Surely “objectivity” must reduce to theory. This is no less the case with respect to truth-claims regarding the relationships between brain activity and events external to the observer. In other words, our understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is itself the product of scientific inquiry and theorizing. Subjectivity, or the first-person point-of-view is a quality of human cognition and is the context within which all human experience occurs.
That fact about subjectivity neither grants nor precludes the subjective context (i.e., the observer’s first-person experience) a privileged access to truth. By this analysis, it’s meaningless to assert that subjective experience is inherently more valid than any “objective” theory regarding the events external to the organism that precipitated the experience. Subjectivity is a peculiar and very limited window onto “reality,” which can only be a necessarily imprecise model – a complex and dynamic set of theories – that itself is only available to us by means of that same window.
Following this path leads me to conclude that our “objective” abstract representations, our theories, or maps of “reality” can gradually become more and more reliable as they are forced to collide with other models, which are not only filtered by individual subjectivity, but might also change the filter itself, by modifying the models that constitute subjective reference points (i.e., one’s “knowledge”).
After sufficient cycles of such collisions (generally known as “scientific progress”), the models which we refer to as “objective” knowledge do become much more reliable than any individual’s subjective experience. This is the basis for believing that “objectivity” can have epistemic priority over “subjectivity.” Of course, this depends on the reliability of the methodologies, veracity, and goodwill of the community of scientists participating in this massive, ongoing conceptual particle accelerator that we refer to as science, in which theories are propelled to collide with one another and expel hidden assumptions and unexpected results.
We can theorize with growing accuracy about what it is like to be ourselves under various circumstances (e.g., after a few shots of single malt or some other psychoactive substance) as a result of recording and analyzing sufficient data points (i.e., experiences).
Similarly, we can theorize with growing accuracy about what it is like to be somebody else, including non-human organisms, after recording and analyzing sufficient data points, including comprehensive investigations of their neurophysiological sensory equipment.
In sum, our “objective” knowledge provides a substantially more reliable frame of reference than our “subjective” experience. But, as Pasternack so eloquently says, “our biases can never be escaped. They are our only window to the Immense World outside our own minds, whose full form remains permanently and tantalizingly out of our grasp.”
In spite of this unbridgeable gulf, we can be reassured that our theories are improving, by observing results and comparing them with our predictions, which are based on prior theories. If the approximation of those theories to external reality were no closer than chance would have it, the predicted results would also be no better than chance. In other words, if our theories did not actually model reality, then any scientific success would always be simply a miracle.
While conceivable, that seems less likely to me than the hypothesis that the external world exists independently of human experience and that we are gradually getting better at understanding what it is. Objective knowledge doesn’t require a “God’s-eye view.”