Subjective and Objective

Subjective and Objective is a title of a well-known paper by Thomas Nagel. In this paper, Nagel explores irreducibility of reducing qualitative subjective views of the world to quatitative objective facts about the world. Should we reduce our experience of Red to the phsyical explanation of what happens when one agent standing at spot X at time X reports seeing Red.

Nagel says it is a folly to expect this reduction to be complete. Some pieces of the qualitative experience will not be explained in the terms of physics - specificly all the pieces that are qualitative.

In my opinion, a partial reduction is desirable. After all, reducing and seeking to explain qualitative experiences of red to measurable, calcuable ones just is itself the scientific game. And it has done us much good. As a matter of fact, this could be a simple definition of science: The reduction of experienced phenomenon into measurable units.

But, these explanations will always leave often the most human, interesting things behind. Nagel says we should be in a sense comfortable with this. I add that we shouldn't be too comfortable. The fools desire to chip away at the qualitative experience in order to bring it into the quantitative fold is fruitful as we gain knowledge; though the task can not, by its defintion, be complete.


Perhaps Nagel would agree.

One thing to think about: Should we think of the qualitative and quantitative phenom as two seperate worlds or two perspectives on one world. Since one is irreducible to the other, the answer is one we will never know. We so fallibile....