“The idea of ‘objectivity’, while useful as a foil for common inclinations and biases, becomes a lethal fiction when reified, which is to say: when we pretend this idea or mode of imagined perspective ‘is real’ or ‘has final authority’ in domains of being, identity, function, purpose or relation.

Let us examine the idea: it is an idea about what happens ‘with or without any human being or mind in attendance’. Essentially: what happens in impossible universes that never did and cannot exist except in formal systems that represent features of them as descriptions or equations. So the idea invents an abstract universe »of representations, evacuates actual reality and all of its true and living diversity, and in the resulting vacuum places figures, like gods without souls, of frameworks and ‘part relations’.

Although this behavior is an aspect of reality since we engage in it, its relationship to our own being and nature, to nature itself… is nothing like what it appears from common perspectives that authorize it. It is a game that pretends to be »more than a god, and whose declarations are often either overtly wrong, or so incredibly minute in what they select for emphasis that they must have ejected nearly all of reality to produce the concentrated fiction that results.

The behavior is absolutely crucial to many domains of research and exploration; it is not the idea that is at issue, but rather our common habits of moving its results beyond their actually speculative domains of useful purchase, and then promoting them over ourselves, reality, nature, relation and intelligence. Objectivity is a toy; when utilized adeptly it can produce otherwise impossible benefits — yet we must object immediately when the idea or its produce is reified — there is no such thing as an objective witness or universe, even a machine would fail to be this — and would have to be formed by living minds for specific purposes in specific (and highly limited) contexts of operation.

There is no such thing as objectivity. It is a computational illusion.”

— an anonymous informant