Morality and Reality are not Objective
The first-person nature of the philosophy will prove immensely fruitful later. But it is important to address the unintuitive conclusions first. We believe that morality, or at least reality, is all objective. That these are more than mere preferences or beliefs. Before we move on to the crux of Input Theory, I believe it is important to dispel these beliefs through the more traditional assumptions.
Let’s start with the easiest one, morality. First, I want you to imagine what it would mean for morality to be objective. Usually, people imagine one of two things. The first is moral authority, that there is some sort of being that determines what is moral and what is not. But in that case, morality is not objective; it is subjective to that authority. And if that authority has the power to or does indeed punish those who violate set moral norms, it is still subjective morality. Though perhaps it would not be in the interests of the subjects of this authority to violate such norms.
The other is that morality is in some way a set of actions or virtues that everyone subjectively finds good or bad, but perhaps is unaware of that. For example, if everyone finds murder bad, then murder is objectively bad. And when people do murder, they are aware that they are doing something “bad”. But consider this. Suppose everyone in the world believed that blue is the best color. Everyone paints their walls, houses blue, and everyone wears blue clothes, just because of how pleasant blue is to their eyes. Is blue then objectively the best color? Or consider this: an alien humanoid race only eats with their right hands; they find it not only difficult but also repugnant to eat with their left hands. Does that make it objectively bad to eat with their left hand? The answers to those questions seem to be “no.” Why then do we believe that murder is bad, just because we all seem to dislike it (though of course not all humans dislike murder)?
Objective reality is not so much incongruent with our experiences as it is just not certainly accessible to us. As mentioned previously, there are coherent, plausible scenarios in which reality does not match what is observed. We could be dreaming, be brains in vats, or be simulated. Such examples also show why morality, if it were objective, would also be inaccessible to us with certainty.
We will later come back to explaining what morality and reality are on an input-theoretic framework. For now, I hope it is clear that morality and reality are at least inaccessible to us and at most incoherent. So we aren’t really losing anything by adopting the first-person metaphysical framework. And frankly, given the aforementioned reasoning, it is easy to see that we kind of already do adopt such a framework. And this framework comes with numerous advantages over the third-person ones.
