Subject Comes Before Object
Why subjective awareness precedes objective reality and how modern culture gets the order wrong, mistaking symbols, facts, and models for reality itself.
First of all—hello from Berlin!
This article is part in a short series (although I never intended it to be one) and is best to read in order. I recommend starting with the previous pieces:
You Don’t Have a Political Problem. You Have a Foundational Problem.
Determinism, Consciousness, and the Threshold We’re Crossing
It also builds on ideas from Bloom’s Taxonomy—for that, I suggest reading my earlier article on the topic, along with the external video linked there. Together, these form a useful foundation for what follows. Hope it helps!
There is a reflex baked into our modern discourse: when disagreement appears, we generally tend to reach for the “objective facts.” Facts are positioned as the final external authority, the thing that ends all debate, the neutral ground that supposedly exists independent of anyone looking at it. Subjective experience is dismissed as bias, distortion, or misinformation. This framing is treated as the obvious, mature, and necessary for society to function. What if I tell you that it is fundamentally wrong.
The common mistake is assuming that the objective world exists first, and the subject merely observes it second. This ordering feels intuitive because it matches how institutions and their legal constructs operate. But intuition here is inherited, not examined. When you look closely—philosophically, scientifically, or experientially—the order reverses directly. The objective comes only after the subjective experience.
In the weird world of quantum physics, this is not a controversial thought at all. Take the double-slit experiment for example. Particles do not possess fixed properties prior to their observation. Before measurement, what exists is not a thing with attributes, but a probabilistic description—a set of potentials. Only when an observer is involved do properties resolve into something measurable. The “objective fact” does therefor not precede its observation; instead it emerges through it. And so, the external world does not announce itself as fully formed. It crystallizes in relation to a subject.
This is not an appeal to mysticism, but a statement about the structural way reality presents itself.
The implication of this realization is felt as uncomfortable because it undermines a core cultural assumption: that reality is something we all access equally from the outside. If objective facts depend on observation, then subjectivity is not a flaw to be eliminated—it is the precondition for anything appearing at all. You do not start with the world and then add a viewer. You start with a viewer, and only then does a world take shape.
Taken seriously, this breaks more than just arguments and the rigid hierarchical systems of what we come to depend on from society. It completely breaks the idea of a fixed, external timeline marching on independently of those who experience. If the world only exists as it is experienced, then when a subject leaves, that world leaves with it. Structurally. There is no leftover “objective universe” waiting somewhere, fully rendered, minus you. The universe you experience is inseparable from the fact that you are here to experience it.
This is why time collapses under scrutiny. Linear sequence is a mathematical model, not a container. Past and future are abstractions derived from memory and anticipation—both of which are subjective processes. Remove the subject, and the sequence loses its anchor. What remains is not an empty timeline, but no timeline at all. The timeline only supports the subject in its ability to experience without overwhelming the subject. Remember that the majority of people have no recollection of life prior to their birth—and for a very good reason when you can connect the dots.
This is also where the distinction between knowledge and knowing becomes critical. Knowledge is symbolic manipulation: data, models, equations, representations. It is extraordinarily powerful, and entirely externalizable. Machines and robots can do it. Systems can do it. Civilizations can scale it relatively easily. Knowing, by contrast, requires inner awareness. It is not just the ability to use symbols, but to recognize meaning through them. A system can have knowledge without knowing anything. A human can do the same—if they reduce themselves to mere symbolic function (i.e., by becoming a robot, supposedly from the Czech word “robota,” meaning forced labor or serfdom).
Modern culture overwhelmingly rewards knowledge and neglects knowing. We accumulate information, refine models, optimize representations, and mistake this for understanding of our reality. But models are not reality. Mathematics is not the universe. Science describes behavior; it does not generate existence. Even our most precise theories remain maps, not real territory.
This is why more information rarely resolves the underlying disorientation people feel. Perhaps you feel this yourself, but can not yet clearly name it. The problem is not the lack of data. It is the lack of orientation. Meaning does not emerge from adding additional symbols layered on top of an unexamined subject. It only starts to emerge when the subject itself is brought back into the equation directly!
To exist is to know—not in the sense of storing facts, but in the sense of self-knowing. Knowing includes the capacity to encounter what was previously unknown and integrate it without losing coherence. Creation—whether intellectual, artistic, or structural—is how this happens. Through creation, meaning appears where none was ever guaranteed. Only then does something like wisdom become truly possible. Rinse and repeat therefor, from others or yourself, does not grant you with wisdom. You have to create something!
This is the gap modern thinking refuses to bridge. Science focuses on symbols without meaning. Spirituality often focuses on meaning without structure. Progress will require both, nonetheless, sequence matters. Meaning cannot be derived purely from the external. It must be anchored from within the subject first.
Which leads to an uncomfortable but necessary conclusion for today’s world:
You need...
Less information. More clarity.
Less outward consumption. More internal stability.
Less argument. Less need to defeat or convince.
Less dependence on “objective” validation.
Less noise between perception and meaning.
What remains of you after you managed to check those boxes is not withdrawal, passivity, or self-isolation. It is where your experience can begin.
When the internal signal starts to stabilize, engagement with the outside world will no longer have the power to distort it. Of course, the objective world will not suddenly disappear, however, now it simply starts to arrive after the subject, instead of pretending that it always has to come first.
That is the correct order. Carpe diem.
Crossing the Threshold
On January 18th, from 19:00 to 20:30 CET, we’re hosting our first webinar: Crossing the Threshold. It’s about moving beyond the familiar 3D script into a grounded, autonomous way of living—how to truly hold yourself in that space.
We won’t dissect this article directly, but the themes overlap. If this piece resonated, this session will take it deeper. Tickets are available at TheNexusFormula.com
See you there!
Love this opening already — “hello from Berlin” as a quiet declaration of context, not a location flex 😉
This is exactly what it needs to be about. What you describe here is something I’ve experienced my entire life — and still do today.
The constant need to translate knowing into information. To explain clarity in a world that only accepts validation after the fact. To see structure before it has language or permission.
It’s exhausting...
And at the same time, deeply affirming to see it articulated this cleanly and without compromise. This doesn’t argue a position — it restores the order.
Quantum states do not require a human observer to “crystallize.” Quantum states decohere through physical interaction with the environment, not through consciousness, observation, or subjectivity. To be able to do a measurement at all, means that the apparatus would physically exchange a photon with whats being measured, leading to wave collapse (decoherence).
If you leave a measurement apparatus switched on in the double slit experiment, but never watches it, the data it gathers will be collapsed data (and not superposition data).
So you have experiment → interaction → decoherence → record → human observer looking at the measurement data a long time later.
Would you still say that the human observing the measurement data long after the fact creates the reality which has already happened long a go during the experiment?