One of the longest lived struggles in philosophy is the one between objective versus subjective reality. Is there such a thing as true objective reality that exists entirely outside our minds, or could we all be just brains in vats, experiencing nothing real?

As with a lot of these ancient dualities, the answer lies somewhere in between, and is invisible to those who are mired in an excessively either/or a/b binary mindset.

We are all, truly, brains in vats, experiencing nothing like pure objective reality. It’s just that those vats are our skulls, and through said skulls, connect to the rest of our bodies and hence to the world.

Objective reality, or at the very least a highly reliable and remarkably durable and convincing illusion thereof, does indeed exist. But there is no way to experience it “directly”. The question itself is meaningless, What would experiencing it directly mean? No matter whether your mental inputs come from the usual five senses, mental telepathy, or the whispers of angels directly into your neocortex, they are being mitigated by your senses. That’s what senses are. They sense things. So all the rationalist folderol about “pure reason” outside the senses is just so much nonsense. There is but solipsism, or senses.

In fact, despite the rationalists’ pooh-poohing of them, the senses themselves cannot be in error. They are mindless, mere machines, and can no more make an error than a bedspread. Only the mind, the realm of “pure reason”, can make a mistake, because it is only in interpretation of the input from the senses that error can occur. A machine like the senses might be broken. But it cannot be ‘wrong’.

But it is clear to any even casually active observer of the human condition that we human beings have a lot more going on than just sensing objective reality. We have rich and complex inner lives filled with all the thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories, and other vital and inevitable functions of the sentient mind hard at work dealing with its own complex subroutines, and in between this inner world and the outer objective world there is often a great deal of tension, a tension that sometimes leads to error when we get confused as to what exactly belongs to each world.

This is the human dilemma, and the result is what I call human reality. Neither entirely objective or entirely subjective, neither wholly white nor completely black, we instead live in the thin, taut layer of existence that is formed by the tension between outer and inner worlds.

We call the resultant state “consciousness”.

Because neither force is ever entirely dominant except in the cases of the catatonically insane or the very intellectual impaired, the human lot is a complex and manifold one. The difference between what we think about something and the thing unto itself can be subtle indeed, and because we ourselves shape the very tools we use to parse the input from our senses and our inner lives, we are quite capable of developing a mental apparatus that is completely incapable of perceiving those things we desire the most.

The truth, then, of the objective versus subjective debate is both more complex and in many ways more tragic than the binary alternatives would suggest. Regardless of any objective or universal truth, no matter how solid and durable the reality of reality might be, we will always be suspended between it and out own complex inner lives.

It is the price of sentience. A subsentient animal might live entirely in the world of its immediate senses and instincts, with no inner conflicts to plague it or doubts to make it hesitate. But it will never know it.

And even if we were nothing but consciousness in the void, we would still be constrained by the limits of the very structure of our minds. The very formation of consciousness itself involves certain choices which are both unavoidable and limiting. The unbound mind simply does not and cannot exist.

So let us resolve to abandon this fruitless talk of objective and subjective reality, and the juvenile dickering and bickering over which one is “better” or “more real”.

Because no matter what we conclude, no matter how elaborate or clever our sophistry or devastating and witty our rationalist putdowns might become, at the end of the day, we will still be living in same mishmash of inner life and outer world we have always lived in.

It’s the only reality available to us : human reality.

And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can move on.