Perspectives are All You Need

I was going to start laying out the basics again, arguing from relational Quantum mechanics, referencing my earlier works like:

and at the end of the day give you the whole spiel of saying

“Seeee perspectivism WORKS.”

But I think I spontaneously decided to go down a different road today. Instead of giving you a broad summary of everything, why not focus on breaking down one specific intuition we all hold.

The idea of other minds and perspectives is something humans struggle with and have to actively learn to comprehend.

All babies are in a meaningful sense solipsists. Everyone must know what they know, must see what they see and must feel what they feel. Objects only exist if they exist within their experience. And once they grasp the concept of other minds, other perspective their horizon of what this world has to offer expands to infinity

Look at the dice here. While we can see the two six dot sides, someone on the opposite side of the table would see two one dotted die sides, right?

Do they see the same dice or not?

Common sense will tell us, yes. They do see the same object but from different vantage points. The dice might look different depending on your perspective but that’s a difference in appearance, not identity.

This type of learned common sense enables us to form a kind of view from nowhere understanding of what this die looks like no matter which perspective we adopt.

The story we tell ourselves is “We can know what an other would see because there exists this entity that is the die in itself. Lying there in an objective arrangement independent on who looks at it. This objective position now determines the outcome of what someone sees if they come into a visual relation with that die from a certain actual location.

The end result of this is something that deeply follows the Kantian intuition of a thing in itself (noumenon) and subjective personal “copies” of that thing depending on ones perspective (phenomenon).

Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology for example comes to exactly this conclusion and coins the term “sensual objects” (get your head out of the gutter) to denominate the die you see from your POV from the die that actually lies on the table.

So a cube seen from an edge and one seen from a side might be the same “real object” but they are distinct “sensual objects”. And while that tracks our experiences of the world quiet well, it leaves us with an unobservable world that exists behind our sensations.

A price many are willing to pay it seems. It explains the stability of the world outside, avoids solipcism and does not fall victim to many of the absurdities direct or “naive” realism would imply about our experiences. AND YET I think I can show that it only ever makes sense under the assumption of a kind of hidden dualism.

Kant says the thing-in-itself "affects" our sensibility to produce appearances but affection is a causal relation, and Kant is explicit that causality is one of the pure concepts of the understanding, valid only within the domain of appearances. It has no legitimate application to noumena. So the system needs the thing-in-itself to do causal work (explain where the matter of intuition comes from) while simultaneously forbidding causal claims about anything outside appearances. F.H. Jacobi put the dilemma in a perfect quote:

"Without the thing-in-itself I cannot enter the Kantian system, but with it, I cannot remain in it."

You need the postulate to get the system off the ground; the moment you use it, you've violated the system's own restriction on where causality is allowed to operate.

In other words either sensual objects are epiphenomenal entities that are not able to do anything or noumenal objects are a-causal entities unable to inform the appearance of sensual objects. There seems to be a worm in this very intuitive division between the subjective and the objective.

Well, how about we scrap the noumenal layer all together? Or rather how about we upgrade the subjective to be the ontological juice of the operation.

Rovelli is doing exactly this with his relational quantum mechanics approach. If we give perspectives (or reference frames) ontological primacy, we do not need any objective fact of the matter behind them.

How does the cube look like if noone is looking at it? How does it visually appear for a blind person? Exactly.

I think you get the point. A perspective independent object occupying any actual dimensionality (space) to it is a silly assumption to have within ones ontology. Because lengths, speeds and masses are relative. Just as colors are relative to both wavelengths and our visual infrastructure and operating system, so is any other property only ever real in relation to something else.

But how does reality remain consistent? Why if there is no objective fact of the matter behind our perspective can we resolve disagreements by taking a closer look?

Fear not, little one. I do have an answer for you.

Reality has its own error correction algorithm. More specifically perspectives in contact naturally converge on intersubjective agreements.

It’s social network effects we know from well.. sociology but applied to physics itself. Or long before its able to self reinforce socially, perspectives simply evolve towards coherent pictures.

The thing I am talking about here is a form of Universal Darwinism.

Let’s return for example to the die in the beginning. If two people looking at the die would see different amount of dots that would be pretty surprising wouldn’t it?…

Now the reason we normally tend to agree on things isn’t (necessarily) based on the fact that the sides have an objective (subject independent) answer waiting to be perceived but is just as easily explained by the structural similarities between individual human perspectives.

We agree because we literally have almost the same perspective on that die. We have the same kind of bio-camera, the same kind of brain and if we see the same side of the die, we have to pretty much stand at almost the exact same position relative to that die.

