Q&A: Is human experience objective or subjective?

From Day Lesson: Time, Fast and Slow

Reader Xiaotiancai: I have experienced the correctness of “there is nothing outside the mind”, and that all external experiences are products of our cognition, so the universal law of human experience of the outside world should be objective, shouldn’t it?

Reply from Wan Wansteel.

It depends on your definition of ‘objective’. If you mean that given the same situation, different people in it will have roughly the same experiences, that these experiences are regular, and that these regularities are relatively stable to the point that they are worth summarizing, learning from, and imitating, then that is indeed the case, or else the behavioral sciences are meaningless.

Granted, we must also note that even the same situation is likely to be experienced differently by different people. For example, if a foreigner who comes to China for the first time goes to experience a Zibo barbecue, his feelings, the things he cares about, the things that leave the deepest impression on him, must be very different from a Chinese person who eats barbecue regularly. Furthermore, if I have red-green color blindness and your eyes are normal, we both face the same red color, but the experience is completely different.

In other words, the experience is very much related to the person’s previous life experience. Of course, what kind of personal history + what kind of current situation = what kind of experience, this is still a rule to follow, and can be said to be objective.

But if “objective” means “true, and all true”, then there is always a limit to the objectivity of experience, and beyond that limit, all laws about experience are subjective. Animal experience is very different from human experience.

Our column previously recommended science journalist Ed Yong’s new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which talks about a lot of interesting animal experiences.

For example, the human eye can only perceive “visible light” with wavelengths between 360 and 830 nanometers, and we can’t directly see the longer wavelengths of infrared light or the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light, but many animals can. For example, the flower in the picture below, on the left is what it looks like to a human being, on the right is what it looks like to a bee–

You may think that the human eye sees a sharper image, but the human eye doesn’t see a key piece of information: there is an area in the center of the flower that appears only in the ultraviolet spectrum and is much darker in “color”. This area is the bee’s equivalent of a bullseye and is easy to target. The same is true of the flower in the picture below –

On the left is what ultraviolet light looks like, and on the right is what visible light looks like. Perhaps because the act of bee nectaring is good for both the flower and the bee, the flower evolved this property to attract bees …… whereas we, as humans, could never have known there was such a thing without the aid of instruments. Much less can we experience the sense of intimacy and purpose that bees feel when they see a flower.

But bees are not a special case. Many insects, birds, fish, reptiles, including rodents among mammals, bats, and even elephants, see ultraviolet light.

• People, that’s the exception. *

Or rather, every animal is special.

350 species of fish are known to generate their own electricity. The electric eel, for example, can release 860 volts of high voltage at a time, enough to stun a horse. It uses electricity as a weapon for its own predation. Can you imagine the experience of having the ability to generate your own electricity? Some fish use electricity to communicate with each other.

A mosquito’s taste system is not in its mouth, but in its feet. That way, when it lands on your skin, it can immediately taste you with its feet. Some animals can sense magnetic fields and rely on the earth’s magnetic field to guide their migration. There are also bats that are known to rely on sound rather than light to discern what is around them.

We can talk about these mechanisms, but we’ll never be able to experience what those animals experience, and no matter how much you think about it, you can’t really feel what it’s like to be a bat.

*So all experience is subjective. *

From the day class: experience design studies (end)

Reader Hu Jiangheng: Our column has talked quite a bit about behavioral design and quite a bit about Kant’s moral philosophy. My query is whether the two are contrary to each other, and if so, what should we do about it?

Wan Wan Gang replied -

This is a very worthwhile discussion. The matter of a merchant using behavioral design methods to attract consumers to buy his product or service is something that, strictly speaking, Master Kant would have looked at with disfavor.

Kant’s moral law requires that our actions must be based on principles - not results - and that the principles of action must be “what you wish to be a universal law”.

For example, if you download a pirated copy of a movie, you know it’s not good, but it’s not really harmful - after all, you wouldn’t have gone to the theater even if you hadn’t watched the pirated copy, and you probably wouldn’t have seen it through legal channels. You think it’s okay for you to take advantage of this small advantage …… but, but you don’t want everyone in the world to do this, or else if everyone watched pirated copies, no one would make movies anymore.

Then Kant would say that you shouldn’t do it either. The fact that you don’t want everyone in the world to do it is proof enough that the whole thing is immoral for you.

But it’s perfectly fine for you to say, “But I usually pay to see the original! If everyone in the world only watched a certain percentage of pirated copies like I do, the movie industry could still continue to survive. In fact, isn’t it obvious that so many people watch pirated copies that the movie industry is still around?

And Kant would say, I don’t look at results, I only look at principles. As long as the action doesn’t conform to the principle, then it’s wrong no matter what percentage you do, no matter what the result is.

Simply put, if you can’t imagine that the world could still function if everyone acted according to the same principles of action, then your action is immoral.

Accordingly, Kant would say that it is immoral to cheat travelers by allowing them to walk an extra distance at the Houston airport in order to reduce the “pure wait” time, and that it is immoral to increase the cost of running the whole society if everyone does it. It is also unethical for businesses to intentionally add large amounts of sugar and fat to food to attract consumers to buy it, regardless of the risk of increasing obesity in society as a whole. As for the use of “variable rewards” by gaming companies to addict players, this is even more of a degradation of the human race.

