Hey, great read as always. This idea of an impartial reference point for true objectivity absolutly resonates. It's such a fundamental concept, crucial for building a solid understanding of fairness and human rights. Thanks for articulating this so clearly; it's something we often lose sight of.
You use the term objectivity and objective throughout your article as though emotion, experiences, context, and worldview can be avoided by willed action. I find this is impossible for humans. We are beings with brains that rely on two hemispheres, each having different priorities. The left hemisphere prioritizes certainty, fixity, inanimate, quantity, language, utility, rules, representation, and power. The right prioritizes ambiguity, fluidity, animation, quality, macro view, purpose, presence, love, and the sacred. Your notion of objectivity is a false product of the left hemisphere which can be delusional. These comments are based on Iain McGilchrist work.
Objectivity doesn’t mean suppressing or excluding the emotional, contextual, or experiential dimensions of being. It’s quite the opposite. It means seeing them clearly in their proper relation to reality.
Emotions originate primarily in subcortical regions such as the amygdala and limbic system, which signal meaning and importance. But when we articulate and analyze those emotions by explicitly naming what we feel and explore why we feel it, we engage the prefrontal cortex, particularly the medial and dorsolateral regions responsible for self regulation, abstraction, and reasoning. This interaction between emotional and executive centers allows for reflective awareness rather than reactive behavior.
In this sense, objectivity is not a left brain abstraction but a dynamic coordination of hemispheric and cortical functions. It’s requires practice of alignment. It includes both rational analysis and emotional awareness, without allowing either to distort what is true. One does not become cold and emotionless, neither overly emotional. Both are irrational. Examining our emotions doesn’t mean denying them; it means identifying their causes, discerning whether they cohere with reality, and reframing them when they don’t. This process is the basis of cognitive behavioral integration. It’s not detachment, but disciplined coherence.
So objective observation is not an attempt to escape the human condition, but to integrate it consciously. It’s the neurological practice of letting reality, not emotion or preference, be the measure by which emotion finds its rightful place. In doing so, both hemispheres and their corresponding modes of cognition work together. Emotion informs reason, and reason refines emotion to bring the mind into alignment with the structure of reality itself.
Thank you for your explanation It gave me plenty of landscape to study. I still think you should indulge yourself with The Master And His Emissary by Dr Iain McGilchrist. He corrects some of the errors in brain function and provides a new paradigm for human reality construction.
Thank you too. And truly, I appreciate the recommendation. McGilchrist’s work, from what I’ve gathered, offers real insight, especially his warnings against reducing human experience to narrow analytic modes. In that sense, I agree with him: it does no good to become so “objective,” or removed, that we lose our humanity. In the end, we are subjects within reality, and only ever will be, not the objective reference point itself.
At the same time, that is exactly why the objective reference point matters.
Objectivity, as I’m using the term, isn’t cold detachment or left hemisphere rigidity. It’s the integrative act, letting emotion, context, intuition, and reason cooperate so we can perceive reality as it is. As I mentioned in my previous comment, neuroscience shows this clearly, that emotional experience arises in subcortical regions, and the prefrontal cortex allows us to step outside the feeling long enough to understand it rather than be ruled by it. That clarity strengthens our ability to act with fairness toward ourselves and others.
So our subjectivity flourishes only when it aligns with what is truly objective; it must stand strictly outside, remain singular, independent and constant. The objective foundation is stable regardless of us, while we are dependent on it for coherence, sanity, and justice.
Where contemporary discourse goes wrong is not that it is “too objective,” but that it reserves objectivity only for production, such as economics, technology, engineering, while avoiding objectivity at the existential level, where fairness, rights, responsibility, and meaning are actually grounded. The study of existence gets pushed into “theology,” where it becomes competing narratives unconcerned with objectivity instead of a disciplined epistemological inquiry into reality itself. At the basis of reality, objectivity is the only structure that remains coherent and allows observation of it to remain intelligent and scientifically rigorous.
In that sense, what humanity once called “God” is not a spiritual preference but the necessary anchor that makes fairness possible, the stable reference point that no subject can claim, manipulate, or relativize. Alignment with that anchor doesn’t eliminate suffering or chaos, but it allows individuals to navigate them coherently, with patience, responsibility, and trust that resolution, perfection, completion and closure is possible even when the path is messy.
So I appreciate your pushback and the reference to McGilchrist, and I think our perspectives are actually closer than they seem. I think McGilchrist has some potentially important insights that can contribute to this greater concern. I’ll definitely explore The Master and His Emissary further. Examining how different thinkers articulate foundational questions is always illuminating.
