286. The Experiencing Subject

We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

We use our understanding and our control to make ourselves happy. We see lack in our lives, and we focus on it like a problem to be solved. We reason that by increasing whatever is lacking, we will improve our well-being, and when nothing is lacking we will finally be happy. Then all of our desires will be satisfied, our aversions vanquished, and our beliefs confirmed.

It is this state of objective perfection that we seek. We want to be the perfect human animal, the one that has optimized its environment through control and thrives endlessly as a result. But in focusing completely on this singular goal, we miss something important. We forget to ask who it is that will thrive.

A human being is not just an animal that exists as an object in physical space. A human being is also an experiencing subject. And the difficulty with experiencing subjects is that they reflect on their experiences and they develop values. They see some things as good and other things as bad, not because of any objective evidence, but simply because of their own individual judgments.

We can judge that things are good for us even when we have been shown that they are objectively bad. But in what sense can anything be objectively bad? To construct our objective standard we have optimized for certain metrics. But why should we choose those particular metrics or optimize in that particular way?

It is only by submitting to a narrow group of subjectively-chosen values that we have arrived at the idea that there can be anything objectively good for a human being. The source of the judgments that have produced our objective standard cannot be anything other than subjective. No one has measured, judged, categorized, tested, or reasoned about human beings who was not also a human being. A purely objective view of life is not possible. To live more joyfully, we must consider our lives from the perspective of the experiencing subjects we also are.