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

[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.