Objectivity Paradox

Nagel's recognition that the human intellect is pulled in two incompatible directions: toward the objective (the view from nowhere that provides universal, perspective-independent truth) and toward the subjective (the view from somewhere that is the only location of experience, value, and significance). The objective direction is what science follows—strip away the personal, the idiosyncratic, the perspectival, until what remains is a description that holds equally for any observer. This method has produced extraordinary explanatory and predictive success across the natural sciences. But it achieves that success by systematically excluding the features of reality that make reality matter to anyone: the felt quality of experience, the significance of events, the value of outcomes. A complete objective description of the universe would be a description in which nothing matters, because mattering is a subjective relation between a conscious being and the world she inhabits. The paradox is that the most powerful method for understanding the world is structurally incapable of understanding the beings who employ the method—and