“Same” here refers not to identical but equal. It is about structural or more broadly relational similarities. And this is true for complex human to environment relations as it is to electron nucleus relations. Up and Down Spin are relative to what we define as up or down in the atomic core. So is negative and positive charge.

We normally think of light as the fastest thing in the universe. But even that is a relational convention. We can see light as stationary with the lowest possible speed and us in relation to it unable to ever fully slow down to 0.

Absolute Zero Kelvin in temperature is in fact pretty analogous here. It is an objective value in Theory but in practice nothing ever reaches the absolute and can only ever be “relatively” close to it.

And it’s not like we don’t have billions of examples in which even miniscule differences lead to completely different perceptions of one and the same thing. Remember the black and blue dress? Green needle? Chaos Theory in general?

The world is filled with genuinen ambiguity and perspectives differ immensely. But similar point of views will show similar realities. Why? Cause that is what makes a perspective what it is. If there is no objective actual object in itself a perspective cannot be a thing separate from what it is a perspective of. The things within our perspective ARE our perspective on those things.

Yes of course they can! What? did you think I would say “well, everyone is right from their perspective and we just have to find a way to co-exist with all possible views”?

Okay shit. That is partly what I belief… Still! People 100% can be wrong about stuff.

But maybe not in the straight forward way correspondence to an objective truth would make us able to be wrong. Things can first of all still correspond to other perspectives and in reverse there obviously can be contradiction. So one way to be wrong is to be a perspectival outlier. Not absolutely wrong but lets just say your perspective is an endangered species not likely to win the memetic evolutionary race for relevance….

Another way to be wrong is a perspective that is incoherent within its own claims aka self contradictory. I think we all know some of those..

And finally a perspective can be wrong in hindsight. Perspectives evolve. They take in new information and are able to change their view on certain issues. So sometimes we are “wrong” by simply having insufficient information. Honestly this pretty much always applies. We never have all information. Thats also part of what it means to be a perspective.

So maybe let’s tackle that next.

Ever heard of the yoneda lemma?

Its a foundational finding of category theory that has the magic ability to make all my friends stop listening to me once I start to talk about it.

But it really isn’t that complicated if we just focus on what it allows us to do.

It allows us to completely define an object, down to the last detail, by every relationship that object has to everything else.

Sounds abstract? Let’s make it simple.

Imagine I never show you my friend Dave. You will never meet him, never see a photo, never get his coordinates in space. So there is no “Dave-in-himself” you could point to.

But I still want you to get to know WHO Dave is. So I tell you everything everyone else knows about Dave. What his mom thinks of him. What his coworkers say behind his back. How his dog reacts when he walks in. What his exes remember. What his bank knows about his spending habits. What his childhood best friend can still recall about him at age nine. (To actually complete the list I would have to include every stranger he interacted every object he ever touched and every gravitational wave he ever emitted by his movement through space… but lets not get carried away xD)

At some point, you have Dave pinned down. This list at its limit IS Dave. Or rather Dave IS the sum total of Daves relations to this world and the world for Dave is the sum total of relations to Dave.

If you know how an object relates to everything, you know the object completely. That’s the beauty Yoneda allows us to formalize. There is no extra fact of the matter sitting behind the relations, waiting to be discovered.

Now swap “Dave” for “perspective.”

Jacobi’s worm, remember, was this: Kant needs a thing-behind-the-appearances to explain why appearances happen at all, but the moment that thing does any explaining, it’s broken its own rules.

Yoneda is how you actually kill that worm.

A perspective doesn’t have a hidden, further, private essence that its relations are merely evidence of. The perspective is its total relational profile, every way it’s been affected, every way it affects, every contrast it draws, every other perspective it’s tangled up with. Ask “but what is the perspective apart from all that relating?” and you’re asking what Dave is apart from every single thing anyone has ever known, felt, or recorded about him. The question might sound deep. But only with enough cannabis involved.

In my earlier work I treated perspectives as independent reality bubbles. This still works somewhat as an analogy but definitely suffers from a risk to become solipcistic or require God to fix the whole monads don’t interact dilema. (#Shoutout to my guy Leibniz!)

Perspectives in contact however aren’t two private noumenal bubbles occasionally poking through to compare notes on a hidden object. Contact already is constitutive as well as informative. Meaning perspectives are made from relations and function as relata. They relate and are made of relationships.

This point is hard to grasp intuitively but I’m far from the first person to understand the world as such. The idea of interdependent arising in Buddhism, Carlo Rovellis Relational Quantum Mechanics, Ontic Structural Realism and the incredibly intelligent Joseph Rahi all came to the same conclusion.

There is no view from nowhere, and there doesn’t need to be one. “Somewhere” is all we need to make sense of reality.