structure.
Each and every one of us lives in their own reality (with its set of values, ideals et cetera) which is not shared by anyone else and, most importantly, completely hermetic. There is no "noosphere"; it is a concept invented from the ground up that holds no weight outside of our individual realities. While that may sound like stating the obvious (and it frankly is), the important thing to note is that whatever one experiences in their reality does not affect others. This is deeper than it seems, because while we often take for granted the notion that beliefs are something that is entirely subjective, we don't think this way when it comes to what we call knowledge or facts; them too are completely subjective, as everything else we think, see or experience. From the faintest of feelings to the most reliable piece of knowledge that we possess, everything only exists in our individual realities, nowhere else. This is not to say that the heat the sun is radiating is only confined in your personal world, but that the experience of that heat is. This doesn't mean that we have control on all our experiences, but that each of them are personal and therefore can change dramatically from person to person. There is no fundamental difference between two people having a different opinion on something and two persons, one with average eyesight, the other colorblind, sit in front of a red and a green lamp and seeing different colours.
Senses are pretty easy to understand: be it our sight, hearing sense of smell or whatever known or unknown sense that we possess, Those are enclosed in our respective realities. People seeing, tasting or hearing may not have the same experience. We find this simple enough to understand— in fact most find this pretty normal. But this simple concept rules everything else we can think about.
As said above, something that is entirely subjective is knowledge. We all take the facts we know about this or that as... well, facts. But facts are themselves entirely subjective. The concept itself doesn't exist— they are simply widespread beliefs. It sounds at first very stupid to say that facts as simple as "water wets" aren't actually facts, but it only sounds stupid because we all believe in them. Our mind created this abstract concept called "fact" and dumps in it every concept it believes are true and unchanging. Yes, some facts appear to us to be completely rock-solid and impossible to disprove (we think, rightly, that water will millions of years from now still wet), but debating wether X or Y fact is sound or unfounded isn't the point I want to get across. I believe that facts are synonymous with widely accepted beliefs because at the end of the day, we cannot truely, without a doubt be sure that any fact that we hold is correct, no matter how dumb this may sound. Yes, we can even start arguing about the wetness-inducing qualities of water: no matter how we look at it, we have NO way of knowing it'll still wet tomorrow. This isn't to say that I have doubts, I don't, but that the qualities we attribute to water are not, and were never, facts. They seem timeless because they've alway been there, and as a result they've been dumped into this mental category we believe is the same for everyone, everywhere, everytime. However, this category called "fact" stems from nothing, and can change from person to person. (Science is not spared by this idea, see the file "Holy Science".) Moreover, History constantly shows us that facts are forever changing. History books abound with very good examples, but we don't even need to go further than our own lives: it is oh-so easy to remember a moment when an idea we took as a fact was disproved. In hindsight it's very easy to say it was a belief all along, and this is precisely why we always think of facts as "true", they've technically never been proven wrong.
facts are reassuring: they make us think the world can be known, that there's a logic behing everything. If I go back to the idea that reality is subjective, of course they can't work; nothing is the same for everyone, all the time. Knowledge itself is immensely useful, but cannot be used to prove anything. I'd describe it as a mental construction of ideas, or a story we constantly keep modifying, but with no explicit connection to the real world. Knowledge is not "things", but is "about the things", or a series of symbols pointing to other symbols or events humans experienced. At the end of the day, every piece of knowledge can be rooted back to something someone experienced, then described. However, the thing described isn't the "real" thing, but the experience which that someone had of that thing. This cannot be stressed enough: there is NO real link between a thing and the knowledge on that thing. One is physical, the other mental concepts. The link between the two is our doing and also a mental concept.
Words are a perfect example of a symbol. A word is about something, but isn't the actual thing, the link we make between the two is completely arbitrary. Moreover, the meaning changes between people or with time, sometimes ever-so slightly, sometimes radically. We live our entire lives relying daily on something as subjective as language, seldom realizing how much it is.
If the very words of all languages is subjective, it then shouldn't be surprising to realize that everything we build upon is, too, subjective. Damn useful, this shouldn't be forgotten, but subjective. I recently thought about the Ship of Theseus, a philosophical problem where a boat that never leaves the dock is slowly deteriorating and the original parts are slowly being swapped for new ones. At the end, all the parts of that ship are new, and someone uses the old planks to rebuild a second ship. The problem is then: which of the two is the original ship? Is it the one that is still at the original position, but made of new planks, or the other one, which completely reused the old planks? Some say it's the first, or the second, or something way more out there. But this problem does not actually exist outside of our minds. The concept of "property" or "identity" are completely abstract and have no weight in the real world. We chose to call that thing a ship, we chose to view it as something unique and we are now embarassed when what we thought simple is no longer so.
