Pushing the objective world away
How the mind learns to separate the self from the external world
How does your mind distinguish your subjective self — i.e. you — from the external world? This sounds like a trivial question, and most people think they have a ready and intuitive answer. You might say, for example, that “the self is that part of my experiences that always comes with me”, or perhaps “I have a natural, hard-wired sense of self as distinct from the external world”, or “the self is the aspect of my experiences which are within my control”. All seem like plausible answers.
This post will explore the question using the same approach we took when discussing logic, number, and time. The first part will outline the shortcomings of all intuitive answers, after which we’ll discuss how these distinctions actually arise.
There’s no intuitive separation
At first glance, your sense of self and of the external world appear to be hard-coded into your mind as a kind of physiological, instinctive knowledge. This is reinforced by the fact that all people, without exception, have some understanding of both. Given how intuitive, foundational, and useful these concepts are, it’s unlikely every person has to learn them anew; in fact that doesn’t seem possible. And surely it would be straightforward for your mind to give itself a concept of itself.
We should start by making some basic observations. First, any attempt to identify the concepts of self and world always takes place inside your mind. In fact anything you experience at all, including the external world, is for you a function of your subjective experience. The external world given through the senses must first become part of your subjective consciousness for you to think of it at all. This makes it difficult to inherently separate the viewer from the object. It’s like looking at a red apple through a sheet of blue lucite: it’s not clear how you would identify which of the two you are seeing.
Your senses themselves can’t guide you in the distinction. The sight of a green tree doesn’t tell you that it is actually a reinterpretation of light with a wavelength of 500 nanometers. You must learn this duality of colour as a separate fact. Even proprioception — which literally means “self-sense” — does not actually indicate your subjective self, as in your consciousness, your feelings, your thoughts and emotions, etc. It only indicates the movement of your muscles, which are properly outside your consciousness. Your mind must associate proprioceptive signals with your notions of consciousness and self-identity.
Besides the senses, there are other aspects of cognition that are more properly “internal”, such as emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Although these seem like the clearest pointers to the subjective self, in truth they can also be externalized, meaning that they can be interpreted as part of the external world. For example, when you worry about your emotions “getting the better of you”, you are pushing those psychic events outside the conscious self as though they belonged to another, external entity.
The same is true of thoughts and abstractions. When you see a chair and interpret it as a chair to sit on, you are processing it as a part of the external world. On later introspection you may realize that the abstraction — chair to sit on — was a product of your own subjective imagination. You can go back and forth between including a thought as part of your conscious self, or pushing it away as an objective reality separate from your immediate viewpoint. Even the statement “I had a thought” can be a statement of both subjective and objective truth.
Just as a river doesn’t inherently have a left and a right bank, your mind must learn to designate aspects of your stream of consciousness as either the self and external world. This information cannot be given as hard-coded, psychological signals. Nor is it a matter of simply turning your attention towards either the self or the world in order to see them; it is a matter of interpreting one and the same experience in two different ways. Your mind ultimately fabricates a fictitious separation between your subjective perception and the external world you perceive. This act of fabrication is like trying to draw a three-dimensional shape on a two-dimensional surface. The best you can do is create the illusion of having done so.
Self and self-consciousness
By default your mind implicitly treats every thought or experience as simultaneously external (world) and internal (subjective self). They are external because you tend not to notice the subjective filter through which your experiences pass. Therefore all your experiences point to objects external to yourself, even when they refer to your own body. On the other hand, since it is always you who is having the experience, your self is present in every experience. Both the self and the world are only implicit in experiences though. Before those concepts develop, you don’t identify experiences as “external” or “subjective” — you don’t identify them at all.
This primitive state of affairs is good enough for most tasks. A person can achieve the majority of their aims by merely reacting correctly to inputs as though they were external events, without explicitly identifying the self attached to them. For example, to deal with a pain in your arm you need only react to signals that indicate “pain” and “left arm”, you don’t need to add “I’m feeling pain in my left arm”; that is, unless you are differentiating the pain in your arm from someone else’s.
