Objectivity

To me being objective means trying to rid ourselves of the biases that we possess. That doesn’t sound very well defined but I think that it should include trying to not colour all of our thoughts and impressions based off of our opinions, feelings, and to a certain degree to put our preconceived notions to the side before we judge people or situations. It’s practically impossible to be entirely objective because if you think about it, we make sense of the world by comparing it to our ideas of how we think it should be. Every time we learn something new, we try to link it back to what we already know.

Looking at it this way, I’m not a very objective person. I tend to not speak my mind until I’ve talked to a person enough to have an idea of how they think. Doing this affords me the leisure of being able to have discourse with the person using their own logic. That is how I like to interact with people, get to know them, and learn a little about how they think. Afterwards see if I can understand their point of view and relate to them and just see what happens. Though there are many times when I can’t afford to do this, after all being entirely socially awkward until maybe after spending about 30 hours or so picking at someone's brain is no way to make connections much less even just meet people. One such incident that I remember, I wasn’t even sure what to make of it, I still don’t know what to make of it today.

I remember this female who at the time I knew she was a classmate of mine, but I had never spoken a word to her or even had any interaction with her until that day, the Thursday before finals started. I remember they were talking about homosexuality. I interjected with something that I had read about 3-5 months back about semi-recent study on homosexuals. The study had mentioned about how they had found that most homosexuals were homosexuals because of social/environmental reasons. I had mentioned that personally, I think of homosexuals as two groups, those who are born as “men trapped in a woman’s body” or “women trapped in a man’s body” and those who become homosexual for some reason or other. Because the former group’s preferences seem to be from birth it would suggest that their preferences stem more from genes than other factors, and I consider them to be true homosexuals. She looked at me in an odd way and said that she didn’t believe that homosexuality came from our environment, nor does it come from genes. She then said to me that it came from within us. I thought about it for a moment, and pretty much said that things that affect our development either come from our environment, or our genes. The term environment is used in a broader manner it includes our living conditions, parents, family, friends etc. She insisted to me again that it’s from something within us, and not affected by the environment but not from our genes. Entirely confused I tried to press her for her thoughts, just to have her elaborate on “it comes from inside.” She didn’t and so I just gave up because there was no point in pressing her for more information when it seemed futile. She went back to studying for our Proofs final, and I went back to trying to work on a proof and that was that.

I utterly failed at being objective, but I also tried to understand her view, which I also failed at. Though I have to admit I’ve tried to figure out what she meant, and seeing her view is a bit hard for me because I subscribe to the idea that we can quantify and study things. I’ll admit, there are many things you can’t study, like ghosts, they kind of lie outside of the realm of science for the pure and simple fact that so far no one has been able to recreate an incident enough times to figure something out. I guess she could’ve meant the soul, though I’m not sure what the soul is, much less what can come out of it. From most descriptions the soul seems to be an integral part of the core of our personality, but our personality is heavily influenced by our surroundings, and I'm not sure what part is the environment and which part is the soul.