That stuff I said I was going to write about yesterday

[ultimatepsi]

I now present to a piece on the nature of reality and perception and it relevance to identity and other possibly important questions.

Comments

[ultimatepsi]

Difference in behavior can be objectively qualified too, though. To determine, if person x a foe, I could ask how many times has x attacked me? or how many actions has x taken that go against my goals? There is continua of less foe, more foe, that there aren't isn't usually with matter of species.

I have trouble accepting the dichotomy of an objective and subjective viewpoint.
Maybe this is a continuum too, with definitions that a simple and consistent at one end, and those that cover more features of a thing, but are not always consistent at identify what is and is not such a thing. If you define human based on genetics and growth, you are unlikely to find something that you can't determine whether it is human. If you were however, to say that a human is a thinking being that strives to continue its existence while striving for some moral good, you're going to run into a lot more cases where what one would intuit as human doesn't match the definition, and a lot more people that disagree with you. It's not that the second definition here is inherently bad, but it is inherently different from the first. I'd call the first objective and the second subjective, because of those differences. I have a hard time believing you don't see those difference, although maybe you meant that you didn't consider them very important.

[sirroxton]

Cool! Let's run with this.

My point is the only reason we make objective differentiations is that they're subjectively useful.

Why are you interested in the difference between an ape and a human? While you can make, perhaps, an objective differentiation between a friend or a foe, why is it important to you? Perhaps you can come up with an objective differentiation between a sturdy and unstable chair, but why do you care? Subjective wants, subjective needs. I could make a differentiation between trees with an even numbers of leaves and trees with odd numbers of leaves, but I don't.

The same mechanism that drives me to distinguish between a stable and unstable chair might drive me to select (and enforce) roles and constraints in human society.

There's a useful distinction between objective differentiations and subjective ones, especially with regards to ethics, but really, if we define "importance" as use-value, there's nothing that necessarily makes an objective differentiation more useful or meaningful than a subjective one, especially when both types of differentations are recognized for the same basic reasons.