Mason Bourgeois
Nov 6 · 1 min read

I saw the bee before I was primed. You created the image from a bee, and my brain recognized that pattern and realized it was a bee, without any external information. Article ruined!! (Just kidding, it was a good read)

While I agree that we hallucinate our experience of reality, there is an external truth (the splotches being a mutated image of a bee) which is objective, even if experienced subjectively. Our job, and the job of scientists specifically, is to pool our hallucinations, find the commonality, and follow that towards an ever-deeper understanding of that truth. If we abandoned our pursuit of it, we’d be giving up on common ground and the ability to communicate, and falling towards solipsism.

That being said, we should be careful to limit our pursuit of objective truth to that which it is possible to know objectively. There are many things (taste, identity, values, etc) which are fundamentally subjective, and the attempt to make objective reality of them, in practice, is the attempt to assert the supremacy of one subjectivity over another.

The boundary between those groups is as fuzzy as a bee’s bottom. The difficulty, I suppose, is deciding which is which.

Mason Bourgeois

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UT Neuroscience graduate and full stack web developer