I have been avoiding this subject since it is too metaphysical for my taste. My interest was in specific problems such as anthropic paradoxes. However, my solution to them does have clear dispositions on these topics. So I will lay it out here.
Fundamental Perspectives
I argued that our rationality is not able to think about things as they are, by themselves. Instead, we would inevitably take a certain perspective or viewpoint when reasoning. Each of us has a natural perspective due to first-person subjective experiences. “I am this particular person, living in this particular time ” is inherently clear to each. It is the primary fact that has none, nor needs any, logical explanation.
Though we cannot think without a perspective, we are capable of putting ourselves into others’ shoes. In another word, we can imagine thinking from different perspectives. All viewpoints are parallel to each other, none is inherently logically superior.
But people often regard a god’s eye view as something else, something that transcends the limit of perspectives. It’s treated as absolute thinking, a fundamental conception that objective reasoning ought to be conducted from. Why we have this intuition would be discussed later. I think anthropic paradoxes are caused by it: trying to conduct the argument from a god’s eye view yet unavoidably also use “I” or “now” from the first-person perspective.
Consciousness and Free Will
The above has some metaphysical commitments attached. Consciousness, though a rather mysterious concept, is undeniably a first-person experience. E.g. from my perspective I only know that I am conscious, whether others are conscious like I do or just some mindless NPCs can never be verified. It is also instantiated by subjective experience so it is irreducible just like perspectives.
Perspective-based reasoning presupposes free will. For thinking from someone’s perspective to be meaningful at all it is a necessary presumption. It should be noted like consciousness, free will is also a first-person concept. Meaning when thinking from a particular perspective, the only consciousness and free will in reasoning would be that of the self. Someone/something else’s consciousness is only presupposed when reasoning from their perspective (still due to the self).
Scientific Objectivity
Since we are not able to reason about things by themselves as they are, scientific objectivity cannot be regarded as faithfulness to the fundamental fact, nor as an objective description of the world from a god’s eye view. Instead, objectivity means something can be inter-perspectively verified.
A statement or theory is objective if it holds true for multiple perspectives. The more unrestrictive it is, the more objective it is. From any given perspective, a statement is tested by the interaction between the self and the environment. We can also imagine testing it from others’ perspectives by observing their interactions with their respective environments.
E.g. “The Moon exists” is quite an objective statement. Because from my perspective, I experience actions upon me that are caused by part of the environment which can be described as the Moon (e.g. I can see it). Also because, from the perspective of many other things such as other people, trees, rocks, our planet Earth, etc, by examining the interactions between itself and the environment, Moon’s existence can also be verified. This is different from the ordinary conception that “The Moon exists” is objective because it describes a basic fact of the world.
Some Implications
The first implication is the role of “observer” is inherent in science. Observer does not mean human, it can be any physical thing that we want to take its perspective when conducting an analysis. Theories and statements are tested base on its’ interactions with the environment. The observer, i.e. the “self” from the given perspective, is not within the scope of scientific studies. So it naturally favors some types of quantum interpretations.
The above also hints at how subjective experience, consciousness, and free will shall be viewed with the frameworks of science. Because subjective experience only pertains to the first person, it cannot be explained by physical reductionism. Consequently, consciousness and free will are also primitives in terms of science.
The God’s Eye View
The problem of the god’s eye view is not because it is imaginary. There is nothing logically wrong with imagining something and assuming its perspective. The problem lies in the fact that it can analyze the environment without needing any interaction. From this view, the whole world is describable even though there is no interaction with the self. So imagining the self feels unnecessary altogether, things can be analyzed just as they are. In a sense, it is supernaturally omniscient.
But this view-from-nowhere type of thinking is not without its merits. If we are only interested in things locally on a macroscopic scale, then interactions between objects and the self are so numerous they are effectively constant. It remains true for any choice of perspectives (think about the Moon above). Within this scope, the god’s eye view analysis won’t cause any problem. And it saves the trouble of paying attention to the numerous interactions from a specific perspective. Maybe our natural tendency of treating the god’s eye view as objective reasoning is because of this. In our daily life, it works and it saves energy.
Determinism Solipsism and Panpsychism
Whether the world is deterministic has been debated for centuries which ties to the question of whether free will exists. However, rejecting the god’s eye view means science could never confirm determinism in the first place. Scientific theories would always be applied from a given perspective, its scope of explanation never includes the entire world. At the perspective’s center, the observer is not covered. The self shall be understood in terms of subjective experience and consciousness. This view is property dualistic.