Hey, great read as always. This idea of an impartial reference point for true objectivity absolutly resonates. It's such a fundamental concept, crucial for building a solid understanding of fairness and human rights. Thanks for articulating this so clearly; it's something we often lose sight of.
One of the best articles on TAG I’ve read!
You use the term objectivity and objective throughout your article as though emotion, experiences, context, and worldview can be avoided by willed action. I find this is impossible for humans. We are beings with brains that rely on two hemispheres, each having different priorities. The left hemisphere prioritizes certainty, fixity, inanimate, quantity, language, utility, rules, representation, and power. The right prioritizes ambiguity, fluidity, animation, quality, macro view, purpose, presence, love, and the sacred. Your notion of objectivity is a false product of the left hemisphere which can be delusional. These comments are based on Iain McGilchrist work.
Objectivity doesn’t mean suppressing or excluding the emotional, contextual, or experiential dimensions of being. It’s quite the opposite. It means seeing them clearly in their proper relation to reality.
Emotions originate primarily in subcortical regions such as the amygdala and limbic system, which signal meaning and importance. But when we articulate and analyze those emotions by explicitly naming what we feel and explore why we feel it, we engage the prefrontal cortex, particularly the medial and dorsolateral regions responsible for self regulation, abstraction, and reasoning. This interaction between emotional and executive centers allows for reflective awareness rather than reactive behavior.
In this sense, objectivity is not a left brain abstraction but a dynamic coordination of hemispheric and cortical functions. It’s requires practice of alignment. It includes both rational analysis and emotional awareness, without allowing either to distort what is true. One does not become cold and emotionless, neither overly emotional. Both are irrational. Examining our emotions doesn’t mean denying them; it means identifying their causes, discerning whether they cohere with reality, and reframing them when they don’t. This process is the basis of cognitive behavioral integration. It’s not detachment, but disciplined coherence.
So objective observation is not an attempt to escape the human condition, but to integrate it consciously. It’s the neurological practice of letting reality, not emotion or preference, be the measure by which emotion finds its rightful place. In doing so, both hemispheres and their corresponding modes of cognition work together. Emotion informs reason, and reason refines emotion to bring the mind into alignment with the structure of reality itself.
Thank you for your explanation It gave me plenty of landscape to study. I still think you should indulge yourself with The Master And His Emissary by Dr Iain McGilchrist. He corrects some of the errors in brain function and provides a new paradigm for human reality construction.
Thank you too. And truly, I appreciate the recommendation. McGilchrist’s work, from what I’ve gathered, offers real insight, especially his warnings against reducing human experience to narrow analytic modes. In that sense, I agree with him: it does no good to become so “objective,” or removed, that we lose our humanity. In the end, we are subjects within reality, and only ever will be, not the objective reference point itself.
At the same time, that is exactly why the objective reference point matters.
Objectivity, as I’m using the term, isn’t cold detachment or left hemisphere rigidity. It’s the integrative act, letting emotion, context, intuition, and reason cooperate so we can perceive reality as it is. As I mentioned in my previous comment, neuroscience shows this clearly, that emotional experience arises in subcortical regions, and the prefrontal cortex allows us to step outside the feeling long enough to understand it rather than be ruled by it. That clarity strengthens our ability to act with fairness toward ourselves and others.
So our subjectivity flourishes only when it aligns with what is truly objective; it must stand strictly outside, remain singular, independent and constant. The objective foundation is stable regardless of us, while we are dependent on it for coherence, sanity, and justice.
Where contemporary discourse goes wrong is not that it is “too objective,” but that it reserves objectivity only for production, such as economics, technology, engineering, while avoiding objectivity at the existential level, where fairness, rights, responsibility, and meaning are actually grounded. The study of existence gets pushed into “theology,” where it becomes competing narratives unconcerned with objectivity instead of a disciplined epistemological inquiry into reality itself. At the basis of reality, objectivity is the only structure that remains coherent and allows observation of it to remain intelligent and scientifically rigorous.
In that sense, what humanity once called “God” is not a spiritual preference but the necessary anchor that makes fairness possible, the stable reference point that no subject can claim, manipulate, or relativize. Alignment with that anchor doesn’t eliminate suffering or chaos, but it allows individuals to navigate them coherently, with patience, responsibility, and trust that resolution, perfection, completion and closure is possible even when the path is messy.
So I appreciate your pushback and the reference to McGilchrist, and I think our perspectives are actually closer than they seem. I think McGilchrist has some potentially important insights that can contribute to this greater concern. I’ll definitely explore The Master and His Emissary further. Examining how different thinkers articulate foundational questions is always illuminating.