Advanced philosophy is for the adventure loving intelligentsia. Look at the image above and you will see why. It is a tangled thicket which is how reality first presents itself to an inquiring mind which is critical, skeptical and accurate. Philosophy has been characterized as the "organization and interpretation of experience." What you see in the image above is the complexity of experience, the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of the philosopher William James. It is a difficult task to try to make sense out of the complexity of experience, but that is what advanced philosophy does.

But where is the observer in the above picture? The observer is taking the picture. So is the observer in the picture? Yes and No.

Now look at the picture below. You can see all the observers. They are searching for information. Is the information in the picture? Yes and No.

(Photo by Safaa Khraizat)

Now we are entering into one of the most complicated issues in philosophy - How to untangle the web of experience. And in particular, how to untangle the observer from the observation.

First of all, who cares? What is so important about this topic? The answer is crucial to the concern about eliminating bias and prejudice in someone's opinion. It has usually been desirable for an opinion to be objective when questions about truth and falsehood are involved. If you feel that all members of a certain nationality are dishonest, then this is going to make you biased when you listen to what they say or read what they write. If you have this feeling that there is alien life out there in the galaxy, then you are going to observe strange lights at night as signs of this alien life. Studies of logical thinking or critical thinking have emphasized the importance of not letting personal bias influence your thinking. Rational discussions should be fair and objective.

So if the answer to our topic question is that you cannot ever separate the observer from the observation, then the advice to be objective and unbiased is misguided. Everyone is always biased.

Then perhaps our question should be: to what extent can we separate the observer from the observation? In other words, what do we contribute to the observation and what does the thing observed contribution to the observation?

Many philosophers have agonized over this topic.

2. Read Werner Heisenberg, a 20th century physicist. In his book Physics and Philosophy he discusses the "uncertainty principle" in quantum physics. He is stating the view that the observer always affects the observation. If you shine a light on something to see it, you have by that action changed what you are looking at.

3. Read Gilbert Ryle, a 20th century philosopher. In his book The Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that all these discussions about the apparatus of the mind are "category mistakes".