Thank you for this interesting melding of the virtues of objectivity and Buddha’s insight of “no self.” I see one oversight, however, and one overreach in the arguments presented.
The oversight is that our subjective experiences serve us well in our practical lives, as does our subjective feelings. We aren’t cyborgs layered with technological marvels providing us with the ability to have objective experiences in our day-to-day existence, so we rely on our best efforts to get things right. As to the second, you say:
We don’t want our doctor’s judgment to be too clouded by empathy when she’s making a diagnosis or evaluating our best course of treatment.
Not only do we want that, most medical practitioners, humans all, find it overwhelming hard to shutoff their feelings of empathy. It’s the biggest problem faced by the medical community during this pandemic: politicians want them to be objective; but medical staff are overwhelmed by the shear number of patients and their inability to just write off people who they can’t save. It’s the medical practitioners who are staying with the dying because their families are not allowed to be present. That’s the opposite of cold objectivity. No one wants to be treated by a Mengele.
The overreach that i mentioned is in touting the benefits of objective, i.e., reproducible observations to science, where it is proven, and then. slipping in:
That subjective experiences don’t always accurately describe our environment isn’t exactly news.
No it’s not news, but it isn’t the whole story either. If it was, our lives would be intolerable. We would be unable to rely on our subjective experiences for anything; but we do rely on things being the way we subjectively take them to be, so there is some value in our own abilities to make our way in the world without relying on ‘objective’ authorities all the time.
And going beyond that, part of the reason why our subjective experiences cannot be relied upon — in the case of scientific matters — is because the scale of the phenomena actively studied by scientists today occur at scales that our unaided senses cannot perceive. I am talking about the micro and cosmological scales. How many of us have access to a particle accelerator, or the several billion dollars needed to build one? Most of us don’t even have a microscope in our homes.
It’s not that subjective experience in this case is so much inferior to the technologically-aided objective observations used in science, it’s that in the cases I mention, it’s not humanly possible to do otherwise. This leaves us in the servitude of science for our knowledge.
There is another way to experience the world than just these two. If you’re. interested.
