DIMENSIONS OF REALITY
1.3
Reality – the Objective
Let’s begin with a fairly intuitive understanding of reality – reality in the terms of objectivity.
Picture a simple perceptual scenario: An organism encounters an object. This object is perceived as a stimulus by the sensory organs, which are then transmitted and processed by the central nervous system. Ultimately, this generates a signal for the perceiving subject, the meaning of which is experienced as a phenomenon.
A simple perceptual scenario
Here, we can distinguish between an object that triggers a neural signal, and the experience of this object for the perceiving subject. The problem, however, is that no one can directly compare the actual object with the subject’s internal experience, which forces us to choose between one of two perspectives.
One perspective is to view the scenario “from the outside,” as another person might. From this standpoint, we can only observe the physical, which we will for now call “objective”. Meanwhile the internal processes of the perceiving subject remain inaccessible and are thus confined to unverifiable speculation. This is known as the “Problem of Other Minds” or “Qualia Problem” in philosophy and cognitive science.
Inverted Qualia
It is impossible to directly perceive what another person experiences. For example, while we may both call a strawberry “red,” my conversation partner might actually see it as what I would perceive as “green,” and we would have no way of knowing.
Because the subjective experience of others is ultimately inaccessible to us, we could, in a first sense, limit our understanding of reality to the material and the physical, that which can be agreed upon intersubjectively. Thus, one first possible meaning of reality could be objectivity–that is a consequentially external perspective. Conversely, this implies that everything internal to the subject, all mental phenomena, are denied the status of reality. We will denote this first sense of reality with the index 1:
First Sense of Reality: The Objective
| real1 | unreal1 |
|---|---|
| objective | subjective |
This epistemological position is known as physicalism and is upheld by behaviorism, which considers only observable behavior as a legitimate object of study. John B. Watson, widely recognized as the founder of behaviorism, articulated this view in his 1913 article, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, often referred to as the “behaviorist manifesto.”
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
Watson, 1913, Psychological Review, p. 158
Author: Fabian Müller