Here is one explanation of How Humans Enable a Mind-Independent Reality;
From,
The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster's Constructivism
Lynn Segal
"Once a concept is constructed it is immediately externalized
so that it appears to the subject as a perceptually given property of the object and independent of the subject's own mental activity.
The tendency of mental activities to become automatized and for their results to be perceived as external to the subject
is what leads to the conviction that there is a reality independent of thought.”
The details as follow;
The above is a quickie, to thoroughly understand the point one will need to read the book and preferable a few times.A Closer Look at the Observer
Reality supposedly contains objects that either are stationary or change their position in space.
Though some objects, like human beings, have a changeable structure, they are perceived as having sameness and continuity.
Our structure is constantly changing, but our friends and relatives recognize us as the same persons.
“What do we mean by change?” asks von Foerster.
“Despite change in appearance of an object, as when a cube is rotated or a person turns around, we take it to be the same object.”30
How does change apply to a “tree growing, or when we meet an old school mate after a decade or two?
Are they different or are they the same?”3l
Perceiving reality depends on distinguishing between invariance and change.
Newborns do not yet have the capacity to take the manifold experiences with the same object and to “compute” its invariance, its unchanging nature.
- Invariance: The property of remaining unchanged regardless of changes in the conditions of measurement.
They cannot yet recognize the equivalence of the implied thing presented now with the implied thing of before.
THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVlTY 21
But that is not surprising, since that equivalence is a complicated logical operation—which can determine, for example, that it is a single object that produces the same constantly changing images on the retina and has a constantly changing position in the room at the end of my waving arm.
Developmental studies of children, conducted by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, show that we learn to perceive object constancy.
It takes about 18 months; Piaget calls this type of learning “sensorimotor intelligence.”
It “involves the establishment of relationships and correspondences (functions) and classification of schemes (cf. the logic of classes); in structures of ordering and assembling that constitute a substructure for the future operations of thought.”
Sensorimotor intelligence
“organizes reality by constructing broad categories of action which are the schemes of the permanent object, space, time, causality.” 32
Piaget, Jean and Inhelder, Barbel. (1969). The psychology of the child.
New York: Basic Books, Inc., p. 13.
For instance, sit down with a five-year-old child and lay out five pennies in a row on the top of a table.
Then give the child five pennies and ask him to make a row matching your own.
This the child can do easily.
A five-year-old child can also tell you that each row has the same number of pennies.
If, however, you increase the space between the pennies in one of the rows and then ask him which row contains more pennies, a five-year-old child will say the longer row has more pennies than the shorter row.
Elkind notes that the same exercise with a seven-year-old has a different outcome.
“In the first place the child regards the question as rather stupid and replies that of course the two rows have the same number of pennies since nothing was added or taken away and spreading them apart does not alter their number.
The older child takes as self-evident, or a priori, what only a few years ago he did not know existed.
Once a concept is constructed it is immediately externalized
so that it appears to the subject as a perceptually given property of the object and independent of the subject's own mental activity.
The tendency of mental activities to become automatized and for their results to be perceived as external to the subject
is what leads to the conviction that there is a reality independent of thought.” 33
[33 Elkind, David (Ed.). (1958). Six Psychological studies by Jean Piaget. New York: Vintage Books, pp. xi—xii]
Piaget's work suggests that we reevaluate the meaning of factual knowledge.
On his 81st birthday, in a debate with the linguist Noam Chomsky, Piaget stated:
“Fifty years of experience have taught us that knowledge does not result from a mere recording of observations without a structuring activity on the part of the subject."37
Von Glasersfeld, Ernst. On radical constructivism, in Watzlawick, Paul, Ed. (1984). The invented reality: How do we know? New York: W. W. Norton. p. 18.
Thus, there are no ‘pure facts.’
A fact is interpreted from the moment of its observation.