Some may think this view is solipsistic. This is not the case. It merely states from any given perspective, the self is primitive and special. It does not assume anything is inherently more important than others nor only the self exists. The perspective of a pencil is just as logically sound as my natural first-person perspective.
And finally, this view is compatible with some version of panpsychism. When reasoning from the viewpoint of someone/something else, they are considered to be logically equivalent to myself in my natural first-person perspective. Effectively assuming it has its own subjectivity and consciousness. However, this does not mean all subjectivity and consciousness feels similar. That could never be confirmed due to their irreducible nature.
My first instinct is to experience this as a personal attack - more specifically, an attempt to make yourself look smarter at my expense in order to win status points - and get angry. I am going to try to make myself believe that this instinct is wrong, or at least unhelpful for the purpose of increasing my reputation within this community.
My second instinct is to feel despondent, stupid, incapable, unworthy of being here, and to start talking about how I'm just not as smart as you people and never will be and wish I'd never said anything. Getting myself to believe that this instinct is also wrong is more of a challenge.
Even though I've expressed those two facts, thus getting them out of my head and possibly clarifying my thinking a bit by openly recognizing them as traps (at least, according to the unemotional logic other people here use, which I have a hard time trusting but am trying hard to in order to fit in), I nonetheless still have no idea how to respond to this comment in any sensible-sounding way that would rehabilitate my loss of face as a result of your claim that I am naive and unreflective etc.
So, instead of responding to the topic itself, which, you're right, I probably cannot effectively speak about due to lacking whatever background you have on it, I'm going to just show this sequence of thought patterns and try to analyze my own thinking out loud, to give you a sense of what I'm dealing with whenever I try to communicate here, and why it's difficult for me to do so in a useful way.
My credence for that first instinct was roughly 80%, then dropped to maybe 50% as the second instinct rose to replace it, and now it's somewhere around 20%. This isn't Reddit but I still wouldn't put it past rationalists to be condescending on purpose to put a newbie in their place or whatever, because they're humans and my prior for humans being kind is quite low.
My second instinct peaked at a sufficiently high value, at least 70%, that I had to "pull back on the reins" so to speak to stop myself from impulsively going to my profile and deleting my account. After writing them both out and committing myself to share them, I felt like I had been sufficiently epistemically virtuous as to renew my own faith that I'm capable of getting along here, at least to some extent, so P("I'll never fit in on LessWrong") is now something like... I'm not very calibrated, maybe 25%? It's hard to say. All these numbers are pulled out of nowhere but that's how I have to do it for now.
What all this tells me is that as a result of my extreme emotional shifts I massively overestimate the quality of evidence that has emotional implications and I probably also hallucinate "evidence" that isn't there. I knew this already, of course, but emotional-me doesn't know it, and has to be reminded every single time. These mood swings are particularly driven by an intense fear of social rejection and abandonment which evokes a trigger response of trying to devalue and abandon the other person or group first, preemptively, to deflect the shame of being unworthy onto them.
Now, on to trying to actually respond to your comment. I do not think I can actually directly address anything you said as it still has a "this must not parse in order to avoid pain" aura around it making my mind come up completely blank when I reread it, but I can say that my initial response to dadadarren was not rooted in any kind of forethought, but rather in intuition trained over a long time of hearing and reading New Agers invoking quantum physics and consciousness to explain and provide "evidence" for their beliefs.
This evoked a kneejerk response of disgust and distrust, wherein I felt as if something simply must be terribly wrong in his reasoning and he must be trying to manipulate me into believing something false and dangerous to my sanity, because it fit the regex for "woo". I then confabulated an explanation for what that wrong thing must be. My response to him was more like a frantic attempt to get a slimy creature off of me than an actual reasoned reply. Same sort of pattern as my first instincts when replying to you - I just had the sense to notice what was happening this time. (It's this exact paranoid pattern of thinking and communicating that has gotten me banned from so many discord servers and subreddits.)
This is been somewhat exhausting. But <sarcasm> at least now I can virtue signal about how self aware I am. Look at me, critiquing the ways my emotions override my rationality! I'm smart, right?! I'm good enough, right?! Please like me again!!! </sarcasm>