By Kantian standards, the modern economic system, which is driven by capital driven by profit, is itself a huge problem. In order to make a profit, businessmen must try to provide instant gratification to consumers at the expense of long-term interests, not to mention ethical responsibilities. Kant might have deplored the fact that the problems of environmental pollution and community decay in modern society are the result of unethical business. ……

However, I think that if we relax Kant’s principle of “principles not results” a bit and look at the real results of economic development, we may have more confidence in the world. Capitalism has gone through times of extreme environmental pollution and brutal treatment of workers, but in general it’s been getting better, and modern developed countries in particular have been more environmentally friendly and welfare-friendly than Kant could ever have imagined. So what exactly do you think has happened?

Kevin Kelly’s view is that technological progress has happened. The world wouldn’t be a better place if humans were still burning coal for heat as their primary method of energy acquisition. But we were fortunate enough to invent electricity and invent ways to generate electricity without burning coal. Looking back then, maybe that phase of burning coal was an essential price to pay in the first place.

And Kant would say, I don’t ask about the outcome! The outcome is uncontrollable. How could anyone at the time have known that electricity might be invented in the future? It was. So Kevin Kelly is not a logical argument, but simply a “confidence”: not only in technology, but in the ability of people in the future to create new solutions to new problems.

*Is it “don’t do what you know is immoral” or “solve developmental problems with development”? There is no standard answer to this question, and it is left to each individual to decide on his or her own, depending on the specific circumstances of each case. *

For example, for someone like Tseng Kuo-fan, I guess he might use the Kantian standard for himself and the outcome standard to decide on national issues.

From Day Lesson: Is the whole universe one brain?

Q&A Blah blah blah Ask me where I’m from: If it is the case that superclusters of galaxies are relying on quantum entanglement to produce some kind of coordination between them, isn’t quantum entanglement incapable of transmitting information? Isn’t that a contradiction?

Reader XIN JI A: Mr. Wan, if the universe transmits signals through quantum entanglement, then theoretically there is no need for galactic fibers, and the signals can be transmitted directly from the starting point to the end point. Then wouldn’t it be uneconomical to evolve a structure similar to the human brain?

Reader Gu Yuxiao: May I ask Mr. Wan, if information is transmitted through the super-distance action of quantum entanglement, then something like “neural pathways” will not be needed. In other words, if the cosmic brain looks like this, it must rely on cosmic fibers to transmit something. Or is there a distance limit to quantum entanglement? Needs to be relayed? So it needs to build up cosmic fibers?

WVG replied -

Quantum entanglement does not convey an “active” message, but it does allow for coordination.

Imagine that there are two electrons, A and B, that are entangled with each other, with a total spin of absolute 0. If you observe that the spin of A is up, then B must be down. If there is another electron C and B so entangled that if B goes down C must go up, then we can observe that the spins of A and C are always the same, and this is coordination.

But this coordination can’t be used to convey “active” information, because you can’t decide whether this observation will make A go up or down, the observation is completely random.

Imagine Alice and Bob are holding electron A and C, and they agree that if the spin is up, it means I still love you, and if it’s down, it means we’re breaking up – so if Alice decides to break up, quantum entanglement won’t be able to make sure that Bob receives a breakup signal, because there’s no way for Alice to make sure that the spin of the electron is up, and the electron isn’t even up, and that the spin of the electron is down. The electrons don’t listen to her.

However, if the two decide to leave their relationship to fate, and say it’s simply up to the electrons whether they break up or not, they do have a coordinated way of knowing how things will end up.

Quantum entanglement can be coordinated instantly, but the two electrons would have to have been entangled before for that to happen. And for electrons A and B to be entangled, they should have been together before! Once entangled, it’s no problem how far apart they can get again, but they have to be together before they can be entangled.

Let’s imagine that the early universe was very small, and the electrons everywhere may have been entangled; by the time the universe expanded, the electrons were farther and farther apart, and perhaps maintained some kind of entanglement. But since they were together before, they wouldn’t be too far apart later. Perhaps it’s a mechanism like this that requires that the distance between two stars that can produce entanglement can’t be more than, say, a million light-years. It is understandable then that superclusters of galaxies must reach coordination through the connection of galactic fibers.

There may be other ways of coordinating or even transmitting information beyond quantum entanglement, such as ‘wormholes’, the equivalent of ‘space-time gates’. However, it is reasonable to assume that in order to open a wormhole, information or something needs to be transmitted in some way. Perhaps a super-advanced star civilization could build an instantaneous “stargate” between any two points in the universe - but only if they first traveled to that point in a non-transitory way. In this way, the development of civilizations, even with the ability to travel, is limited by distance.

Reader Joker Like a Cloud: what kind of evidence do you think emerges that would be sufficient to show that the universe and the brain are the same? For example, you’ve already mentioned today the proximity of structures with suspected signaling/synergy. What might be the next piece of evidence of empirical significance?

Van Wagenen replied -

What kind of evidence would convince me that the whole universe is “alive”? That would still require a coordinated event at a distance. Imagine if we on Earth did something to the Sun on our own initiative, and then a short time later we found out that something had happened to a couple of nearby stars, or even a couple of stars farther away, then we could say that there is something going on, and that there is a connection between them that we don’t know about.

Weaker, but still more likely to be observed are large-scale, non-active coordination phenomena. For example, we have talked about ‘fast radio bursts’ before, if several locations in a particular supercluster complex suddenly all have fast radio bursts, and those locations are clearly hundreds of millions of light years away, then there must be something wrong.

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