And if one of the two ships still feels like the original ship, consider the following. When we buy a light bulb at a store, we'd now consider this is our light bulb. However, we'd also agree that the light bulb hasn't changed between the time before and after we bought it. It's still the same light bulb, in no way its qualities have somehow changed to make it our light bulb. If we give it to a scientist, he'd be able to tell us plenty of things on it, but not that it's ours. It's just a belief, which never left our mind, or reality. It is entirely subjective, and it is the same thing for every other concept that we hold. This goes way beyong words: we often feel some kind of attachement to something we believe is ours. This is also subjective, for the same reasons. Wether knowledge takes the form of sentences or stays at the level of vague impressions, it still is enclosed in our own realities.
Something even harder to grasp is that absolutely everything we can think about are concepts which do not exist in reality. Mathematics, politics, religions, species, science, astrology, geography, gender, nationality, any kind of mental categorization is man-made and so artificial. Most of our realities are shaped against them, but they do not exist outside of our minds. In regard specifically to categorizations, we can see that they aren't natural because whichever one we choose to look at, we will always, always find edge cases. i.e. things which cannot enter nicely into one category. People living on the border between two countries, impossible-to-label music discs, political views impossible to accurately represent on the political compass, newly discovered animals not belonging to any known family of species... The list goes from the most mundane to the most precise of categories. Again, categories are useful, no doubt about it. But this doesn't make them any realer.
A huge majority of us cannot help but think. I say it's almost an illness. We have to remember that everything we think about not only exists purely within our mind, therefore has NO effect on the world around us, but that the meaning we give to our thoughts is entirely subjective. People react differently to the same event, remember different things of said event, then attibute different meanings to the resulting memories. It can be different because it's completely enclosed in their respective reality. If you have bad memories of an event, you cannot blame the event as it had absolutely nothing to do with how you interpreted it. It's neutral, in a way. You are the only person giving meaning to it. This text isn't an incentive to become a stoic, but the point here is that if we feel down in our lives, we should ask ourselves if feeling down really is the sensible path to take. Of course nothing will change just like that, but at least with this way of viewing things all the cards are in our hands.
Our whole life, we are constantly being presented the "truth", from a God, a politician, scientists, our parents, our colleagues at work, etc. But no "truth" really exists: there are just stories, built upon mental concepts, that keep changing, gaining or losing believers. Most stories aim for the betterment of mankind, but use different criteria. Economic growth, faith, planetary boundaries, immigration... At the end of the day, whichever one we choose, we choose it because we think it's the best on for us, our family, and most likely others. But, like everything else until now, those stories are based on thin air. That doesn't mean that they will all equally well "save our world", some are horrible at that, but that when it comes to promoting the one we think is the best fit, we're all fighting on equal terms, no matter how right/wrong we think we/they are.
Saying that thoughts have no relation to the "real" world has profound implications, one of them would be the changes that should be brought to the knowledge we have of ourselves. My relation to self-knowledge is by what I started this whole "questioning" phase, thanks to someone who goes by Jamie online. (If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend you watch his hour-long video diving deeply into self-knowledge, he will explain everything on that subject way better than anything here.) Knowledge, as written above, has no real link to reality apart from the one that we make ourselves. This is the same thing for self-knowledge: we don't know ourselves because the thing that we know about is not us but a concept, or image, representing ourselves. It's impossible to know ourselves because whatever we think about is by definition a thought, NOT the thing it represents. All our relatives have an image of ourselves, each different from the image we have, itself different of "the real us" which we are unable to think about (because if we think about it, that would be a thought of it, therefore not "it"). If one is insulted by someone, he himself isn't hurt (no scars, nothing), his self-image, a concept, is. It should then feel pretty strange that almost everyone is so scared of seeing their self-image hurt when it is a man-made concept which, in reality, doesn't exist. Yes, we are constantly worried over something which doesn't exist. But because we have done so for so long, it feels impossible to break the cycle.
Here are my thoughts about our world, which you may have seen somewhere before. I'm sure I didn't invent anything. Our world is strange, and any explanation is challenged by countless others. Some may say that, going by the logic that anything is subjective, this way of thinking contradicts itself; that if concepts do not exist, this theory doesn't exist either, therefore everything falls flat. Apart from the idea that since it contradicts itself, it shoud be discarded (if you think that, you're stupid), it's true; the concept itself of subjective reality doesn't exist either. It doesn't because anything we think of, be it with words or something more primitive, doesn't exist. The idea of subjective reality is used as a vessel to try and communicate something that cannot be thought of, and so cannot be shared. (Using the word "something" is already a mistake.) This theory feels self-contradictory because it is, but I believe it is that way because it's been created with thoughts which according to it are flawed and don't exist, but are at the same time the only tools we have.
Let's pretend this theory is right, what changes then? Not much, really. But going by this theory allows us to see the world and its problems under a different light. An idea I have, for example, concerns the main "story" we should believe in. If we agree that most political views are built from mountains of ideas and symbols which don't really exist and that the only thing which has direct repercussions on us humans as a whole is the physical world (which we cannot know, simply observe and try to describe as faithfully as possible), then it would make sense to believe in the story that gives the most weight to the physical world. In other words, what scientists say. (And they currently say that we're fucking the planet REAL hard.) This is why, I believe, this story is the sanest one to believe in (of course, make of that what you will). Other heuristics of this sort likely exist.
Added 2025-03-15, edited whenever