[FRIAM] Subjectivity as a spectrum

[Santafe]

I had wanted to respond to that point from Jochen, too, along the direction Glen did, but Glen gives me a better point of departure than I had from my own impulse.

> While I agree that subjectivity is better understood as multidimensional, I disagree *entirely* that a baby is all or extremely subjective. Being largely against narrativity, I'd argue that babies are more objective than any adult. They measure the world and have a minimum of bias/narrative to pervert those measurements [⛧]. Maybe "objective" is the wrong concept, though. Maybe "empirical" is a better one.

I am willing to take the premise that infant life is more in-the-moment than the lives of their future more-aged selves will be.  Not that I can remember what it was to be an infant, or that this is anything better than going along with a meme that I know I have heard a lot of times.  But, okay.  You do what you can do.

Then, once again using an analogy to Vygotsky’s argument, which I now realize is probably one of several that he took from Wittgenstein: V argues that self-modeling grows up as a reflexive application of skills and tools for other-modeling that are under active pressure earlier-on and more constantly.  I could readily believe that there is some duality to this, in which the category of “other” also takes its shape partly as a negative space from the concurrently forming category of “self”.

So should we think of subjective and objective as categories, neither of which has a place to occupy within just-in-the-moment in ways that it will within other scaffoldings for the-moment?  So they form as categories that are part of the ordering space of what isn’t just in the moment, or in experiences as those would arise absent such scaffolding that also feeds back on how they arise?

Eric