Objective Thinking - Research Paper Example

As a result of adopting this approach you live in a childlike bubble with the world outside oneself and you are only concerned with the effects you have on the outside world and vice versa. This paper aims to: 1. Define objective experience, as opposed to subjective experience; 2. Describe the experience of an objective thinker; 3. Explore the possibility of training adolescents to think objectively; and 4. Explore the connection between thinking objectively and language. Isolating Objective Experience Bothereau (2009), in explaining atomism and atelic conceptualization, subscribed to the theorization of experience, in which experience can be analyzed and understood as a theoretical entity.

At the same time, it is everything and everywhere, observable as well as unobservable. Bothereau goes on to compare the theories in question to Whitehead’s (1920) sense-awareness continuum, in which sense-perception is possible only with a division of the continuum, of a part objectified experience. Many theorists, as well as those in the practical sciences like medicine, take into account two components of experience: the objective and the subjective. While the patient’s blood pressure is objective and can be validated using a sphygmomanometer, his experience of pain is subjective and cannot be perfectly transferred through Nagel’s observer empathy (1974, in Baars, 2996).

Baars (1996) advocated for such practical criteria to understand subjectivity. Indeed, the common argument against physicalism is that an ideal, complete physical description of a living human being still leaves out that person’s subjective conscious experience, or what it was like to be that person (Rudd, 1997). Is it possible to eliminate subjective experience? Watt (2004) argued against the view that cognition and emotion are counter-posed to each other. Instead, cognition is an extension of emotion, which is an extension of homeostasis.

The brain’s functions are made possible through integration of systems from top to bottom of the neuroaxis. Biologic proof is in the neural connections between thalamocortical brain systems and many subcortical (basal forebrain, diencephalic, and midbrain-reticular) systems. He goes on to explain that, past early infancy, much of human consciousness consists of emotion-and-cognition amalgams, citing music and art as examples of activating emotion by cognition. Sutherland (2001) also commented on the indispensability of emotion in decision-making, as concluded by many theories from stimulus-response and behavioralism, symbolic logic and representation in any medium, to naturalism.

He recounted Damasio’s (1994) findings that patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain that deals with social emotions, were completely unable to make decisions. If emotions, as judgments on what is perceived, are classified as subjective experience, and much of human consciousness consists of emotion-and-cognition amalgams, then it is not possible to completely disassociate subjective from objective experience. However, there are stoic individuals, or those who have mastered affective self-regulation (not affective elimination), at least for a time.

The next question would then be whether it is possible to hardwire the brain to think primarily “objectively”, which will be explored in the latter part of the paper.