And this is how the concept of self first enters your awareness. Your desire to designate yourself in a social context, and to separate yourself from others, requires that you name yourself or point to yourself as the target. Early in childhood, this is critical for obtaining the things you want. Is it any wonder that toddlers learn to say “my” long before they learn the word “your”? The former has an incomparably higher value. When you are first learning to say “my” you are not even consciously indicating yourself. The word is used as a part of a broader exclamation emphasizing possession, e.g. “my stickers!”, which means “give those stickers!” The self-ish desire for possession, attention, and interaction drives you to learn to articulate those words.
As you mature, you develop new and different anxieties, such as whether people judge you or dislike you. Now you start to focus on your physical self, and ask “who am I? how do I look?” The thoughts that occur to you in these cases will be thoughts of yourself from the outside, as others perceive you, similar to what you might see by looking in a mirror. The anxiety of being judged creates a consciousness of your self as an entity. It is only when people start asking “who are you?” does self-identity first become a question for you¹.
Still, because you are seeing yourself as others see you, you are conceiving of your self as an object among others. This self here is like a physical chess piece on a chessboard, a piece that you happen to care the most about. It’s an external view of yourself, projected back into your own thoughts. “How do others see me? What is my identity to them?” — these are the questions that your concept of self answers. You are learning how others view you and your body from the outside — your objective self — whereas the subjective self represents “you” as seen from the inside.
You may by now have realised that the original distinction between subjective self and external world was actually misleading. It conflated four different concepts: self, external world, subjectivity, and objectivity. The self we’re interested in is the subjective one, not the one seen from outside. But this realisation now confronts us with a new and more difficult puzzle: since subjectivity and self are distinct concepts, how can you conceive of subjectivity as separate from the self?
Truth, assertion, and objectivity
A clue to this riddle is hidden in the connotations of the word “subjective”. It is curious that in general usage the word “subjective” heavily implies “untrue”². When someone says “that’s a subjective opinion” they are trying to downplay your assertion as invalid. At the same time, the concept of objectivity is inextricably intertwined with the truth; anything objective is necessarily true in some sense. If we figure out what makes thoughts subjectively or objectively true, it may lead us to an answer for our question.
Not every thought in your mind is concerned with truth, however. A thought by itself (without its emotional affect) is inert, it merely connects one mental image or sound to another; it says nothing about its truth value. Take, for example, a thought that associates an image of a person to an image of him getting on a bus:
This simple thought could be framed as an assertion, as in “he got on the bus”. It could be a fantasy, as in “I’m imagining a man getting on a bus”. It could be a universal, as in “people generally get on buses”. It could be a memory, as in “I remember seeing him get on a bus”. It could be a prediction, as in “he will get on the bus”. It could be a plan, as in “first he needs to get on the bus, then…” A thought can be interpreted and reframed in a myriad of ways.
To convert a thought into a statement of objective truth you must add an explicit assertion to it — an assertion like “he got on the bus”. Truth, as represented in your mind, is always framed as an assertion of some kind. Vague impressions cannot constitute “truth”; truth requires that you are able to clearly assert it when the situation demands. In fact, you can only claim something as objectively true if you can assert it to others, and get consensus. What makes it objective truth, from your standpoint, is that you can obtain an agreement among people around you, either potentially or actually. Otherwise “objectivity” loses all meaning.
For example, everyone around you may agree that a red ball “is red”, and that is considered objectively true. Then someone looks under a microscope and notices it’s not actually red, or they shift the discussion to wavelengths of light rather than colours. Now the colour red changes from being an objective reality to subjective “appearance”. Truth becomes subjective anytime disagreement enters the picture.
Because others can’t see your subjective experiences, there is ongoing pressure on you to restrict your statements to something that everyone can agree to. In extreme cases, to not do so may result in you being called a liar or unreliable. Objectivity is therefore a constraint others place on your speech and thinking. This pressure soon becomes internalized as your own personal motivator, similar to Freud’s “superego”. It keeps your thoughts in line with what others will accept.
This is how the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity first take hold in your mind. Your experiences and thoughts aren’t inherently objective or subjective. You interpret a thought as objective when you formulate it in a way that others can verify. The inconvenient remainder of your thoughts which don’t fit this criteria you interpret as subjective; as a sort of mea culpa. Thus a heterogeneity is introduced into your otherwise undifferentiated flow of thoughts and experiences, between those thoughts you can freely assert, and those you have to heavily caveat. This explains how you learn about subjectivity with respect to truth. But how does that translate into subjectivity as “a view from the inside”?
