In this episode, Geoff Allen speaks with Jenann Ismael about puzzles surrounding subjectivity. They discuss topics like time, pain, colour and spatial navigation. In all of these cases, there is a puzzle about how subjective experiences can be reconciled with objective descriptions.
Jenann’s treatment of perspectives and points of view is wonderfully insightful. She frames the metaphysical question in terms of ‘frames of reference’. Certain experiences (pain, colour, the flow of time) only exist within the ‘frame’ of a particular system. They are frame-dependent phenomena.
We should not expect frame-independent descriptions to capture these phenomena. Such descriptions are not only incomplete but incompletable!
As Jenann puts it: ‘Physics doesn’t just *allow* for frame dependence, physics *entails* that there will be frame-dependent quantities – if there are, on the one hand, intrinsic quantities and, on the other hand, observers of those intrinsic quantities.’
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Going deeper, there is also a puzzle about the metaphysics of subjects in the world: ‘We aren’t separate from the world; we are enacting the world as we’re representing it, and that partly means that we have an effect on what is the case,’ Jenann argues. ‘We see both reflections of ourselves in the world and reflections of the world back at us. The world… it pushes back on you, just as you push into the world.’
What does this mean for objectivity and realism? How can we reconcile the place of subjective experience in the world? Tune in, folks!!
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Jenann Ismael is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She has also taught at Stanford University (1996–1998) and the University of Arizona (1998–2018). She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1997. Jenann is the author of the books Essays on Symmetry (2001), The Situated Self (2007), How Physics Makes Us Free (2016) and Time: A Very Short Introduction (2021).
Jenann’s work falls into two rough classes. First, there are concerns drawn from the philosophy of physics – for example, the structure of space and time, the foundations of quantum mechanics, the role of simplicity and symmetry in physics, the nature of probability, natural laws and causal relations. Second, questions surrounding mind, cognition, phenomenology and the nature of perspective. Jenann has been described, by John Perry, as ‘a leading philosopher of her generation’.
