Reality is a Spectrum

Disclaimer; Sorry for the unedited stream of conciousness writing!

As I was relaxing and listening to one of my favorite songs, a striking thought suddenly materialized in my head. Why do people enjoy certain things? What causes you to have a favorite color, food, or song? Are popularly liked things actually objectively better than the less popular ones?

The study of qualia, or instances of subjective, conscious experience, is a field with all sorts of disconcerting ideals due to the lack of empirical evidence for the causation as to why people tend to choose certain items over others. The only sure thing is that qualia exists, proven by a thought experiment called the Knowledge Argument. It was developed by F.C Jackson in 1982. In this thought experiment there is a scientist named Mary who exists in a black-and-white world with only the physical and scientific description of colors, but has not actually experienced them for herself. Will she gain new knowledge when the colors are revealed and she finally sees them through her own eyes? I believe that she will learn something new–since actually living and seeing color is an event that transcends research on a black-and-white paper.

This quick establishment of the existence of qualia leads me to my main question: What determines what we like? Research from all over the world resoundingly proves that blue is the most common “favorite” color. My favorite color is purple. Why do so many people choose blue, rather than squash or fuschia? One well known reason is that blue appears in the sky, oceans, and ubiquitously in nature. People have been found to associate the color blue with calmness and serenity, as well as sadness. Another possibility is the ad populum argument, which supposes that people have heard from somewhere that blue is the most common favorite color around the world, leading them to choose the option during the study, as an attempt to “fit in” with the rest of the globe. It is an absurd concept that humans are so swayed by popular movements and trends–yet it decides “favorites” in our lives much more than we’d be comfortable sharing. Personally, I attempt to limit the trends that I follow because I think that it demeans individuality, but I enjoy some popular music and tend to like popular artwork, shows, or clothing styles. Are these things really more objectively beautiful or appealing?

The Mona Lisa is not the most impressive or most beautiful, yet it is the most famous artwork ever created. It stumps me as to how this is possible, since one would think that the most appealing painting would garner the most attention globally. Subjectivists would disagree that objectivity exists but the very fact that popular culture occurs is not simply a sampling error, or by random chance. One controversial example of subjectivism is attractiveness. Everyone is striving for the goal of obvious appeal–yet only a select group have it naturally. These people can exude this everywhere they go regardless of whether people personally want to date them. My personal anecdote is Andrew Garfield. According to everyone I know, he’s the most attractive spider-man. I disagree, and honestly find him to be overrated in his looks. This is me being hypocritical as a proclaimed objectivist–but more on that later. My point here is that although I personally don’t find him overwhelmingly attractive, he is viewed by a wide variety of people from all walks of life to be so, and this is unbelievable that so many people with different experiences of qualia can come together and agree on a subjective fact of reality (ie. Andrew Garfield is attractive). I suppose that people cannot control what they like, because the reason why they like it is unbeknownst to them.

Do certain songs sound objectively better than others? I would agree with that, but why that surely cannot be explained completely by science. You can measure pitch and frequency as well as the speed or patterns inside a song. That fails to account for why the brain prefers one over the other, for a massive portion of the population. Maybe the argument to popularity comes into play here as well, since I have found myself pretending to like certain songs and genres to appeal to my friends. The urge to be accepted in society is often stronger than the urge to be genuine–but still, I cannot physically will myself to change my view on a certain song. No amount of pretending can change what I like, or don’t like. The only dilemma with my own logic is the fact that you may grow into liking things–foods, songs, clothing. It all changes as you grow and change your perspectives on life.

Similarly to how there is no pinpointed spot where you change from teen to adult, or baby to toddler, it is impossible to pinpoint the location in which your opinion changed on a particular food or song. My theory of qualia comes down to a simple change in how we look at the world. Something shocking to me was when I came across a Reddit post (iykyk) stating that hot and cold were not opposites, but different ends of the same spectrum (this being temperature). I pondered over how many things could really be spectrums. Pretty and ugly, dumb and smart, good and bad, etc. These adjectives are not states of being, or even opposites. They are just different. If subjectivism is even a viable claim, these words should not even be considered. How could something be defined as pretty, if when considering everyone else’s perspective, it is ugly. If 10 people like a song, and 1 hates it–is the song good? Why do more people liking something cause it to be perceived as better. Nothing can be solely defined as pretty or ugly, good or bad, even hot or cold, no more than three can be decided as the color green over all others. Words are subjective in that manner as well, when combining this theory of spectrums with casual theory of reference (CTOR).