The subsequent push-back
As you continue to accept others’ feedback regarding what counts as objective truth, you find that there are many important aspects of your daily existence that can’t be expressed as objective facts, such as feelings, needs, or qualia. For example, when you tell a lie to get something you want, or vent your spleen in a fit of anger, or simply believe something because it is pleasing or advantageous to you and you can’t be bothered to try harder, you are stepping outside the narrowly prescribed frame of “objective truth”.
This creates a gap between objectively asserted truths and the rest of your experiences; a gap that was introduced when you suppressed the parts of your thoughts that were personally biased, in order to appear objective. An internal conflict arises between your desire to express your inexpressible subjective viewpoint, and the pressure from others to conform to commonly verifiable facts. This leaves your mind in an unsteady tension.
This conflict demands a reconciliation. As discussed in another post, your mind always creates new concepts in response to the failure of your current ones to meet your needs; at which point a new domain of thoughts opens up to address the gap. Here, your mind invents a new concept, the internal world, to justify the mismatch in the two modes of experience. The “internal world” validates, or more accurately excuses, those experiences for which no other witnesses — and therefore validation — exists. By defining the internal world as a sort of justification for your non-objective thoughts, you are able to go back to believing the truth of your subjective experiences despite the lack of verification — or the outright contradiction — from others.
But the public world cannot be totally neglected. To placate your superego, the concept of the external world comes in to defend the validity of the communal space of truth. The two henceforth maintain their own “non-overlapping magisteria”, and the paradoxes of subjectivity are pushed temporarily out of sight.
Root concepts
None of the patterns described above are meant to represent a single moment in time or a simple concept, rather they are a set of lifelong trends. For every moment of your life during which you are conscious and aware, you are building up a heap of interpretations, each of which is created the moment you consider the target thought or experience. The domains of self and world may even blend together as required for each new interpretation.
These interpretations do not themselves “create” subjectivity or the external world out of thin air. As already mentioned, both the “view from the inside” and the “view of the outside” are already present in every thought or experience you have. They merely interpret a given mental event as one or the other. They append a belief, e.g. “I am seeing my thoughts”, or “that is a toothbrush there” to your experiences. As you mature, you learn to do this so well that eventually these interpretations seem as instinctive as thinking in your native language, and so the act of identifying the self and the external world start to feel like a built-in capabilities.
Later in life, you build more nuanced models of the subjective self and the external world based on these foundations. Theories in physics and chemistry (objective world), models of social psychology (self), and treatises on phenomenology and transcendental aesthetics (subjectivity) are outgrowths and elaborations of these basic patterns. Their roots are still identifiable even in their complexity. For example, materialists and idealists both still maintain the concepts of subjective self and external world. The difference between them is that materialists believe the subjective side is hollow or illusory, and idealists believe the same of the objective side. Both still use the two concepts as the starting point for their inquiries.
This post does not take sides on such ontological disputes. Rather its goal is to ask how you come to designate your experiences and thoughts as part of the subjective self or the external world. Philosophical inquiry so far has focused on determining where to correctly draw the line between the two. It rarely asks how a mind is able to carry out that process of investigation.
On the other hand, for those who are focused on building “philosophically” capable AI, describing the cognitive journey is more important than getting the correct final answer. The final answer may remain indefinitely unresolved or inexpressible. But the journey can still be delineated as a series of definite thoughts and experiences. Even if we never find an answer to the riddle of how the subjective and objective worlds are woven together, we can still concretely describe the thoughts people have had about them, and how they evolved from childhood onward.
¹ These are good examples of concept reversal. Traditional theories of concept formation expect that you first form a notion of the self, and only after try to obtain benefits for that self or make that self look good. In reality, it is the desire to get benefits, to be approved of, to fit in, which create your concept of the self as fits those criteria. New features are added as new needs arise. For example, it is not true that ideas of personal identity are the basis for notions of individual guilt, rather the reverse: the motivation to judge people as guilty leads to beliefs about a personal identity that can maintain such guilt.
² This is a useful insight, since a word’s connotations point you to where it came from, and why you learned it. As discussed in this post, pragmatics precedes semantics; to which we can also now add connotation precedes denotation.
