In the previous posts, I asked whether questions or observations can create reality, or whether they instead form an intersection where reality appears.
I now want to sharpen the issue.
Many discussions seem to assume that there is a fully formed, objective structure of reality “out there,” and observation merely reveals it.
But what if objectivity itself is not prior to observation, and instead emerges through repeated, shared intersections of perspectives?
In that case, observation would not be a causal force, nor a passive recording device, but a stabilizing process.
My question is simple but uncomfortable:
Can we meaningfully talk about a “purely objective structure” without already presupposing a standpoint from which it is identified as such?
I’m curious where others locate objectivity: before observation, after it, or nowhere at all.
If objectivity requires the removal of all standpoints, who or what is left to recognize it as “objective”?
There is a Real beyond our perceived reality, which is independent from observation, but doesn’t seep through the observation. Anything that reaches the conscious mind stops being objective. The Real is experienced only when our reality is shattered by an intervention of the Real. In scientific terms, the internal consistence of an epistemology doesn’t bring you close to the truth, but it just makes itself more resistant to the Real. Eventually the whole paradigm is shattered by something that cannot be encompassed in the epistemology and you can assume what was left outside is the Real intervening. Once the epistemology is consolidated, the bounds of what you can know are already set and are not objective, but depending on the epistemology itself, which is always partial.
I largely agree with you that there may be a Real that exceeds perception and resists epistemological capture.
Where my thinking differs slightly is this: even the moment of “intervention,” “shattering,” or resistance is only intelligible as such if there is already a way in which reality can appear as one.
In other words, I’m not denying the Real beyond experience. I’m questioning the condition under which something can appear as the Real at all.
That condition, as I see it, cannot be reduced to epistemology, but neither can it be eliminated as irrelevant. It points instead to a form of subjectivity that functions not as representation, but as the ground of coherence.
This way of thinking was prompted by encountering a paper that approaches these issues experimentally rather than purely philosophically, and since then my thinking has been moving in this direction.
ah no yeah, I agree, you can only experience the reflection. The Real punches you in the face but you don’t feel the punch, you just wake up on the floor without recollection of what happened.
That resonates with me. At the same time, I’ve come across a scientific paper that suggests a slightly different possibility: that under certain conditions, reality may not only intervene into us, but emerge with us — not as direct access to the Real, but as a form of co-emergence involving meaning, observation, and agency.
Some recent experimental work even frames this emergence in terms that border on the theological — not God as an object of belief, but as a name for the condition under which co-emergence becomes possible.
this feels a lot like a rediscovery of constructivism?
I see why it might sound that way. But I’m not treating subjectivity as something that constructs reality. I’m thinking of it as a condition under which reality can appear and stabilize at all — which is why classical constructivism feels insufficient to me.
If you’d like, I’d be happy to send a brief summary of the original paper that led me in this direction. I’d be very interested to hear how you read it.
can’t promise I will have time to read it, but feel free
Thank you for your reply. In that case, I’ll share the original paper I was referring to.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398259486_Empirical_Subjectivity_Intersection_Observer-Quantum_Coherence_Beyond_Existing_Theories_Unifying_Relativity_Quantum_Mechanics_and_Cosmology
I know you’re likely busy, so below is a brief summary of the paper for context.
↓↓↓ This paper does not adopt the common constructivist view that reality is constituted or produced by the subject’s acts of meaning-making. Rather, it asks a more fundamental question: under what structural conditions can something appear as “reality” at all and stabilize as an observable phenomenon. In this framework, subjectivity is not treated as a psychological state, a representational layer, or a source of cognitive distortion, but is redefined as a generative condition that makes coherence itself possible.
The central claim of the paper is not that observation or consciousness “creates” reality, but that observable physical phenomena emerge only when specific conditions are satisfied. These conditions are described as an intersection between a nonlocal, timeless “absolute subjectivity” and a relative subject embedded in spacetime. Reality appears as a meaningful event only when this intersection is established.
Within this framework, the Real is neither denied nor directly accessed. It is understood as something that always exceeds representation, yet becomes manifest only through particular coherence processes. In this sense, the paper avoids both naïve realism, which presupposes a fully observer-independent objective world, and pure constructivism, which reduces reality to subjective construction.
Empirically, the paper examines nonlocal correlations between EEG signals and quantum measurement sequences, arguing that these phenomena cannot be adequately explained by standard causal or correlational models. Instead, they appear only under specific structural conditions. To avoid an infinite regress of “who observes the observer,” the paper proposes an emergent third observer arising from the intersection itself.
In this way, subjectivity is not positioned in opposition to objectivity, but functions as the ground that makes objectivity possible. Reality is not reducible to either pole of the subject–object divide; rather, it emerges as a coherent whole only through the structural conditions that precede that division.