Everyone even has a different definition of the word qualia. No one uses the same terminology because as different people, how could we mean the same thing when discussing experiences. Inside, everyone thinks differently and therefore processes words in different ways due to discrepancies in memories and experiences. I will never know what it is like for my friend to see red, or for a stranger to listen to my favorite song. This concept further solidifies my belief that nearly anything that can be described by adjectives is a spectrum. Even the belief of subjectivism and objectivity is on a spectrum for me. Just how subjective the world is. I’d say it is leaning towards the subjective side of the spectrum, but there are objective truths in the world. Mathematics, physics, raw data, and other empirical fields cannot be on a spectrum. 2+2=4, and that is a fact, regardless of differing languages, thoughts or memories. The definition of 2 could differ, however, because of CTOR.

Another revelation that arrived to me was the deniability of opposites. One would suppose that even if descriptions like good or bad were on a spectrum, they are opposites. This is the gray area, because the opposite can be described in two main ways(for me and most people at least). I’ll use hot and cold as an example. Option 1: Cold is the absence of heat. Option 2: Cold is the polar opposite of heat. Do you believe that opposites and lacking something can be different, because I see a dilemma in this. Cold and hot can be measured (to a point), because of the thermometer, yet people still disagree as to how cold or hot it is due to inner subjectivity. How could something subjective be the opposite, because not only does it vary per person, but it varies within the person based on their mindset or emotions. This realization was very ominous for me, because it questioned my very grasp on reality. Opposites were simply a term used to describe difference, because, “a person or thing that is totally different from or the reverse of someone or something else”, can no longer exist upon a subjective spectrum. Nothing can be agreed upon in this world, so maybe what I’m saying does have some sense to it.

I read an article about the colors of school subjects, as me and my buddies constantly argue over this subject. History was voted as yellow, which I agree with. The reasoning behind this is that yellow feels like an old, dusty color–and there are many old papers with a yellow tint. If the world had been altered and old dusty things had a red tint and I only knew it to be that way, I’d say history was red. This is a contradiction to the objectivist reality, because our life is based upon the qualia we experience and what we subjectively feel and internalize. My friend learned history in a green class as a young girl–so history is green for her. Who is right? A disagreement like this can be solved by thinking about these decisions in a spectrum. Imagine a rainbow spectrum and each person places a slider on a slightly different spot. Now, one could directly pick the exact hex code that they feel the subject belongs with, adding a layer of specificity. The chance that different people choose the same answer goes down massively, and although this is partly due to the increased complexity of the selection, I feel that it still more accurately represents the innate diversity of responses.

Imagine yourself and a clone trying this color experiment. Clone You will be planted onto a random spot on the earth, with random events occurring for it. The clone has absolutely nothing in common with Real You. If both of you completed the color survey an infinite amount of times, surely the same answer will occur. It is a statistically low chance until you integrate the infinite part. Regardless, we end up with two people with nothing in common both choosing the exact same color for the subject history, down to the hex code. If we reversed the process and started from choosing the same hexcode, how could we discern these two different people? Different experiences could lead to the same conclusion, but the same conclusion logically should not give any reason for different experiences to occur. If You and your Clone both chose the same thing, it is entirely a random possibility, or there was something subjective motivating it. Once we add in the subjective motivations–train both of you with learning history in yellow classrooms with yellow books and writing with yellow pens and highlighters, the chance that both of you choose the same hexcode would almost certainly increase nominally.

Although I do not have the resources to conduct a study on this aspect of qualia, I hope that one day a scientist pursues this field. I believe that this could legitimately mean something when understanding human behavior, and help society decrease the effect of popular culture on daily life–hopefully causing some to reagan taste and individuality. But once again–maybe it was never about individualism. The common experiences we all see, like the sky or the ocean can decide our favorite color together. The reason as to why we like certain things is beyond me, but hopefully my analysis of life as a spectrum can help others similar to myself to quantify the maths and probabilities of qualia.